Soon after the end of term I made my way northwards, to spend Christmas, as so many before, with the Lovats at Beaufort, where the topic of interest was the engagement, just announced, of Norfolk to his cousin, elder daughter of Lord Herries. We played our traditional game of croquet in the sunshine of Christmas Day, and spent a pleasant fortnight, of which, however, the end was saddened for me by the premature death of my niece's husband, Charles Orr Ewing, M.P. They had only just finished the beautiful house they had built on the site of my old home, Dunskey, and were looking forward to happy years there.
I was at Arundel for a few days after New Year, and found the Duke very busy with improvements, inspecting new gardening operations, and so on; "and after all," he said, "some one will be coming by-and-by who may not like it!" From Arundel I dawdled along the south coast to Canterbury, and paid a delightful visit to my old friends Canon and Mrs. Moore at their charming residence (incorporating the ancient monastic guest-house) in the close. I spent hours exploring the glorious cathedral—the most interesting (me judice) if not the most beautiful in England. The close, too, really is a close, with a watchman singing out in the small hours, "Past two o'clock—misty morning—a-all's we-e-ell!" and the enclosure so complete that though we could hear the Bishop of Dover's dinner-bell on the other side of the wall, my host and hostess had to drive quite a long way round, through the mediæval gate-house, to join the episcopal dinner-party. Their schoolboy son invited me that night to accompany the watchman (an old greybeard sailor with a Guy Fawkes lantern, who looked himself like a relic of the Middle Ages) in his eleven o'clock peregrination round the cathedral. A weird experience! the vast edifice totally dark[[6]] save for the flickering gleam of the single candle, in whose wavering light pillars and arches and chantries and tombs peered momentarily out of the gloom like petrified ghosts.
I saw other interesting things at Canterbury, notably St. Martin's old church (perhaps the most venerable in the kingdom),[[7]] and left for London, where, walking through Hyde Park on a sunshiny Sunday morning, I lingered awhile to watch the perfervid stump-orators wasting their eloquence on the most listless of audiences. "Come along, Mary Ann, let's give one of the other blokes a turn," was the prevailing sentiment; but I did manage to catch one gem from a Free Thought spouter, whose advocacy of post mortem annihilation was being violently assailed by one of his hearers. "Do you mean to tell me," shouted the heckler, "that when I am dead I fade absolutely away and am done with for ever?"—to which query came the prompt reply, "I sincerely hope so, sir!"[[8]] Lord Cathcart (a great frequenter of the Park), to whom I repeated the above repartee, amused me by quoting an unconsciously funny phrase he had heard from a labour orator near the Marble Arch: "What abaht the working man? The working man is the backbone of this country—and I tell you strite, that backbone 'as got to come to the front!"[[9]]
I left Paddington for Oxford in absolutely the blackest fog I had ever seen: it turned brown at Baling, grey at Maidenhead, and at Didcot the sun was shining quite cheerfully. I found the floods almost unprecedentedly high, and the "loved city" abundantly justifying its playful sobriquet of "Spires and Ponds." A Catholic freshman, housed in the ground floor of Christ Church Meadow-buildings, described to me his dismay at the boldness and voracity of the rats which invaded his rooms from the meadows when the floods were out. The feelings of Lady Bute when she visited Oxford about this time, and found her treasured son—who had boarded at a private tutor's at Harrow, and had never roughed it in his life—literally immured in an underground cellar beneath Peckwater Quad, may be better imagined than described. It is fair to add that the youth himself had made no complaint, and shouted with laughter when I paid him a visit in his extraordinary subterranean quarters in the richest college in Oxford.
The last words remind me of a visit paid me during this term by Dom Ferotin and a colleague from Farnborough Abbey. Escorting my guests through Christ Church, I mentioned the revenue of the House as approximately £80,000 a year, a sum which sounded colossal when translated into francs. "Deux millions par an! mais c'est incroyable," was their comment, as we mounted the great Jacobean staircase. "Twopence each, please," said the nondescript individual who threw open the hall door. It was an anti-climax; but we "did" the pictures without further remark, and I remember noticing an extraordinary resemblance (which the guide also observed) to the distinguished French Benedictine in the striking portrait of Dr. Liddon hanging near the fireplace. We lunched with my friend Grissell in High Street, meeting there the Baron de Bertouche, a young man with a Danish father and a Scottish mother, born in Italy, educated in France, owning property in Belgium, and living in Wales—too much of a cosmopolitan, it seemed to me, to be likely to get the commission in the Pope's Noble Guard which appeared at that time to be his chief ambition.[[10]]
I remember two lectures about this time: one to the Newman Society about Dickens, by old Percy Fitzgerald, who almost wept at hearing irreverent undergraduates avow that the Master's pathos was "all piffle," and that Paul Dombey and Little Nell made them sick; the other a paper on "Armour" (his special hobby) by Lord Dillon. I asked him if he could corroborate what I had heard as a boy, that men who took down their ancestral armour from their castle walls to buckle on for the great Eglinton Tournament, seventy years ago, found that they could not get into it! I was surprised that this fact (if it be a fact) was new to so great an authority as Lord Dillon; but we had no time to discuss the matter. Mr. Justice Walton, the Catholic judge, also came down and addressed the "Newman," I forget on what subject; but I remember his being "heckled" on the question as to whether a barrister was justified in conscience in defending (say) a murderer of whose guilt he was personally convinced. The judge maintained that he was.
February 15 was Norfolk's wedding-day—a quiet and pious ceremony, after his own heart, in the private chapel at Everingham. I recollect the date, because I attended that evening a French play—Molière's Les Femmes Savantes—at an Oxford convent school. It was quite well done, entirely by girls; but the unique feature was that the "men" of the comedy were attired as to coats, waistcoats, wigs and lace jabots in perfectly correct Louis XIV. style, but below the waist—in petticoats! the result being that they ensconced themselves as far as possible, throughout the play, behind tables and chairs, and showed no more of their legs than the Queen of Spain.
Going down to Arundel for Holy Week and Easter, I read in The Times Hugh Macnaghten's strangely moving lines on Hector Macdonald,[[11]] whose tragic death was announced this week. Easter was late this year, the weather balmy, and the spring advanced; and the park and the whole countryside starred with daffodils and anemones, primroses and hyacinths. Between the many church services we enjoyed some delightful rambles; and the Duke's marriage had made no difference to his love of croquet and of the inevitable game of "ten questions" after dinner. The great church looked beautiful on Easter morning, with its wealth of spring flowers; and the florid music was no doubt finely rendered, though I do not like Gounod in church at Easter or at any other time. I refrained, however, when my friend the organist asked me what I thought of his choir, from replying, as Cardinal Capranica did to a similar question from Pope Nicholas V.—"that it seemed to him like a sack of young swine, for he heard a great noise, but could distinguish nothing articulate!"[[12]]