As soon as Rowland had somewhat recovered his strength, he began to explore the country round London, in the quest after a suitable house. The search was a long one. “I have,” he wrote in March, 1826, “with the exception of a small district which I am just going to explore, and a part of Essex, examined every great road from London.” At length his efforts were crowned with success. In the old mansion which had for ages borne the name of Bruce Castle, standing in the beautiful fragment of what once had been a wide park, he found a home for his new school. He had always been keenly alive to the charms both of scenery and antiquity. Here he found the two happily combined. The park, indeed, was but small, yet so thick was the foliage of the stately trees, and so luxuriant the undergrowth of the shrubberies, that its boundaries failed to catch the eye. High overhead the rooks, from time immemorial, had had their homes in the lofty elms. The wood-pigeons built on the topmost branches of a noble cedar of Lebanon, and the cuckoo, with his two-fold shout, never forgot there the return of spring. The kingfisher has been seen perching on a branch that overhung the pool in which the water-hen has reared her young. Hard by the main building stood an ancient tower, where the owls, year after year, made their nest—a tower which was standing when Elizabeth visited the mansion, and when Henry VIII. met there his sister, Queen Margaret of Scotland. Ancient though it is, it does not go back to days when both the house and manor took their name from their owner, the father of King Robert Bruce. The foundations of earlier buildings have been found deep beneath the lawn. On two of the bricks of the house there can still be read the first letters of names which were carved, as the date tells, when a Stuart was King in England. Through a narrow gate in the western boundary of the park, the path leads, across a quiet lane, into the churchyard. Here, as tradition told, the wall had been broken down when the last of the Lords Coleraine died, who had once owned the manor, and through the gap the body had been carried to its resting-place. Close by this little gate rose a graceful Lombardy poplar to the height of 100 feet—a landmark to all the country round. Through the trees, when winter had stripped them of their leaves, was seen from the windows of the Castle an ancient church-tower of singular beauty: ivy had covered it to the coping-stone with the growth of full two hundred years. When the foliage of summer hid it from the view, nevertheless it made its presence known by a peal of bells famous for their sweetness. The sound of the summoning bell might well inspire lofty thoughts and high aims, for it had once hung in the Citadel of Quebec, and had rung out the alarm when Wolfe stormed the heights of Abraham. The bells still remain, but the ivy has yielded to the ruthless hand of an ignorant restorer. The tower is ivy-mantled no more; and the graceful work of two long centuries has been in a moment wantonly cast away.
This beautiful home was doubly endeared to Rowland Hill, for here he brought his bride, and here he spent the first six years of his wedded life. In the same summer that he left Hazelwood he had married the playmate of his childhood. His affection for her had grown with his growth, and had never for a moment wavered. He had long loved her with the deep but quiet love of a strong nature. He was no Orlando to character his thoughts on the barks of trees. Even to his Journal, though he kept it hidden from every eye but his own, he never entrusted his secret. Two years before he kept his golden wedding-day he noticed, it would seem, this silence so uncommon in a lover. “From motives of delicacy,” he noted down, “I avoided in my Journal all mention of my early attachment to C——.” If his early records were silent in her praise, yet, when he came to write the history of the great work of his life, he spoke out with no uncertain accents. “I cannot record my marriage,” he wrote, “without adding that my dear wife’s help in my subsequent toils, and not least in those best known to the public, was important, perhaps essential, to their success.” An old-fashioned friend of his family, who knew well how hard she had laboured in helping her husband in his great work, on hearing some one say that Mr. Rowland Hill was the Father of Penny Postage, quaintly remarked, “Then I know who was its Mother. It was his wife.”
CHAPTER VIII.
The family group at Hazelwood, of which Rowland Hill had for many years formed the central figure, began with his settlement at Bruce Castle to break up. It had from time to time been lessened by the marriage of a child; nevertheless, four sons and a daughter had been left, who lived year after year under their parents’ roof in harmony and with great singleness of heart. “In our course through life,” he said in a passage which I once more quote, “from the beginning to the present hour, each one of us has been always ready to help the others to the best of his power; and no one has failed to call for such assistance again and again.” How great was the aid that he afforded his brothers, they gratefully acknowledged. One of them, writing to him a few years after he had left Hazelwood, said:—
“No one, I am sure, can forget for many hours together that the family owes much more to you than to any other member—that, in fact, the sacrifices you have made, and the energy and talent you have brought to bear on its advancement ought to obtain for you the constant acknowledgments and gratitude of all. Arthur and I frequently avow this in our private conversation. I think, too, you show beyond dispute that you have been more persevering than most of us in your pursuits, even though you were not allowed to choose your profession.”
In the time of their tribulation and in the time of their wealth, the brothers were equally united. Many years they had passed in breathing—
“The keen, the wholesome air of poverty;
And drinking from the well of homely life.”