FOOTNOTES:
[18] Unfortunately they never received payment for this work, which was left on their hands, and resulted in a heavy loss.
CHAPTER XIV
THE COTTAGE AT THREE MILE CROSS
It was during March of the year 1820 that the removal to the cottage at Three Mile Cross took place. Although it was attended with the inevitable bustle and discomposure, it could not have been, according to all accounts, a job of very great difficulty, for most of the furniture and pictures had been sold—sold at odd times to meet pressing needs—and there was, therefore, little to convey but the three members of the family, such books as were left to them, together with Mossy—the dear old nurse who had shared their misfortunes right through from the Alresford days—and Lucy the maid.
“Our Village” in 1913.
The Village of Three Mile Cross—A general view looking towards Reading.
We can almost picture the scene with the heavy farm-wagon, broad-wheeled and lumbering, crunching its ponderous way along the carriage-drive and out through the gates, with some of the dogs prancing and bounding, now before and now behind, barking at the unusual sight. Having cleared the gates there would be a turn to the left, along a short stretch of narrow lane emerging into the road from the village, where a sharp turn again to the left would take them on beneath over-arching elms—leafless and gaunt—over a tiny bridge spanning a tributary of the Loddon, past an occasional cottage where twitching parlour-blinds would betray the stealthy interest of the inmates in the passing of the folk from the big house; on until the road branched, where the right-hand fork would be taken, and so, by a gentle curve, the wagon would emerge by the side of the George and Dragon into the Basingstoke Road. And now, with a crack of the whip—for the last few steps must be performed in good style—the wagon would sweep once more to the left, where the finger-post, by the pond opposite, pointed to Reading, and in a moment or two draw up in the fore-court of the Swan, there to unload into the cottage next door.
Mossy and Lucy would be waiting to receive the goods, and the cobbler opposite would watch the proceedings with more than usual interest, for to him, that night, the village gossips would surely repair for news, he being so favourably placed for the garnering of it.
While the wagon is being unloaded we will transfer ourselves again to Bertram House.
The dogs are scampering and scurrying in the undergrowth of the now neglected shrubbery, chasing leaves which the March winds scatter crisply. The house is gaunt and cheerless as houses always are on such occasions. Fitful gleams of watery sunshine streak through the trees across to the steps down which two sad women take their slow way. The dogs bound towards them and are greeted and stroked, the while they curve their sleek and graceful bodies in an ecstasy of delight.
Along the carriage-drive they walk, with its surface all overgrown with weeds and marked with the heavy wheels of the wagon, the tracks of which, deeply cut in the yielding road, they now follow. Once through the gates they turn for a backward glance of “My own cotemporary trees” and then a “long farewell to all.” At the end of the lane they cast one sad look back—there is pain in the eyes of both—then turning they follow the wheel-marks until the cottage is reached, the door flies open—for Mossy has been watching for them—and all that the cobbler sees of their arrival will force him to draw on his imagination if his inquisitive neighbours are not to be disappointed.
“Your delightful letter, my dear Sir William,” wrote Miss Mitford shortly afterwards, “arrived at the very moment when kindness was most needed and most welcome—just as we were leaving our dear old home to come to this new one. Without being in general very violently addicted to sentimentality, I was, as you may imagine, a little grieved to leave the spot where I had passed so many happy years. The trees, and fields, and sunny hedgerows, however little distinguished by picturesque beauty, were to me as old friends. Women have more of this natural feeling than the stronger sex; they are creatures of home and habit, and ill brook transplanting. We, however, are not quite transplanted yet—rather, as the gardeners say, ‘laid by the heels.’ We have only moved to a little village street, situate on the turnpike road, between Basingstoke and the illustrious and quarrelsome borough [Reading]. Our residence is a cottage—no, not a cottage—it does not deserve the name—a messuage or tenement, such as a little farmer who had made twelve or fourteen hundred pounds might retire to when he left off business to live on his means. It consists of a series of closets, the largest of which may be about eight feet square, which they call parlours and kitchens and pantries; some of them minus a corner, which has been unnaturally filched for a chimney; others deficient in half a side, which has been truncated by the shelving roof. Behind is a garden about the size of a good drawing-room, with an arbour which is a complete sentry-box of privet. On one side a public-house, on the other a village shop, and right opposite a cobbler’s stall.
“Notwithstanding all this, ‘the cabin,’ as Bobadil says, ‘is convenient.’ It is within reach of my dear old walks; the banks where I find my violets; the meadows full of cowslips; and the woods where the wood-sorrel blows. We are all beginning to get settled and comfortable, and resuming our usual habits. Papa has already had the satisfaction of setting the neighbourhood to rights by committing a disorderly person, who was the pest of the Cross, to Bridewell. Mamma has furbished up an old dairy, and made it into a not incommodious store room. I have lost my only key, and stuffed the garden with flowers. It is an excellent lesson of condensation—one which we all wanted. Great as our merits might be in some points, we none of us excelled in compression. Mamma’s tidiness was almost as diffuse as her daughter’s litter. I expect we shall be much benefited by this squeeze; though at present it sits upon us as uneasily as tight stays, and is just as awkward looking. Indeed, my great objection to a small room always was its extreme unbecomingness to one of my enormity. I really seem to fill it—like a blackbird in a goldfinch’s cage. The parlour looks all me.”
Any doubts which the cobbler opposite may have entertained as to the status of the new arrivals—if, indeed, particulars had not already filtered through from Grazeley—must have been dispersed by the Doctor’s action in at once removing the terror of the Cross. More than this, he had actually suspended the village constable—who was also the blacksmith—for appearing before him with a blood-stained head—an unwarrantable offence against the person of the Chairman of the Reading bench. Three Mile Cross was to be purged; henceforth, it must behave itself, for a real live magistrate had come to live in the midst and, until the villagers found that the Doctor’s bark was worse than his bite they might shake with apprehension—and “they” included the cobbler who stuck closer to his last and was not to be tempted to anything more than a knowing wink when the magistrate and his family came under discussion.
“Borrow a little of the only gift in which I can vie with you—the elastic spirit of Hope”—wrote Miss Mitford to Mrs. Hofland at this time, and in that sentence we catch a glimpse of this wonderful woman who point blank refused to acknowledge a shadow so long as but one streak of light were vouchsafed to her.
“This place is a mere pied à terre,” she wrote, “till we can suit ourselves better,” and her one dread was that her father would elect to live in Reading, to which town she had now taken a sudden and violent dislike. “Not that I have any quarrel with the town, which, as Gray said of Cambridge, ‘would be well enough if it were not for the people’; but those people—their gossiping—their mistiness! Oh! you can imagine nothing so bad. They are as rusty as old iron, and as jagged as flints.” By which we may quite properly infer that the affairs and dwindled fortunes of the Mitfords were being openly discussed.
As a matter of fact, they must at this time have been almost penniless, with nothing between them and actual want but what they could obtain by the exertions of the daughter with her pen.
Whatever the original intention of the Doctor may have been as to the tenure of the cottage, it has to be recorded that it lasted for thirty years, witnessing the best and most successful of Miss Mitford’s literary efforts and her short-lived triumph as a dramatist; marking the gradual decay and death of Mrs. Mitford, and the increasing selfishness of the Doctor, the results of which, when he died, were his daughter’s only inheritance.
But, lest we should be accused of painting too gloomy a picture, let us also joyfully record that it was in this humble cottage and among the flowers of its garden that there gathered, from time to time, those truest friends who came from far and near to pay homage to the brave little woman who found comfort in the simple things of life, and was happy only when she was permitted to share her happiness with others.
Despite the pigs which came through the hedge from the Swan next door and “made sad havoc among my pinks and sweet-peas”; despite, also, the pump which went dry “from force of habit,” soon after they were installed, Miss Mitford was not long before she had “taken root,” as she called it, and begun again her work and her correspondence.
Haydon, the artist, sent her a picture—his study for the head of St. Peter—a delicate compliment and, seeing that their walls were so bare, a seasonable gift. “I am almost ashamed to take a thing of so much consequence” wrote the pleased recipient; “but you are a very proud man and are determined to pay me in this magnificent manner for pleasing myself with the fancy of being in a slight degree useful to you. Well, I am quite content to be the obliged person.”
Anxious to keep down all needless expenditure we now read of the “discontinuance of my beloved Morning Chronicle” and of inability to accept invitations away because of “mamma’s old complaint in her head” and “papa’s sore throat, which he manages in the worst possible manner, alternately overdoing it and letting it quite alone; blistering it by gargling brandy one day, and going out in the rain and wind all the next; so that, to talk of going out, even to you, seems out of the question. They really can’t do without me.” On the other hand, and remembering the mistiness, the rustiness and flinty nature of the Reading folk, there was the pathetic plea to Sir William Elford that he should turn aside on his journeys to or from town, to pay the cottage and its inhabitants a visit. “We shall have both house-room and heart-room for you, and I depend on seeing you. Do pray come—you must come and help laugh at our strange shifts and the curious pieces of finery which our landlord has left for the adornment of his mansion. Did you ever see a corner cupboard? Pray come and see us or you will break my heart—and let me know when you are coming.”
Three months later she wrote:—“I have grown exceedingly fond of this little place. I love it of all things—have taken root completely—could be content to live and die here.... My method of doing nothing seldom varies. Imprimis, I take long walks and get wet through. Item, I nurse my flowers—sometimes pull up a few, taking them for weeds, and vice versâ leave the weeds, taking them for flowers. Item, I do a short job of needlework. Item, I write long letters. Item, I read all sorts of books, long and short, new and old. Have you a mind for a list of the most recent? Buckhardt’s Travels in Nubia, Bowdich’s Mission to Ashantee, Dubois’ Account of India, Morier’s Second Journey in Persia. All these are quartos of various degrees of heaviness. There is another of the same class, La Touche’s[19] Life of Sir Philip Sidney (you set me to reading that by your anecdote of Queen Elizabeth’s hair). Southey’s Life of Wesley—very good. Hogg’s Winter Evening Tales—very good indeed (I have a great affection for the Ettrick Shepherd, have not you?). Diary of an Invalid—the best account of Italy which I have met with since Forsythe—much in his manner—I think you would like it. Odeleben’s Campaign in Saxony—interesting, inasmuch as it concerns Napoleon, otherwise so-so. The Sketch Book, by Geoffrey Crayon—quite a curiosity—an American book which is worth reading. Mr. Milman’s Fall of Jerusalem—a fine poem, though not exactly so fine as the Quarterly makes out. I thought it much finer when I first read it than I do now, for it set me to reading Josephus, which I had never had the grace to open before; and the historian is, in the striking passages, much grander than the poet, particularly in the account of the portents and prophecies before the Fall. These books, together with a few Italian things—especially the Lettere di Ortes—will pretty well account for my time since I wrote last, and convince you of the perfect solitude, which gives me time to indulge so much in the delightful idleness of reading.”
The anecdote of Queen Elizabeth’s hair to which Miss Mitford alludes in the preceding letter, was one of which Sir William wrote in the previous April. It was to the effect that two ladies of his acquaintance had just paid a visit to Lord Pembroke’s family at Wilton, and whilst there one of them desired to see the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadie when, in perusing it, she discovered, between two of the leaves, a long lock of yellow hair, folded in an envelope in which was written, in Sir Philip Sidney’s handwriting, a declaration that the lock was “The faire Queen Elizabeth’s hair,” given him by her Majesty. In recounting this anecdote to Mrs. Hofland, Miss Mitford remarked that “the miraculous part of the story is, that at Wilton, amongst her own descendants, the Arcadia should be so completely a dead letter. I suppose it was snugly ensconced between some of Sir Philip’s Sapphics or Dactylics, which are, to be sure, most unreadable things.”
But, apart from this “idleness of reading,” Miss Mitford was busily gathering material for her articles in the Lady’s Magazine, roaming the countryside for colour. “I have already been cowslipping” she wrote. “Are you fond of field flowers? They are my passion—even more, I think, than greyhounds or books. This country is eminently flowery. Besides all the variously-tinted primroses and violets in singular profusion, we have all sorts of orchises and arums; the delicate wood anemone; the still more delicate wood-sorrel, with its lovely purple veins meandering over the white drooping flower; the field-tulip, with its rich chequer-work of lilac and crimson, and the sun shining through the leaves as through old painted glass; the ghostly field star of Bethlehem—that rare and ghost-like flower; wild lilies of the valley; and the other day I found a field completely surrounded by wild periwinkles. They ran along the hedge for nearly a quarter of a mile; to say nothing of the sculptural beauty of the white water-lily and the golden clusters of the golden ranunculus. Yes, this is really a country of flowers, and so beautiful just now that there is no making up one’s mind to leave it.”