Whip and Spur

by George E. Waring

The sun had gone, and above the dreamy blue of the far-lying woods, the early evening had hung the sky with mellow, summery, twilight loveliness.

The casements of the old house at Whittington glowed ruddy and warm through their marvellous clustering ivy, and it was the idlest luxury to hang over the crumbling road-wall, peopling its suggestive chambers with the spirits of their long-gone tenants. It is a farm-house now, and there is no available record to tell the stranger the story of its more glorious days. No rigid history hampers the fancy, and the strolling lover of the by-ways and roadsides of our dear Mother England may let his imagination run with flowing rein, sweeping away the hayricks and marigold beds, and calling back the peacocks and bagwigs of the halcyon days.

Perhaps for the last time in my life I was taking the breath of an English twilight,—sweetest to those whose childhood and youth have fed on the rhyme and tale the green old land has sent to her world-wide brood, and who come, in riper life, to find the fancies of early years warm and living on every side, in hedge and field, in cowslip and primrose, in nightingale and lark. The thick-coming impressions such musing brings are vague and dreamy, so that there seemed a shade of unreality in the quiet voice that bade me “Good evening,” and added, “Yes, it is an engaging old house, and it has a story that you may be glad to hear.”

It was not from perversity that I turned the subject, but no tale of real life could have added interest to the fancies with which the old manse had clad itself in the slowly waning day. Wayside impressions lose their charm if too much considered, and, as my new companion was walking toward Lichfield, I was glad to turn away and join him,—ending a long day’s tramp with the slow and quiet gait that his age compelled. There was the least shade of the uncanny in his bearing, and his speech was timorous and gentle. His threadbare and seedy look betokened a native unthrift, but there was an undercurrent of refinement in his mien and in his manner, and a trusting outlook from his large blue eyes that made him the fittest of companions for a summer evening’s walk in a country filled with the mingled flavor of history and romance.

He was a man of the intensest local training. To him “the County of the City of Lichfield” was of more consequence than all Staffordshire besides, and far more than all England and all that vague entity called the World. Even the County of the City of Lichfield was large for his concentrated attachment: he knew it as one must know a small town in which he has passed the whole of a long life; but his heart lay within the cathedral close, and the cathedral close lay deep within his heart,—deep and warm, with its history and its traditions, its romance and its reality, so interlaced that he had long since ceased to ask what was real and what unreal. All was unreal in the sense of being of more than worldly consequence in his estimation, and all real as a part of the training of his whole life.

To him Lichfield Cathedral was no mere pile of sculptured stone, built round with the facts of recorded history; it was the fairy handiwork of times and scenes long past, its walls raised by the hand of pious enthusiasm, shattered and cemented by the strife and blood of the civil war, hallowed by the returning glory of the Restoration, blessed by the favor of royal presence, and now made admirable in his daily sight by the dignity and grace of those holy men its dean and chapter.

As it was the cathedral I had come to see, and as I had come for no architect’s measurements, for no student’s lore, only to bathe in the charmed atmosphere of its storied past, I had fallen upon a guide after my own heart, and it was as pleasant as it was easy to lend full credence to all he so honestly believed and told.

In early life he had had gentler training, but he had long been a Poor Brother of the Hospital of St. John the Baptist in Lichfield, and had, for many years, held, by seniority, the right of presenting a rose, on St. John’s nativity day, to the heirs of William Juvenis (goldsmith), who, by grants made in consideration of this ceremony, had secured perennial prayers for the souls of his ancestors and a fragrant memory for his own.

Hedged about by the traditionary customs and quaint observances of an ancient charitable foundation, deadened in a way, if you please, by the aristocratic pauperism of his condition, my gentle companion had grown to his present dreamy estate.