Morton Berkeley sought no career; he lived with his mother and sister, Lady Mary, at Cranford, his principal pleasure and occupation being the preservation of the game on the estate—an object of not very easy accomplishment, owing to the proximity of Cranford to London, the distance being only twelve miles by railroad, and the facilities thus offered of escape and impunity to poachers necessarily considerable. The tract immediately round Cranford was formerly part of the famous, or rather infamous, Hounslow Heath; and I have heard Mr. Henry Berkeley say that in his youth he remembered perfectly, when he went to London with his father, by day or night, loaded pistols were an invariable part of the carriage furniture.
My first acquaintance with Mr. Morton Berkeley's devotion to the duties of a gamekeeper was made in a very singular manner, and accompanied by a revelation of an unexpected piece of sentiment.
—— and myself were visiting at Cranford on one occasion, when the only strangers there beside ourselves were Lady C——, Lord and Lady S——, and Lord F—— and his sister, a lady of some pretensions to beauty, but still more to a certain fashionable elegance of appearance, much enhanced by her very Parisian elaborateness of toilette.
One night, when the usual hour for retiring had come, the ladies, who always preceded the gentlemen by some hours to their sleeping apartments, had left the large room on the ground-floor, where we had been spending the evening. As we ascended the stairs, my attention was attracted by some articles of dress which lay on one of the window-seats: a heavy, broad-brimmed hat, a large rough pea-jacket, and a black leather belt and cutlass—a sort of coastguard costume which, lying in that place, excited my curiosity. I stopped to examine them, and Lady Mary exclaiming, "Oh, those are Morton's night-clothes; he puts them on when everybody is gone to bed, to go and patrol with the gamekeeper round the place. Do put them on for fun;" she seized them up and began accoutring me in them.
When I was duly enveloped in these very peculiar trappings, we all burst into fits of laughter, and it was instantly proposed that we should all return to the drawing-room, I marching at their head in my gamekeeper's costume. Without further consideration, I ran downstairs again, followed by the ladies, and so re-entered the room, where the gentlemen were still assembled in common council, and where our almost immediate return in this fashion was hailed by a universal shout of surprise and laughter. After standing for a minute, with a huge rough overcoat over my rose-colored satin and moiré skirts, which made a most ludicrous termination to the pugnacious habit of my upper woman, I plunged my hand into one of the pockets, and drew forth a pair of hand-cuffs (a prudent provision in case of an encounter with poachers). Encouraged by the peals of merriment with which this discovery was greeted, I thrust my other hand into the other pocket, when Mr. Morton Berkeley, without uttering a word, rushed at me, and, seizing me by the wrist, prevented my accomplishing my purpose. The suddenness of this movement frightened me at first a good deal. Presently, however, my emotion changed, and I felt nothing but amazement at being thus unceremoniously seized hold of, and rage at finding that I could not extricate myself from the grasp that held me. Like a coward and a woman, I appealed to all the other gentlemen, but they were laughing so excessively that they were quite unable to help me, and probably anticipated no great mischief from Mr. Berkeley's proceeding. I was almost crying with mortification, and actually drew the cutlass and threatened to cut the fingers that encircled my wrist like one of the iron handcuffs, but, finding my captor inexorable, I was obliged, with extreme sulky confusion, to beg to be let go, and promise to take the coat off without any further attempts to search the pockets. I divested myself of my borrowed apparel a great deal faster than I had put it on, and its owner walked off with the pea-jacket, the right pocket of which remained unexplored. We ladies withdrew again, rather crestfallen at the termination of our joke, I rubbing my wrist like Mary Stuart after her encounter with Lord Ruthven, and wondering extremely what could be the mysterious contents of that pocket.
The next day Lady Mary told me that her brother had long cherished a romantic sort of idolatry for Miss F——, and that, as a pendant to the handcuffs in one pocket of his dreadnought, the other contained her miniature, which he dreaded the night before that my indiscretion would produce, to the derision of the men, the distress and confusion of the young lady herself, and the possible displeasure of her brother. Mr. Morton Berkeley's manners to me after that were again, as they always had been, respectful and rather reserved; the subject of our "fight" was never again alluded to, and he remained to me a gentle, shy, courteous (and romantic) gentleman.
He was habitually silent, but when he did speak, he was very apt to say something apposite, and generally containing the pith of the matter under discussion. I remember once, when I was reproaching his brother Henry and his sister with what I thought the unbecoming manner in which they criticised the deportment and delivery of a clergyman whose sermon they had just listened to (and who certainly was rather an unfortunate specimen of outward divinity), Mr. Morton Berkeley suddenly turned to me, and said, "Why, Mrs. Butler, he is only the rusty bars the light shines through"—a quotation, in fact, but a very apposite one, and I am not sure but that it was an unconscious one, and an original illustration on his part.
THOMAS DUNCOMBE. Mr. Thomas Duncombe, the notorious Radical Member for Finsbury, very generally and very disrespectfully designated in the London society of his day as "Tommy Duncombe," and Mr. Maxse (Lady Caroline Berkeley's husband), were also among the persons with whom I became acquainted at Cranford.
Of a curious feat of charioteership performed by the latter gentleman I was told once by the Duke of Beaufort, who said he had derived from it the nickname of "Go-along Maxse." Driving late one night with a friend on a turnpike road after the gates were closed, he said to his companion, "Now, if the turnpike we are just coming to is shut, I'll take the horse and gig over the gate." The gig was light, the horse powerful and swift. As they bowled along and came in sight of the gate, they perceived that it was closed; when Mr. Maxse's companion calling out to him, "Go-along, Maxse," that gentleman fulfilled his threat or promise, whichever it might be, and put his horse full at the gate, which the gallant creature cleared, bringing the carriage and its live freight safe to the ground on the other side; a feat which I very unintentionally imitated, in a humble degree, many years after, with an impunity my carelessness certainly did not deserve.
Driving in a state of considerable mental preoccupation out of my own gate one day at Lenox, in a very light one-horse "wagon" (as such vehicles are there called), instead of turning my horse's head either up or down the road, I let him go straight across it, to the edge of a tolerably wide dry ditch, when, suddenly checking him, the horse, who was a saddle-horse and a good leaper, drew himself together, and took the ditch, with me in the carriage behind him, and brought up against a fence, where there was just room for him to turn round, which he immediately did, as if aware of his mistake, and proceeded to leap back again, quite successfully without any assistance of mine, I being too much amazed at the whole performance to do anything but sit still and admire my horse's dexterity.