"Mrs. Bulman went up from Northumberland to London, taking her little child with her. The evening after she arrived at her London house, she had occasion to go downstairs, and at the foot of the stairs passed a man talking to her maid; at that time she happened to have a bank-note in her hand. Afterwards she went upstairs again, and put her child to bed. In a little while she went up to see if it was comfortable. When she went into the room, the child was in bed, but appeared to be in rather an excited state, and said, 'Mama, I feel quite sure that there is somebody under the bed.' Mrs. Bulman said, 'Nonsense, my dear; there is nothing of the kind: only you are over-tired; so go to sleep, and do not think of anything else foolish;' and she went downstairs.
"I don't know what the child did then, but when Mrs. Bulman went up again, there was no one under the bed, but the window was open, and the lock of the desk on the table had been tried.
"Many years afterwards, Mrs. Bulman had occasion to visit a London prison. When she was going away, the governor came to her and said that there was a man there who was under sentence of death, and that he could not account for it, but, having seen Mrs. Bulman pass as she went into the prison, he was exceedingly importunate to be allowed to speak to her, if it were only for a moment. 'Well,' said Mrs. Bulman, 'if it will be any comfort to the poor man, I am sure I shall be very glad to speak to him,' and she went to his cell. She did not recollect ever having seen the man before, but he said that as he was so soon to go into another world, it could not matter to him what he confessed now, and that he thought it might be some satisfaction to her to know what a very narrow escape she had once had of her life.
"He said he was in the house talking to her maid, having gone in to visit one of her servants, when she came downstairs with the bank-note in her hand, and that he could not say what tempted him, but that he had seized a knife and hidden himself behind a door till she passed on her way upstairs again. Then he found his way to her room and concealed himself under her bed. There he had heard her come in and put the child to bed and leave it, and then, amazed at the strangeness of his situation, he turned round. She came back, and he heard the child tell her that there was a man under the bed, and if at that moment she had looked under, he should have sprung out and murdered her. She did not, and afterwards hearing a noise downstairs, he thought it was better to make his escape, which he did by the window, leaving it open behind him."
"Wallington, Sept. 24.—On the way here I stopped to see Belsay, the finest of the Border fortresses, a grand old gothic tower, standing in a beautiful garden and amongst fine trees.
"Opening from the enclosed courtyard, which now forms a great frescoed hall in the centre of this house of Wallington, are endless suites of huge rooms, only partly carpeted and thinly furnished with ugly last-century furniture, partly covered with faded tapestry. The last of these is 'the ghost-room,' and Wallington is still a haunted house: awful noises are heard all through the night; footsteps rush up and down the untrodden passages; wings flap and beat against the windows; bodiless people unpack and put away their things all night long, and invisible beings are felt to breathe over you as you lie in bed. I think my room quite horrid, and it opens into a long suite of desolate rooms by a door which has no fastening, so I have pushed the heavy dressing-table with its weighty mirror, &c., against it to keep out all the nasty things that might try to come in. Old Lady Trevelyan was a very wicked woman and a miser: she lived here for many years, and is believed to wander here still: her son, Sir Walter, has never been known to laugh.
"Sir Walter is a strange-looking being, with long hair and moustache, and an odd careless dress. He also has the reputation of being a miser.[219] He is a great teetotaller, and inveighs everywhere against wine and beer: I trembled as I ran the gauntlet of public opinion yesterday in accepting a glass of sherry. Lady Trevelyan is a great artist. She is a pleasant, bright little woman, with sparkling black eyes, who paints beautifully, is intimately acquainted with all the principal artists, imports baskets from Madeira and lace from Honiton, and sells them in Northumberland, and always sits upon the rug by preference.
"There is another strange being in the house. It is Mr. Wooster, who came to arrange the collection of shells four years ago, and has never gone away. He looks like a church-brass incarnated, and turns up his eyes when he speaks to you, till you see nothing but the whites. He also has a long trailing moustache, and in all things imitates, but caricatures, Sir Walter. What he does here nobody seems to know; the Trevelyans say he puts the shells to rights, but the shells cannot take four years to dust."
"Sept. 26.—Such a curious place this is! and such curious people! I get on better with them now, and even Sir Walter is gruffly kind and grumpily amiable. As to information, he is a perfect mine, and he knows every book and ballad that ever was written, every story of local interest that ever was told, and every flower and fossil that ever was found—besides the great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers of everybody dead or alive. His conversation is so curious that I follow him about everywhere, and take notes under his nose, which he does not seem to mind in the least, but only says something more quaint and astonishing the next minute. Lady Trevelyan is equally unusual. She is abrupt to a degree, and contradicts everything. Her little black eyes twinkle with mirth all day long, though she says she is ill and has 'the most extraordinary feels;' she is 'sure no one ever had such extraordinary feels as she has.' She never appears to attend to her house a bit, which is like the great desert with one or two little oases in it, where by good management you may possibly make yourself comfortable. She paints foxgloves in fresco and makes little sketches à la Ruskin in the tiniest of books—chiefly of pollard willows, which she declares are the most beautiful things in nature. To see pollard willows in perfection she spent six weeks last spring in the flattest parts of Holland, and thought it lovely—'the willows so fine and the boat-life so healthy.' 'Well, you will go to the bad,' she said to me yesterday, because I did not admire a miserable little drawing of Ruskin: my own sketches she thinks quite monstrous.
"We went the day before yesterday to Capheaton, the home of the Swinburnes, a very curious old house, and Sir John Swinburne, a very pleasing young miser, is coming to dinner to-day. Yesterday we went through fog and rain to Camphoe, Kirk Whelpington, and Little Harle, a fine inhabited castle. Sir Walter made me wade through the Wansbeck as we came back!"