II
December 21, 1772.
Winter has come on: a melancholy, wet and stormy winter, without the glitter of snow and ice; and with the sea moaning or roaring by turns. I think with longing (though I hope poor Eustace does not guess how near I sometimes am to crying for homesickness) of our sledging parties with the dear cheerful neighbours at Grandfey; of the skating on the ponds, and the long walks on the crisp frozen snow, when Eustace and I would snowball or make long slides, laughing like children. At St. Salvat's there are no neighbours; or if there are (but the nearest large house is ten miles off, and belongs to a noble lord who never leaves London) they do not show themselves. I do not even know what there is or is not in the country that lies inland; in fact, since our coming, I have never left the grounds and park of St. Salvat's, nor gone beyond the old fortified walls which encircle them. My very curiosity has gradually faded. I have never pressed Hubert for the saddle horse and the equipage (the coach-house contains only broken-down coaches of the days of King George I.) which he promised rather vaguely to procure for me on our first coming; I have no wish to pass beyond that drawbridge; like a caged bird, I have grown accustomed to my prison. Since the bad weather I have even ceased my rambles in the shrubberies and on the grass-grown terraces: the path to the sea has been slippery with mud; besides I hate that melancholy winter sea, always threatening or complaining.
I stay within doors for days together, without pleasure or profit, reading old plays and novels which I throw aside, or putting a few stitches into useless tambour work; I who could formerly not live a day within doors, nor do whatever I set to do without childish strenuousness!
These two or three days past I have been trying to find diversion in reading the history of these parts, where the Brandlings—kings of this part of Wales in the time of King Arthur, crusaders later, and great barons fighting at Crecy and at Agincourt—once played so great a part, and now they have dwindled into common smugglers, for 'tis my growing persuasion that such is the real trade hidden under the name of pilchard fishing—defrauders of the King's Exchequer, and who knows? for all Hubert's rank as magistrate, no better than thieves and outlawed ruffians.
Hubert has been showing me the family archives. He lays great store by all these deeds and papers, and one is surprised in a house so utterly given over to neglect, to find anything in such good order. He saved the archives himself he tells me, when (as I have always forgotten to note down) the library of the castle was burnt down on the occasion of my late brother-in-law's wake; a barbarous funereal feast habitual in these parts, and during which a drunken guest set fire to the draperies of the coffin. I did not ask whether the body of Sir Thomas, which had been brought by sea from Bristol after his violent end there, had been destroyed in this extraordinary pyre; and I judge that it was from Eustace's silence and Hubert's evident avoidance of the point. Perhaps he is conscious that his efforts were directed to a different object, for it is well nigh miraculous how he should have saved those shelves full of documents and all that number of valuable books bound with the Brandling arms.
"You must have risked your life in the flames!" I exclaimed with admiration at the man's heroism.
He bid me look at his hands, which indeed bear traces of dreadful burning.
"I care about my ancestors," he answered, "perhaps more, to say the truth, than for my living kinsfolk. Besides," he added, "I ought to say that I had taken the precaution to remove the most valuable books before giving over the library to their drunken rites. As it was, they burnt my poor dead nephew to ashes like the phoenix of the Poets, only that he, poor lad, will not arise from them till the day of judgment!"
January 12, 1773.