In the reign of William Rufus it was that the castle was built by one William d'Albini – just about the time when a brother knight of Normandy "took up his selection" at old H – , on which his descendants have sat continuously to this present day. Doubtless William and his neighbour had the equivalent of a pipe and glass together many a time, and inspected the works in company – these works which were to stand for a thousand years! Whether both gentlemen married ladies of the land I know not, but a Cecily (which sounds Saxonish) of William's line and name in the thirteenth century took the castle and manor of Rising into the family of Lord Montalt, her husband, where they remained for a good while. Then it appears to have become royal property, as witness Queen Isabella consigned thereto by her son.
The Black Prince and Richard the Second are mentioned as owners, if not occupiers, and it is said that King Richard exchanged it with the Duke of Brittany for the castle of Brest. In the spacious days of great Elizabeth it was the Dukes of Norfolk who were in possession, off and on. Since then it has seemed to belong to Howards – sometimes one branch, sometimes another – and it belongs to Howards now. What volumes of history are written between the lines of this brief pedigree!
I went over the bridge and through the Norman gatehouse. I looked about at the magnificence within, crossed the greensward and turned the corner to the entrance door. I walked in and up the great staircase of stone to the splendid archway under which the dead people passed to their great hall, now roofless and ruined. I surveyed the vaulted stone room with the Norman windows that was once its vestibule (and at the last a caretaker's lodging); opened a little door in a corner which disclosed a stony shaft round which a stony newel stairway corkscrewed up and up to narrow stony passages and chambers and long arcaded galleries tunnelled in the thickness of the walls – the steps so worn away by the many centuries of use that one could not keep foothold on them without the hand-rope on the wall, the dimensions so circumscribed that one thought of the burrows in the Egyptian Pyramids. Then I considered that further exploration would impair the pleasure of an extended rummage at leisure in the afternoon; also that luncheon would now be ready. And I returned through the village to the Black Horse.
Looking about I found the salle-à-manger, chill, and empty of life. A long table was set for a meal, but was still without food and without company. Further investigation brought me to a garden beside the house where stood a few small tables, at one of which two ladies – mother and daughter who had shared the box seat of the drag with me – were taking a light luncheon in peace and privacy. They were having eggs and salad and bread-and-butter and tea, with green grass under their feet and the sweet air and sunshine round them; and at once I perceived that this was the sort of thing, and not the table d'hôte, for me. I took a table at a distance from them, but, no waitress forthcoming, I went across to ask them how they had obtained their provisions, which resulted in our joining forces and having a pleasant meal together. No one else came to the garden, except the maid who served us, and we chatted together as do callers at the same house on an At Home day, finding themselves isolated for the moment on contiguous chairs. One thing leading to another, it transpired that the young lady, who wore fine diamonds on her engagement finger, was going to be married in five weeks. A chance allusion to my own circumstances evoked the further information that her intended husband was a Melbourne man! That is to say, Melbourne was his birthplace and the place of business of his firm for which he acted as London manager. They mentioned his name and I knew it well. I see it in large letters on a factory wall every time I pass over the railway between the city and my home, and now I never see it without thinking of her. By this time if all went right she will have been married a long time. I hope she is well and happy.
I resumed my explorations of the castle, where I had several chance encounters with my friends of the inn garden on break-neck stairs and in stony corridors where there was scarce space for us to pass each other, while still wandering in the solitude I desired, companioned only by my thoughts. It was a memorable afternoon. I had never before been in such close touch with the people of the past, makers of the History of England which is the lay bible of the British race. The very chambers they slept in and where they were born and died; the same floors and walls and stone-ribbed ceilings, the same outlook from the same windows and loopholes over heath and marsh to distant sea and the dim line of the coast of Lincolnshire; the Chapel of their penances and dispensations, where they dedicated the swords of slaughter; the Hall where they brawled and feasted, the dark holes at blind ends of the stony labyrinth, which silently witnessed to unthinkable dark deeds. If I had been better acquainted with old castles than I was, I might have been less impressed by these things and the reflections they evoked. As it was, the whole place seemed so thronged with ghosts that I felt as if I had not room to move amongst them.
And yet I learned from a little talk with those who knew, that a caretaker – a lady "custodian," moreover – had kept house and home in the very middle of it all, up to a quite recent date. How could she? Her bedroom was the "Queen's Room" where Isabella herself had slept (next door to her "Confession Room"); another that she used was the "Priest's Chamber," up at the top of that slant-stepped newel stairway. The room at the top of the great main staircase, with the three Norman windows and the great dog-toothed Norman archway that once gave entrance to the hall, was her sitting-room. The evidences were there – archway bricked up, and a little iron stove (how little it did look, to be sure, in more ways than one) set against the bricks; windows glazed, boards (I think) laid down over the flagged floor. I tried to fancy how the lady custodian had furnished it – to picture her sitting at her book or needlework under that mighty overmantel above the hearth! I had not then seen the quarters of the chaplain of Malling Abbey, and how charmingly ancient and modern can be made to blend in the composition of a home by a person of intelligence, means and taste. Yet the gatehouse at Malling, apart from the chaplain's "treatment" of it, is snug and cosy indeed compared with this. I could live there delightfully myself. But here – ! From kitchen to parlour, from parlour to bedroom the lady custodian had to make pilgrimages through ruins open to the sky and up stairways and along tunnel-passages such as one shuddered to think of in connection with dark nights. Imagine the wind rising after you have gone to bed, sighing and sobbing like ghosts of tortured captives come back to the scene of their Mediæval woes, whistling through the loopholes like the arrows of a besieging army. Think of hearing an owl hoot in the desolate great hall – the creepings and scratchings of things alive that you cannot account for – the deadly silence in between, that feels like the silence of a tiger watching you and crouched to spring!
I was not surprised to learn that the last woman to defy the associations of the place had found them too much for her, and that since her time the caretaker had lodged outside the castle instead of in. Her husband had died in that room of the bricked-up arch and the little iron stove, and what she went through in the nights of his last illness, when she had to sit up to watch him, and on the night when she was left with his coffined corpse for company, nearly drove her out of her mind. So I was told, and I quite believed it.
I came down at last from the wonderful place, having still time before me in which to explore the village. Mrs B. had warned me not to neglect this duty.
It is a beautiful village. As one saw "The King" written all over West Newton, Dersingham, Wolferton, every acre within a radius of miles from the royal seat, so here the impress of "The Howards" was plain upon Rising from end to end. The home of the family is in it; of course, withdrawn from the gaze of trippers. I passed its guardian walls and spoke to a gardener who came through a high gate, wheeling his barrowful of stuff from the grounds within. I think he said that his lady was in residence. I strolled on to the village green to look at an ancient cross which Mrs B. had mentioned as an important feature. So it is – a very interesting example of the wayside shrine. I could find no special story attached to it, but one felt sure that it commemorated "The Howards" in some way. The rectory near by – a home of dignified leisure, also withdrawn from the gaze of trippers – is in their gift. The church is full of memorials of them. If I know little of castles I know much of the churches of my native country, and how remarkable they are. This one must be ranked with the ecclesiastical gems of Norfolk, which is so rich in them – although I found that it had been very thoroughly "restored," which generally means in some points altered from the original plan, within late years. By the way, Mrs B. has a valuable collection of the etchings of John Sells Cotman, whose work is, for architects and antiquaries, an authority on Norfolk churches and cathedrals, abbeys and castles, as they were a century ago; and I am not sure, but I think that one of them shows the square tower of Rising church without the singular roof which now covers it. However, it is a beautiful building, plainly Norman throughout; with all its richness of ornamentation, massively simple and sincere, worthy to stand beside its great neighbour, which has defied the chances and changes of a thousand years. The hand of the Howards may be seen all over it, inside and out, but they have written only their love and taste, and said as little as possible about their own importance.
Just across the road from the church is another Howard institution of the past, in which I was deeply interested – Trinity Hospital, otherwise the Bede House, otherwise almshouses for decayed females of the working families on the estate. Here the gaze of the tripper is not objected to – is probably welcomed, since an alms-dish stands on the table at which the "Governess" (which I think is the correct title of the lady superintendent) gives you final items of information about the place; the vessel dumbly suggesting a donation from the visitor, to be devoted to the comfort of the old ladies in providing them with such little extra luxuries as they can enjoy. I did not need the hint, and I should think the offerings of visitors ought to almost "keep" the old ladies, who want so little.
It is a charming bit of architecture, and to me it seemed immensely old. I said so to the lady superintendent, and you should have seen her amused smile at my ignorance! "Oh dear, no," she politely corrected me, "this is not old; not more than three or four hundred years at the most." From her way of saying it, you would have supposed it had been jerry-built last week. But she was right; in Rising village, a neighbour of the great castle, an appanage of the Howards, it was a mere mushroom. Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, erected it in the reign of King James the Second.
Nevertheless, it is a charming bit of architecture. She could not shake me in that belief. A sort of gatehouse of two storeys, capped with three pointed roofs, two square and a saddle-back between them, gives entrance through an open archway to the most delightfully green and peaceful quadrangle, which was a picture indeed that golden summer afternoon. Exactly fronting me as I entered was another block of buildings, comprising a little chapel, a reception-room, and the quarters of the "Governess." Between this block and the gateway block, and joined to each on both sides and to one another, the dwellings of the pensioners made out the square, which was edged with the ever-beautiful English flower-border, the middle being filled in with the ever-matchless English lawn. All the roofs were large, steep, massive and heavily tiled; the chimneys on the same scale, the walls (except in the two blocks mentioned) low, and pierced with square latticed windows and the cottage doors – a pair to each pensioner – most of which stood open, with the old ladies, at their knitting or what not, sunning themselves at some of them. There was about everything that sober orderliness, scrupulous neatness and finish, so striking and so grateful to the eye of the old colonist, and such an enhancement and completion of the charm of rural England in characteristic scenes like this. It was a reproduction on a small scale of the college quadrangles at Cambridge, the composition of which had so enchanted me. I was enchanted with the Howard Almshouse, and inclined to envy the Howard protégée her haven of repose.
But the twentieth-century cosmopolitan, who has more or less gone with the times, has strange conflicts of feeling within the breast on being shown the uniform of the Howard protégée, the wearing of which is a condition of her tenure of one of these picture-book homes. Out of cardboard boxes and swathings of tissue paper the lady superintendent brought forth the brand-new cloak and hat that appeared to be kept for display to visitors; and I looked at them. Taken as a garment, and not a symbol, the cloak of scarlet cloth with the Howard badge embroidered on it is quite beautiful; the hat is another matter. It seems made of the stuff used for the modern gentleman's bell topper, and in shape resembles the Welsh peasant hat; one has seen it also in pictures of witches, of the time when they were tried by fire and millponds. It has a towering and tapering sugarloaf crown, and a round, narrow brim, and is worn over a white cap with a full border. In other words, the uniform is a costume of the time of James the Second.
Now…
Well, I mentioned the matter in local circles once or twice. My non-committal attitude did not fail to evoke disparaging remarks upon the Howard Bede House fashions, and especially the hat. "They don't like wearing it," I was told. Who can wonder? "But for them things, there's a many would like to go in, and ought to go in, as can't bring theirselves to do it."
In Ely, when I left that town for Australia, there was a pious foundation which similarly persisted in making its beneficiaries wear the costume of the founder's age. Long past the middle of the nineteenth century though it was, unfortunate little boys had to run the gauntlet of the street in old-man beaver hats and full-skirted old-man coats with great flap-pockets – spectacles to make the humane heart bleed. When I returned, I found the old free school building extant and unchanged, but the preposterous uniform no more. Now that the twentieth century has passed its first decade, I think it would be a fair thing to let the witch's hat, and the "badge" that has lost its meaning, go.
I was dreamily making my way back to the Black Horse when I spied the village post office – the "open door" to all persons and peoples into the great world of living human affairs that I had been feeling so remote from. Something within me sprang awake at the sight – it was the instinctive although often unconscious desire for human sympathy that accompanies any unusually impressive experience. I stepped into the tiny place, and sought pen and ink. I drew a postcard from a packet I had bought of the old man at the gate of the castle grounds, and wrote under a picture of the great stone staircase: "Here I am, and I wish you were with me," or words to that effect. I addressed it to my friend at Boston in Massachusetts, who had sent many a token of the same kind to me, stamped it, and dropped it into the letter-slot. Then, feeling no longer alone – only just as much so as I liked to be – I stepped back into the sunshine, happy in my thoughts of her and of how she would understand.
And, as I was crossing the road, thus bemused and absentminded, a lady, evidently sight-seeing by herself as I was, crossed it from the other side, and in passing stopped me to ask some question about the way to somewhere. She turned out to be one of our driving party, although I had not noticed her. When I had replied to her introductory query, she said: "I saw you with Mrs B. this morning. You are Mrs C., are you not?" Then she told me she had a sister living in Melbourne, married to a Melbourne doctor, and she wondered if by chance I knew them. I did not know her sister, but the name of her distinguished brother-in-law every Australian knew. This little encounter, opening the lines of the "wireless" to my dear home on the other side of the world, filled up the measure of emotional satisfaction that was so abundantly vouchsafed to me that day.
Or almost. The drive home (by a different route) was as delightful as the drive out. And when I reached Mrs B.'s and the capacious arm-chair, and M.'s most charming tea-table …
I am afraid I must confess, after all my sentimental rhapsodies, that the crowning joy of my expedition to Rising Castle was the heavenly cup of tea that awaited my return to the starting point.
CHAPTER XIII
A TRIP SOUTH
There are people, and they seem to me the vast majority, who have no curiosity about or interest in anything or anywhere outside their business and domestic boundaries; who "wouldn't cross the street," as they say, to look at the Parthenon or the Sphinx, or see anything in them if they did; to whom a guide-book, with photographs, means a map and a railway time-table and an indicator of the tariffs of different hotels. But the passion for travel – to "see the world" – has possessed me from my youth up. It has grown with my growth, and has not waned with the waning years. As long as the faculties of vision and locomotion remain to me, I shall cherish dreams of the Sphinx and the Parthenon, Venice, the Swiss Alps, the castles of the Loire, the thousand and one beauty spots of the all-beautiful world, which I have yet to see – trusting in the Fates, which have begun to indulge me, to give me a sight of some of them before I die.
I do not think they could drop me down anywhere and leave me altogether ignorant of where I was, so far and wide has an exploring imagination led me, and so much has it made of its every opportunity, since I first began to read and to look at picture-books. After thirty years of life in the Australian Bush, I went one day to a tea-party in Melbourne, where one of the entertainments provided was a guessing competition. One wall of a room was covered with prints and photographs of public buildings of the world; they were of miscellaneous character, old and new, selected so as not to be too obviously familiar or to give an unfair advantage to experienced travellers amongst the guests. I had never travelled; I do not think I had seen one place of the many represented – except the Wilson Hall of the Melbourne University, which was the only one to puzzle me; yet I won the first prize easily.
Happily, the beauty of a beauty spot is not dependent on human or historical associations, and the Australian Bush fed fancy well when it had no other inspiration. Likewise, when the opportunity to return to England came, unprovided with means for much sight-seeing within the country, or any whatever outside of it, I was too happy in what I had to miss what I had not. It seemed almost as much as I could bear to roam my native county, and see the homes of childhood, Old H – and Rising Castle as I did; after that satisfaction I felt like being now able to depart in peace – that I had not lived in vain. And when in the month of September – still golden weather, for that English summer was made on purpose for me – I set forth to visit Devonshire, then I felt that Aladdin's Lamp and the Philosopher's Stone were not "in it" with my command of luck.
In my young days, be it understood, with this spirit of enterprise so strong within me, I saw nothing of the world outside the eastern counties, and not much of them, except when the dear eldest aunt mothered me so much too carefully in London now and then; nor had I when, in 1870, I was abruptly detached from my belongings to be taken to the other side of the world – not to see another inch of it until I arrived. But all through those early years I was storing up knowledge of the beauties of England, putting together mental pictures of scenes which I had fair hope of beholding with the eyes of the flesh in time – although, as a matter of fact, I have not seen a tenth of them even yet. As they seemed to come under the head of things attainable that were unattainable, and not, like foreign places, of things unattainable that were unattainable, a reasonable hope was justified. Nor did I stop at hoping. I weeded the garden and gathered snails for pennies, went without sugar for sixpence a week, while my brain seethed with plans for better business, in the effort to give substance to some of my dreams.
All the places in Scott's novels – my first romances, read aloud to us little girls by our mother as we sat at our sewing tasks about her knee; all the castles in the English histories; the lakes and fells of the north, the soft hills and dales of Derbyshire, the moorlands of Jane Eyre and Katherine Earnshaw, the Devon of Lorna Doone and Amyas Leigh…
I cannot count them. But, of them all, Devonshire was my dream of dreams.
My grandmother lived her last years there, and there she died. From her and the aunts we had descriptions of the county and its manifold charms; they only ratified what I had already learned. I think this must have been before the youngest aunt became a royal governess, or it may have been there was an interregnum in her career as such; anyway, she had her home in Devonshire at this time, which may have been a reason why I did not go there. However much I might long to see a place of dreams, I could not have wanted to see it in her company. Besides which, to go to Devonshire from Norfolk, in those days and to untravelled persons of our means, loomed as huge an undertaking as it would now be (not to me, but to rural stay-at-homes) to go to Egypt or Madeira from the same place.
At any rate, I did not go. I communed with my favourite Blackmore (as I now commune with his successor in my regard, delightful Eden Phillpotts), and dreamed of going some day. And when the some day came, it was my last in England for eight and thirty years. For the first time I crossed the land from east to west, on my journey to the ship in Plymouth Sound. Leaving Paddington at night, darkness (not sleep) hid the most of the way, but the light of the May morning came early enough to show me the part I had most longed to see. Pale dawn it was, and the train rushing along, but in all my years of exile I treasured the impressions of the little that I saw; they but fixed the old dream and made it permanent. I still had scarcely begun to realise it, but I seemed to know better what it would be to realise it. "We are to return in five years," I remarked to my drowsy partner, for so we had promised to do, in the innocence of our hearts. "Then we must see Devonshire."
We did not return in seven times five years, and when we did I might never have seen Devonshire, as I have never seen the lakes and fells, or Kenilworth, or hosts of things, but for one of those little happenings which come without warning us of the great ones in their train.
Some few summers ago I went to a new place to spend the Long Vacation with a son whom I was accustomed to companion at such times. Alone of our family, we chose, when choice was ours, the wilds of nature for our holiday resorts; and he sent for me to join him on an island that he had discovered, in a cottage that stood on its own lone beach, where we could live the simple life like Robinson Crusoes, plus the advantages of a general store (only one) and a daily steamer to and from the mainland, within the distance of a healthy walk from our abode. I went, and we had a great time – then and on several subsequent occasions in the same locality. No maids, no dressing; no constraint imposed and no effort required in the heat of the year (the Long Vacation of Australian universities begins in December and ends in March); absolute repose, combined with delightful occupation. We walked out of our beds into our morning bath in the sea, and returned for a plunge or an idle wallow at any time of day that the whim took us. We never failed to bathe (in this only bathroom at our disposal) before sitting down to our evening meal, and more than once I have risen in a hot night to soothe restless nerves in moonlit water. The sea was almost at our threshold, gently lapping a beach as smooth to naked feet as a ballroom floor. On the other side of the island, where it faces the south, the Pacific hurls its weight upon rocky headlands and thunders in rocky caverns as stern and wild as Caledonia's coasts can show. It was there we went for picnics.
Of course, we were not quite alone. The island had been discovered by others and had boasted a tiny watering-place for years. Two hotels and several boarding houses clustered about the single store (there are two now) and the little pier where the little steamer called twice daily, going to and returning from the source of fresh meat and newspapers; and these houses were filled in the summer season, and we numbered friends amongst their guests.
But the point to be mentioned is that our delightfully remote cottage belonged to a gentleman through whom – although we never met or knew each other – I came to realise my dream of some day seeing Devonshire. I often wish I had known him; for by all accounts he was a rare and original person.
In the oldest of our old times, the pre-gold times, when these lands were being "taken up" by a gallant set of young men, cadets of what we call "good" British families, he had been a pioneer squatter. But then, while the days of our history were still the "early days" – before or soon after my own arrival – he went back, married, settled and lived the bulk of his life like any other English gentleman of wealth and social standing, in accordance with the habits and customs of his family. I do not know for how many years he had inhabited his fine house in Devonshire, at which I was a happy guest so recently, but I know they were a great many. Then, a widower, approaching a late old age, he divided his large fortune amongst his nine daughters (reserving what he deemed to be sufficient for his remaining needs), settled the family house upon them for their joint use, and came back to Australia – to the little island on the Victorian coast where by such a small chance we found him.
Still farther along the lonely beach from our little cottage he had built his last home, much of it with his own hands. A four-roomed weather-board house, bare-floored, unceiled – sufficient, and no more. Here he had been living for some time, with one man for his whole establishment – the uncrowned king of the island, who could not meet a child without giving it a coin, or hear of a necessity that he did not exercise all his gentlemanly ingenuity to relieve, as when he sent a sack of sugar to a struggling mother "to make lollies for the little girl" – when two of his eight daughters in England (one was married in New South Wales) came out to see how he was getting on. I think it was not until they arrived that he built new rooms for their accommodation, and it is significant that at the same time he built himself another room quite detached from the house, which he left to their more civilised control, and the maid who was now added to the establishment; but, whether he invited them or not, he had reason to bless their coming. Unless he was the sort of man who would just as soon die alone and untended as not, which he very likely was.
I joined my son on the island the day after the old man met with the accident which caused his death. One of the many children who put themselves in his way at every possible opportunity had been to see him, to announce a birthday and receive the inevitable half-crown, and in the course of the proceedings had spied a small rifle leaning against the wall. It had just been used, or was going to be used, on minahs that were eating the orchard fruit. Unseen by his host, the boy picked up the weapon, and, "fooling" with it, shot his benefactor in the leg. I heard of the mishap, and of the periodical inquiries from our cottage as to the patient's state. No alarm was manifested, and his daughters came to see me. Later, as the wound seemed obstinate, it was thought wise to take it to Melbourne for treatment; and one morning they carried the unwilling invalid along the beach before our cottage to the steamer that was to take him thither. He raised himself from his stretcher, and waved his hand to us, and that was all I ever saw of him. He died in Melbourne some weeks later. But the island, all aweep and heart-broken, got his body back; and his grave on the sandy hill, in the midst of sea waters, seems an appropriate resting-place for such a man – more so than the monumental vaults and tombs that hold the dust of his kin of England.
To his one Australian daughter he left his Australian home. I rented it from her for a year or two. The daughters who had come out to see him returned to their sisters in Devonshire. I stayed with them for some time before they left, and we parted as friends, and with the mutual hope that we might meet again. There was small prospect of a reunion in England then.
But the time came. To my unutterable surprise I found myself there, engaged to pay them a visit. One of them, that is the elder, with her father's nomadic blood in her veins, voyaged back again after a couple of years and set up her tent on the island much as he did, only rather more luxuriously. Her return coincided with my departure, and for the moment I missed her at both ends of the world. But M. was at home, and to her I set forth joyfully on a morning of September, about a year ago from this date of writing.