"A son to clasp my finger tight."—NORMAN GALE.
When we had been in Spain for nearly a year, there was some dispute about the business arrangements of Willie's partnership in his uncle's bank, and Willie withdrew altogether from the affair. We then decided to return to England. Though glad to go home, I parted from my Spanish relations with regret, and have always since my visit to them thought that the admixture of Irish and Spanish blood is most charming in its result.
On our return to England we lived in Clarges Street, London, for some time, while Willie was looking for a place in the country where he could start a stud farm. Willie was very fond of horses, and understood them well, and I was delighted at the idea of his getting some really good brood mares and breeding race-horses. We knew, of course, nothing of the enormous expense and many losses such an undertaking was certain to entail.
At last we decided to take Bennington Park, Hertfordshire, and on going there Willie bought some good blood stock, among the pick of which were Alice Maud, Scent, and Apricot. Soon we had all the boxes tenanted, and I spent many happy hours petting the lovely thoroughbred mares with their small velvety noses and intelligent eyes.
The chief form of social intercourse in the county was the giving of long, heavy, and most boring dinners. People thought nothing of driving eight or even ten miles {25} (and there were no motor-cars then) to eat their dinner in each other's houses, and this form of entertainment used to produce such an absolutely painful boredom in me that I frequently hid the invitations from Willie, who wished to "keep up with the county."
Willie and I were a good-looking young couple, and people liked to have us about. Willie, too, was a good conversationalist, and had a ready wit that made him welcome, since an Irishman and wit are synonymous to the conventional mind. That his witticisms pertained rather to the France of his education than the Ireland of his birth was unrecognized because unexpected.
I was—rather, I fear, to Willie's annoyance—labelled "delightfully unusual" soon after our going to Bennington, the cause being that I received my guests one evening with my then abundant hair hanging loosely to below my waist, twisted through with a wide blue ribbon. To Willie's scandalized glance I replied with a hasty whisper, "The very latest from Paris," and was rewarded with the mollified though puzzled expression very properly awarded by all men to the "latest fashion" of their womenkind.
I put off the queries of the ladies after dinner in the same way, and was rewarded by them by the general admission that it was a fashion for the few—who had the hair. Never did I admit that I had been out with the horses so late that I had had just time for Caroline to hurry me into a gown and shake down my hair as my first guest arrived. So little do we deserve the fame forced upon us.
Willie was never good at dunning friends for money owed, and as we had many brood mares, not our own, left with us for months at a time, the stable expenses, both for forage and wages, became appallingly large. It was always difficult to get the accounts in, and while Willie {26} did not like to worry the owners even for the amount for the bare keep of the animals, he was himself perpetually worried by forage contractors, the shoeing smith, and the weekly wage bill, besides the innumerable extra expenses pertaining to a large stable.
As I urged against the sale of the mares, which he so often threatened, their happy, peaceful maternity, in the long lush grass and shade of trees by day, their comfortable boxes at night, and their fondness of me, he used to stare gloomily at me and swear gently as he wished there were more profit than peace in their maternity and my sentimentality. But he could forget his worries in the pleasure of schooling the yearlings, and we agreed always to hold on as long as possible to a life we both found so interesting, and with the facile hope of youth we thought to get the better of our expenses in time.
In this year (1869) my eldest (surviving) brother, Frank, became very ill, and Willie and I went to Rivenhall to see him. He wanted me to nurse him, so I stayed on in my old home while Willie returned to Bennington.
Frank had consumption, and very badly; he suffered intensely, and I think I have never longed for the presence of a doctor with more anxiety than I did for Dr. Gimson's at that time. My perpetual fear was that the effect of the opiate he gave to deaden poor Frank's pain would wear off before he came again. When it grew dusk Frank desired me to put candles in every window, that he might not see the shadows—the terrifying shadows which delirium and continual doses of morphia never fail to produce.
Frank's very dear friend, Captain Hawley Smart, the novelist, came to Rivenhall in the hope that he could cheer poor Frank's last hours; but he was too ill to know or care, {27} and Hawley Smart could, like the rest of us, only await the pitying release of death.
We went on at Bennington in very much the same way until the end of that year. Willie had been betting very heavily in the hope of relieving the ever-increasing difficulty of meeting our heavy expenses, and now, in view of his losses in racing added to the cost attendant on keeping up such a large stud, the kind-hearted bank manager insisted that the large overdraft on his bank must be cleared. Hitherto, whenever he had become very pressing, Willie had sent him "something on account," and we had given a breakfast for his hunt, as Willie said such a good fellow "could not eat and ask at the same time." Now, however, Mr. Cheshire sorrowfully declined to eat, and maintained that his duty to his firm necessitated his insisting upon the clearing of the overdraft.
When Willie was made bankrupt, Mr. Hobson—a gentleman living near us with his very charming wife, who afterwards became Mrs. A. Yates—very kindly took my little old pony across the fields at night to his own place and kept him there so that he should not go into the sale of our goods. This defrauded no one, as the pony (my own) was beyond work, being my childhood's pet.
I was now nearing my first confinement, and my aunt, Mrs. Benjamin Wood, took a house for me at Brighton close to my sister's, Lady Barrett-Lennard. There my son Gerard was born.
I was very ill for some time after this, and my mother, Lady Wood, stayed with me, employing her time in making a lovely water-colour sketch for me.
Willie's affairs were now settled, and I had to give up all hope of returning to my dearly loved country home and all my pets; but I had the consolation of my beautiful babe, {28} and I forgot my sorrow in my greater possession. He was very healthy, so I had no trouble on that score.
A young solicitor who took Willie's affairs in hand, Mr. Charles Lane (of Lane and Monroe), very kindly took upon himself to call on my Uncle William, who was then Lord Chancellor of England, and ask him to assist us in our financial difficulties. Uncle William was much astonished at the application of this obviously nervous young solicitor, who with the courage born of despair went on to suggest that Lord Hatherley might give Willie a lucrative appointment.
Strangely enough it had never occurred to me to apply to Uncle William for anything, and when Mr. Lane called on us and solemnly presented me with a substantial cheque and a kind message from my uncle, Willie and I were as surprised as we were pleased, even though Mr. Lane explained that "the Lord Chancellor had no post suitable" for Willie's energies.
We then moved into a house on the Marine Parade, as the one we were in was very expensive, and though I was glad to be next door to my sister, I felt it was not fair to my aunt, Mrs. Wood, who was paying the rent for us.
My faithful French maid Caroline stuck to us all through our fallen fortunes, as also did our stud-groom, Selby, and though we could no longer pay them the high wages they had always had, they refused to leave us.
My aunt now took a cottage for me at Patcham, just put of Brighton, and I was able to have my pony there. The house at Patcham was a dear, little, old-fashioned place right against the Downs, and there I used to walk for miles in the early morning, the springy turf almost forcing one foot after the other, while the song of the {29} larks and scent of the close-growing, many-tinted herbage in the clear bright air filled me with joyous exhilaration.
Willie went to town, and often was away for days, on various businesses, and I was very lonely at home—even though I daily drove the old pony into Brighton that I might see my sister.
I had a cousin of Willie's, Mrs. Vaughan, to stay with me for some time, but she was perpetually wondering what Willie was doing that kept him so much away, and this added irritation to loneliness. I had had such a busy life at Bennington that I suffered much from the want of companionship and the loss of the many interests of my life there. I felt that I must make some friends here, and, attracted by a dark, handsome woman whom I used to meet riding when I walked on to the Downs, I made her acquaintance, and found in her a very congenial companion. Quiet and rather tragic in expression, she thawed to me, and we were becoming warmly attached to one another when Willie, in one of his now flying visits, heard me speak of my new friend. On hearing her name—it was one that a few years before had brought shame and sudden death into one of the oldest of the "great" families of England—he professed to be absolutely scandalized, and, with an assumption of authority that at once angered me, forbade me to have any more to do with her. He met my protests with a maddening superiority, and would not tell me why she was "beyond the pale." I explained to him my own opinion of many of the women he liked me to know and almost all the men, for I had not then learnt the hard lesson of social life, and that the one commandment still rigorously observed by social hypocrisy was, "Thou shalt not be found out."
{30}
When I met Mrs. —— again she soothed my indignation on her behalf, and as we sat there, high on a spur of a hill, watching the distant sea, she smiled a little sadly as she said to me: "Little fool, I have gambled in love and have won, and those who win must pay as well as those who lose. Never gamble, you very young thing, if you can help it; but if you do be sure that the stake is the only thing in the world to you, for only that will make it worth the winning and the paying."
It was nearly ten years afterwards that I, feeling restless and unhappy, had such a sudden longing for the sea, that one morning I left my home (at Eltham) very early and went down to Brighton for the day. I was alone, and wished to be alone; so I got out of the train at Preston, for fear I should meet any of my relations at Brighton station. A fancy then seized me to drive out to Patcham, about a mile farther on, to see if my former little house was occupied. Having decided that it was I dismissed my fly and walked up the bridle path beyond the house out on to the Downs, where, turning south, towards the sea, I walked steadily over the scented turf, forcing out of my heart all but the joy of movement in the sea wind, with the song of the skylarks in my ears.
I sang as I walked, looking towards the golden light and sullen blue of the sea, where a storm was beating up with the west wind. Presently I realized that I was very tired, and I sat down to rest upon a little hilltop where I could see over the whole of Brighton. The wind brought up the rain, and I rose and began to descend the hill towards Brighton. I wondered apathetically if my sister was in Brighton or if they were all at Belhus still. Anyhow, I knew there would be someone at her house who {31} would give me something to eat. Then I turned round, and began deliberately to climb up the hill on to the Downs again. After all, I thought, I had come here to be alone, and did not want to see my sister particularly. The family might all be there, and anyhow I did not want to see anybody who loved me and could bias my mind. I had come down to get away from Willie for a little while—or rather from the thought of him, for it was rarely enough I saw him. If I went down to see Emma and Tom they would ask how Willie was, and really I did not know, and then how were the children. Well, I could thankfully answer that the children were always well. Why should I be supposed to have no other interests than Willie and my children? Willie was not, as a matter of fact, at all interesting to me. As to my children, I loved them very dearly, but they were not old enough, or young enough, to engross my whole mind. Then there was dear old Aunt Ben, who was so old that she would not tolerate any topic of conversation of more recent date than the marriage of Queen Victoria. What a curiously narrow life mine was, I thought, narrow, narrow, narrow, and so deadly dull. It was better even to be up there on the Downs in the drifting rain—though I was soaked to the skin and so desperately tired and hungry. I paused for shelter behind a shepherd's hut as I saw the lithe spare form of my brother-in-law, Sir Thomas, dash past, head down and eyes half closed against the rain. He did not see me, and I watched him running like a boy through the driving mist till he disappeared. He had come over from Lewes, I supposed. He was a J.P., and had perhaps been over to the court; he never rode where he could walk—or rather run.
I waited, sheltering now from the rain, and through the {32} mist there presently came a girl riding. On seeing me she pulled up to ask the quickest way to Brighton, as the mist had confused her. As I answered her I was struck by a certain resemblance, in the dark eyes and proud tilt of the chin, to my friend of many years ago, whose battles I had fought with Willie, and who had told me something of her life while we sat very near this place. The girl now before me was young, and life had not yet written any bitterness upon her face; but as she thanked me, and, riding away, laughingly urged me to give up the attempt to "keep dry," and to fly home before I dissolved altogether, I had the voice of my old-time friend in my ears, and I answered aloud, "I am afraid; I tell you, I am afraid." But she was dead, I knew, and could not answer me, and I smiled angrily at my folly as I turned down the track to Preston, while I thought more quietly how the daughter whose loss had caused such bitter pain to my dear friend, when she had left all for love, had grown to happy womanhood in spite of all.
I was now feeling very faint from my long day of hard exercise without food, but there was a train about to start for London, and I would not miss it.
On the platform for Eltham, at Charing Cross, stood Mr. Parnell, waiting, watching the people as they passed the barriers. As our eyes met he turned and walked by my side. He did not speak, and I was too tired to do so, or to wonder at his being there. He helped me into the train and sat down opposite me, and I was too exhausted to care that he saw me wet and dishevelled. There were others in the carriage. I leant back and closed my eyes, and could have slept but that the little flames deep down in Parnell's eyes kept flickering before mine, though they were closed. I was very cold; and I felt that he took off {33} his coat and tucked it round me, but I would not open my eyes to look at him. He crossed over to the seat next to mine, and, leaning over me to fold the coat more closely round my knees, he whispered, "I love you, I love you. Oh, my dear, how I love you." And I slipped my hand into his, and knew I was not afraid.