[3] Many years afterwards, when appointed to the See of Winchester, the late Bishop Thorold alluded to it as one of a number of Town-Villages which he said he found so peculiarly distinctive a feature of Hampshire.
CHAPTER II
LYME REGIS AND TRAGEDY’S SHADOW
The picture, given us by Miss Mitford herself, of those early days in the Hampshire home, is one from the contemplation of which we are loth to drag ourselves.
Again and again in her Recollections we note how the memory was drawn upon to conjure up some pleasant scene from the past. Of the town itself her vision is of “a picturesque country church with yews and lindens on one side, and beyond, a down as smooth as velvet, dotted with rich islands of coppice, hazel, woodbine, hawthorn and holly reaching up into the young oaks, and overhanging flowery patches of primroses, wood-sorrel, wild hyacinths, and wild strawberries. On the side opposite the church in a hollow fringed with alders and bulrushes, gleamed the bright clear lakelet, radiant with swans and water-lilies, which the simple townsfolk were content to call the Great Pond.”
Fortunately for us the hand of Time has touched this old town gently. It is true the picturesque country church has, by sheer force of decay begotten of a hoary antiquity, given place to one not less picturesque on the old site; but the peaceful aspect of the streets and inns remains, together with that commodious house in the Broad Street which, excepting one slight internal alteration, differs in nothing from the house which Miss Mitford knew in her childhood, the place of her birth.
With steep-pitched roof and painted front, its old dormer-windows look out with a certain grave dignity befitting the windows of a house which enshrines such a tender memory, on the town “through whose streets streamed Cavaliers and Roundheads after the battle of Cheriton,” on the downs where, a full hundred and twenty years ago, the little mistress was wont fearlessly to ride on her father’s favourite blood-mare, seated on a specially-contrived pad and enclosed so fondly by that same father’s strong and loving arm.
Specially privileged and greatly esteeming the privilege, we have wandered through the rooms of this house; seen the breakfast room round which were ranged the books of Grandpa Russell’s library; seen the curiously contrived sash-window—the like of which we have never seen in any house before or since—fashioned so cunningly that its entire height slides upward into a recess quite out of sight; stepped through the opening thus made on to the flagged pathway leading by quaint outbuildings and stable to the garden and orchard beyond, where, as we have already noted, took place those dashing rides on a human mount, with a powdered, beribboned pig-tail in lieu of reins.
Small wonder is it that we looked on these things with something akin to reverence, and certainly with pity in our heart as we recalled how shamefully those idyllic days were to end.
With a strong preference for country sports and occupations, with a gay and careless temper which all the professional etiquette of the world could never tame into the staid gravity proper to a doctor of medicine, and with that insidious canker, the love of gambling, slowly devouring any manliness he may have possessed, Dr. Mitford gradually frittered away the whole of his wife’s fortune, save a matter of £3,500 in the funds, which, being in the hands of trustees, was beyond his reach. Generous to a degree, and with a blind confidence and belief in her husband’s affection, Mrs. Mitford would not permit any part of her property to be settled on herself, and was therefore, to some extent, to blame for the catastrophe which followed.
Thus, in a few short years of married life—at the most nine—we find this professional man forced to sell furniture and portions of his library in order to meet current expenses and ease the clamours of his creditors; forced, indeed, from very shame, to quit the self-contained and therefore intolerant town where bitter tongues were wagging and scornful fingers pointing, and to take up a residence in a distant seaside town, where, if he ever hoped to retrench and reform, and had he but given the matter a moment’s consideration, he was scarcely likely to achieve his object.