At last my uncle, Lord Gerard, asked us up to Garswood, and we debated if we had a right to accept it or not. I begged him to do so, as I thought it might bring us good luck. We were alone in a railway compartment, when one of the £15 rolled out of my purse, and slid between the boards of the carriage and the door, reducing us to £14. I sat on the floor and cried, and he sat down by me with his arm round my waist, trying to comfort me. Uncle Gerard kept us one month, paid our fare up and down, and, without knowing that we wanted anything, gave me £25, and from that time one little help or another came to keep us alive without our asking for anything. We sold some of our writings, and it was discovered that some back pay was due to Richard.
During this ten months at home, we saw a great deal of Winwood Reade, whom all know by his travels in Africa, his many literary works, of which the cleverest, but the most harmful, was the "Martyrdom of Man," of which he presented Richard with a copy, which was carefully treasured till about six months before Richard's death. He told us the following account of a ghost story:—
There was a place in Africa or in India (I forget at this distance of time), where there was a haunted bungalow, and Winwood Reade was longing to see a ghost, as he was very sceptical about the existence of such things. In this particular bungalow there was a room on the ground floor, with folding doors of glass that opened to the ground, leading out into the compound. Every night at twelve o'clock these glass doors (being locked) slowly opened outwards, and the ghosts of three surgeons who had died of cholera appeared in their winding-sheets. Winwood Reade engaged the bungalow for the night, it being quite empty, but he could not induce anybody, for love or money, to go with him. At last he tempted a black boy, by large promises of money, to pass one night there, and the boy said if he might sleep on the roof he would, but nothing would induce him to go inside the house. So they started forth, and Winwood took with him a good novel, his gun, his watch, and plenty of brandy and water, and towards eleven o'clock made himself very comfortable on some cushions in a corner of the room in full view of the window. As his watch pointed to twelve, the doors slowly opened, he seized his gun, and in a moment the three white figures appeared. I said, breathless with excitement, "And what did you do, Winwood?" He smiled and hesitated, and said, "To tell the honest truth, I dropped my gun and fainted, and when I came to I got out of the house as quick as I could, called the boy, went away, and never went back." He was such a brave man he could afford to own this.
Richard writes at this time in his journal, "I called on some old friends, and as I came out of the house I heard the servants whisper, 'Why, Captain Burton looks like an old gypsy.'" This was after his recall.
We had one very pleasant evening at Lady Marian Alford's. She had been building her house at Prince's Gate, and Miss Hosmer had sculptured her fountain; it was the opening night. Lady Marian wanted to prepare a little surprise for her friends, so she made Richard dress as a Bedawin Shaykh, and Khamoor (my Arab girl) and me as Moslem women of Damascus. I was supposed to have brought this Shaykh over to introduce him into a little English society. He spoke Arabic to Khamoor and me, and broken English with a few words of French to the rest of the party. It was a delightful little party, and we enjoyed it very much, and—though they all knew him—nobody recognized Richard, which was very amusing; but presently the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh were announced, and Lady Marian had to go out to prepare them for this little joke, which amused them immensely, and so it gradually had to ooze out. There was a delightful supper, three tables each of eight. Khamoor in her Eastern dress came in with coffee on a tray on her head, and presented it kneeling to the Prince and the Duke, and to the others standing. Everything that Lady Marian Alford did was so graceful.
I see that Richard notices in his journal a correspondence between himself and the Rev. Herbert Vaughan, D.D. (our present Cardinal), which I imagine was about the Sházlis. And he also notices that his name is again left out of Sir Roderick Murchison's address, and asks, "Why? Old Murchison hates me."
Again speaking of Sir R. Murchison, Richard writes, "He was anxious to pay due honour to our modern travellers, to Livingstone and Gordon, Speke and Grant. He has done me the honour of not honouring me." Later on: "Received a card from him to go and see him."
We also went to Ashridge, Lord Brownlow's, on a visit to Lady Marian Alford, which visit we enjoyed immensely, where we met Lord Beaconsfield and numbers of other delightful people.
He also notices in his journal: "Had the satisfaction of hearing of Rashíd Pasha's disgrace and removal. Wonder if he wishes he had not crossed swords with me."