When we were at Knole alone together I used to go down to his sitting-room in the evening to play draughts with him—and never knew whether I played to please him, or he played to please me—and sometimes, very rarely, he told me stories of when he was a small boy, and played with the rocking-horse, and of the journeys by coach with his father and mother from Buckhurst to Knole or from Knole to London; of their taking the silver with them under the seat; of their having outriders with pistols; and of his father and mother never addressing each other, in their children’s presence, as anything but “my Lord” and “my Lady.” I clasped my knees and stared at him when he told me these stories of an age which already seemed so remote, and his pale blue eyes gazed away into the past, and suddenly his shyness would return to him and the clock in the corner would begin to wheeze in preparation to striking the hour, and he would say that it was time for me to go to bed. But although our understanding of one another was, I am sure, so excellent, our rare conversations remained always on similar fantastic subjects, nor ever approached the intimate or the personal.

Then he fell ill and died when he was over eighty, and became a name like the others, and his portrait took its place among the rest, with a label recording the dates of his birth and death.

APPENDIX
A Note on Thieves’ Cant

The vocabulary given on page [135] contributes no word which may not be found in any cant dictionary, and therefore may appear undeserving of inclusion. But I put it in because I think few people, apart from students of philology, realize the existence of that large section of our language in use among the vagabond classes. Cant and slang, to most people’s minds, are synonymous, but this is an error of belief: slang creeps from many sources into the river of language, and so mingles with it that in course of time many use it without knowing that they do so; cant, on the other hand, remains definite and obscure of origin. Slang is loose, expressive, and metaphorical; cant is tight and correct: it has even a literature of its own, broad and racy, incomprehensible to the ordinary reader without the help of a glossary. Its words, for the most part, bear no resemblance to English words; unlike slang, they are not words adapted, for the sake of vividness, to a use for which they were not originally intended, but are applied strictly to their peculiar meaning.

Although the origin of cant as a separate jargon or language is obscure—it does not appear in England till the second half of the sixteenth century—the origin of certain of its words may be traced. Of those included in the vocabulary on page [135], for example, ken, for house, comes from khan (gipsy and Oriental); fogus, for tobacco, comes from fogo, an old word for stench; maund, or maunder, to beg, does not derive, as might be thought, from maung, to beg, a gipsy word taken from the Hindu, but from the Anglo-Saxon mand, a basket; bouse, to drink (which, of course, has given us booze, with the same meaning, and which in the fourteenth century was perfectly good English), comes from the Dutch buyzen, to tipple. Abram, naked, is found as abrannoi, with the same meaning, in Hungarian gipsy; cassan, cheese, is cas in English gipsy; dimber survives for “pretty” in Worcestershire. Cheat appears frequently in cant as a common affix.

As for autem mort, I find it in an early authority thus defined: “These autem morts be married women, as there be but a few. For autem in their language is a church, so she is a wife married at the church, and they be as chaste as a cow I have, that goeth to bull every moon, with what bull she careth not.”

INDEX

[1]. State papers of Henry VIII.