Journal.
“August 13, 1886.—Two days ago Lady Ossington took me to Lady Evelyn Campbell’s wedding with James Baillie Hamilton in Henry VII.’s Chapel. They have married on his vocation, which played all the time of the ceremony, and on which their future depends for the bread and butter of life, at present supplied to them by America for looking after it. They have also a camp, in which they propose to train boys for hardships in the colonies, and the sweet little bride began her own hardships by having to walk two miles to this, through the wet grass and fern of a desolate moor, carrying in a basket the cold chicken and bread which her sisters had put up for her supper.
“I have been reminded how James Baillie Hamilton was at Harrow at Hayward’s house, which in my time used to be Harris’s, and to have then the reputation of being haunted. He told Catherine Vaughan that one night whilst he was there, Albert Grey, also a senior boy in the house, rushed into his room wild with horror, and said that when he was in bed he had seen by the moonlight a most terrible figure come in, a kind of nondescript, and that as it approached a chill as of death came over him. Eventually it had seemed to go into a corner of the room and disappear there. Something was arranged for Albert Grey for that night, and the friends never told at Harrow what had occurred. Years afterwards, at his camp, Baillie Hamilton met a boy called Anderson, who had been in Hayward’s house. He told how he and another boy slept in the same room. One night he heard his companion in an agonised tone say, ‘Oh, do light the candle: there is something most dreadful in the room.’ He lighted it, and found his friend sitting on the edge of his bed, trembling from head to foot. He said that the door had opened, and a horrible nondescript figure had come in, when the most terrible chill, as of death, had come over him. After a time, all seeming as usual, the boys put out the light. They had hardly done so, when Anderson himself saw the figure—the appalling figure, come towards him, and the same deathly icy chill seized him. They lighted the candle again, when the apparition vanished.
“One of the curates at Llandaff was going to the place where Miss Hayward, sister of the Harrow Master, lived, and Catherine asked him to inquire if she remembered the circumstance. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that is exactly what happened; and that room is never used now.’
“On the evening of the wedding-day I went to Chichester, where the Bishop’s palace, venerable and grey, but buried in myrtles and coronillas, and radiant with brilliant flowers, lies close under the shadow of the beautiful cathedral spire. The Bishop (Durnford), at eighty-seven, is the very type of a christian scholar, perfectly charming in conversation, equally at home in classical and in French, English, and Italian reminiscence and quotation, and touchingly filled with a generous and kindly spirit to all he meets with. Circling around him were various relations, a brother-in-law—a pleasant old clergyman Mr. Keate, nieces, two sons, Dick and Walter, the latter the pleasantest and frankest of young Eton masters, and the daughter, Miss Durnford, who is mistress of the house, and whose active energy makes all right wherever she goes, and very cheerily right too. The profuse family use of adjectives and verbs, which they unearth for themselves, was very entertaining. ‘We seem to be going to have a regular Belshazzar,’ said Walter Durnford when something more than usual appeared for luncheon.
“There is much to interest in the palace, which has a charming early English chapel and a grand old kitchen. The cathedral retains the human interest of its old pavement and a few tombs, sadly mutilated or tinkered up: one of a Lady Arundel is very fine. There are curious paintings of Cadwallador and of Henry VIII. giving charters on one of the walls, by a painter of Henry VIII.’s time, who also decorated the ceiling of the very fine old dining-room in the palace. Round the town, much of the old wall remains, making a pleasant walk; but the most curious building is St. Mary’s Hospital, like a church, with a great single nave divided at the sides by chapels, which form the little two-roomed houses of ten old women, presented by the Bishop and custos, who live there rent-free in great comfort, with firing, and twelve shillings a week for their maintenance. At the end is the chapel, only separated from the rest by an old oak screen.
“With the Bishop and his party I went to Midhurst, a most attractive old town in lovely country, and we walked through an ancient wood above the Rother to the grand ruins of Cowdray, full of recollections of the Poyntz family, who, as its possessors, came in bitterly for the curse of sacrilege. When Mr. Poyntz went out in a boat at Bognor with his two sons, and the boat upset whilst Mrs. Poyntz was watching it from the hotel-window, the boys clung to the tail of their father’s coat as he held the side of the boat in the waves, and he—who could not swim—had the agony of feeling one after the other leave go and sink, without being able to help them. He himself was eventually saved by the boatmen. In the church of Easebourne, which stands in the park, near the fine old building called the Priory, is a touching tomb by Chantrey, erected to this Mr. and Mrs. Poyntz by their three daughters—Ladies Clinton, Exeter, and Spencer. As they were co-heiresses, Cowdray was obliged to be sold, and was bought by the Egmonts.”
“Highcliffe, August 25.—I arrived here for my usual happy summer week with Tina, Lady Waterford, who has been a curious contrast to the lady of the place, but in herself very pleasant. She described how Cromwell, determined to take ‘the golden vale of Tipperary,’ said he would take it ‘by Hook or by Crook’—the two villages on either side the river—and thence the proverb.
“There has been a bee-show on the lawn here, Mr. Bellairs and young Evan Maberly going amongst the bees, taking them up, and treating them just as they pleased; but it looked horrible when their hats were covered with a crawling mass, and bees were hanging to nose and ears.
“Lady Jane Ellice says that at Harewood there is one of the most splendid collections of china—quantities of it. Formerly it all used to be kept in the gallery in which the family live, on bureaux, tables, &c. One evening it was all left in its usual place, and the next morning the whole collection—everything—quite unbroken, was found on the ground. There was never the least explanation. The china has ever since been kept in cases.”