It was to Lyme Regis they went—this unduly optimistic, noisy, sportsman-practitioner, with his uncomplaining still trustful wife and their six-year-old daughter, wide-eyed and wondering why this sudden flight. The true import of this removal was not to be hidden from this remarkably intuitive child. “In that old, historical town,” she writes in one of her reminiscent moods, “that old town so finely placed on the very line where Dorsetshire and Devonshire meet, I spent the eventful year when the careless happiness of childhood vanished, and the troubles of the world first dimly dawned upon my heart—felt in its effects rather than known—felt in its chilling gloom, as we feel the shadow of a cloud that passes over the sun on an April day.” Strangely-sad words these, expressing the thoughts of a child at an age when, not strong enough to help and too young to be confided in, it can do nothing but mark the change, questioning the mother’s furtive tear while, rendered more sensitive by reason of its own impotence, it shudders in the cold atmosphere of vague yet ill-concealed suspicion and mistrust.
Yet, mark the improvidence of this unstable man; the house he took in Lyme Regis was, “as commonly happens to people whose fortunes are declining, far more splendid than that we had inhabited, indeed the very best in the town.”
The house still stands with its “great extent of frontage, terminating by large gates surmounted by spread eagles.” It is now known as “The Retreat,” and is in the Broad Street of Lyme, proudly pointed to by the inhabitants as the house once rented by the great Lord Chatham for the benefit of his son’s—William Pitt’s—health, and, twenty years later, by the Mitford family.
Lyme Regis is the embodiment of much that is interesting, historically and politically, but particularly to us by reason of its literary associations. Of “The Retreat” we have, fortunately, a description written by Miss Mitford herself.
“An old stone porch, with benches on either side, projected from the centre, covered as was the whole front of the house, with tall, spreading, wide-leaved myrtle, abounding in blossom, with moss-roses, jessamine, and passion-flowers. Behind the building, extended round a paved quadrangle, was the drawing-room, a splendid apartment, looking upon a little lawn surrounded by choice evergreens, the bay, the cedar and the arbutus, and terminated by an old-fashioned greenhouse and a filbert-tree walk. In the steep declivity of the central garden was a grotto, over-arching a cool, sparkling spring, whilst the slopes on either side were carpeted with strawberries and dotted with fruit trees. One drooping medlar, beneath whose branches I have often hidden, I remember well.”
This great house, with its large and lofty rooms, its noble oaken staircases, its marble hall, long galleries and corridors, was scarcely the house which a man anxious to mark time in an unpretentious fashion was likely to choose. Nor, had he stopped for one moment to consider, would he have chosen Lyme Regis as a retreat, for it was then practically at the height of its fashionable prosperity, with its gay Assembly Rooms, the resort of those on whom Bath and Brighthelmstone were beginning to pall, and who were henceforth to divide their patronage between this Dorsetshire rendezvous and that other, just awakened, resort still further westward round the coast and destined, in the slow course of a century, to become the imperiously aristocratic Torquay.
No, indeed! this was no move the wisdom of which was calculated to inspire in the breast of Harness, the trustee, any restoration of confidence, for those long galleries and corridors were, quite naturally, “echoing from morning to night with gay visitors, cousins from the North, and the ever-shifting company of the watering-place.”
It was a strange place wherein a laughter-loving child should be sad. “Yet sad I was,” she says. “Nobody told me, but I felt, I knew, I had an interior conviction, for which I could not have accounted, that, in the midst of all this natural beauty and apparent happiness, in spite of the company, in spite of the gaiety, something was wrong. It was such a foreshowing as makes the quicksilver in the barometer sink whilst the weather is still bright and clear.”
How pitiful it all seems! how strangely pathetic when, side by side with that description of the insistent shadow, we set the written indictment of him who was the cause of all the trouble—pathetic because, though an indictment, it is done so gently and breathes the very spirit of forgiveness.
“Then ... he attempted to increase his resources by the aid of cards, (he was, unluckily, one of the finest whist-players in England), or by that other terrible gambling, which assumes so many forms, and bears so many names, but which even when called by its milder term of Speculation, is that terrible thing gambling still; whatever might be the manner of the loss—or whether, as afterwards happened, his own large-hearted hospitality and too-confiding temper were alone to blame—for the detail was never known to me, nor do I think it was known to my mother; he did not tell and we could not ask. How often, in after-life, has that sanguine spirit, which clung to him to his last hour, made me tremble and shiver.”