“She had not been in bed long when a man appeared in the room with a candle and a knife. Coming up to the bed, he passed the light again and again close before her eyes. She bore it without flinching in the least, only appeared to become restless and turned over in her sleep. Then he proceeded to the dressing-room and became occupied over the jewels. As soon as she was aware that he was entirely engrossed, she darted out of bed, banged to the door of the dressing-room, locked it on the outside, and rang violently for assistance. When help came, and the door was opened, they found the man strangled from trying to get through the iron bars of the window.
“The portrait of old Lady Selby still remains at the Mote.”[29]
To Miss Leycester.
“Bretton Park, Nov. 21, 1872.—To-day we went—Lady Francis Gordon, Mrs. Lowther, Mr. Doyle, and I—to luncheon at Walton, an extraordinary house in the middle of a lake, which belonged to the Roman Catholic Mr. Waterton, the great ornithologist. It is approached by a long drawbridge and is most curious. A Mr. Hailstone lives there now, a strange man, who spends his large fortune on antiquities, and has a wife who writes on lace, and wonderful collections.[30] Their son has never eaten anything but buttered toast, cheese, and port-wine (has never tasted meat, vegetables, or fruit), but is eight years old and very flourishing.
“Lord and Lady Salisbury are here. The latter can only be described by the word ‘jocund,’ except when she does not wish to make acquaintance or desires to snub people, when she becomes hopelessly impenetrable. There is a party of fourteen, all new to me, but I get on very well. They look upon me as an aboriginal from another hemisphere, and indeed they are that to me; but it is too new a set to feel the least shy in. There is great satisfaction in being only a background figure, and Lady Margaret is quite charming, the house handsome, and the park pretty. We all went to church this morning in a sort of family drawing-room in the grounds, the vulgar herd screened off by red curtains, only the clergyman in his pulpit visible above the screen.”
I made a very interesting excursion with Lady Margaret and some of her guests to Haworth, the wild weird home of the Brontës on the Yorkshire fells, where the steep street with the stones placed edgeways, up which the horses scramble like cats, leads to the wind-stricken churchyard, with its vast pavement of tombstones set close together. On one side of this is the dismal grey stone house where the three unhappy sisters lived, worked, and suffered, with the window at the side through which Patrick Brontë used to climb at night. Not a tree is to be seen in the neighbourhood except the blackened lilac before the Rectory door. Nature is her dreariest self, and offers no ameliorations. The family were buried beneath their pew in the church,[31] so that Charlotte, the last survivor, sat in church over the graves of her brothers and sisters. The people seemed half savage, most of all the Rector, who violently hurled Lady Margaret and Lady Catherine Weyland from his door when they asked to see the house, being bored, I suppose, by the pertinacity of visitors.
The Brontës were really Pronty—Irish—but when old Mr. Brontë went to college, he did the wise thing of changing his name, and the family kept to it.
I went for two days from Bretton to Lord Houghton at Fryston, which has since been burnt, but which was so filled with books of every kind that the whole house was a library, each bookcase being filled with a different subject—the French Revolution, Demonology and Witchcraft, &c., &c. Lady Houghton was living then, a most gentle, kind woman, a sister of Lord Crewe. From Lord Houghton I received constant kindness and protection from my first entering upon a literary life, and, in spite of his excessive vanity, I was always sincerely attached to him. “Butterfly to the hasty eye, he was firm in his friendships, firmest of all in his fearless championship of the weak, the strugglers, the undeservedly oppressed.” As Johnson says of Garth—“he communicated himself through a very wide extent of acquaintance.” His conversation was always interesting, but I have preserved scarcely any notes of my visit to Fryston, and chiefly remember his mentioning that Sydney Smith had said to him, what I have so often thought, “It is one of the great riddles of life to me why good people should always be so dreadfully stupid.” He also spoke of the many proverbs which discouraged exertion in “doing good,” from the Persian “Do no good, and no harm will come of it,” to the French—
“Pour faire du bien
Ne faites rien.”
Talking of the Baroness Burdett Coutts, Lord Houghton said, “Miss Coutts likes me because I never proposed to her. Almost all the young men of good family did: those who did their duty by their family always did. Mrs. Browne (Miss Coutts’ companion) used to see it coming, and took herself out of the way for ten minutes, but she only went into the next room and left the door open, and then the proposal took place, and immediately it was done Miss Coutts coughed, and Mrs. Browne came in again.”