XLVII
The story of his life is a strange one. He tells how, as the third son, and most unwelcome addition to his parents’ growing family, he was, at the age of eighteen months, given away by his father and mother to a recently widowed and childless aunt, as eager to adopt, as his unnatural parents were keen to be rid of him. The aunt was Maria (Leycester) Hare, widow of his uncle Augustus; and thus, in the similarity of Christian names at least, there was a peculiar appropriateness in this adoption, which was undertaken in what seems a very cold-blooded way: the parents to have no claim upon their son and the aunt to be called “mother”; as indeed, throughout the story of his life, she is styled. She brought him up and sent him to Oxford, and for thirty years they lived together, as mother and son. He wrote a panegyric on her, in the “Memorials of a Quiet Life,” and in the long story of his own is seen to have been very much more affectionate than many real sons are. Yet the reader of his pages cannot help coming to the conclusion that the “sweet mother,” as he constantly styles her, was not only afflicted with a very dour religiosity, but was a tyrant in his infancy, and an exacting invalid, and an incredibly mean, parsimonious and suspicious creature during his youth and early manhood. But, for all that, no real mother ever had so good a son, so tender and constant a nurse in sickness, as he.
“HUZ AND BUZ”: ENTRANCE TO HOLMHURST.
When, in 1860, it became necessary for his adopted mother to leave Lime and seek a new home, they long sought the ideal home of their fancy, which they named, in advance, “Holmhurst.” All through that summer they inspected innumerable small estates in the south of England, but none were in the least like that ideal “Holmhurst,” and they were on the point of abandoning the quest for awhile, and going abroad, when a neighbour sent a Hastings paper with the humble advertisement, “At Ore, a house with thirty-six acres of land, to be let or sold.”
“What a horrible place this must be,” I said, “for they cannot find one word of description”; for the very ugliest places we had seen had often been described in the advertisements as “picturesque manorial residences,” “beautiful villas with hanging woods,” &c. But my mother rightly thought that the very simple description was perhaps in itself a reason why we should see it.... Long before we could arrive at Ore, we passed under a grey wall overhung by trees. “It looks almost as if there might be a Holmhurst inside that wall,” I said. Then we reached a gate between two clipped yew-trees, and a board announced, “This house is to be let or sold.” We drove in. It was a lovely day. An arched gateway was open towards the garden, showing a terrace, vases of scarlet geraniums, and a background of blue sea. My mother and I clasped each other’s hands and simultaneously exclaimed—“This is Holmhurst!”
We found that the name of the place was Little Ridge. There were six places called Ridge in the neighbourhood, and it was very desirable to change the name, to prevent confusion at the post-office and elsewhere. Could we call it anything but Holmhurst? Afterwards we discovered that Holmhurst meant an ilex wood, and our great tree is an ilex.
And here they made their home. Ten years later his adopted mother died here, and here he passed out of these shadows and unrealities, suddenly and painlessly, when another thirty-two years had gone, little more than two years after he had, in writing the concluding words of the story of his life, said:
When I look at the dates of births and deaths in our family in the Family Bible, I see that I have already exceeded the age which has usually been allotted to the Hares. Can it be that, while I still feel so young, the evening of life is closing in? Perhaps it may not be so; perhaps long years may still be before me. I hope so; but the lesson should be the same, for “man can do no better than live in eternity’s sunrise.”
It would be unpardonable to leave unmentioned the additions to the house he loved so well and the gardens and shrubberies he delighted in. Still stands the sundial on the lawn, that sundial which had been placed by his great-great-grandfather, Bishop Hare, on his house of the Vatche, at Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, and was presented to him in 1859 by the then owners of the Vatche. Still one looks delightfully across these uplands down to the sea, where the craggy ruins of Hastings Castle cut across the horizon, and the streets of Hastings come crawling dimly up out of the vale; but the Hospice in the grounds, where he continually housed and entertained his pensioners, is empty, and the garden-paths have lost their trimness and become overgrown with grass since strangers have come and reduced the staff.
Even Queen Anne, whom he brought down from London and set up in the meadow, looks neglected.
Every Londoner is familiar with the white marble group of figures in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, representing Queen Anne (now, alas! deceased) presiding over four seated effigies, emblematic of England, France, Ireland, and the North American Colonies of her days; but few recollect that this group is not the original of the one sculptured by Bird in 1712. Bird’s work had for many years fallen into a disgraceful state of neglect. Her Majesty’s nose had long been chipped off and her forearms had disappeared, while the four seated figures, with scarce a complete set of limbs among them, more nearly resembled the victims of a railway accident than the highly respectable allegorical group they really were. The whole composition was therefore cleared away, and an entirely new and scrupulously exact replica was made by the afterwards notorious Richard Belt, and placed in its stead.
QUEEN ANNE, AT HOLMHURST.
The battered and grimy original disappeared from public ken, and was wholly forgotten, when Mr. Hare in 1893 discovered its component parts lying in a heap in the City of London stoneyard, on the point of being broken up, and greatly coveted them for the embellishment of Holmhurst. He found that the poor relics were jointly owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and the Lord Mayor, and eventually persuaded all those eminent personages to make him a present of the remains, which were removed by road to Holmhurst, “at great expense,” as he says, with the aid of twenty-eight horses, four trucks, four trollies, and sixteen men. He re-erected them in his grounds, at a still greater expense, on a circular stone pedestal, similar to the original, which he had quarried from the outcroppings of stone on this little estate.