This is a very fair place indeed, the best of it being the climate. I'm nearly always happy when I'm abroad, particularly in the Mediterranean. I suppose there's something in fogs and perpetual rain and cold and darkness which is especially uncongenial to me. Also there are no business and bothers here to speak of, which is certainly a great change from home. We have the quiet and peace which we both enjoy and value, and I am glad to say that I have been getting on very well with the Breviary; for whereas I had hoped before returning to have reached Ascension Day, I now venture to think of the third Sunday after Pentecost.
A drawback (my Lady reminds me) to our residence here is its distance from any church, our only accessible service being one Low Mass each Sunday. There's an impressive, and very Spanish, Cathedral at Palma, with functions well and carefully done; but it is remote from us here.
The death of Edith[[12]] was a great shock to me, as well as a source of sincere sorrow. Requiescat in pace. We shall all go the same way in the long run, 100 years hence it'll be all the same; but it does seem rather hard that the axe should fall on the neck of all of us (however much it may grieve or inconvenience the survivors), and cut us off from the only world we have any experience of. Not, for the matter of that, that it's much worth stopping in—still, it's all we've got. However, crying over this spilt milk—and I confess to having shed some tears since I heard the news—will never put it back into the pitcher, so perhaps there is not much use in crying. But I am sincerely grateful for your kind sympathy.
1874, Domestic happiness
Later in the same year, after his return to England, Bute took occasion, in a letter to his ever-faithful friend at Oxford, to repel with indignation some malevolent rumours which had reached him to the effect that he had not found in his home life the happiness which he had anticipated.
Not one jot of truth is there, or has there ever been, in these iniquitous calumnies. Our happiness indeed is complete, and the terms on which we live completely affectionate and intimate. I find myself more attached to G. the longer I have the privilege and honour of living with her, and of seeing, as St. Augustine says of St. Monica, "her walk with God, how godly and holy it is, and to us-ward so sweet and gentle."
This letter was written from Heath House, Weybridge—"a little house," writes Bute, "which we have hired for a month or two. I go hence to London nearly every day to read Hebrew with a Rabbi [this was in view of the new version of the Psalms for his projected translation of the Breviary], and all sorts of things with a Jesuit. Besides the sacred language 'in which the Eternal spoke,' and certain branches of Liturgiology, I continue, as formerly, to read history and science—very humbly.
"We go to Scotland this month, but perhaps shall be at Cardiff for Christmastide, though Mountstuart, as you know, is the home of our predilection."
Before Christmas of this year, which Bute spent not at Cardiff but at Mountstuart, he published (anonymously) a little book containing a translation of the Christmas Offices from the Roman Breviary. "I hope and believe," he wrote, "that it may be of some service to those (there must be many) who desire to follow with intelligence the Liturgy of that holy season, but are prevented from doing so by their partial or total ignorance of the language of the Church. For this reason I should wish the booklet made known through the ordinary channels—a matter in which I confess to thinking our Catholic publishers very much less enterprising and business-like than those who cater for devout Anglicans. But for this state of things, I fear, non c'è remedio."
In Bute's own chapel he was accustomed to have the church offices (with the exception, of course, of the Mass) recited in the vernacular. "Christmas went well here," he wrote to a friend in January, 1875. "We had the Monsignor [Capel] down. Mattins and Lauds were said in English, the altar being incensed at the Benedictus; and Mgr. C. treated us to a short and rather eloquent fervorino after the gospel at Mass. By the way, the progress of my Breviary is most discouragingly slow: eppur si muove."