At last my sufferings were such, from the relaxing air of Hurstmonceaux, that I was taken to Eastbourne, but an attempt was still made to chain me down for six or eight hours a day in a stuffy lodging at lessons with my tutor, who had not an idea of teaching and knew nothing to teach. Poor man! he was at least quite as wretched as I was, and I know that he thirsted quite as much for the fresh air of the downs. Aunt Esther came over, and used cruelly to talk, in my presence, of the fatigue and trouble which my ill-health caused my mother, and of the burden which she had thus brought upon herself by adopting me. It is only by God's mercy that I did not commit suicide. I was often on the point of throwing myself over the cliffs, when all would have been over in an instant, and was only restrained by my intense love for my mother, and the feeling that her apparently dormant affection would be awakened by such a catastrophe, and that she would always be miserable in such an event. Twenty-two years afterwards, when we were as closely united as it was possible for any mother and son to be, my darling mother reverted of her own accord to this terrible time: she could never die happy, she said, unless she knew that her after love had quite effaced the recollection of it.
Yet, even in these wretched months at Eastbourne there were oases of comfort—days when my "Aunt Kitty and Lou Clinton" came down, and, with "le cœur haut placé" and sound common-sense, seemed to set everything right; and other days when I made excursions alone with my mother to Jevington in the Downs, or to Wilmington with its old ruin and yew-tree, where we used to be kindly entertained by the primitive old Rector, Mr. Cooper, and his wife.
When I went, in 1877, to visit Alfred Tennyson the poet, he asked me to give him a subject for "A Domestic Village Tragedy." The story which I told him occurred at Hurstmonceaux this summer. Mrs. Coleman, who kept the "dame's school" at Flowers Green, had a niece, Caroline Crowhurst, a very pretty girl, the belle of the parish, and as amiable and good as she was pretty, so that every one was friends with her. She became engaged, rather against the will of her family, to a commercial traveller from a distance. He wrote to her, and she wrote to him, maidenly letters, but full of deep affection. One day they had a little quarrel, and the man, the fiend, took the most intimate, the most caressing of these letters and nailed it up against the Brewery in the centre of Gardner Street, where all the village might read it and scoff at it. As the people knew Caroline, no one scoffed, and all pitied her. But Caroline herself came to the village shop that afternoon; she saw her letter hanging there, and it broke her heart. She said nothing about it to any one, and she did not shed a tear, but she went home and kissed her aunt and her mother more tenderly than usual; she gathered the prettiest flowers in her little garden and put them in her bosom, and then she opened the lid of the draw-well close to her home and let herself in. The lid closed upon her.
I remember the news coming to Lime one evening that Caroline Crowhurst was missing, and the dreadful shock the next morning when we heard that the poor girl had been found in the well. My mother, who had known her from her birth, felt it very deeply, for at Hurstmonceaux we were on the most intimate terms with the poor people, and Philadelphia Isted, Mercy Butler, dear old Mrs. Piper the schoolmistress, Ansley Vine of the shop, grumbling old Mrs. Holloway (who always said she should be so glad when she was dead because then people would believe she had been ill), the crippled Louisa Wood, the saint-like bedridden Mrs. Wisham, and gentle Mrs. Medhurst, who lived amongst the primroses of "the lower road"—all these, and many more, were as familiar to me as my own nearest relations. To many of them, when well enough, I went regularly, and to Mrs. Piper, who had lived in the time of the castle, and known my father and his brothers from babyhood, almost every day. Her death was a real affliction. My mother walked behind her coffin at her funeral. In her will she left me a box which had belonged to my unhappy little ancestress, Grace Naylor.
At the end of July my real mother, "Italima," with my sister, came to stay at the Rectory. The visit was arranged to last a month, but unhappily on the second day of her stay, Italima went out with Aunt Esther. They came home walking on different sides of the road, and as soon as she entered the house Italima sent for post-horses to her carriage and drove away. I have never heard what happened, but Italima never came to the Rectory again. Soon afterwards she fixed her residence at Rome, in the Palazzo Parisani, which then occupied two sides of the Piazza S. Claudio.
In August it was decided to send me away to a private tutor's, and my mother and Uncle Julius went with me to Lyncombe, near Bath. My tutor was the Rev. H. S. R., son of a well-known evangelical writer, but by no means of the same spiritual grace: indeed I never could discover that he had any grace whatever; neither had he any mental acquirements, or the slightest power of teaching. He was "un homme absolument nul," and though paid a very large salary, he grossly and systematically neglected all his duties as a tutor. Uncle Julius must have been perfectly aware how inefficient the education at Lyncombe would be, but he was probably not to blame for sending me there. Because I did not "get on" (really because I was never taught), he regarded me as the slave of indolence—"putrescent indolence" he would have called it, like Mr. Carlyle. He considered me, however, to be harmless, though fit for nothing, and therefore one to be sent where I should probably get no harm, though certainly no good either. It was the system he went upon with my brothers also, and in their case he had all the responsibility, being their guardian. But, indeed, Uncle Julius's view was always much that of Rogers—"God sends sons, but the devil sends nephews," and he shunted them accordingly.
"Les grands esprits, d'ailleurs très estimables,
Ont très peu de talent pour former leurs semblables."
I went to Lyncombe with the utmost curiosity. The house was a large villa, oddly built upon arches in the hollow of a wooded valley about a mile from Bath, behind the well-known Beechen Cliff. At the back of it was a lawn with very steep wooded banks at the sides, and a fountain and pool, showing that the place had once been of some importance, and behind the lawn, meadows with steep banks led towards the heights of Combe Down. We all had rooms to ourselves at Lyncombe, scantily furnished, and with barely a strip of carpet, but we could decorate them with pictures, &c., if we liked. We did our lessons, when we were supposed to do them, at regular hours, in the dining-room, where we had our meals, and after work was finished in the evening, and eight o'clock tea, we were expected to sit with Mrs. R. in the drawing-room.