The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

There was another old home—an earlier one—that on my first walk in D—— I went to look at. Its associations were even more keenly dear, and archæologically it was immensely the most interesting.

I was astonished to see how very, very old it was, and for the first time was curious about its evidently extensive history. There was a monastic suggestion in its thick walls and crow-stepped gables, and the oaken door exactly like a church door, and the peculiar irregularity of the grouping of its parts. Nothing was changed, except that a horrid little office had been built into a corner that was once a sunless well between masonry, containing only evergreen shrubs and a dense mat of lilies-of-the-valley; but the office was an excrescence so glaringly alone by itself that one could treat it as if it were a tradesman's cart awaiting orders. Nothing else seemed to have been altered; even the bay-tree, from which we gathered leaves to flavour cookings, stood in the little front court as of yore, and the old ivy was, I am sure, the old ivy of fifty, possibly a hundred, if not a thousand, years ago. I viewed the place now with instructed eyes, which told me that half-a-century was a mere fraction of its age.

The guide-book says nothing about it. Old dwelling-houses are too thick on the ground in England to have any distinction unconnected with famous persons and events; this was no more to the town of D—— in 1908 than it was to us when we left it for the modern four-square house with the pillared portico and stone lions on the lawn, down there near the station. At neither time was there a doubt of the latter's incomparable superiority.

But I had come from the land of the raw and new, the domain of the social vagrant and the speculative builder, and I could appreciate the charm of this relic of antiquity, for the first time. I stood at the gate, and tried to think how it had come there. The clue was in the name of the lane beside it—Priory Road—and in the guide-book statement that the fine old rectory, in the gardens of which we used to lose arrows and balls over the wall dividing it from ours, stood "on the site of a Benedictine Priory."

Then I tried to reconstruct the plan of the interior, and remembered that the floor under the cocoanut matting of the dining-room was of cold stone slabs; the passages the same, and I think there was a press of black wood, that became store cupboards, built into an end of that room. Entering the arched front door, of such pronounced ecclesiastical design, mother's store-room was the first thing you came to, a room that opened out of the front hall on your right hand. Passing through that hall and opening the door that faced you, you were dropped straight into the drawing-room down a short flight of steps. One window of that apartment looked out towards the road (I fancy the excrescent office blocked it); another, and a door, opened directly upon the garden, gravelled nearly all over, with, at one side, a group of large and very old yew-trees, roofing a circular wooden bench. In the right-hand drawing-room wall a third door opened, at the top of another flight of steps, into what we called the music-room—really a cosier sitting-room, incidentally enclosing the piano, and without so many draughts in it; and a fourth door in a fourth wall led you into the stone-flagged passage connecting with our refectory and the domestic offices, and to the foot of the staircase. Surely that plan was never drawn with a view to the convenience of a lay family!

Upstairs the arrangement was still more unconventional, although it may have been conventual, for aught I know. That window over the arched main entrance—it was open, and its muslin curtains fluttering in the breeze—belonged to one of three rooms so tucked into the many-cornered structure that they described a sort of triangle; one was hemmed in by two, the only way in and out being through one or other of those two, which also intercommunicated, the point of common junction being a sort of square entry place, having the three doors in its panelled sides. For some reason the inmost, which was also to the person in the road the outermost, room was reserved as a guest chamber—the aunts used it; but once it was given to a male visitor, who wanted to be out early. His dilemma was a cruel one, seeing that his window was in a sheer wall and he had no rope ladder. He could gain freedom only through my parents' room or through that occupied by their daughters, now grown from babies to little girls. After long listening in our joint vestibule, he chose the former path, as the least of two evils; but, although he crept on stockinged feet, my mother was awake. She made some alterations after that. It seems to me they should have been made before.

Over that window above the front door another and smaller window looked down on me. I met its gaze with a shrinking eye and the cold creeps down my back—yes, even after all those years and years! You reached the little sloping walled room behind it through a suite of attics at the top of dark and lonely stairs; the first room was the servants', who, however, were not there when I went to bed; the next had only ghosts in it, and the locked door of a lumber-room out of which I nightly expected some shape of horror to spring forth on me as I breathlessly scurried past; the last—with this window in it—was where I slept with my governess.

Seven governesses in succession reigned over us, for in my circle it was considered rather shocking to send girls to boarding-school, which was quite the proper place for boys; and I can truthfully affirm that I never learned anything which would now be considered worth learning until I had done with them all and started foraging for myself. I did have a few months of boarding-school at the end—obtained by hard teasing for it—and a very good school for its day it was, but it left no lasting impression on my mind, except that of great unhappiness. The unhappiness had nothing to do with its being a boarding-school, but solely to its not being Home. Home is a place that I never do get away from without immediately wishing myself back in it.

Of the first two governesses—technically the nursery governesses—I remember little but their names and the circumstance that one of them was a nobleman's grand-daughter. Her mother had eloped with a poor tutor, and been cast out of her world in consequence—so closely does one generation resemble another in some of its practices, if not in all. The next—I think the next—was she who once turned that gable room into a torture-chamber, worthy successor of heretic-persecuting Mediæval monks, if any such preceded her. Only I was not a heretic, but an innocent, fairly well-behaved, carefully cherished child.

She came from L——, a neighbouring town of county importance, and it was darkly hinted that her father kept a boot-shop there. Anyway, she gave herself great airs. Before coming to us she had been governess at S—— Hall, and her late pupil, Rosamond U——, was thrown in our faces all day long. If they were not so well known, I would like to write the omitted names in full, and express to Rosamond U——, if she be living, the sympathy I have since felt for her in that long-past experience common to us both; but at the time I loathed her beyond everybody, with the solitary exception of our joint governess. Rosamond was so beautiful, so good, such a perfect lady!—the continual foil to her successors. Miss H—— sniffed behind backs at everything in our house, because it was so different from what she had been accustomed to. I slept in her room—alas!—and when she was beautifying herself for the evening and father called for her at the foot of the stairs, she used to inform me, with that ugly smile of hers, that at S—— Hall Mr U—— always came upstairs to her door and escorted her to the drawing-room on his arm—he was such a perfect gentleman! She must have been a liar, than which one is accustomed to believe there is nothing worse; but she was worse—a vile woman all through. I have never in my life disclosed the horrors of the nights I spent with her; her threats of revenge, if I should do so, sealed my lips at the time, and my mortal terror of her, even after she was gone, for years more; and then I was ashamed to speak. My poor parents died ignorant of what they had exposed me to in my tender childhood. I, so extravagantly beloved and cared for! Possibly Rosamond U——'s rank saved her from the like treatment. When I think of Miss H——, and I hate to think of her—even now she could taint the English landscape—when I do think of her, it is to wish I could tell all the parents in the world about her, as a warning against the promiscuous governess and against leaving any governess unwatched. Better the poorest boarding-school, where there is the safety of publicity, a thousand times. In L—— I had a married cousin, whose little bridesmaid I had been, and whose baby, that I was allowed to nurse on a footstool, lured me to stay with her once or twice; but I clung to her side all the time lest perchance I should sight Miss H—— half-a-mile off, after she had left our employ and lost all power over me. One day at church—great St Margaret's, so full of people—I caught a distant glimpse of the dull, sallow face, and nearly fainted as I stood.