The Lord Derby of this expedition was a great friend of mine. His wife, formerly Lady Salisbury, was Lady Galloway’s mother, and I originally met her staying at Galloway House—after which she invited us several times to Knowsley. I think my first visit there was in 1879 when we met the Leckys—afterwards great friends—and Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lowe (afterwards Lord Sherbrooke). He was an albino and chiefly remembered for his abortive attempt to tax matches, giving rise to the joke “ex luce lucellum.” She was, I believe, a very good-natured woman, but it was funny to see the result of her excessive flow of conversation. She would begin with a circle round her, and person after person would gradually steal away, leaving her at length with only one victim whom amiability or good manners forbade to depart.
I well recollect that Lady Derby won my heart on this occasion by coming to the front door to meet us on arrival, under the evident impression that as a young woman I might be shy coming to a very large house among those, including my host, who were mostly strangers. I dare say that I might have survived the shock, but I was much struck with the courtesy and thoughtfulness of a woman old enough to be my mother, and it was one of the first lessons, of which I have had many in life, of the great effect of the manner in which people originally receive their guests.
Lady Derby was a remarkable woman in many ways. Her heart was first in her husband and children and then in politics. She could never take a lightsome view of life and let it carry her along. She always wished to manage and direct it. Her motives were invariably excellent, but occasionally things might have gone better had she taken less trouble about them. She did great things for her children, who adored her, but even with them it might sometimes have been well had their lives been left a little more to their own discretion. She was kindness itself to me, and I used greatly to enjoy going to Derby House, then in St. James’s Square, where she was always at home to her particular friends at tea-time and where one always had the chance of meeting interesting people.
APOTHEOSIS OF THE QUEEN
To conclude my recollections of the Jubilee. I think that it was in the autumn of 1887, and not after the Diamond Jubilee, that we were staying with Lord and Lady Muncaster at their beautiful home in Cumberland. We went to the local church and an Archdeacon was preaching for some Society which involved a plea for missionary effort. He spoke to this effect (of course these are not the exact words): “There are black men, brown men, red men, and yellow men in the British Empire. We must not despise any of them, for we are all children of one Great——” I naturally expected “Father,” but he added “Mother”! So far had Queen Victoria advanced in the tutelary rank! I was told after her death that the Tibetans had adopted her as a protecting deity—and that they attributed the invasion of their country to the fact that she had died, as we had never disturbed them in her lifetime. I record later on how natives in Madras did “poojah” to her statue, offering coconuts and such like tribute—but the Indians also did “poojah” to a steam-engine when they first saw it, so perhaps this was not an extraordinary token of reverence.
CHAPTER VI
GHOST STORIES AND TRAVELS IN GREECE
To go a little back in recollections of the eighties one of our friends was Lord Cairns, Lord Chancellor in 1868 and again from 1874 till, I believe, his death. Once when I was sitting near him at dinner, we were discussing ghost stories. He said that without giving them general credence he was impressed by one which had been told him by the wife of the Prussian Minister, Madame Bernstorff. (I think, though am not sure, that Bernstorff was Minister before there was a German Embassy.) The story was, briefly, that a man in Berlin had a dream, thrice repeated, in which a comrade appeared to him and said that he had been murdered, and that his dead body was being carried out of the city, covered with straw, by a certain gate. The man roused himself, told the police, the body was duly found and the murderers arrested. “Well,” said I, “I think I have read that story in Dryden, and believe he took it from Chaucer.” Sure enough I found the tale in “The Cock and the Fox,” Dryden’s modernised version of Chaucer’s “Tale of the Nun’s Priest”—but the amusing thing is that Dryden says,