It was when I was at Beckett, just before Easter 1860, that I was first told that we should have to leave our dear home at Hurstmonceaux. Many years before, there had been an alarm, and my mother would then have bought the Lime property, but that the price asked was so greatly above its value, and no other purchasers came forward. So she was satisfied to go on renting Lime and the surrounding fields for a small sum, especially as she had a promise from those who had charge of the sale that no other offer should be accepted without giving her the preference. In the spring of 1860, however, Mr. Arkcoll, a rich old Hurstmonceaux farmer and churchwarden, died, leaving a large fortune to his nephew and a considerable sum of ready money to buy a house near his property. Lime had long been as Naboth's vineyard in the younger Mr. Arkcoll's eyes, and before we knew that the uncle was dead, we heard that the nephew was the purchaser of Lime, the promise to us having been broken.
My mother immediately offered Mr. Arkcoll a much larger sum than he had paid to save Lime, but not unnaturally he was inexorable.
Thus it was inevitable that at Michaelmas we must leave our dear home, and, though I had suffered much at Hurstmonceaux, and though our position there as a ruined family was often a dismal one, yet we felt that nothing could ever replace what Lime itself was, where every plant was familiar, and every tree had its own little personal reminiscence. And there was also the great difficulty of finding a new home within our small means, and yet large enough to house our many books and pictures.
I met my mother at Bournemouth to talk over plans and possibilities for the future, and we went on to Weymouth, where we remained some weeks. It was bitterly cold weather, but I always liked Weymouth, and the pleasant walks in Sandyfoot Bay, and excursions to Bow and Arrow Castle, Corfe Castle, Abbotsbury, and Lyme Regis. In April I was again at Beckett.
To MY MOTHER.
"Beckett, April 8, 1860.—Yesterday I went with Lady Barrington and Lady Somerton to Ashdowne (Lord Craven's). It is a most awfully desolate place, standing high up on the bare downs. Four avenues approach the house from the four sides. It was built by a Craven who was Lord Mayor of London, and who, flying from the great plague, rode fiercely on and on, till upon this bleak down he saw a desolate farmhouse, where he thought that the plague could not penetrate, and there he rested, and there he eventually built. The four avenues, and the windows on every side, were intended to let the plague out in one direction if it came in at the other. Inside the house are great stag's horns which Elizabeth of Bohemia brought with her from Germany, and portraits of her, Prince Rupert, Prince Maurice, and the four princesses her daughters, painted by one of them. The young Ladies Craven showed us the house amid shouts of laughter at their own ignorance about it, which certainly was most dense.
"We went on by roads, which were never meant for a carriage, to a point whence Lady Barrington and I walked across the down to 'Wayland Smith's Cave,' a very small cromlech, in which Wayland could hardly have stood upright when he used it for a forge."
"Hendred House, April 15.—It is a proof how necessary it is for the writer of a Handbook to see himself all that he writes about, that I found East Hendred, of which I had heard nothing, to be one of the most romantic villages I ever saw—groups of ancient gable-ended houses, black and white or black and red, with turreted chimneys—a ruined moss-grown chapel dedicated to 'Jesus of Bethlehem'—a fine old grey church in a glen—and a beautiful Catholic chapel attached to this quaint old house, which contains a great Holbein of Sir Thomas More and his family, his cup, a portrait of Cardinal Pole, and the staff upon which Bishop Fisher leant upon the scaffold!"
My next visit was to Dr. Hawtrey, the Provost of Eton, to whom I became much attached. Being in the house with him was a constant intellectual feast, he was so accomplished as well as learned. Beautiful and interesting books were produced to illustrate all he said, and it would be hard to say how much Latin or Italian poetry he daily read or repeated to me. It was impossible not to be perfectly at home with him, he was so easy and natural. Of the two old sisters who had resided with him, and who were known by Eton boys as Elephantina and Rhinocerina, only one was still living, in a gentle and touching state of childishness, keeping up all her old-fashioned habits of courtesy and politeness; the mind now and then taking in an idea like a flash of light, and immediately losing it again. The Provost's attention to this old sister was quite beautiful, and her affection for him. When she was going to bed she would "pack up" and carry off all the things upon the table—books, envelope-boxes, &c., which were soon sent downstairs again.