The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

It was so remote a village that there was no way of getting to it from D—— but by driving the whole eight miles. M. sent the landlord of her local inn, her accustomed coachman, an intelligent man whose ancestors had been in service with mine, to fetch me; and he entertained me on the way with the history of the old families whose homes we passed and with whom my family had had more or less intimate relations in the years before he was born, as that history had been enacted within his lifetime and during the later part of mine. The soft grey rain came straight down, and we were both coated and mackintoshed to the eyes. I had to peer from under the edge of my dripping umbrella at the well-known gateways (the lodges more modernised than the mansions they belonged to, so far as I could see the latter through their splendid woods and avenues), the familiar farms and villages, with their fine old churches, all the dear, historic landscape; but, wet as it was, I had to struggle not to make it wetter—and my handkerchief hopelessly buried under my wraps. I tell you, dear sympathetic elderly reader, the memories that flocked along that road to greet me were all but overwhelming. It was, for peculiar and precious charm, the drive of my life—to date; only the one I had next day surpassed it.

It did not rain next day, and Mr B. drove up to the abbey, spick and span, in plum-coloured livery and shiny hat, to take us out for the afternoon. Nice man that he was, with his old family traditions so entwined with mine, he entered with respectful zeal into the spirit of the expedition, undertaking that I should miss nothing of interest to me through default of his. He and M. mapped out the route with care, and as we pursued it he turned on his box seat at intervals of a few minutes, to name each feature as we approached or passed it, and make such comments as seemed called for. Half the time I was standing up in the carriage behind him, straining my eyes to see, at the direction of his outstretched whip, something in the dim distance not yet plain enough to see. And yet, by accident or design, the latter I suspect, in collusion with M., he was driving slowly past the very face of T——, the goal of this pilgrimage, without word or sign, when my roving eye lighting upon it recognised it instantly, without anybody's aid.

Would that I had a photograph of it! For not only was it a good old house surpassing my fancy dreams of it, but it had not visibly changed in the least degree, nor had any of its farm surroundings. Just as I had left it when I was a child I saw it again when I was an old woman; and the whole scene was as familiar to the last detail as if I had been seeing it all the time. The big road gate, the pond within, the barn, the garden (raised above the surrounding meadow), the house itself, its generous front windows as wide as they were deep, and the kitchen at the side, and the dairy running back to the elder-tree where they used to kill the fowls—everything was in its old place, and no sign of decadence visible from the point at which I viewed it. This permanence of English things was so remarkable to me—because in Australia nothing is permanent, but altering itself to bigger or better every minute of the time.

As at the moment of sudden death the complete panorama of one's past life is before the mental eye—as one dreams a whole story in multitudinous detail between the housemaid's morning knock at one's door and the echo of it that wakes one (if those legendary happenings are to be believed)—so I seemed to live all my little childhood over again in the few minutes that Mr B. held his horse on the highroad, and I stood at his shoulder to gaze at the place, which, although not my birthplace, still meant for me the beginning of all things. Memory could go no further back than to an infancy that was put to bed in the middle of the day and given meals on its nurse's lap with a spoon. I looked at the nursery window, and instantly thought of a little thing left to cry in its crib, untended and unheard, with feelings so acutely hurt by the unprecedented neglect that the mark was left for evermore; and the occasion, there is evidence to show, was the birth of a sister three years younger than herself.

I looked at the "parlour" window and it was crowded with her. She was just old enough to be "shown off" as the usual prodigy of intelligence by adoring parents. My second earliest memory of myself is as a public singer. They stood me on the big round "centre table" that they might see me as I sang. I did not know the meaning of the words I lisped, yet I had remembered many fragments of them, and the tunes entirely, in spite of having heard neither during the many intervening years. And now an unknown friend in England, General Sir M.G., who fought in the Mutiny, who used to sing them himself before he went to that business, probably at the same time as I sang them, has filled up for me the gaps in the verses of one of my favourite songs, with the remark, which I can so feelingly endorse on my own account, that he wishes he could remember what he reads now as well as he does what attracted him in those old days. Almost simultaneously another friend in England, one of his Majesty's Privy Councillors, did me the very same kindness; and thus the old ballad seems to have a claim to be given a place in these reminiscences, for the sake of other of our contemporaries who may share our sentiment about it.

"'Twas a beautiful night, and the stars shone bright,
And the moon on the waters play'd,
When a gay cavalier to a bower drew near
A lady to serenade.
To tenderest words he swept the chords,
And many a sigh breath'd he.
While o'er and o'er he fondly swore:
Sweet maid, I love but thee."

With a lingering lilt at the end:

"Sweet mai-aid, sweet mai-aid, I lov-ove, I lov-ove but
thee."
"When he turn'd his eye to the lattice high,
And fondly breath'd his hopes,
In amazement he sees, swing about in the breeze,
All ready, a ladder of ropes.
Up, up, he has gone. The bird she has flown.
'What's this on the ground?' quoth he.
''Tis plain that she loves. Here's some gentleman's gloves,
And they never belong'd to me.
These gloves, these gloves, they never belong'd to me.'
Of course you'd have thought he'd have followed and
fought,
For it was a duelling age;
But the gay cavalier quite scorn'd the idea
Of putting himself in a rage.
So wiser by far, he pack'd up his guitar,
And as homeward he went sang he,
'When a lady elopes down a ladder of ropes
She may go to Hongkong for me.
She may go, she may go, she may go to Hongkong for me.'"

I do not know if it was the same cavalier to the same lady—but I think not, and General G. thinks not—who thus mourned by my infant lips:

"I'll hang my harp on a willow-tree
And go off to the wars again.
A peaceful life has no charms for me,
The battlefield no pain.
For the lady I love will soon be a bride,
With a diadem on her brow,
Oh, had she not flattered my boyish pride
I might have been happy now!"