On the other side of my old home, along the London Road, I walked in the Past every step of the way. There was the same old workhouse, which we used to visit after church on Christmas mornings to see the paupers wolfing their roast beef and plum pudding, beside it the Court House, full of memories of concert nights and entertainments—particularly of a demonstration by a girl clairvoyant, who, while "under the influence," informed a member of our party that her son was lying dangerously ill at his tutor's house in Heidelberg; which was afterwards proved to be the case, although this was the first she heard of it. D—— has a Town Hall now, a Jubilee Town Hall, but in my day the Court House seems to have been the place for public functions; and I have an acute remembrance of sitting through an evening on a ledge but a few inches wide, being crowded off the benches and too proud to ask for a lap. My back aches and the calves of my legs curl up now when it comes across me.
Further on, C—— Hall by the roadside—unchanged, except that I found it temporarily tenantless. My little girl-contemporaries who used to live there wore white pants to the feet, frilled around the ankles, under their short skirts, like Miss Kenwigs. Where, I wondered, as I looked at the blank windows, where were they now? Across the road, in front of the hall, lay the park-like lands belonging to it, the beautiful turf only matched by the beautiful trees—all as it used to be. There I saw myself, a little thing in a new pink frock, dancing about with my mother and a crowd of busy ladies amongst long plank tables, at which the poor folk of the town and for miles around were being feasted on roast beef and plum pudding, while brass bands brayed and flags fluttered in the sun. The occasion was the Celebration of Peace after the Crimean War.
Then the village of D——, object of so many walks in the governess days—I tramped thither one fresh and sunny morning when I wanted a good constitutional, and, as usual when I found the door open, I entered the church. The clergyman, in a rapid gabble, was reciting the daily service; he had one daily—in the very middle of the working morning, in a parish containing only those who were bound to be hard at it earning their living and attending to the needs of families. When, oh! when will parsons learn common-sense? It was a relief to see that these parishioners were not seduced from the path of duty by his well-intentioned invitation. The whole congregation was embodied in one extremely old man, whose infirmities had long disqualified him for the work of life. For him, I thought, it would have been enough at this hour to leave the place open, to comfort him, when he liked to wander in, with its divine suggestions. He could not have followed the breathless patter of words with his deaf ears.
However, perhaps this is not my business.
[CHAPTER VI]
EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS
I went on from D—— into the deeper and more beautiful recesses of my native county, the localities associated with my earliest years, the most sacred places of them all. It was early in July, when the rhododendrons, so thick in the woods, had done their flowering, but the trees were in full perfection, and the honeysuckles of the hedges scented the highways.
Two large families of cousins had grown up thereabouts, and some were still clinging to their native soil. All had been unknown to me from the time of our paternal grandfather's death, in 1856, which precipitated the estranging lawsuit—all, that is to say, excepting E., who married from our house. As children we used to shoot veiled glances at each other in church, but that was all the intercourse permitted to us. However, in later years, when we had sense of our own to judge the merits of this old quarrel, one and another of my cousins claimed acquaintance with me through my publishers, and I came to England with several long-standing invitations from them to visit them when I could. M.G., a widow a few years older than myself, was one who had never deserted Norfolk, and whose charming home was in the very heart of my own country, within a drive of all the places I most desired to see again. An "abbey," it was called, a farmhouse now, divorced from its lands, one of those beautiful English dwellings, several hundreds of years old, that I was always adoringly and enviously in love with; and attached to it were the ruins of a religious house, which the county directory informed me was founded for Cistercians in 1251, and granted at the Dissolution to the family whose present representative, of the same name, owns it still, my cousin's friend and landlord. From the old garden, out of the stupendous trees (are there trees in England to rival Norfolk trees?), rose fragments of the walls of that old abbey, broken arches and windows with some stone tracery left in them; and there were damp depressions in which lumps of carved stone were jumbled up with weeds and ragged bushes, the crypts which Time had filled, but not wholly filled, with the rain-washings of centuries. Imagine my joy in such surroundings! And within the comparatively modern but still antique (it looked to me Elizabethan) residence, nothing to clash with the grey stone walls and mullioned and labelled windows, all simple dignity, frugal refinement, warmth, ease, comfort. It was a delight to me merely to walk up and down the stairs, wide and shallow and solid, echoing the footfalls of generations of gentlefolk at every step; especially when at the top lay the cosiest of beds and at the bottom the cheeriest of quiet firesides.
Although it was July we had a fire all the time—the little touch that made us kin, my cousin and me. The old prejudice against lighting a fire after spring cleaning or before a certain fixed date in autumn, coincident with the exchange of lace window-curtains for stuff ones, or some such annual domestic rite, had not died out in rural England since I had been away; but here—as soon as I walked in out of the rain on the afternoon of my arrival—the sight of a ruddy blaze, and a well-furnished tea-table beside it, told me that in this remote village I had struck an enlightened woman.