On the western coast of England, and in one of the most beautiful parts of that beautiful coast, is a spot which I must describe, not only for the benefit of those who may profit by it, or of those who may love to identify any place they read of, with some place which they remember or imagine, but because many of the principal events of my tale occurred in the midst of that precise scene. Those who know the sea-board of Devonshire will, I think, have no difficulty in recognising the locality from certain distinctive marks.
The place to which I allude is a little bay, taking somewhat the form of a horse-shoe, and indenting the land deeply. It is formed by a high headland, on the south western side, which shelters it from the prevailing winds. The face of this promontory, to its very extreme point, is one precipitous cliff of cold grey stone, varying from six to nine hundred feet in height, rugged and broken indeed, but apparently pathless; and bold would be the man who should attempt to scale it; still bolder he who should seek to descend from the height above. This is called Ale Head; and the opposite limb of the bay consists of another promontory, not so steep or precipitous, indeed, but still lofty and scarped enough, which bears the name of Ale Down. Neither does it project so far into the sea from the general line of coast, which trends away to the eastward at no very abrupt angle. Protected thus on three sides by very high ground, and with only a somewhat narrow opening in one direction, the waters of that bay, during the greater part of the year, are as soft and tranquil as a dream of heaven; but they are very deep also, for the cliffs run down far below the low water-mark. Standing on the heights above, I have looked down, and beheld the sea lying beneath my feet, as smooth as a mirror and as blue as a sapphire. A hundred-gun ship could anchor in that bay, within pistol-shot of the cliffs of Ale Head.
Between the higher promontory and the lower, however, is a deep dell. I must not call it a valley; for the sides are too steep, and the concavity too narrow, to admit of that name. Down this dell flows a strong deep stream of beautifully clear water, over a rooky bed, from which a large quantity of sand is carried down, forming a soft dry landing-place, where the dell opens upon the bay. This little beach is not at all extensive, being, from the foot of the rock on the one side to the base of the hill on the other, not more than two hundred yards wide, and perhaps forty in depth. Through the centre of it flows the stream into the sea; and, twice a-day, ocean comes up to meet its tributary, covering by far the greater part of the sands.
There were then, and are now--at least I have never seen it without--some five or six boats hauled up on the shore, giving the first intimation which one receives on entering Ale Bay from the seaward, that that wild and lonely scene has human habitations near. But so it is; and, on each side of the little river, commencing at about a hundred yards from the mouth, and ending about a quarter of a mile farther up the dell, are built a number of fishermen's cottages, pressed between the steep hill-side on the one hand and the deep banks of the stream on the other. At various places down the dell, too, little bridges are built across from bank to bank; sometimes merely the trunk of a tree flattened on the side that lies uppermost--sometimes an ill-turned arch of roughly hewn stone. These are all foot-bridges, I need hardly say; for horse, cart, or carriage, never, I believe, ventured so far down the valley.
The next object, speaking of human life, which you see after the boats, on entering the bay, is the end of the lowest fisherman's hut, peeping out through the opening of the valley; but a moment or two afterwards, as you pull on, you will perceive upon the side of the hill to the south-west, if you raise your eyes in that direction, the gables and chimneys of a large old mansion, rising above a wood of considerable extent and luxuriance which clothes the valley nearly to the shore, for in that favoured climate vegetation does not shrink from the sea air; and at no great distance may be seen the trees actually dipping their branches in the waves. They wisely eschew, however, the cutting winds upon the hill top; and the high summit of Ale Head is as bare as the back of a tortoise, and well nigh as brown.
We must look a little more closely at the mansion, however. Let us suppose, then, that we have landed by the side of the stream, crossed the dry sands, and entered the little dell, with light clouds floating rapidly overhead and making the blue bay and the grey cliffs, and the brown downs above, sparkle with gleams like the sweet transitory hopes that brighten, as they pass, the hard stern features of this earthly life. Oh, ye bright visions of imagination, could one but grasp and arrest ye for an hour, how much happier, how much better, might man be!--what a different thing were life! But ye are of air, and only given us, in this stormy scene, to assure the sad and tempest-beaten heart that there is still sunshine above the clouds.
Walking on before the fishermen's cottages, along the very very narrow path, we come to a spot where the road extends, but is no longer carried on upon both sides of the stream. It mounts, too; the valley becomes less deep, more wide. The left, or south-western side, is covered with wood; the right slopes up sharply, clothed with short green sward. Suddenly, at about half-a-mile from the bay, a road branches off to the left, while that which you have been pursuing by the bank of the stream widens out and becomes a good sound carriage-road. We must take the left-hand road, however, which, forming an acute angle with the path by which we have arrived, seems as if its ultimate point, or terminus, as we should now corruptly call it, was destined to be the very highest and farthest part of the promontory of Ale Head. But it has no such ambitious notions; and, after rising somewhat abruptly for a little way, it runs on towards the sea, with a very slight inclination upwards, winding through the wood till, with a sharp turn to the right, it passes between two gates of hammered iron-work, supported upon stone columns, with large round globes on the top. Then come two or three little glades in a slight hollow of the hill, and then the old mansion, standing on a somewhat higher point. How can one describe it? It is but a collection of innumerable gables, and walls, and windows, built in the reign of Elizabeth, added to in the reign of James, left to go to decay during the Commonwealth, repaired and re-decorated under Charles II. It is all of the grey stone of the country; but the sea air, and the proximity of the woods, have tinged it with many colours, so that its aspect is not that of a venerable old man who has passed his life in peace and tranquillity, but rather like the weather-beaten face of an old sailor, bronzed and tinted by the wind and tempests.
Within, are many rooms and many passages; flights of steps go down, apparently merely for the purpose of going up again; and you are continually meeting doors and new rooms where nobody expected them. But many of these rooms are very handsome--spacious, lofty, and well-formed; and though, to say the truth, they would be more lightsome and cheerful were they not generally panelled with walnut or black oak--yet there is something fine and impressive in that dark carved wainscoting; and, when the sunshine steals in and brightens it, it is like a sweet smile upon the face of age.
In one of these large handsome rooms, upon the first floor above the ground, on a spring day in 1715, sat a girl of about eighteen years of age, in the dress of a highborn lady of that time. I need not, and had better not, describe it; for it was as stiff and as ugly a costume as ever was invented by the capricious taste of man. The character of an epoch is always displayed in the dress of the generation; and what could be expected from the dry gallantry of Louis the Fourteenth's latter days, and the stiff decorum of George the First's? Nevertheless, the most hard and unbending garments in which that fair form could be encased could never have repressed its wild grace or shackled its free light movements. Her maid complained that she burst more bodice-laces than any lady in the country; and it is a certain fact that her hair contrived to disentangle itself from combs and fillets, and sport in the wind like wreaths of smoke, more frequently than she herself wished or even knew. How it happened she could not tell, and she gave herself no great trouble to enquire; for her mind was often wandering after other things, sometimes with the eager sportiveness of a child after a butterfly, sometimes with steady and untiring thought, like a wayfarer on a long journey.
It must be said, too, in justice to her good taste, that she abhorred the vile fashions of the day in which she lived, and would often stand and contemplate the portraits of Vandyke, of which there were several in the house, or other older pictures still, and wonder by what curious process the mind of man had been led to abandon what is flowing and beautiful for that which is rigid and ugly. There was a refuge, however, even in the costume of those times, which saved part of the day from being spent in durance vile; and this was in what ladies called their night-clothes. The term, it is true, was a deceit; and the words, "night-clothes," meant merely a light and easy morning-dress, in which they often spent the early hours of the day before they dressed for parks and promenades. It was put on as soon as they rose in the morning, in exchange for the garments in which they had really passed the night. Sometimes they even went out in those, wrongly called, "night-clothes" before the conventional hour for appearing in public had arrived.