CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library PR 6031.A63L4 1908a Leaves from a life. 3 1924 013 660 992 LEAVES FROM A LIFE The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013660992 LEAVES FROM A LIFE " Nothing extenuate, nor set aught down in malice " Othello V. 2 NEW YORK BRENTANOS 1908 TO K. P. OF DORCHESTER ' A sight to make an old man young." CONTENTS OHAP. PAOB I. I Am Born 1 II. We Make a Move 22 III. In Early Years 45 IV. Growing Up 67 V. More Especially Our Set 87 VI. Artists and Picture-Dealers . . . ,112 VII. Some Literary People . • i • • .139 VIII. More Literary Folk, Particularly Shirley Brooks l6l IX. Still More Literary Folk . . . . .182 X. Parties in the Sixties ...... 208 XI. Theatres, Actors and Audiences .... 239 XII. Odd Happenings 268 XIII. Some Parsons 297 XIV. Some Legal Adventures 328 XV. The Top of the Hill 355 LEAVES FROM A LIFE CHAPTER I I AM BORN T WAS born in the year 1848, and I only wish I could recollect the events of that stirring epoch. Naturally I cannot, but I have always had an idea that the storm and stress of the period, the unrest and upheaval of most things which occurred then, influenced me in some mysterious manner, and made me a rebel against most of the forms and ceremonies that in a great measure deform and cripple a most delightful world. The part of London that saw my birth was a small crescent called Park VUlage West, and is at the present moment much as it was now nearly sixty years ago. It stood back from the main road of Albany Street, Regent's Park, and was as long as we lived there a continual source of joy and delight to us. In the first place, we were quiet and retired, and yet in half a minute we could see the omnibuses go up and down the street, and we could visit our mother's little dressmaker, who was called Miss Jones, and to reach whose abode we had to A I LEAVES FROM A LIFE climb three steps, push open a half-door, and enter a tiny parlour, in the window of which were laid out open fashion-books, as a hint of the glories to be found within. I can at the moment smell the mingled odour of warm irons, linings, and " materials " that domhiated the chamber, and see little Miss Jones, in a very flounced dress, with a bodice having a very long point before and behind, and loose swaying sleeves, which I have lived to see reproduced as the "latest thing" more than once ; while her six little curls, three on each side of her face, bobbed up and down, as she held forth to our mother on the different modes in which she could have her winter or summer dress made to the best advantage. Next to Miss Jones was quite a dreadful shop, where they made coffins, and to which we were sent now and again with rolls of flannel and silk to be " pinked " for home dressmaking. I wonder if anything is ever " pinked " now ? In those days flannel underskirts were all pinked, and sUk flounces were finished with the same hideous de- coration, and the vast joy of my first silk frock was damped by the fact that we had to take the flounces thereof to be " pinked " at the undertaker's aforesaid. I can never forget the horror of that, for though we did not see any coffins, we heard the tap, tap, tap at the back of the place, which the undertaker's wife obligingly told our nurse was old Mr, " Some one's " coffin in the making; describing it in detail, and showing with pride the satin cushion on which his head was to rest, despite the fact that we knew old I AM BORN Mr. •' Some one " in life, and were indebted to him for many and many a treat. Lower down on the opposite side was a public- house, and here I made my one and only appearance at the public bar. I must have been very, very small, not more than three or four, but I recollect it precisely, the smell of the mingled beer and saw- dust, the loud raucous voices, and presently the angry manner in which we were snatched out of the place, the long-clothes infant grabbed out of the nurse's arms, and our flight up Albany Street, pursued by the nurse, who was kept at bay by a policeman, and our indignant mother waving her back whenever she dared to approach the sacred infant. 1 do not believe either I or my sister had ever been taken to that house before, but a kindly neigh- bour had warned my mother of the nurse's pro- clivities who, acting on the warning, had caught the nurse in the act ; and oh ! how thankful we were to see her go. I have an idea she was Irish. I know her name was Mary, and I recollect how she used to curdle our blood with the most awful and hideous nightmare tales, which made us most fearsome cowards in the dark, and caused us agonies which took us years and years to outgrow. Nowadays the modern nurse does not believe in fairies, which are pronounced by her to be absurd, and not to be credited for one moment. I think of the two specimens I prefer Mary, banshees, night hags, public-house and aU. There was a fearful joy 3 LEAVES FROM A LIFE in listening to her, there can be none at all in hearkening to the modern nurse, who, attired in hospital garb, minces along, immersed in a half- penny novelette, pushing her charge in an elegant vehicle over any one she comes near, and taking no notice of anything until she reaches the park or wherever may be her destination, where she finishes her novelette or else confides to all the rest of the nurses her love affairs, and also the aflfairs, or what she thinks are the affairs, of those whose money she takes with one hand, while she deprives them at the same time of every shred of character they might possess. All the same Mary's departure was a vast relief to us then, and she was succeeded by the daintiest, kindest of women, the young widow of a Dorset- shire sailor. She hved with us fifteen years, when to the children's rage and despair she married again, an omnibus conductor, who bought a little bake- house in Hertfordshire, where she lived until she died at a vast age. She was " old nurse " when she came to us fifty years ago, and she has only been dead about three or four years now. We used to hear from her long stories about the sailor husband, but soon, very soon, the rapidly filUng nursery was no place for us elder ones ; mites of three and four and five, we were relegated to the " tower room," where we used to have lessons with the governess, a subdued, sad, wearisome creature, whom I frankly hated at the mature age of three, and wondered about even then. I should have wondered still 4 I AM BORN more had I known that her brother was then in Bedlam, confined as a criminal lunatic there, for murdering his own father in a fit of ungovernable frenzy. I believe there are still members of that gifted and unfortunate family still Mving, indeed I know of one whom I remember, a charming and beautiful young married woman, the wife of a celebrated academician, who is still alive in an asylum, and so I cannot mention names ; but I shall never forget the dread we aU had of Miss D , and her mournful voice, and her attempts at making us learn something or other. One thing I do know, and that is, she never taught me to read : I picked up my letters myself, and could read easily at the mature age of two, and when I recollect how little we had to read, and how often we read it, I think I almost envy the child of to-day with its endless books and toys, and its more than endless amuse- ments and instruction. Yet I do not think I reaUy do envy it ; thank heaven, we were allowed to grow, we were let alone, we were neither trained nor developed nor interfered with ; and though some- times I have craved for more light and more con- ventionaUty, more training, I have worried along comfortably through life, made out a path of my own, and have never been dependent for amuse- ment on any one, content with books and news- papers, and always able to be sufficient company for myself. I fancy Miss D gave me my first dread of other people. By some means we had 5 LEAVES FROM A LIFE heard before she left us about her brother, and we heard that once our father had gone to see him to arrange a journey abroad in their student days ; and when he did not reply to papa's knock or open the painting-room door, papa noticed a curious scraping sound, and looking down saw a razor moving about under the door as if to cut into his boots. Papa called out " Don't be a fool, D : open the door," and that ended the episode, which would have been forgotten had not the young artist, Mr. Egg, and my father been driving along in a diligence in France, when, half asleep, papa saw D glance round, draw his razor from his pocket and make for Mr. Egg, who was asleep in the comer of the lumbering carriage. Papa called out, D laughed, but Mr. Egg was awakened, he and papa had a whispered consultation, and when the diMgence arrived at its destination, meant to part company with their eccentric friend. But he saved them the trouble ; he disappeared, and the next thing they heard of was the murder, and that the brUliant genius was incarcerated in Bedlam, where, to the day of his death, which took place quite recently, he painted pictures which were really beautiful, and were I believe sold, and helped to pay for him in the asylum. What would have happened had not papa been awake we can only conjecture, but I do not think either he or Mr. Egg would have left the diligence alive. In thinking over my earliest days of aU, events appear to me as a series of pictures, hung on a 6 I AM BORN gallery wall, and apparently they had no connecting link. The next picture I see, after our rapid exit from the public-house, is a very different one. I was sitting on the floor of the dining-room, my mother, a sweet and graceful figure in grey cash- mere, her full skirt and sweeping sleeves after the fashion of Miss Jones, and with her dark hair in the same arrangement of curls, was pouring out tea, while my father and his idolised brother Charles were skirmishing by the fire for the first sight of the Times. Personally I was in very great fear lest they should hurt each other, but a gentle " Now, WiUiam," ended it, and Uncle Charles departed to his home next door shouting defiance as he went, and waving one-half of the paper which he was bearing off in triumph. Uncle Charles died when I was three or four, and that was the last sight I recollect of his gay and gracious presence. He was, I think, short and slight ; I know he had laughing blue eyes and a long lock of hair on his forehead, which he had to toss out of his eyes every now and then, and I have often heard my father declare he would have been Lord Chancellor had he hved to an age when he could have earned that distinction. Certainly he was brilliantly clever, very joyous, very charming, and full of hfe, as indeed it seemed to me all artists and their relations and friends used to be, but he died of what was thought to be a neglected cold, but which was really typhoid fever, to cure which his doctor sent him to Dover, where 7 LEAVES FROM A LIFE he died at once. Died because no one knew how to treat tj^hoid, and in consequence Uncle Charles ate what he liked, and went a long journey when he ought to have been in bed on milk diet, with a couple of trained nurses to wait on him night and day. How weU I recollect my father's mad and un- controllable grief, and how he tore out of the house — I think to go to his brother ; and how we watched with horrid complacency the great black coffin carried up the steps into his house, while our two cousins, rather younger than ourselves, gave them- selves vast airs in their new black, and seemed to think an orphan the most delightful and con- spicuous thing in the whole world. We rather shone too among our acquaintances, I fancy, on the strength of that funeral, and though we certainly loved our uncle and missed his merry ways and papa's jokes and fun for many a long day, we were not deterred from playing at funerals with great gusto, the long horsehair bolster from the sofa being the coffin, and the cellarette under the sideboard serving as the grave. I think ceUarettes are absolutely extinct nowadays, so I may not be doing wrong if I give a short description of the one we had. It stood on four castors and was rather a heavy fluted piece of mahogany, with a locked cover ; inside it was lined with lead and divided into different compartments for the heavy cut-glass decanters, which were the pride of my mother's heart, and which she polished herself with an old 8 I AM BORN Bandana handkerchief belonging to her grand- father, and which she kept in the middle drawer of the sideboard itself, in company with a chamois leather and a duster which she used herself, the first, should the table silver show a speck of dirt, and the second, did any dust appear on any articles of furniture in the room. I do not think to the day of her death, through all the years that led from comfortable obscurity to a life among the most delightful and brilliant people of the times, that I ever saw my mother idle for five minutes of the day. She was always doing something. In the earliest days she was invariably sewing, sometimes for us, very often for my father, whose costumes she made and arranged, and who owed her many a hint for his pictures and the colours and draperies used therein, that were never known of untU she died. Then the taste and fancy she had lavished on him were wanting, and soon began to fade out of his work after her death, and the one great and fatal error of his life became public property. Later on in years she made her house and her entertainments brilliant and unique, and having a perfect genius for organisation, left nothing to other people. Long before flowers were indispensable in a room — in the days when one had to go to Covent Garden or to Soloman's inPiccadillyfor anything one required in the way of plants and blossoms — we were never without them, and I well recoUect the disgust expressed by my grandmother at a charming arrange- 9 LEAVES FROM A LIFE ment of ox-eye daisies and grass which my mother had gathered during a day in the country I fancy Kew or Hampton Court which would nowadays be admired for its appropriate Hghtness and delicacy of touch. " Nothing but weeds," said Grandmama ; we never called her Granny, no one would ever have thought of such a word ; " you ought not to bring such rubbish into the house ; " but Mama said nothing — she never did appear, now I think back, to say much ; but the daisies remained, and even Grandmama hved to see great bunches sold in Westbourne Grove out of the flower-girls' baskets, although I do not beheve that she herself would ever have spent a farthing on such " rubbishy stuff"." When I think of the gay young golden-headed, frizzled, waved, and curled grandmothers of to-day, I can hardly believe my grandmother existed, but I know she did, I can remember her so very, very weU. She could not have been fifty years old when I first began to see her in my picture-gallery, but she must have looked an elderly hundred and ten. In the first place, the unbecoming fashions of the early fifties were adapted to her venerable age, and she wore unfailing black, more especially because I think she and my grandfather had been very rich and were then very poor, than because she was in mourning for any one. I think her gown was of rep, it was very horrid to touch, and she wore, as did aH ladies in those days, a big apron, alpaca or cashmere lO I Am born in the morning, silk in the afternoon, trimmed with rows of narrow velvet and tied round the waist with cords and tassels which hung down in front ; moreover she always crowned herself with a large cap tied imder her chin, and which concealed where her "front" began and left off; a front being the mark of a married lady in her days, for although she had most beautiful long black hair, it was cut short after she was married, and the cap and front donned at once. Indeed, the first wedding in her family, my mother's, gave her a severe shock, for Mama declined both cap and front and set her face against the almost universal travelltQg bridesmaid. But despite the fact that Grandmama always treated us children with the greatest scorn, and kept us all at the farthest possible distance, never failing to impress on us our utter unworthiness in this life, and our sure prospect of destruction in the next, in con- sequence of which we hated her with a deep and bitter hatred, she was a great and remarkable character, and I am truly sorry that her sententious manner of talking, and her detestable habit of drawing a moral at my expense, caused me to flee before her whenever she came my way. Grandmama was a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions and was extremely proud of her birth, which she declared went straight back to the Roman occupation of York, in and around which city her people had lived generation after genera- tion. She had married out of the schoolroom, and produced year after year an enormous family of II LEAVES FROM A LIFE sons and daughters, of which my mother was the third, and of which now only three survive. People who recollected my aunts in their youth say such beautiful young creatures never were seen. When they rode or walked out they were followed, and it is a curious coincidence that while John Leech put them into his pictures in Punch, Du Maurier did the same for our generation, and I and my sisters and one brother are enshrined in nameless, yet deathless fame by his pencil in some of the numbers from 1867 onwards. Whenever I think of my early days, they always seem set to music, ripples of laughter play round them, an air of unstudied lightheartedness and mirth is reproduced, and though I know great and bitter troubles must have befallen our house, I have not the faintest recollection of them. As with Uncle Charles's funeral, if we knew of them at all, and I cannot think that we did, we turned them into dramatic episodes and forget all save that any event was better than none. The one and only sad feature in my childhood is Grandmama ; she always appeared fiiU of evil prophecy, always ex- pecting catastrophes to happen, and invariably dreamed the most hideous dreams, many of which unfortunately came true. One she related once with bated breath, when she handed me with solemn state the work-basket which had belonged to my eldest aunt, who died suddenly just after her first ball. It was to the effect that the day Aunt EUen returned from school Grandmama dreamed 12 I AM BORN that she came downstairs to find all the blinds down, and she was staring at them, when Aunt Ellen and old Jane, who lived with my grand- mother over fifty years, came in together, and then that Aunt Ellen said, " Oh Jane, why are the Winds all down ? " to which Jane replied sadly, " Dear Miss Ellen, don't you know ? " " and that day week," concluded Grandmama, "she was a shrouded corpse." UnUke most dreamers, my grandmother used to relate her dreams before the thing she dreamed about happened, and these dreams always came true ; one only did she keep to herself to her dying day, and never told a soul even then. It was too ghastly, she always said, but the day after her dream she came down to her breakfast in sUence, then said she had had a dream she could never tell, and retired to her room until the next day, when she had in a measure recovered her composure, and was severer in demeanour to her family than ever before. I am glad I do not live in the dreadful Sabbatical atmosphere in which my mother was brought up, and indeed for the matter of that, my father too, for he was taught to love going to church by attend- ance at long dull services, where, if he did not behave, he was tied to the leg of the kitchen table at home until the time for the next service came round. But I fancy that beyond attendance at family prayers and at church he was left very much alone as far as his rehgious opinions were concerned, and I never recollect his ever going to a " place of 13 LEAVES FROM A LIFE worship " except when one of us was married, and I suppose when the children were christened, but I have no clear recollection of that. He began by painting on Sunday, despite his mother's objection. When she told him he could never meet with success if. he continued to do so, he repHed, " Sir Joshua Reynolds always did," but she met him with the prompt reply that "that had nothing to do with the question at all." However, he soon gave it up, not from any religious scruples, but because he found the one day of rest an emphatic necessity, so he used to spend the mornings going round the Kensington artists' painting-rooms : Egg, Mul- ready, Creswick, AnsdeU, Henry O'Neil, and others ; the afternoon we generally got him to go out with us ; and in the evening we had those deUghtful gatherings of which I shall speak later on. They did not occur in Park Village West ; there I think tea and supper and " the play " were my parents' recreations ; but as we left there when I was about five, I do not remember much of what they did after six o'clock. I can, however, well recollect how dismally I m particular suffered from the agonised howls from the Zoological Gardens on Sundays, and I think these first gave me the rehgious doubts I have always possessed. From my earhest days I have adored animals. I would cause Miss D anguish by patting every stray dog we met in our walks, and by catching up and kissing every dirty little kitten, and the animals in the Gardens were very near and dear to my heart. 14 I AM BORN Would it be believed that in those days the wretched creatures were not fed from Saturday night until Monday morning, by which time the neighbourhood resounded with their savage howls ? The noise I beheve, and not the animals' sufferings, was the cause of this wicked cruelty being knocked on the head, and I can well remember saving, aye and stealing, bits to give to the creatures, when we used to go to see them on Sunday afternoons. We were always at the Zoological Gardens ; we not only had friends who gave us the green tickets, but we knew the keepers, one of whom lived in a lodge where we sometimes had tea, which always smelt of lion, and which now and then contained baby lions or other beasts, very small, very soft ; which were being warmed and fed in front of his fire, and which I distinctly remember being allowed to nurse. I fur- ther recollect the feel of the rough tongues which licked our fingers, and being solemnly warned not to allow them to draw blood, for we were given to under- stand that, if they once tasted blood, the soft httle kitteny things would become violent and gobble us up on the spot. Once I was in very real peril in these same gardens ; I did not know that the horrible creature advancing towards me dragging a bit of chain and waving a stick was an escaped ourang-outang — the one specimen, I believe, then in any civilised country — and I was about to try and make friends when a white-faced keeper, followed by two or three other men, sprang out of the bushes and seized the chain ; afterwards I heard the nurse IS LEAVES FROM A LIFE tell my mother of the dreadful risk I had run, for our keeper friend had told her if they had not caught the beast when they did, he would have torn me limb from limb. I can't say if he would ; I saw an ourang-outang the other day which did not look so very large or so very alarming, yet I distinctly remember the beast towering above me, so I think I must have been quite small enough to demolish if he had desired to do so. Yet another monkey obtained my undjdng hatred by stretching out a long lean arm, and grabbing a beautiful long feather out of my best hat, and when 1 stamped and raved with rage the beast ran up to the top of the cage, and tore it into the smallest of atoms. 1 also remember calling in agony to the seals when they were fed to mind the bones, arousing roars of laughter, at my expense which enraged me, for honestly I could not see what there was to laugh at, as it was an ordinary request made to us when- ever we had fish in the school-room. But much as I loved the gardens then, I love them a thousand times more now, when the animals are decently housed and treated, called by their names and looked after by their keepers, who reaUy under- stand arid care for their charges. The only thing that remains to be done is to teaCh the public to behave, to cease to prod the beasts with " swagger sticks," and to realise that monkeys don't eat sardine-tin lids or orange peel; and that the beautiful tame squirrels that now run fearlessly about the place, will soon lose their confidence in i6 I AM BORN humanity if they are teased as they are at present, and not made friends with as they are in the Central Park in New York. I do not recollect such tire- some teasing on Sundays in the Zoo in old days, but I'fancy the Fellows were more particular about to whom they gave their tickets ; I know we used to be greatly envied because we had so many ; now it seems to me that most of the Council School children, and brats of that ilk, disport themselves in the sacred spot on Sundays. One or two more pictures are hung round the walls, and belong to the special time of Park Village West. One is a curious one of two females, in long trousers tied in at the ankles, and with a short species of stuck-out skirt similar to the one a baUet dancer used to wear. They had hats and feathers and soft grey boots with shiny leather toes, and were alto- gether awesome specimens of humanity. They were turning round the corner at the end of our crescent, and we were told that the females were called " Bloomers," so it must have been the year of the great exhibition, when the original Mrs. Bloomer first came over from America to teach her doctrine of hygienic clothing. I have lived to see many attempts at so-caUed rational dress, have gazed at the divided skirt dear to the heart of the inventor, have seen women, who ought to know better, career round the park on bicycles, clad in check stockings, knickerbockers, and men's coats, shirts, and ties ; while others drag yards of skirts after them through the muddy germ-laden streets, B 17 LEAVES FROM A LIFE but not one of them do I recollect so well as I do these bloomers, more especially as they were followed by the ubiquitous street-boy making use of all pos- sible opprobrious terms. At the same time, absurd as it may sound, these erratic females were the first persons who ever made women aware of the fact that they possessed legs, and that they should use them more than they did in those days. Now the present- day dress for young women is, in my humble opinion, faultless, the short light skirt, the excellent and woollen hidden knickerbockers, the blouse and the sensible useful hat are all just what they should be, and when I recollect the walks I used to take, hold- ing yards of material in my cramped hand, while petticoats twisted and twined themselves round my unfortunate Umbs, and that I used to skate in a similar garb, the long skirt being then drawn by pulleys into folds so that it did not entirely impede one's progress, I envy the girls of to-day, though I would not be one of them on any account whatever. The last picture which is connected especially with our first home is that which contains the Duke of WelUngton ; the Duke as he used to be called. I could not have been more than three ; I believe he died in the autumn of 1852; but I can see him distinctly. I was in a cab with my mother when he came riding slowly past ; he was very bent, and his head seemed sunken on his chest, and every now and then he raised a couple of fingers to his hat as he was saluted by the crowd, and quite well do I i8 I AM BORN remember his long thin legs in white trousers tightly strapped beneath his boots, and the stolid groom following behind. " Never forget you have seen the Duke of Wellington," said my mother ; and I never did forget it, nor that I saw a black flag hoisted on Walmer Castle when he died, nor that my father and mother got up at some unearthly hour in the dark November morning on which he was buried, I think at 3 or 4 a.m., to go to the house of our doctor, who hved in the Strand, and of whom more anon, and from whose window we have seen many Lord Mayor's Shows. My last recollec- tion connected with the Duke was of going to see the funeral car, which was kept for some time in what is now Marlborough House, and which was apparently, before it was bought and fitted up for the present King, a storehouse of rubbish. I think the car was kept in the stables ; it was a black and awesome creation, and I insisted on being taken away from it. I heard that it cost hundreds of pounds, and it was so heavy it broke through the road the first time it was moved. Can it be true that it still exists in the Crypt of St. Paul's ? Some day I really must go and see. It does not give one a good opinion of the British public when one recollects that it broke the windows of Apsley House because the Duke, who saved Europe from Napoleon, would not give way on the subject of the Reform Bill. True, he was a regular old hide-bound Tory ; true, he objected to educat- 19 LEAVES FROM A LIFE ing the people, because he said it would produce a race of clever devils who would deny God and turn forgers and thieves ; but he had seen what " the people " could do when roused, and was a believer in the wholesome disciphne that conquered Bona- parte and made England a name to conjure with. That same British public hissed our best and bravest general, a man who, with his heart torn and bleeding from the greatest personal loss that could affect any man, went out at a moment's call, and once more saved England when she was almost at her last gasp. What can we say, then, of the great heart of the people ? So little in its favour that I for one prefer to forget it, and to remember only that most of its ghttering favourites and heroes have long since been forgotten, while those whom it bespat- tered with mud, and shrieked words of hatred at, are safe in the hall of heroes, and are placed where time, and time alone, places every one of us : in our right places. It is a good rule, that of the National Portrait Gallery, that no one's picture shall be placed there until he or she has been dead a certain number of years. Would we could aU suspend our criticisms of public men until we could see all round the question ! But that, in these days of an un- fettered and inexpensive press, none of us are able to do. I often wonder what the Daily Mail, for example, would have said of that daring statesman who, without waiting for instructions from home, stopped the soldiers at the Cape on their way to 20 I AM BORN China and despatched them to India at the time of the Mutiny; and whether he would have been reprimanded and sent home, despite the fact that his action broke the back of the rebellion and pre- served the Indian Empire for us 1 21 CHAPTER II WE MAKE A MO\'E I HAVE no very fuU recollection of the furniture and decorations of Park Village West, but I remember the house perfectly, and above all do I recollect the garden, for it sloped down from the house to some railings, and beyond them lay the Regent's Park Canal. On one side of the garden, going past Papa's painting-room, was a long ivy bed, in which it was our delight to forage for snails, and in which we used to trample ; I can never smell ivy now with- out seeing that special bed, out of which we used to emerge black and odorous, to be raged at by Papa, who could not bear us to scrimmage in his beloved ivy bed. The very old man that is my father nowadays is quite forgotten when I smell ivy. Then I see him, young, hthe, active, wrath personified, yet with a humorous twinkle in his eye and a suppressed smile round his mobile mouth, rush out, palette and mahl-stick in hand, to chase us away ; while we shrieked with mingled awe and deUght, the wrath vanishing in a game of romps, which lasted until the waiting model was 22 WE MAKE A MOVE remembered, and Mama's "Now, William," re- called him to his work. Our dear young father ! how we worshipped him, his talents, his never- failing, delightfully amusing talk, and his never- ending stories. He was not one of the men " who hang up their fiddles behind the door " when they come home. No, all his best stories were told us at once, and his " Now, what have you seen, what have you done to-day ? " his " Now, children, you amuse me," cultivated our powers of observation, and made us at least always ready to talk when it was necessary for us to do so, and indeed very often when it was not. Ours was never a sUent house- hold ; and we one and all of us read every book and paper we could lay our hands on ; first of all to talk over things with Papa, and afterwards because we loved reading for its own sake. The artistic temperament has its great and un- doubted drawbacks, but such as they are they do not touch the children or young people of the household ; and 1 can honestly say that, despite the trouble, the great trouble my father once gave my mother,! never remember the smallest " row " or unpleasant wrangle in our household ; or what to my mind is even worse, the least dulness, the least slackness in the flow of easy talk which never failed us when we were gathered together. I am quite sure that on the surface at any rate the artist's tempera- ment is the most dehghtful one in the world with which to come in contact ; it was then ; it is now. There may be, there are, concealed lapses from 23 LEAVES FROM A LIFE the strict code of morals prescribed by Mrs. Grundy ; there is shortness of money ; there are debts and difficulties ; but the moral side is, I think, a thousand times better than it used to be, and the money diffi- culties are not discussed in the sordid manner in which a business man drags in his troubles by the heels on every possible occasion, should he be in any financial strait. But then the business man knows what debt means ; that it ruins his credit, and hampers and often ruins his creditors as well as himself; the artist curses the tradesman, and wonders he can't and won't wait, and, indeed, knows he must, until some pot-boiler pays the bills, and he begins to run up others in a light- hearted manner. In our daythepicture-dealertookall the sordid bar- gaining out of Papa's hands, save and except when he was inundated with commissions from enthusiastic admirers, who implored him for more pictures than he could ever hope to paint ; and when I recollect the crowds of carriages which lined the roads before "sending-in day," and the passionate enthusiasm some of his pictures aroused, I feel sure, if one could only know it, that in about a hundred years the now much despised Victorian art will some day rival the Romney and the Gainsborough sales of to-day. Indeed, if they do not, the Victorian artists will stiU be this to the good ; they had their day ; they " saw it and were glad ;" and while my father's last big commission was for value to £10,000, Romney's pictures went for about £20 in his life- 24 WE MAKE A MOVE time, and I do not suppose Gainsborough's went above the hundreds. The extraordinary success of my father cannot surely be due entirely to the " vile taste " of the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, for that success still lasts in an extraordinary manner. No work- man ever enters our house without eagerly scanning and begging for a verbal description of the engravings of the pictures which hang on our walls, and there is always a smaU crowd round his best-known picture in the Tate Gallery. When he married he had about £150 a year allowed him by his mother, and he and his bride set up their wedded home in rooms in Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury Square. That was in June 1845. My eldest sister was born there, and I think my eldest brother; but I was born in our first house, a modest enough establishment; but one that could not have been kept up on such an income ; as there were three children and much coming and going of guests. We were not long, either, in Park Village West ; where we parted from our canal, the last home of many dear dead cats and dogs, over which I used to weep as they floated past, with great sorrow on our parts, but great relief to our parents. For people had just begun, after the Great Exhibition, to think smeUs might pos- sibly not be healthy, and that the rising damp and fog from the canal might be the cause of my brother's croup. I think we moved late in 1852, but I am not sure of the year. 1 only know that I recollect quite well going to look over the house with my 25 LEAVES FROM A LIFE mother, who cruelly left me seated on a chair in what was first our schoolroom, and afterwards the library, my legs much too short to reach the ground, while she explored the kitchens and the bedrooms, despite the fact that I had promised an accurate description of the house to my brother and sister left behind ; I being generally taken, I regret to say, because I was the most troublesome of the three eldest children — the other two, born respec- tively in 1850 and 1851, not being old enough to require a description of their future abode, were not taken into consideration. Yet the move was not all due to our father's great success as an artist, for in 1852 both our grandmother on his side and an old uncle died and left him suffi- cient money to buy the house ; the dear delightful house that was ours for years and years, and from which those of us who married were married, and those who died were taken away to their last long sleep. Never tell me that a house does not absorb the personalities of its owners, because I know that it does, and that house became us, in a manner that no one would beheve who had not seen it in our jovial prosperous days of happiness, and who could see it now, smug, prosperous, well painted and kept, but oh I so commonplace that it is not the old house any longer, and it is only one of a group of most uninteresting habitations. Yet up that long flight of steps, glassed in for us when we began to go to parties, has passed every notable in England 26 WE MAKE A MOVE from the late Queen Victoria, the present King and Queen, and all the princes and princesses, to what we prized still more — raging republicans as we were and indeed as 1 still am — all the literary, artistic and musical celebrities of the mid and later Victorian era ; and we never saw, it seems to me, any of those who are represented by the fatuous bridge-playing Society folk one hears so much of nowadays : for all who came to our house were in- teresting from either one cause or the other. But when we took the house it was in the most fearsome state of dirt and dilapidation, due to its having been inhabited by a family of Greeks. At least, that is what the caretaker said, as she pointed out damaged paint, spoiled boards, and walls which appeared to be studded with nails in every available place. The Greek family haunted us children for many years, and whatever was found unsatisfactory at first, we at any rate put down to the Greeks, and they were supposed, Heaven alone knows why, to have murdered each other and buried each other — how this was managed we did not trouble to think — in and about the house and garden. Indeed, the mere word " the Greeks " reduced us all more or less to order among our- selves. I do not think our parents ever knew that we thought about our predecessors in the house, or how much they influenced us, especially after it was dark ; but the Greek family was very real to us, and I have always hated the Greeks as a nation because of them. 27 LEAVES FROM A LIFE It must have taken some time to get into the house, for when we looked over it it was, as I have just said, not only dirty and dilapi- dated, but not quite large enough ; and Papa at once began to build, and started a mania which possessed him for years. It had no painting-room, and one had to be built, and above that a large bed-room, a dressing-room and a bath-room were placed ; and I think the second drawing-room was added ; anyhow it was there when we went to Uve at Pembridge Villas, for in those two rooms did " the Greeks " most abide, and well do I recollect the awful dread in which I used to practice five- finger exercises on the piano with my back to the two rooms behind; for the instrument was then placed flat against the wall by the door of the first room. Will it be believed that both I and one of my sisters invariably curtseyed three times to the back; drawing-room to propitiate any Greek who might be lingering there, the while we kept a wary eye over our shoulders in case one should leap upon us and strangle us before we could shriek I I quite recollect the manner, the fearsome manner, in which the house was first decorated. In the dining-room was a heavy dark red flock paper and grained paint, which, put on when we entered the house, remained as it was until about 1870, when it was re-done after my mother's own taste, and was made artistic and beautiful; and the furniture — cellarette and all — migrated from Park Village West ; it had two heavy leather arm-chairs, 28 WE MAKE A MOVE a " lady's " and a " gentleman's " ; in one Mama used to sit all the morning sewing for us or for Papa ; and in the other Papa used to sit for half an hour after dinner, smoking and reading and gene- rally searching for a " subject." The ugliness, he said, of modern dress always appalled him, and he avoided it as long as he could, reading over and over again Goldsmith, Moliere, Richardson, and in fact all the old writers, untU one joyous day, long before the Pembridge ViUas day though, he came across the pages of the immortal Boz, and made himself happy with " Dolly Varden " and " Kate Nickleby," and I think one or two other characters out of the books he loved. But, these completed, he came back to the old writers, most of whose works I read before I was ten, and from whose writings I for one never got the smallest harm, not half the harm that girls receive nowadays from problem plays and novels which bewilder and suggest; for what was wrong in the old writers was beyond my comprehension, though the story part dehghted me, and in some cases gave us an outlet for our dramatic aspirations. Our pet play was from Defoe's " The Plague of London ; " the doU's house was marked with a red cross ; while the dinner-bell was tolled by Willie, and wedulybroughtoutour dolls' "dead," and thoroughly enjoyed the gruesome entertainment. But those were schoolroom games ; we only went into the dining-room for our early dinner ; then Papa used to come in for five minutes, a biscuit in one hand 29 LEAVES FROM A LIFE and a glass of sherry in the other (his usual lun cheon), leaving the model to consume hers, the while he told us stories of his morning's work, and heard in return aU the latest news from the school- room and the rapidly filhng nurseries overhead. There was a red velvet sofa in the dining-room, which is hnked in my memory with one of the most awfiil moments of my social life, for there 1 had to sit and entertain Colenso, the " heretic " Bishop of Natal, while my mother entertained in the drawing-room Bishop Gray and his nephew, who was then, and to the day of his sudden death, one of our most familiar friends, and whose erratic manner and queer unconventional ways, hid from the pubhc gaze the kindest heart that ever beat, though many things he did — notably asking the Gaiety Chorus en masse to sing at poor Fred Leslie's funeral at his church — caused him to be regarded with severity by most folks. I never saw that red sofa without seeing Bishop Colenso also. I could not have been very grown-up, as I felt so desper- ately uncomfortable ; but I know I tried my hardest to keep him in conversation until I saw Bishop Gray depart. This Bishop Colenso saw also, and laughed. "Well," said he, "I never thought to be obUged to Bishop Gray; but I am now; I suppose you would not have talked to me all this time if he hadn't been in the drawing-room, and I can thank him at all events for a delightful quarter of an hour ; " and Mama came in and took him away before I could do more than blush and 30 WE MAKE A MOVE stammer, and let out, as I most undoubtedly should have done, that his quarter of an hour had seemed about four times that space to me, though now I am proud and glad that I had the talk and saw the tall and splendid Bishop, though until he turned to go I dare not look above the tops of his gaiters ; and tliat I have still the recollection of the man whose goodness to the Zulus is not forgotten even at the present time, and whose "fearful lapses " from orthodoxy are nowadays the merest commonplace beliefs of most of us, if indeed we have not gone considerably beyond them. The red sofa, being placed in the window, was our favourite perch when any distinguished visitors were expected, and from here we saw the arrival of Queen Victoria. Her visit was announced long before she came by the riding up of a mounted man, whether gentleman or groom I do not know ; " The Queen will be here in half an hour ; " then came another one, " The Queen will be here in twenty minutes ; " then another, " The Queen will be here in ten minutes ; " then the last, " The Queen is in sight," which meant she could be ex- pected at any moment. I think she would have been amused if she could have known that the pretty, smart parlour-maid in orthodox cap, apron, and black dress, who opened the gate to her, was one of our aunts, curiously enough her own namesake, and born on her own birthday : Aunt Vickey having begged to undertake this task in order to obtain a near view of the httle 31 LEAVES FROM A LIFE lady her loyal heart adored. Papa himself stood at the foot of the steps, bowmg pro- foundly, until the Queen shook hands graciously with him, while Mama waited at the top to be introduced to Her Majesty. No, I think that introduction took place in the drawing-room ; for here one of the smaller princes, I think Prince Leopold, made the naive remark at the top of his voice, " I didn't know artists lived in such big houses," to be sUenced at once by his mother's look, which was quite sufficient to quell the stoutest heart. There has often been a great deal written about the late Queen, but I have never seen de- scribed the enormous power she had over all who came in touch with her; and to the day of her death she must have exercised this singular trait. She was well below the then average height of woman ; 1 am not tall as women go now ; but when I put on her widow's dress to stand as a model to my father for the costume, it was ridiculously short on me, and I was then in short dresses ; and he had to obtain another help, who could wear the dress to greater advantage. But all the same there was dignity in the figure to the last ; a nameless something that despite — perhaps because of — the plainly banded hair with the cap, the unobtrusive dress, the small plump hands wearing the hundred and one (as it seemed to us) small and worthless rings proclaimed her of high position, and would have done so to any one ignorant of the special rdle she filled in life. 32 WE MAKE A MOVE We were all of us, as I have remarked before, republicans at heart : my father's sense of the humorous always overcame him too much to be able to take royalty seriously, and he had always refused royal commissions because, as he said, " He should never be able to behave " ; but after the first " sitting " we never heard anything but praise of the Queen. The first idiotic stiffness over ; when she gave over speaking to him through a third person, thus : " Please tell Mistah such and such a thing;" " Mister says so and so," and rational converse was possible between the Queen and Papa, they got on famously. She laughed at his stories, took an interest in all he told her, and whenever the good and charming Lady Augusta Bruce had not sufficient authority to obtain what he required, a word to the Queen was enough, and the article, whatever it was, at once appeared. Dresses sworn by their owners picked to pieces flew together in a miraculously quick manner ; and sittings were given by people who declared them- selves on the point of starting to the furthermost parts of the world. But from the red sofa we could only see the departure and arrival : the length of the Queen's stay rather wearied us, and we had time to wonder, first, how she Uked the picture ; then if she had turned Papa into a Lord, which we much feared she would do ; then if she were making him paint the picture out and was standing over him while he did it over again: before, with the same c 33 LEAVES FROM A LIFE ceremony in which she arrived, she departed, Aunt Vicky closed the gate on the retreating carriage and doubled up in shrieks of laughter at the excellent result of her first and last appearance as parlour- maid, while Papa danced a fandango at the bottom of the steps, while we rushed tumultuously towards him. " Well ! what did she say ? " we shouted ; " did she like it ? and are you a Lord ? " " Princess Beatrice (who was then about seven) liked it, and that's enough for you," said Papa, while afterwards we heard of the rehef with which he heard the Queen's praise and received her thanks ; yes, her thanks, though neither then nor at any other time was she ever moved to make him anything ap- proaching a Lord. Who has not been up the steps and into that delightful drawing-room^ I wonder? Here comes handsome Prince Louis of Hesse and his gentleman-in-waiting to take his turn in the painting-room, where he smoked endless cigars in an impatient way, and did not prove a very tractable sitter, while poor Captain Westerweller stood until Papa suggested a seat could be found him. " He will schtaand," said the Prince, and kept on smoking untU his sitting was over and he departed, leaving the scent of smoke behind him and not the most delightful remembra,nce beside. Smoke, however, was the atmosphere of our house, and in those days it was nothing Mke as universal a habit as it is now ; but Papa would 34 WE MAKE A MOVE smoke in all the downstairs rooms, and Mama was much put to it to get rid of the noxious odour. At last she discovered that in a small shop close to a neighbouring Roman Catholic chapel she could buy the strongly scented incense they used in their services. She soon procured a quantity, and I can see her now bustling about the house and burning the stuff in the fire-shovel. The Archbishop of Canterbury — ^Longley of the saintly countenance and the beautiful voice — was expected that day, and when Papa met him in the drawing-room he sniffed ; then he said very quietly with a roguish smUe, " Have you had Manning here ? " Mama was never allowed to forget that, more especially as Manning, the fine, ascetic, spiritual Cardinal, did come to see Papa more than once, and I think had some idea of making a convert of the easy-going fi-eethinker, whose opinions of all Churches is small, and of all clerics even smaller still. Then came the courtly Sam of Ox&rd, a Bishop I secretly and ardently adored ; and I still keep a faded photograph he gave me after relating to me his pet ghost-story, in which, at least at the time he told it me, he earnestly believed, and which I do not repeat here because I think all the world knows it as weU as I do. He was Chancellor of the Order of the Garter, and we revelled in his magnificent robes and the beautiful blue cloak all the knights wore in con- junction with splendid collars, tied on each shoulder with broad white satin ribands. I do not know if these white ribands are always worn, but that they 35 LEAVES FROISi A LIFE are on the occasion of a wedding I can myself vouch. The greatest favourites we had among the great folks whom we watched arrive from the red sofa, were the charming Princess Mary and the Princess Royal. The Duchess of Teck was always smiling and kind and delightful ; she was Princess Mary in those bygone days : and the Princess Royal was the simplest, sweetest, and the most really artistic member of the royal family. She knew about and cared for art : the others, I cannot help thinking, knew little and cared less: what artist has the present King honoured, or asked to his table as he invites actors and rich financiers ? Not one that I personally could name. Would it be lese-majest4 to describe the small, fractious, and very naughty Uttle boy who was generally with the Princess Royal, and who is now the German Emperor ? Well, if it be, I will take the risk. He was a tiny, pretty, deli- cate httle lad, and he utterly abhorred the High- land dress in which he was clad on the special occasion for which he was brought to England, and I fancy the cold wind stung his small knees : anyhow his conduct was awful. Somehow or other the dirk belonging to his costume was not forthcoming, and he was lent one belonging to his Uncle Leopold. The first part of the ceremony he was pretty quiet. It was discovered afterwards that he had spent it in picking out the great cairngorm in the dirk handle and then casting it away, and 36 WE MAKE A MOVE I do not think it was ever found : then he began to fidget ; his mother tried to hold him, and at last handed him over to his two uncles, Leopold and Arthur, whose bare legs he bit, while they bore the pain like Stoics, I only hope they smacked him well when they got the little ruffian back to the Castle. "Willy," as his English relations called him, became fond of Papa, and when we met him in the Long Walk at Windsor he used to call out, " Come and wide with me, Mistah " for he was, as indeed were all the royalties then, utterly unable to pronounce his r's. His sister, little Princess Charlotte — I do not think she has been to England since her marriage many years ago, and I do not know if she is still ahve — used to suffer a good deal at his hands, and I once gave him a smart tap on his naughty httle fingers when he was pulling her hair ; he looked at me for a minute and said nothing. I often wonder if he ever remembered that episode ! I at least am always glad to recollect I once cor- rected the all-powerful Emperor before whom the whole world trembles, it seems to me, nowadays. I shoul<^ much like to know if royal personages ever really realise what ordinary people really think of them : but they cannot : they are absolutely never alone, and are always approached in such a servile manner that I suppose they come to believe that they really are all that the world makes them out to be. Ail the same, 1 think that Queen Victoria had weighed it all, and would have laid down all her crowns and all her power to have kept her 37 LEAVES FROM A LIFE husband, for whom she went mourning all the days of her life to that life's end. It was from the leads on the top of the inner drawing-room at Pembridge Villas that 1 first saw the Queen driving by, Prince Albert at her side, and the rest of the carriage overflowing, it seemed to me, with boys and girls. The Queen wore very bright colours, and had a large bonnet and flowing veil, but I do not recollect her dress as well as I do that of a later period, when we were allowed to be on the steps of the Royal Academy, then held at the present National Gallery, when she was expected to see the "show." The Queen then wore, over a huge crinoline, a plaid silk dress in bright colours, with two or three flounces edged with velvet, a black mantle with deep fringes, and a large white bonnet; her bonnets always seemed large ; and she was as usual accompanied by the Prince and two or three biggish boys and girls. I quite well recollect how much I was struck by the blue eyes of Prince, Queen, and children and by the gracious manner in which the Queen bowed, and the charming smile she had for her husband. I could not have been more than ten, if as much, but I can see the picture now quite as well as I saw it then, but of course only " in my mind's eye, Horatio ! " The next time I saw the Queen was from the red sofa, and then she was in heavy black, a colour she never again left off. It was from my own little room that, in 1861, I heard the great bell of St. Paul's boom out — could it have 38 WE MAKE A MOVE been at midnight when the Prince died ? My father had heard at the club how dangerously iU he was. We did not care, of course, but the bell awed us aU, as did the pauses where his name should have occurred in the service in church the next day. News did not travel as fast then as it does now : the pause was the first intimation to the greater part of the congregation that the end had come, and our governess was fuU of importance when we came out of church, as we had heard the tolling bell, and Papa had had the news sent up from the club before any one in Bayswater had been told. I think Miss Wright had conveyed a note from Mama to the parson : was he the Rev. J. Robbins, I wonder ? I think so. Then after the service we walked to Cleveland Square, where one of my aunts lived, to tell her the news. My grandfather was there, and he at once declared the Prince's death was a distinct interposition to save the English nation from being Germanised and made a sink for the reception of all foreign impurities. Poor Grandpapa 1 What would he have said had he lived to see our army clad in German overcoats, hideous to behold ; our rail- way porters disguised in German caps and uniforms; and to traverse whole quarters of London where the signs above the shops and the advertisements are in every language save English, and where every one one meets is a refiigee or outcast from the country he ought to call his own, and be returned to as soon as possible. It is extraordinary to remember how Prince 39 LEAVES FROM A LIFE Albert was disliked and suspected all his lifetime in England by every one, from the highest to the lowest; and the more than well-deserved reaction from this unjust judgment only began two or three years after his death. I have heard in my childoood ridicule poured on his artistic attempts ; sneers at his mean- ness; indignation at his impertinent interference in home and foreign affairs, and every abuse show- ered on him that any one can imagine : I have hved to hear his praise in every mouth, and to know that he honestly loved art for art's sake ; that in his short time he did more for artists than any king or prince ever did before or since ; that he reformed abuses in the domestic arrangements of the Palace that would have ruined a far richer woman than the Queen of England ; and that to his wise advice we owe the French alliance, now " going strong," as boys say, under the name of V entente cordiale ; and that to him above all do we owe peace with America, and the, splendid domestic example, the loss of which can never be replaced, until we are fortunate enough to be sent such another man among us. Victoria's era may have been dull — ^personally the part 1 knew best was delightful and perfect — ^but it was good. All the same, I for one do not wish the time over again ; there are compensations nowadays, at any rate people are amusing to watch, and after all, that is a very great thing I My excursions among the royal folk who haunted our house have caused me to digress, for we had been some ten or 40 WE MAKE A MOVE eleven years at Pembridge Villas before the Court came up our long stone steps. When I first recollect Westbourne Grove, a tea- garden was where the large pubhc-house called " the Hedan " now stands, and the "Grove" was a street of prim little houses, each with its little garden in front; and the owners used reaUy to "garden," and vie with each other in the arrangements of their trim little plots. I always thought Turner, the R.A., came to see us at Pembridge ViUas, but it must have been at Park Village West. I can just recoUect a little bent old man and being told his name, and having to thank him for a Madeira cake he brought for us children, but he died in 1851 : and I know we had not moved then. But well can I remember the tea-garden, and our standing up on tiptoe to look in and see the arbours where people sat and drank tea, I suppose ; and our rage when the public- house took its place and the big shops began to appear. Some of the worst times I recollect as a child were the times of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, and I have never forgotten the horror that seized me when the news-boys called through the foggy night : " Glorious victory ; appalling losses ; fall of Sebas- topol." I wonder how many times Papa darted out into the foggy night and bought a paper, only to find Sebastopol had not fallen, and was not to fall for many a weary month. How he and his friends used to abuse the Government, and rage about the treatment of the troops in the Crimea ; and how, 41 LEAVES FROM A LIFE when the bitter winter went on and on, and we children even cried with the cold when we went to bed, we used to shiver doubly at the thought of the poor men and horses ; for if we were cold in the house, what must they be in the open, or even in the tents about which we heard so much ? Guy Fawkes was stiU very much in fashion then, and that year the Emperor Nicholas was the " Guy ; " a fact impressed upon us, when he died, by Tenniel's magnificent cartoon in Punch; next year Nana Sahib was the " Guy ; " then we were forbidden to read the papers. All the same, I did read them, and for me the barest details of the Mutiny have still the greatest fascination, though really the papers had very httle actual detail in them, as I found in later years when searching files for a story I was writing in which the Mutiny came in. I think aU the awful particulars came in private letters: there was no telegraph then direct to India, no Suez Canal, no ocean greyhounds for ships, no scare-heads in hal^enny papers, as there are now, which make a walk through any large town in time of war a thing of dread. Indeed, in peace they are bad enough, and one's heart often jumps into one's mouth at the " ghastly accident in the Strand " — " fearful tragedy in London " — lest either should concern us in some way or other! The worst fogs I ever recollect in London were about these times ; there was quite an alarm, too, about the garrotters, who had an amiable habit of coming behind one, choking their victim and rob- 42 WE MAKE A MOV|E bing him of all he had, and then leaving him half dead ; and I well recollect not being allowed to go alone with my sister to our dancing-lessons, though we had only to cross the road, run through our friendly doctor's house, and cross another road to reach our destination ; first, because of the fogs ; we might lose our way ; secondly, because we might be garrotted ; though what thieves could be sup- posed to steal from small girls of nine and eleven is more than I can imagine. There have been fogs since, notably when Brett and Haydon, the cele- brated detectives, came to sit, and came into the schoolroom to wait and see if the fog would lift, the while they told us blood-curdling stories of their adventures, and showed us how to open hand- cuffs should !we ever find ourselves in the grasp of the law ; and then came, much later, an awfiil fortnight of real black denseness when Mama died, and the world suddenly seemed to become black too. There have not been for many years anything like those fogs ; one could not see an inch before one's nose ; boys bearing torches used to rush about and try to earn a penny in leading old gentlemen all wrong, and Papa once found himself in a hansom cab, with the horse going up the steps of a house, instead of along the road ; and another time was guided home by a blind man, who said pathetically, " Fogs make no difference to me. Sir ! " I think Papa had made the acquaintance of this man by hearing him go along the Queen's Road, saying persistently, " Am I near the Butter Shop ? 43 LEAVES FROM A LIFE am I near the Butter Shop ? " No one heeded him, and at last Papa did, found the shop he wanted, and led him there. For years, " Am I near the Butter Shop ? " was one of our family phrases, and meant an inquiry as to whether we had reached the end of anything we particularly wanted to finish, either food, a book, or, maybe, even some " talldng-to " on the part of our elders that we did not particu- larly care about. 44 CHAPTER HI IN EARLY YEARS The greatest joy we had after leaving Regent's Park was Kensington Gardens ; and we never found our walks there or therein the kast bit dull. In the first place, they could be approached in two or three different ways. Our favourite one was down the " Grove," and up the Queen's Road, unless our governess wanted to do some shopping, which we loathed ; but if she walked down slowly enough for us to see the gardens of the little vLUas, which became all too soon the rapidly increasing shops, and finally allowed us to wait while the little brewery at the top of the Queen's Road poured out odorous grains into a dray, we were quite content, more especially as our dear friend, Mr. Egg, R.A., lived in those days next door to the brewery, and sometimes saw us and called us in and gave us cake. I almost for- gave him for the horrible nickname, " Jow-row," to which I had to answer ; no one else called me this, and 1 do not know why he did. But I do not think he realised how my cake was embittered, and how I had to try and love him, when he called for " Jow- 45 LEAVES FROM A LIFE row " and I had to go ; or I am sure he would have given up the habit. Once in Kensington Gardens we were at peace. There was no elaborate gardening done then, and I have no special recollection of the coming of spring, indeed I fancy our springs were much occupied with combating childish complaints; but I have the very strongest remembrance of summer, and the return to the Gardens in autumn, after our heavenly sojourn of two or three months by the sea. We used to go out quite early in the summer, and then we had to reach the Gardens by the quickest way. Alack ! this led us up a narrow street, still as narrow as it was then, and on one side was an enormously high wall, over which still taUer trees nodded and beckoned. Behind that wall was a lunatic asylum, and our great dread used to be that the lunatics would escape, climb the trees, and drop on us over the wall and make a sudden end of us in a body ; we had to pass by the great gates that enclosed the house, which was reached up a flight of the usual steps, and which had " Dr. Davidson " on a brass plate, and we always longed, with a longing tempered with dread, to see the valiant man, who not only lived there, but apparently liked it. The asylum is gone, vast mansions stand on its site, and, of course, the courageous doctor is long since dead. It would have driven the lunatics madder than ever could they have seen the cease- less stream of motor-trafiic that now passes along that once quiet road, and which must make Hfe 46 IN EARLY YEARS well-nigh unendurable to the dwellers in the man- sions. Once past the asylum we breathed freely. Was there not a delightful shop where in summer our governess bought a great bag fuU of small black cherries, which we used to consume, with an eye to gentility, in the less frequented parts of the Gardens? and then, too, we reached the park-keeper's lodge, where, when we had pennies, we bought dark sticky squares of hard-bake inlaid with spHt almonds, and beautiful ginger-beer, the like of which I have never met since. If it were very hot. Miss Wright used to open a small fringed parasol, which had a stick that folded in half in the middle and was kept in place by a metal socket ; then after collecting all the cherry stones into the bag and neatly bur5dng them, she sat down and read : or, as I believe, slept : giving us gracious permission to look in at the orange-house, as we called the conservatory of the Palace, and which, empty, dirty, and dilapidated, was quite easy of access then. Now it is quite a different matter. But then no royalties had rooms in the Palace. Queen Victoria's toys had not been disinterred and set in order, and the orange-house had nothing but a couple of orange-trees in it, and we used to play unchecked on the steps and peep in at the grimy windows undisturbed, dreaming of the great folk who had lived there once, and of the William and Maiy of our history books, who became very real to us when we ran down the steps they may have passed with stately tread. I fancy in our early days, from 47 LEAVES FROM A LIFE say '52 to about '58, the Queen was not much more popular than her Consort, for we never thought of her and her prun, quiet childhood in Kensington Palace, but only of Dutch William and his spouse. The glamour of the young Queen of '37 had faded, there was, as I said before, great distrust of the Prince, and in consequence we, at least, heard nothing of the childhood we should have ideaUsed, playing where she played, and running up and down the Broad Walk where she used to ride her donkey, ignorant of the fate before her. There was only the Broad Walk and what we called the flower- garden in our time ; aU the rest was green and grassy with broad expanses, and in the place where we used to dig for "pig-nuts," and find them, eating them afterwards with vast enjoyment, there is now a superior gravelled walk. Then it used to be a short cut for men walking across to Westmin- ster, and as we always met the same men at the same time we, of course, made up stories about them, and so our walks were a constant source of enjoyment to us. There was one awful family we used to meet in the Broad Walk which we looked forward to meeting with mingled dread and delight. There were five of these wretched objects, and they belonged to the hated race of Greeks; aU were more or less idiots, all walking in a row guarded at each end by a vigilant gouvernante, and our great joy was to see whether they would be able to pass us without making faces. If they did, we put on 48 IN EARLY YEARS superior and what we fondly hoped were aristocratic airs; if they did not, we used to put out our tongues at them, while Miss Wright and the rival gouvernantes glared, and wondered whose charges were most to be blamed. At last, one of the idiots stamped and roared at us, and this brought matters to a climax ; the parents of the Greeks were spoken to by the park-keeper, and we never met again. They little knew, poor creatures, that they gave us our first lesson in the then scarcely mooted doctrine of heredity, or pointed the moral that the marriage of cousins was likely to result in such shambling, blear-eyed creatures as those we used to meet. How we grasped or heard these facts I know not ; 1 only know the lesson it gave me, and even to this day I can never hear of the marriage of cousins without a shuddering remembrance of that gruesome family of Greeks. The Broad Walk of to-day, with its smart nurses, each in her prim uniform, and with an elegant and comfortable baby-carriage, in which her little charge can lie at full length while the other sensibly dressed children run in front, is very unlike the Broad Walk as I recollect it first. I can see myself and my sister, clad in Rob Roy plaid pelisses, shoes and white socks, and brown bonnets with caps with tiny pink rose-buds, inset all round the face, and tied tightly under the chin, and our hands in thread gloves ; while Willie dressed in a belted tunic and white drawers and a hideous tasselled cap on his head, walked disdainfully in fi-ont ; then came the D 49 LEAVES FROM A LIFE nursemaid with what we called the " push-along " : the word perambulator had not then been heard : bearing a couple of sma,ller children, while old Nurse staggered after us bearing the " long-clothes," the name of derision we always gave to the latest arrival. The " push-along " was a most uncomfort- able vehicle, and consisted of a narrow seat covered with American leather or some such substance ; it had a wheel on each side and one very small one in front, and the tall handle at the back was used to push the- miserable thing. There were no cee- springs, no india-rubber tyres, but all the same we regarded the " push-along " as some folks do their motors nowadays, and we had great joy when the autumn came, for new shell gravel was laid down then, and we took turns to drive the vehicle over the beautiful shells. The lovely noise we made when crushing them is still in my ears when I write, and I can stUl smell the opening chestnut burrs and the dying leaves when, leaving the sea-shells, we foraged about for the great brown chestnuts, which we carried home and made uito necklaces, or ground up into a hideous compound, called flour, out of which we made cakes for the long-suffering dolls. Long before the days of Peter Pan there were fairies in Kensington Gardens, fairies who showed us the pig-nut stores, and who guarded the fear- some medicine-bottles fiillpfHquorice- water, which we made at home and conveyed to the fairies' cellar in the Gardens, to be buried there until it became of priceless value. There must yet be 50 IN EARLY YEARS many medicine-bottles buried deeply there, for we always forgot where we had put them, and finally gave up the idea: first, because we imagined the fairies could not resist the dehcious stuff and had drunk it; and, secondly, because we were told seriously we were much too old to play at such idiotic games. The " long-clothes," when we wore the Rob Roy pelisses, was born in 1853, and was the first of us to arrive on the scene in Pembridge Villas, and for some reason or other she was always outside the inner ring of our games, and finally, when she was ousted from the position of youngest by two or three more " long-clothes," who arrived one after the other far too fast to please us, for we were frightfully tired of babies by this time, we made her and ourselves believe she had only been an adopted child : as if any one with such a tribe of chil- dren would have voluntarily taken in another to feed and clothe; and at last, when she was very trying, we determined she had been a legacy from the Greeks, and that was how she came to be in our sacred house at all. When we returned from our walk in summer I, at any rate, had a couple of hours of misery in a heated tiny schoolroom wrestling with sums which I loathed, and needlework which I could never do and hated, with the prospect of mutton and greens and rice pudding before me, and the crowning horror of the " practice " in the Greek-ridden drawing-room ; then came tea, the heavenly joy of the garden where we grew salads, currants, and all kinds of fruit and flowers despite 51 LEAVES FROM A LIFE the cats, which came m crowds and held tea-parties and concerts, untU one evening Papa, driven dis- tracted by the prolonged howls, rushed out and slew a couple with a spade, returning pale and trembling from burying them in the dark, as he declared he felt he was the worst of murderers. It was awkward that our intimate friends next door missed and bewailed their own beloved cat, but suspicion never fell on Papa, and this is the first time the real cause of the disappearance has been told. The domestic arrangements of those days were very different to what they are now, and as such, I think, deserve a few words here. My mother was a great believer in medicine, especially in domestic medicine, and we suffered in due course. Every year in the early spring she made a jorum of treacle and brimstone, which she kept on the washing-stand shelf in Papa's dressing-room, a wooden spoon in it coming through a hole in the paper cover, and for about a fortnight she enacted the part of Mrs. Squeers on her unfortunate off- spring. But at last, the devil having entered us, we incited WiUie to eat the lot at one sitting, and the result was so disastrous that she gave up the brimstone and treacle regime from that day. Then there was an awful dose the nurses called " sinner and pruines" (senna and prunes), which was brought hot and odoriferous at dawn to the unhappy invahd. Rhubarb and magnesia had been tried, but as we invariably rose, smashed the cup, 52 IN EARLY YEARS and sprinkled the bed and bearer, it was given up ; and our worst dose was hot castor oil and milk, shaken together in a bottle and poured Irom the bottle down our throats. A strong peppermint lozenge somewhat mitigated our woes, while those who had not been dosed incited the invalid to dance, so that the hideous liquid might be heard to wobble about inside the victim, which shows what imagination will do ! Then we had powders, but these the doctor brought ; Mama did not make these. It fell to her and Miss Wright to conceal them in different vehicles, hoping to take us in, and cause us to take them in in their turn. But we always found out in time to avoid the gritty de- posit, and at one time the two busts which stood half-way up the stairs on red pedestals were full of figs which we concealed there, and were never dis- covered, as far as we knew ; or if our dear friend, the housemaid, found them she at all events never told of us, but simply burned them. In October Mama broughlf out her small and precious sQver saucepan, and over a fire lighted specially in her bedroom — fires were never allowed upstairs except in cases of real and severe iUness — she would concoct camphor baUs for chapped hands, which we were allowed to roll up in silver paper to preserve them for use, and a salve for the lips made from wax and a sweetly scented rose-essence, which we fetched from the chemist's shop in Oxford Street, kept by our be- loved patron, Jacob Bell, where our still dearer friend, Mr. Hyde Hills, was always to be found in a 53 LEAVES FROM A LIFE species of glass room beyond the inner shop, from whence he used to emerge to kiss us and fill our hands with dehcious acid-drops and pear-drops which lived in glass jars all along a shelf behind the long counter. How good the men of those days used to be to little girls ! Later on we were kept in gloves by Mr. HiUs, Mr. Burnand, uncle of the present Sir Frank, and Mr. O'NeiU; while the beloved Shirley Brooks brought books arid snippings from Punch, and others less known to fame took us about and taught us how wonderful and beautiful is this London of ours. Mama's domestic medicine would cause a scare nowadays, as would her cheerful way of treating infectious diseases. These " diseases," as we called them, were always commenced by my second brother, and the moment he began we were encou- raged, nay commanded, to follow suit, and we gaily whooped in chorus: had measles en masse (although personally, try how I would, I escaped and have never had it to this day), and finally had scarlet fever gallantly without any carbolic sheets and without the least attempt on Mama's part to prevent the complaint spreading. Yet scarlet fever even then was a name of dread and terror in any nursery. I recollect Mr. Faed's wife and two children dying in a week, and Mr. Horsley's first wife and family disappearing, and leaving only one behind, who, in his turn in later years, died of the same complaint, for the late Archbishop of Canterbury — Tait — was not by any means 54 IN EARLY YEARS the only man at that time whose house was left desolate in a few weeks. I well remember, too, the almost sudden death of Mrs. Adams, who was nursing her five children with the same thing. She was the wife of the first Vicar of St. Peter's, Bays- water, a gentle, sweet-voiced woman ; some one says the five children died, too, but I do not think so ; we used to play together, and I must have recol- lected such a tremendous calamity; besides, there is no mention of the holocaust on her tablet in St. Peter's, and surely there must have been had this been the case. Still these cases are sufficient to show how few precautions were taken when scarlet fever appeared in a family. They were even worse in Papa's days, for he told us a grim story of turning over some old journals of his father's and finding between the leaves a very large piece of skin : " this skin came off my foot when I had scarlet fever '' was inscribed round the relic, and book and all flew into the fire. Papa knew enough to be certain the fire was the best place, but did not know enough to restrict the scarlet fever to one child, and to isolate room and sufferer at once from the rest of the house. There were no trained nurses either : Miss Wright nursed my sister (who shared her bed) and myself stuck in a cot along the wall, while Mama and the nurses, and the elderly housemaid, Susan, " took on " the others : we all recovered, but two of us bear marks to this day, and have had a good deal of iU-health, which might have been avoided, perhaps, had more been known than was known SS LEAVES FROM A LIFE of what might be the consequences of scarlet fever. I do not recollect what we did to recover after scarlet fever, but I do remember well that after whooping-cough we went to Hampton Court and had a lovely time. Mama's sisters and parents were there, and we played with our pretty aunts and a friend, who became the evil genius of our home, and has gone now, I hope, to " her own place." That time at Hampton Court always seems to me a vision of flowing flowery muslins, fluttering curls, laughter, and play. Our yoxmg aunts chased us all through the Maze, bought us heaps of sweets at a lovely shop in Kingston, and were generally delightful. Yet they had just come down fix)m a great house and luxury to a small cottage, and had apparently nothing before them save the prospect of marriage some day, or else of earning a precarious Uving; whUeGrandmama, Grandpapa, and old Jane were all together, loving each other dearly, yet squabbling and scratching like cats from morning to night, really because they had nothing else to do. I like to think of our childish remembrances of the dear old place, and to forget that war was wrecking England, and our home life threatened by one of the cruellest deeds that ever was done. The last disease I ever recollect was diphtheria, which claimed a victim in our yoimgest. As this was declared one day, and we were ordered away on the next, I fancy knowledge of infection must have been spread by then. 56 IN EARLY YEARS A word here of the heroic conduct of our doctor's wife, a heroine if ever there were one, who, regardless of her own flock, took in our three youngest until the doctor said they were safe, when I, at the respon- sible age of seventeen, was despatched with them and my third sister to Brighton, my first intro- duction to the place and to the cares of housekeep- ing, which I shall never forget, more especially as my sister, on her way down in the train, said her throat was sore, and as temperatures were not taken then I could do nothing but wait ; the next morning the wretched child was quite well and out on the beach with the " three little boys ; " but we had to stay at Brighton some time, and, during that period, dear, kind Mrs. Shirley Brooks came down and looked after us until little Evelyn Shirley died and was buried and the house was pronounced fit for us to return to. During that viisit an episode occurred that would hardly be credited nowadays. Mrs. Shirley Brooks was looking for rooms for herself and I went with her ; at last she came to some in the Crescent, where is now the Grand Hotel, and something in them aroused her suspi- cions. They would suit her, but In some way she managed to send me and the landlady down together to look at the sitting-room once more. In less than a minute she came flying down- stairs ; she had se^n a coffin under the bed ! Later on, she found a man had died of smaU-pox, and the landlady, anxious about her " Easter let " — Easter was a great time then at Brighton— had hidden the 57 LEAVES FROM A LIFE coffin until the corpse could be fetched away. Mrs. Shirley and I were at once vaccinated, and no harm came of it, but a considerable stir was made, thoi^h as there was no legislation then on the subject, I fancy the landlady came oif scot free, as did we, always remembering our scare and the sore arms which made us crosser than cross. Dear, kind, good Mrs. Shirley Brooks, my mother's stand-by and champion, the " Shirlina " of our set ! what mother of boys nowadays would have rushed down to look after children from a diphtheritic house, as she did? She and our dear, dear Mrs. AUchin have special nooks in my walhalla owing to their splendid conduct at that time and, indeed, at many another crisis of our interesting and absorbing childhood. Mrs. Allchin has left good and celebrated sons who owe her much, and who wiU recollect, as I do, how she worked to keep the house and family in order, to placate the tired, over -worked, and irritable " head of the house," and who, despite it all, never failed to have splendid teas ready for us as well as her own bairns, should there be special stress at home, such as " picture Sunday," or the arrival of one of the endless babies, when we were taken in and welcomed on the one condition that we should make no noise which could reach the ear of " the Doctor." It was not always possible to avoid this, and well I recollect the slight dark man, whose irate countenance glared at us for a moment round the schoolroom door, taking the sweetness out of the ginger-bread, and silencing us for at least five minutes 58 IN EARLY YEARS after he disappeared to his special den downstairs. Dr. Allchin was not our family doctor ; of him I shall speak in another place ; but he was a species of ex-officio attendant, always willing to come in on an emergency, and much loved by us despite the dread we had of him ; but I think he was always more or less aihng, and that and his numerous family kept him on wires and finally made him alarming to every one. There were tragedies even in Bayswater, and his was not the only one that touched the fringe of our happy, careless lives. I think the education given to girls in those days was about the worst that could be conceived. The generation before was carefully trained in domestic arts ; it could work, cook, and housekeep to per- fection, but we at any rate never learned anything of the kind, if I except the tentative attempt to teach us to sew long horrible seams, to mend our stockings and hem pocket-handkerchiefs, which generally ended their days as doUs' dusters. Mama herself was a past mistress in every womanly art, and never since her day have I eaten real jam or custard, both prepared by herself from receipts I often wish I possessed; while when money was plentiful and our clothes and plain sewing were made and done by others, she did a vast amount of fancy-work, and our drawing-room was adorned with endless stores of real lace-used as mantel borders and other furnishing articles, all of which she took an enormous delight and pride in. I quite well recollect how she progressed through the horrors of 59 LEAVES FROM A LIFE Berlin wool, which she used to buy in enormous quantities from a shop in the city kept by a Mr. Benjamin Phillips, who in after years became Lord Mayor of London, and whose descendants now have an enormous warehouse and are gorgeous swells ; beautifiil strings of glass beads came from there too, and much smaller beads, which were sold in packets, aU sorted out to different colours ; then came crewel work, which reaUy was pretty ; and finally, the lace work, though she always knitted — to rest herself, she said — socks for Papa and the boys, counterpanes and couvre-pieds : and indeed, her last work, never to be completed, was a collection of woolly star-fish, or what resembled them, which she meant to be finally sewn together and made into a covering for one of the numerous beds. The first work I recollect is the fine embroidery, which to me appeared to be formed by working over a blue line and then cutting out a hole. Mama and Miss Wright must have made miles of this stuff ! It was used on every species of under-garment, it trimmed our white summer frocks, the babies' frocks were made of it, and it reached its apex as trimming to the wide fiiU skirts which every lady wore, and examples of which can be seen in John Leech's pictures. " So many cart-wheels this morning," would Miss Wright exclaim trium- phantly at our early dinner, to Mama ; the round pattern most in favour being known by that name ; and I wonder how we learnt anything at all when the cart-wheels were in progress; and, indeed, I 60 IN EARLY YEARS am always astonished that we did not grow up ignorant of everything that girls nowadays, it seems to me, learn in the kindergarten. The only extraneous education we received was from an Italian master, and at the weekly dancing- lesson, and even the Italian came to an early and sudden end. He was a typical foreigner in ap- pearance ; and as Papa was then engaged on one of his best - known pictures, in which a foreigner is a prominent figure, he was pressed into the service and made to sit. He only consented on condition that it was not to be a portrait; he was a refugee from Venice, before it was rescued from the Austrians, a count, and alto- gether a most delightfully mysterious person. He did not often unbend ; we knew no ItaUan, and he very little English, but sometimes he would talk to Mama, who had the gift of languages, and knew Italian fluently, and she would translate for us until we had some idea of what he had endured in the Venetian prisons, and of his remarkable escape from the clutches of his enemies ; but even she never knew his real name, and to us he was only the Signor. He did not see the picture untU it was completed, and the day before it was to be exhibited, and then he nearly had a fit ; it was he himself. Papa must paint it out, must alter it, and he raved and tore about the painting- room until Papa gave him some sort of a promise that he would do what he could. But the picture went for exhibition untouched. The next Thursday 6i LEAVES FROM A LIFE came and no Signer, and so did the Thursday after with the same result, and at last Mama went round to his poor lodging, which was in one of the narrow streets leading out of Soho. But the landlady could only teU her that the Signor had gone out as usual on the Tuesday, leaving aU his goods and chattels about, and had never returned. From that day to this we have never heard the reason of his disappearance ; he may have been murdered, he may simply have fled for fear the Austrian power could reach him in England ; I do not know why he left, and certainly none of us ever heard of him again. His dramatic flight was one of our early romances, and with him disappeared our chances of learning Italian, at any rate. After Miss D. came Miss Wright, who stayed with us some years, and despite her frantic devotion to " cart-wheel " embroidery, she taught me all I ever knew. She was an extraordinary woman, and had been cast on her own resources at the age of eighteen, when her father, who, I believe, made boots in Staf- fordshire, failed, and was helped by his relations to go out with his wife to America, hoping to retrieve his fortunes in that then most remote spot. I should think she was about thirty when she came to us, a slight " elegant female " with the usual curls, pinched waist, black silk apron, worked coUar and cuffs, and flounced petticoats of the period, very much accentuated by the fact that she had been some years in France to learn the language, and was in consequence supposed to be not only next 6z IN EARLY YEARS best to a native, but to be an authority on the latest fashions, which then, and until the Franco - Prussian war taught us we could make our own, always came or were said to come from Paris. I don't know how I learned it, but I know now that Miss Wright's France was no farther from England than Boulogne, where she resided au -pair in a chemist's shop, and where she certainly learned the language, though not the accent, for to her — and she left me when I was thirteen — I owe the fact that I can read and understand French as well as I can English, though my pronunciation thereof is better not mentioned. Anyhow, while I can understand French people perfectly, I have yet to find the native of France who can understand me. There is one thing Miss Wright taught us besides French, and that is, if we were not sure of an historical or geographical fact, that we were to look it out at the moment, and make certain if we were right or wrong. If anything exciting were going on in any part of the world, we had to know all about that part of the world, and to learn day by day how things were progressing, and thus we fought our way through the Crimea, the Mutiny Bowdlerised, the coming of Garibaldi, and the tremendous war in America that saw the death of slavery and the birth of perhaps the most detestable nation that has ever been called into existence. Naturally we were all the most eager politicians, and always on the side of Freedom : we little thought then to live to see freedom become licence, 63 LEAVES FROM A LIFE and emancipation the outlet for the worst crimes and passions in the world. Still, never again can the poor suffer as they used to in the pre-Reform days; never can books be dear; never can travel be reserved for the few ; never can the hideous prisons exist which were then in every land ; and if we of the last generation long to put on the drag, and return to the peaceful, plenteous times of the mid and late Victorian eras, let us also remember that no one can see history in the making, and that we must wait to know what the present rush and storm and stress reaUy mean. The American war was not so interesting to us as the other wars, as Miss Wright had left us by then. We had a love for the South, too, although "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had been dinned into our ears, both by Grandmama and Miss Wright ; but we secretly favoured the gallant, valiant Southerners, and thought more of their ruined plantations, dying magno- lias and rose-trees, and beautiful houses, than we cared for the rough, uncouth North. In- deed, had I to choose now, I should vote for the South : at all events, the inhabitants were courteous gentlemen. I have no affection for the grasping money-getters of the North, whose women have annexed and vulgarised Europe, and to whom we owe the present craze for splendour and extravagance which has culminated in the doings of what the cheap press calls " the Smart Set." StUl, I think, of aU the wars the Crimean touched us most. We saw 64 IN EARLY YEARS the return of the Guards from our vantage-ground at the National Gallery, then the Royal Academy, and we saw the Queen distributing medals in Hyde Park. I particularly recollect the goat of the Welsh regiment, decked out in ribands and with gilded horns, and the deer which preceded another regiment, as well as I recollect the fireworks let off to celebrate the Peace, for we had a beautiful carriage, hired for the occasion, and looked on with mingled joy and dread, until a stick from one of the rockets fell close to the carriage, when Mama could bear no more, and took us home, for which I, at any rate, was secretly thankful, for I hated crowds then as I do now, and am much too much of a coward really to enjoy anything that is shared by the London mob. My last recollection of the Crimean War is connected with Folkestone. Papa, in the fuU tide of his prosperity, had found our house too small, and had begun to build, and having by that time become great friends with Lucas, of the firm of Kelk and Lucas — who, I think, in connection with Mr. Freake, opened up, buUt over, and spoiled for us the fields which are now South Kensington, and where 1 have heard the cuckoo and nightingale, and picked wild roses and honeysuckle — he put our dear house into his hands, and we went altogether to Mr. Lucas's house at Folkestone, where we spent the winter. The coldest, most horrible winter I ever recollect, when the wind used to howl hke a thousand evil E 65 LEAVES FROM A LIFE spirits, and the sea used to roar at night until we thought of Daniel and the lion's den, and wondered if we should be washed away before the morning. Our one amusement was to watch square blocks of gold and silver being landed at the quay, on their way to the Mint, the while we sheltered in the horse-boxes which had taken the horses out to the war, and which stood there all the time we were at Folkestone, exposed to all weathers, and no doubt forgotten as usual by the War Office authorities. 66 CHAPTER IV GROWING UP I THINK I began to grow up when Miss Wright left us in a fit of pique, and her place was taken by a sour-faced widow with one son, whose name was Port. I may say at once we hated both frankly, and bewailed Miss Wright. For though she had a horrid habit of suggesting that we were too old for some of our games, and never reaUy believed that when I put on a wide sash of plaid riband and mounted the rocking-horse on the leads, that I became in one instant the real Sir WiUiam Wallace made famUiar to us by the constant reading of Miss Jane Porter's " Scottish Chiefs " : she had always a soft corner for the dolls, and being an amateur doctor and nurse herself, would enter thoroughly into all their different ailments, and would try and encourage me to sew for them. Indeed, I did work all the carpets in the dolls house in cross-stitch, and sewed the curtains, the first and last piece of needlework I ever began and finished. This T was bribed to do by her reading aloud, and I often think she must have had a throat 67 LEAVES FROM A LIFE of brass, for hour after hour would she read on and on, only stopping abruptly if we stopped sewing, or if our brothers fidgeted beyond even her powers of endurance. Saturday and Sunday were our best days: then the old Illustrated News used to arrive, and we read it from cover to cover; while of course Punch was another joy, and kept us au courant with all that was going on. Indeed, Punch was part of our household, and as we knew all the staff, from gay, fat Mark Lemon downwards, we generally knew what to expect, and very often had seen the pictures — notably John Leech's — before they became public property. Papa used to teU us that when Punch came out first, in 1841, he bought the very first number at a small newsvendor's shop out of the Edgware Road, and being delighted with it, he went to get the next week's issue at the same place, to be met with, " Oh, I haven't taken it again ; I don't believe there'll be no more numbers out " but Papa did not believe him, and sought out another more enterprising tradesman, and from that day to this we, as a family, have never been without our beloved Punch. I think a great deal of the all-round information I possess has been obtained from Punch and the daily papers ; and as soon as 1 could possibly comprehend that there was a world outside our nursery, I took care to know as much as I could of what was going on there. But with all this I, and my sisters too, were singularly ignorant of the world of sin and crime 68 GROWING UP which existed and yet exists beneath the surface. At the same time we certainly knew that murders were occasionally committed, and that there were such things as burglars, because we had had pointed out to us the house in Regent's Park where Cour- voisier,the valet, murdered his master, and we passed with dread a bhnd old man, led by a red dog down Regent Street, who was either Burke or Hare ; a man who turned Queen's evidence and escaped hanging to be shunned for ever after, and to end his days begging for enough to keep his miserable soul in his stUl more miserable body. Then, too, did we not hear eagerly discussed the trial of a young woman called Madeleine Smith, who simply was not hanged because the Scotch verdict, "not proven," was returned by the jury ; while the terrible tragedy of the Road murder was talked almost threadbare, Papa maintaining from the first that Constance Kent was guilty, whilst nearly every one else believed that such a crime was impossible for so young a girl. Yet I think to us these murders appeared more like scenes in a theatre than real happenings, and I am not at all sure now that the blind man was the murderous body-snatcher, or that we did not in our usual way pick him out as an unpleasant and sinister-looking creature on which to hang the peg of a tragedy. The greatest pleasures we had were the long walks we sometimes persuaded Papa to take us: these always happened after dark, as he never left his painting-room as long as he 69 LEAVES FROM A LIFE could see to paint, and to all the delightful things he used to tell us we added the romantic glamour of the dusky, badly lighted streets, the yellow gas-lamps peering through the low-lying, foggy air, and in winter the certainty that we should be allowed to buy ready-roasted chestnuts to put in our pockets, first to warm our hands, and afterwards to eat in the schoolroom ; or the chance of meeting the hot potato man, with his red-eyed portable oven and his fragrant store of potatoes. He never ceased to be surprised at our refusal of his butter and pepper additions, but despite that we preferred to keep the skins intact and to put in the necessary butter with what we knew was a clean knife at home. Does any celebrated artist buy hot potatoes and chestnuts in the street now for his children ? I wonder ; but I rather expect the children would object even if he did not, and would insist on being taken to one of the up-to-date Bond Street tea- shops instead. I do not think we ever passed a house in or near London in our walks about which Papa could not tell us something. The toU-gate at Notting Hill was the scene of a favourite story, for hither his old uncle was once chased by foot- pads ; and it was only just in time that he reached the gate, made the toll-keeper open it, and take him in, while the " foot-pads " came up, swore at the barrier and their escaped prey, and made off before the constable arrived I Russell Square, of course, was sacred to "Vanity Fair, ".which, long before I was 70 GROWING UP pronounced old enough to read it, I knew by heart, and loved as I love it now ; and to us, at any rate, all the characters in both Thackeray's and Dickens's books are real people, we knew and know their haunts so well : and to us London is peopled by their men and women far more than by the real human beings that pass along the streets. One of our favourite expeditions was to Kensington, to see the Leeches, who then Uved in the house he died in; a terrace of three or four houses just beyond the turning known as Wright's Lane. We were devoted to John Leech, and 1 can see him quite weU as I write — tall and blue-eyed, irritable and energetic — stamping up and down the room as he swore at the hateful organs which kUled him, and at the noises which nothing could keep out" of his work- room. Mrs. Leech was very pretty, and I think did not live very long after her hsuband, whom she adored: she was small, with the usual curls and round-about appearance made familiar to us by John Leech's sketches of the British Matron; indeed, she was his principal model, and she was, I should think, essentially one of the wives of that special time ; very quiet, very busy, very domestic, but the heart of the house, and always ready to help the bread-winner, utterly unconscious of all she meant to him and how very much she assisted him to do his work in the world. We used to play with the two children. Amy and Jack, both of whom are, I think, dead. Jack was drowned out in Australia, 71 LEAVES FROM A LIFE and Amy married : I do not know who looked after them when their mother died, and they passed out of our ken. I rather beheve their father's sisters took them ; they had a most excellent prepara- tory school for boys; but at any rate, after the Kensington house was given up, we never met again, and aU I recollect of John Leech are his pictures, his roUicking good humour when there were no organs about, and the agony he endured when they came and ground at his front door, secure in the fact that he must pay them to move on, as there were no laws or by-laws then to put in motion and to relieve him of the hateful, wicked nuisance. I also remember with a shudder being in the house when he died, for the tragedy occurred suddenly when a children's party was going on, and we were suddenly silenced in our play, dressed and hustled home before we realised what was happening. One other thing do I recollect, and that is his intense fondness for horses, and that he induced Papa to make some of his disastrous investments in horse-flesh. Not that he sold him or procured him the animals ; but that he incited him to ride, and looked on as he caracoled — ^there is no other word — down Westboume Grove, more or less on the pave- ment all the way, imtil he got to the Park, where the animal either refused to stir, and had to be led home, or else first deposited Papa on the ground and then made back to the livery stables as fast as he or she could go. To the best of my belief, Mr. Leech took Papa to Tattersall's and superintended 72 GROWING UP the purchase of the last animal he possessed, a sweet creature called " Star," from the white mark on her forehead; but Papa was never meant to have a horse. Sometimes he would leave " Star " for weeks in the stable, and then be very astonished that no one could hold her when she came out, despite the fact that we children used to see "Star" in the Park in our early walks ; the livery-stable keeper knew Papa was safe at work, and often turned a dishonest penny by letting her out on hire when he was quite sure she would not be seen. But Papa always preferred to walk any day; he had his reasons, unfortunately ; but when we went with him we cared for little else, if we could get him to talk, either about his work, the day's paper, or the houses and people by whom we were passing. Sometimes tragedy stalked beside us ; and well do I recollect one Sunday, when we had gone to see "Uttle S.," an artist of some fame in those days, who hved in Gower Street : that street which, improved as it is at the present time, alWays seems to me the incarnation of gloom and tspair. It must, I think, have been rather late in e year, or there might have been a fog ; in any case the upstairs drawing-room into which Papa, I, and one other of the children, I forget which, were ushered seemed to me fuU of darkness and sadness. "Little S." was seated over the fire, clutching his head in his hands. "Thank God you've come," he said. " I couldn't have borne it 73 LEAVES FROM A LIFE much longer ; she has been here all the morning. By God, F , I know that feHow will kill her," and then came out the story, we all the while looking out of the window and being saturated by the narrative that we certainly could not have comprehended at the time, but which I, for one, have never forgotten. It appeared that Mr. S.^s sister, to whom he was deeply attached — and I never yet found a Jewish family which was not strongly tmited, and I have known and loved many Hebrews — ^was married to a doctor of whom she went in abject and bodily fear ; and she had been ia Gower Street that morning telling her brother of her dreads and alarms. The man was poor, and extremely, diabolically clever, and re- quired money to carry out some special experiment, and he had been pressing his wife to let him have what he required out of her scanty dower. She had refused : with all the caution of her race she knew that probably that was all that remained between her and the workhouse or her good brother's charity ; and she had brought him a will, secretly made, that left all to her own people in case anything happened to her. She was iU, very ill, but "that fellow" made her worse, and it required all Papa's powers of persuasion to quiet his friend and convince him there was nothing to fear. But not twenty-four hours after that Sunday the poor lady lay dead ; she had been given " the wrong medicine " in the night by her husband. There was a tremendous row, I think a trial ; it may only have been the 74 GROWING UP inquest; it is too long ago to be quite sure of anything save the event ; and though " little S." did his best, the doctor husband escaped with his neck. But his reputation was tarnished; bril- liantly clever as he was, he never really " arrived." He married again, a woman with a vast amount of money, only to die piecemeal of some horrible com- plaint a few years ago. I saw him "not long before he died at Brighton, and I thought if "little S." could have seen him too he would have been revenged. If ever a man were in the Devil's clutches, soul and body, it was that man; he had the tortures of the damned imprinted on his sunken, tired face. Then there was the old crossing-sweeper at the bottom of the Haymarket, who used always to exchange a word with Papa, and look sadly and enviously at us while she did so. Later in life I knew she had been a celebrated beauty, and was only about thirty then when we thought her vener- able indeed. She had been left in the care of her husband's mother while he went out to the Crimea, but she could not bear the restraint of the formal RusseU Square house, and she set up on her own in rooms near us. Papa painted her portrait, and she came often to see us, but one day she disappeared; her husband had returned unexpectedly to find she had been faithless to him ; he turned her out of doors, regardless of the fact that she was penniless — and beautiful : and her end was the Haymarket crossing. Indeed, I do not know if she is dead, but if she is not, she must be eighty at least ; toothless, withered 75 LEAVES FROM A LIFE and forgotten in some barren ward of some hideous workhouse in London I It is an absolute fact that with all the books we read and aU the varied knowledge we picked up, much as chickens pick up crumbs, we had not the least idea of what I must express by that un- pleasant word " sex." People did wrong or right, stayed at home or left their people, because they were good or bad, and not for any other reasons whatever. We knew the celebrated Laura Bell by sight quite well : she was afterwards married, became rehgious and died in the odour of sanctity as a respectable member of society; but her sin in our eyes consisted of leaving her childhood's home to live in London by herself and "enjoy herself," poor wretch; and we had not the smallest conception in what her real sin consisted. We only knew that she and, later on, the equally notorious " Skittles," were not to be spoken of ; but simply because they were not good, and as such were unworthy to be named : while the subjects of more than one picture for which, as a child and young girl, I acted as artist's model, were absolutely incomprehensible to me, notably a picture of Mr. Egg's, where I am one of the children building card houses, while the mother is being tempted from her home by a man who is bending over her on the sofa. The picture is called "The Gambler's Wife," and is especially impressed on my mind because the attitude I had to assume is a kneeling one, and I fainted, for almost the only 76 GROWING UP time in my life ; and I have never forgotten the sudden oblivion that preceded mj fall from the " throne " (the round green pedestal table on which all sitters used to be placed, and I daresay are now), and my coming to in the kitchen, with kind Susan bathing my head, regardless of the fact that soapy water was meandering down the front of my very best frock. There is another house in Bayswater that was a real terror to us, because the owner had left strict injunctions that he should never be placed underground after death, and that his coflfin should rest on the roof of his house under a glass dome. I have seen that dome and that coffin ; it was before one reached Orme Square, where the eagle still stands on its pedestal, and where we used to go and see Toole, the dear delightful actor whom we adored, and who was then prosperous and happy in the love of wife and bairns. Alas 1 all died before him, and he faded out of life, kindly nursed and tended, it is true, but one of the saddest, most melancholy sights I have ever beheld. Then there was yet another house I cannot pass even now without a shudder ; it was beyond Pem- bridge Villas, up towards St. John's, Notting Hill, which was the first church we were taken to after we left Regent's Park. It is a big house up steps, and has a lion in stone on each side, and looks now much as it did quite forty years ago. In those days a doctor and his wife lived there, and they were not only great friends of our people, but were most 77 LEAVES FROM A LIFE kind to us. Sweets, which we never received at home, our food being of the plainest possible kind, were always forthcoming, and we could never go too often to that hospitable place; But all of a sudden it was closed to us, and long after we heard that the beautiful wife drank; was given chance after chance to reform untU the last chance came, was not taken, and in utter despair she sought the surgery, took poison, and died, while the unhappy husband left the country, and to the best of my belief has never been heard of since. There was one delightful family that lived up that way Avith whom we spent an immense amount of time, but they none of them became celebrated. The eldest daughter was most beautiful, and married a Spaniard with a very long name, who was an attache at the Embassy. She was a good deal older than we were, and we watched her wedding with the livehest interest. I have never seen her since her wedding- day, but her daughter married Martin Harvey, the actor, and looks in her photographs as if she had in- herited some at least of her mother's exquisite beauty. Another great beauty in our eyes was a girl called Louisa Crampton ; she too was grown up and out when we were in the schoolroom, but I have never forgotten her delightful face. Her father was very rich in those days, although I believe he lost all his money afterwards and really almost came to want ; and she used to sing in the most marvellous manner. The stage then was considered quite impossible for ladies, and indeed both actors and actresses were 78 GROWING UP " rogues and vagabonds " and quite out of the pale of real society, orelse I am sure Louisa Crampton would have made her debut in grand opera. Yet behind the great house in Kensington Square a theatre was erected, and there operas were given. I recoUect Miss Crampton's exquisite beauty of form and voice, but I do not remember who acted with her, or what form of opera was given at all. The Cramptons, Penns, Lucases, and Cosenses are all connected in my mind ; they all gave big and delightful parties, and all seemed to have large famihes of young people with whom we played and danced ; but the Cramptons and Penns were older than we were ; the others lived out at Clapham ; and our real friends were the AnsdeUs, Philhps, Edith Elmore, Brooks : Tommy Brooks the artist, not Shirley Brooks' children : they were boys and much our juniors ; and endless famihes of other artists' children, and few, if any, of them have I seen for the last thirty-seven years. I think the AnsdeUs' was the most perfect house- hold I have ever beheld, and I still recollect, as if it were yesterday, all we did, said, and played at. Mr. Ansdell must have made an enormous fortune by his pictures, for not only did he possess a splendid house in St. Albans Road, Kensington, but he had a place at Lytham in Lancashire, and, I think, a moor in Scotland beside ; at any rate, he used to go there and shoot and fish every year. The great joy to me about the St. Albans Road house was the expanse of field and garden : for there he used to 79 LEAVES FROM A LIFE keep the animals he painted jfrom, and here we were allowed to stroke the noses of the deer and pat the cows and horses, which were always about the field. Mrs. Ansdell's maiden name was Romer, and a quantity of Romer cousinsused to join in the revels. I have never seen Sir Robert Romer since those days ; indeed, the last time I saw him he was a big lad of sixteen or seventeen, chasing me up and down the stairs of Mr. O'Neil's house, which was close to the AnsdeUs', because I had somehow offended the much grown-up Miss Betty Lemon, whom he adored, and to whom he was afterwards married. Even in those days Bob Romer administered what he thought was justice, and woe betide any of us who teased Betty or took liberties with that fair and stately damsel. Mrs. AnsdeU must have had the temper of a saint, and was as free from nerves as were all the matrons of those days. I never recoUect hear- ing the word, and indeed no present-day mother, with her small and compact brood of over-studied, over-considered oflfspiing, would be able to bear the terrific noise we must have made when we were all on the rampage, as we used to be at the AnsdeUs' house. It seems to me that we were allowed any- where, and that we rushed up and downstairs, and in and out of rooms, while Mrs. Ansdell merely encouraged us, or got ready the tremendous teas which were never equalled either before or since. Most of that enormous family lived to grow up, but one or two had hard fates. Maria, the eldest 8q GROWING UP daughter, was beloved by Freddy Walker, and was much looked up to by us in consequence ; but 1 think there were five or six years' difference in our ages, and when one is thirteen and the other eighteen, the difference is, of course, almost impassable. We were very fond of gentle Mr. Walker, and hoped she would reward him, but unfortunately her affec- tions were fixed elsewhere, and she married dis- astrously in the eyes of the world, and died out in India suddenly of cholera, her husband following her in a few months. Dear Maria ! and yet she loved the man she married with a vast and romantic love. Mr. Ansdell never gave his consent, although she was married in due form from her home ; he knew that money was scarce, and not long after her first child was born she had to come home, because there was nowhere else for her to be. But she used to steal out to meet her husband in Kensington Gardens : she would see him : she could not live without him, and finally a berth was found for him in India, they went out there together, and the end soon came. As all the world knows, Freddy Walker died young too ; I think after Maria died ; but it seems but yesterday when I watched the three, Maria and her lover, and poor Freddy glowering in a corner as they danced together, and biting his nails as he always used to do in moments of despair or uncertainty. Well, they are all three dead now ; let us hope that after life's fitful fever they one and all sleep well ! I thiok that prim Mrs. Port was much upset at F 8i LEAVES FROM A LIFE our constant lapses from the schoolroom routine, and that she never understood us at all. I most certainly assert that she never taught one of us one single thing. Miss Wright kept us rigorously to the schooboom hours, but Mrs. Port was too fond of doing nothing herself to care what became of us. I suppose we ought to have been sorry for her; she was left a widow with one son to educate, but we were too sharp not to see that instead of taking us proper walks she used the time to caU on her friends, leaving us to kick our heels outside, while the son was always dropping in to share our tea. Her last offence was being perpetually found at the Brompton Oratory, where she had a friend — ^a priest with very bright blue eyes, who disliked her, I think, as much as we did : for at last he communicated with Mama, and Mrs. Port departed weeping aloud, and declaring that both she and the son were now condemned to starve ! I never could understand her affection for the Brompton Oratory priest, for we never went inside the chapel, but always met him coming in or going out, and she was, moreover, a militant Protestant, with such extremely Low Church views that she refused to take us for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, and her attitude and conduct in church were more rigid and correct than I can describe. She always used to kneel bolt upright and hold a pocket-handkerchief underneath her nose, and never glance to the right or left ; so she never discovered that we had other books than prayer-books, and 82 GROWING UP that even in those early days we had boyish ad- mirers with whom we used to walk home ; while she met her son and talked to him and brought him in to our early dinner as often as she dared. After Mrs. Port, Mama thought something really definite must be done, and she engaged a German governess, who was with us untU my eldest sister married ; after which the schoolroom never saw me again. Indeed it saw very little of me after Miss Wright left, when I could not have been more than thirteen at the outside, for the afifectations and in- sincerities of Mrs. Port maddened me, and Fraulein Haas coul<^ not manage her schoolroom party in the least. My eldest brother was not strong, either physically or morally, and Mama would never allow him to be sent away to school, and in consequence he was always at hand to help us in tormenting poor Miss Haas, who was foolish enough to make favourites, and had not, alas for her ! the very smallest sense of humour. My eldest sister always wanted to learn ; she reaUy liked the stuffy school- room and the hateful books, and in consequence she received all the teaching, whUe WUlie and I drew rude pictures on our slates, and read what we liked, and came in and went out as we liked, and no one interfered with us at aU. It is a merciful thing, I always think, that I never had the least inchnation to get into mischief, for assuredly I could have done it, had I wantc^l to ; but I had no leanings that way, and indeed knew absolutely nothing of what mischief could 83 LEAVES FROM A LIFE be or meant. We had always the most delightful people to talk with and Usten to, and whenever we went out made our own stories for ourselves, and in consequence were never in the least tempted to pass for an instant out of the beaten track. That gave us aU we wanted, for our beaten track was unlike that of most folks, and was plentiftilly illu- minated, too, by our very hvely and always active imaginations. I do not know what thing I did that especially maddened Miss Haas, but I do know that all at once Mama thought I ought to go to school. I can remember now the chorus of rage at our Simday dinner-table when she announced my future fate. Edmund Yates, Shirley Brooks, John Parry, and one or two others begged and prayed her to relent ; but she would not, and took me off to Bath, where I think the school must have been a late sur- vival of the " prunes and prisms " period of early Victorian days, for though I was only there two or three days, I shall never forget the narrow-minded mistress, or the missish girls who had never read either Dickens or Thackeray, hated poetry, and talked about lovers and all kinds of dreadful things I for one could not understand. But I soon took the law in my own hands, returned home, and flatly refused to go to school again at any price whatever. Mama was annoyed, but I was never scolded. Papa grudged, I think, the term's fees he had to pay ; but all our set rejoiced at my " blow for freedom," and as I was most useful to Papa, not only to sit to him at ninepence an hour (being GROWING UP threepence less than the current rate of pay, 1 discovered afterwards) for a model, but to read while he painted, I never heard any more of an escapade which would have turned the hair of a modern parent grey, and should no doubt have been visited by some sort of punishment. AU the same, I am convinced if I had remained at school I should have become an idiot. AU the doors and windows were always shut ; the lessons were absurd, and consisted, as far as I could make out, of strings of questions and answers to be learned by rote, and the girls slept in long dormitories, which meant one would never be alone, a thing I never had had to put up with, and one that I cannot stand to this day. I question, too, whether I was not better taught by all the reading I did, both for Papa and myself, than I could have been at any school of that day, and indeed, even now, I think a school very soon knocks aU originality out of a girl and teaches her a mere smattering from a primer of sorts, especially made and condensed in order to allow her to pass certain examinations. I have yet to find any " up-to-date " girl who has as much aU-round information as we picked up, or at least as I did. But then I have a passion for reading, seeing, learning anything, and I also possess a memory that has been a most valuable asset to me in my way through hfe. Papa's favourite tasks for me were, first to take his pass-book to the bank in a street out of Oxford Street, and secondly to change the books at Mudie's, once a week not being often enough in the days of three- volume novels for him 85 LEAVES FROM A LIFE and Mama, who always used to go to bed with a novel and an orange — I suppose she read the one and con- sumed the other before Papa came upstairs to bed. He always sat up to ungodly hours, and Mama in- variably arose after he went to his dressing-room to see the house was properly locked up, her two dreads being burglars and fire. The latter she always smelt at the most untoward times, and the former she always heard, generally about two in the morning, especially when the weather was extremely cold. Her dread of fire, too, caused her to make a round of our rooms, and woe betide us if she found the gas burning, and that we were either reading or writing. I always wrote : I never can remember the time when I did not : and in consequence I became very wily with the key-hole and aU the cracks in the door, which finally I locked : for was I not engaged on an immortal work, which, I am thankful to know, never went out into the world, because I never had sufficient money to pay for the stamps to send it away, but which I loved so dearly that I gave the hero's name to my eldest son, and which I still secretly think was a fine work of art. But my first pubMshed writing was in the Bayswater Chronicle, and was a review of the Royal Academy exhibition. How the readers would have laughed could they have seen the learned critic with her curls and her short frocks, which reaching as they did only to the tops of my boots were a serious trial to me once I had become an author 1 86 CHAPTER V MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET Artists in our day were divided into sets, much more, I fancy, than they are now. There was our set, centred in the Kensington and Bayswater districts ; there was the St. John's Wood set ; and there was another set which comprised Millais, Leighton, Sir Frank Grant, and some of the more aristocratic memhers of the Academy. Yet I may say that we were intimate more or less with the members of all. I can just recollect the presidency of Sir Charles Eastlake, but I do not remember him personally, and I fancy that at that particular time Papa was out of favour in high places, and we were more or less under a cloud, that would touch his social relations, but that certainly never was felt by us as children and young people at all. Sir Francis Grant was an extremely courtly and delightful gentleman, always scrupulously polite when we met him out, but we never went to his house, and nourished a hidden hatred of his daughter, because she was the President's daughter, older much than we were, and appa- 87 LEAVES FROM A LIFE rently able to go anywhere and do anything she chose. I can just recollect her, and that is all ; but Sir Francis I remember perfectly because he was so nice to look at, and because he always, in some miraculous way, recollected our names and all about us when we met him. The first artist I recollect was Turner, who, as I have mentioned before, died when I was three; the second was Mulready. He lived in what was then *' Linden Grove," and is now Linden Gardens, a turning out of the Bayswater Koad, which in those days was an ideal spot, as it was quite out of the way of all traffic, and each small house had its really nice garden. In Linden Grove lived not only Mulready, but Creswick, Mr. and Mrs. Gray, the father and mother of Edward Ker Gray, and Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Wigan, from whose hospitable house Irving was married; and as we knew them one and aU, Linden Grove was, of course, peopled with friends. I remember Mulready as a small, very neat man, very deaf, and very kind, and for years I treasured the black and blue " Mulready envelopes " he gave me, which were the predecessors of the penny stamp, and he never could understand why they were superseded. The design was certainly very good, but as the letter had to be written on the paper, which was one with the envelope, the method was clumsy, and the penny stamp placed on any envelope, which could hold either a large or small sheet of paper as required, was much to be pre- ferred. But I gathered from Mr. Mulready that 88 MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET he had some grievance against the Post Office for not using his envelopes, of which he appeared to have a great many surplus copies. I trust he knows now how valuable they are ; I wanted a couple for a schoolboy friend nine or ten years ago, and I know I had to pay something like £4 for them. Mr. Mulready was very old, I think, when we used to go and see him, but one of the greatest difficulties I have in writing these remembrances is to get things into focus ; when one is small every one else appears taU ; and when one is young every one over thirty-five appears venerable ; I fancy he could not really have been more than seventy at the out- side, but he was very bent and feeble, and had had heavy domestic trials. What they were I never quite knew, but he lived quite alone in liinden Grove, and I know there were a wife and son at least somewhere or other in the world, with whom he had nothing to do. His hands shook very much when he gave me the " Mulready envelopes," and he said a good deal about the foohshness and the hideousness of the penny stamp ; and I do not think he was painting stiU, for we never went into his painting-room. I know we were sorry when he died in 1863, so I know he must have been kind to us ; but then every one was in those days, and whenever we went to any of Papa's friends' houses we were always made a great deal of, and allowed to do very much as we liked. Mr. and Mrs. Creswick and Mr. Creswick's sister lived next door, or next door but one, to 89 LEAVES FROM A LIFE Mulready, and often and often we went to see them there. Mrs. Creswick was a small and most sweet lady ; Miss Creswick was severe, and kept her and us too in a species of order we very much disliked, while Mr. Creswick was most festive, rollicking and amusing, albeit he used more " swear-words " than would be considered orthodox nowadays, and was too fond both of food and drink to be always in the best of health. He was extremely well off in the later years of his life, and he turned the Linden Grove house into a small palace ; he also had a most charming garden and painting-room. He had no children of his own, but he used to have big parties for us and other young folk when we used to dance in his painting-room and the drawing-room, which were connected, and have supper : and such a supper ! in the dining-room and conservatory, which was aU lighted up for the occasion. Linden Grove itself in those days was not lighted, one turned out of the Bayswater Road into what appeared to be a dark tunnel, and I well recollect an amusing episode, due to this fact, that Mr. Creswick was never tired of telling us. The Athenasum Club in those days used to be a very favourite rendezvous for many of the Royal Academicians, andjseveralof them and their friends met there between' 4.30 and 7 to play whist day after day, Mr. Creswick among the number. He was very fond of new copper coins, which he saved for us, and on this especial occasion some one had 90 MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET presented him with two very new and very bright farthings, which he placed in his waistcoat-pocket, and gave no second thought to until he reached home and had just, as he thought, given the cabman his fare of two shillings. In a moment he recollected the farthings, and he called to the man to stop ; but, glancing at the bright and shining coins in his hand, by the sparse Ught aflfbrded by the oil lamps in the cab, he drove off at the top of his speed and dis- appeared into the Bayswater Road. We were dis- appointed of our new farthings, but I wonder what the cabman thought — I do not want to know what he said — when he realised the real worth of the coins he had made off with. The two sovereigns he fondly hoped were his were brass, and he was even minus the two-shiUing fare that he had really earned. One Sunday we went to see Mr. Creswick, who was laid up on the sofa with one of his usual attacks : I think they must have been caused by gout, for they made him extremely irritable : gentle Mrs. Creswick used to look smaller than ever when he was suffering, while even his redoubtable sister was not quite as mihtant as usual : and when we went in to see him we were warned to be careful, as " Tom " was not very well. We trailed in after Papa as meeTs; as several mice, to be met with a volley of curses ; not addressed to us; however, but to some one unknown; alas ! not to remain unknown for long. 'It was just at the time when " Silas Marner" had come out, and every one was reading that 91 LEAVES FROM A LIFE most exquisite book. Papa had had it from Mudie, and I had read it aloud to him while he worked. He had been tantalised himself by the mystery of the disappearance of Dunstan, but I would not allow him to look at the end ; and when we had finished the book he snatched it up, and saying, " Well, no one who has this copy shall wait as long as 1 have done to know what happened to that fellow," he wrote at the bottom of an early page just what had occurred. By some extra- ordinary and evil chance this very copy had reached Mr. Creswick, who adored mysteries, and read as many novels as any love-sick miss, and I can remember distinctly the sudden pause in his curses, and the curious white look which came over his face, when Papa told him he was the culprit. He did not speak for a few moments ; I really don't think he could ; afterwards he confessed his first impulse was to burn the book and turn us all out neck and crop ; but " SUas Marner," which one can buy now for a shilling, or even less, was then a two-volume business, and I think meant a guinea ; and Papa was one of his dearest friends, and they were both Yorkshiremen, while he simply adored us en masse ; so Papa was forgiven, albeit we were solemnly warned never to mention "Silas Marner" again before him, and 1 am quite sure we never did. The last time I saw Mr, Creswick was the day before I was married, when 1 went to say good-bye and to thank him for a most exquisite landscape he gave me as a wedding gift. He died while we were on 92 MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET our honeymoon, and I never entered that hospitable house again. He declared his life had been short- ened by the passing of the underground railway beneath his house and garden, and that he would have to leave the charming place ; one could, aided by a strong imagination, fancy one felt a slight vibration in the painting-room. Weill he was spared the real shakings and vibrations of the present day, which would, I am sure, have driven him really out of his senses ; and his house and garden are now either flats or subdivided into much smaller premises. The first artist I reaUy adored and worshipped was Sir Edwin Landseer ; I think I must have been about nine years old when I made his ac- quaintance. Mama had one of the tremendous "parties" which used to punctuate our child- hood and girlhood, and as he was coming I begged hard to be allowed to sit up. At last the party was in full swing, and I sidled up to Papa. I was in a very, very stiff white frock, trimmed with a great many of Miss Wright's " cart-wheel " em- broideries, and a broad scarlet sash was gaily tied round my waist. The bodice had short, full-puffed sleeves, and in each puff was a rosette of very narrow scarlet velvet, these rosettes being put in and taken out by Miss Wright when the frock went to be washed, and I felt very well dressed and very important. Papa pointed out the great man to me, and I was enraptured. He was small and compact, and wore a beautiful shirt 93 LEAVES FROM A LIFE with a frill in which was placed a glittering diamond brooch or pin, I do not know which ; and he looked to me like one of his own most good-humoured white poodles. He was curled and scented and exquisitely turned out, and I said at once : " Oh ! what a delightful old gentleman ! " Papa meanly went across to Sir Edwin and told him what I had said. He spoke with a slight stutter or drawl. " I shaU propooose," he said, and coming over to where I stood gazing in rapture at the embodiment of my dream, he at once, and to my vast confusion, pro- ceeded to demand my hand from Papa. It took me some little time to reaMse that nine is not a marriageable age, but I do not think many small girls can recall with pride that at this early stage in their career they were asked formally in mar- riage by such a great celebrity, even though it was only in joke. We were very much attached to all the three Landseer brothers; but Sir Edwin always rem.^ned in my mind at the top of the tree. Charles was an inveterate punster, and the only time I really saw him serious was when he, I, and Dr. Percy, the great authority on coins, were caught by the tide at Hastings and had to chmb the chff to avoid being drowned. It was a horrible adventure, but Mr. Landseer went on first, I chnging to his coat-tails, and long, lanky Dr. Percy came behind pushing me vigorously, the two men encouraging and helping me aU they could, and assuring me the task was nothing out of the 94 MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET way. I know we were an hour late for their din- ner ; so how long it took us I cannot think, while both Dr. Percy, who was not strong, and I who was, were in bed for three or four days after, and by common consent we none of us discussed the cUmb, which was a bad nightmare for me for many a long day. Sir Edwin used to tell stories at which there was a good deal of laughter, but I do not think very many would bear writing down ; one I recollect quite well, which may perhaps be told. " Edwin's one fault is duchesses," his brothers used to say ; and it was a duchess — I think of Suther- land — of whom he related that he was walking with her through a glen where, under her superin- tendence, some workmen had been making great alterations. " I can't think how it has been managed," said Sir Edwin in his most courtly tones. " Oh, it was quite easy," rephed her Grace seriously; " it was a mere matter of damming and blasting." I think the Duchess, whose very strongest words were " Dear me ! " would have been slightly astonished could she have known the construction put upon her remark when Sir Edwin told the story. There was a romance in Sir Edwin's own life, but that has never been told ; aU I heard about was that there were reasons for sUence, and that there were some beautiful girls who were very Uke him ; but his end was sad ; he ceased to paint, became imbecile, or childish, and was looked after and tenderly nursed by " Miss Jessie," his devoted sister, who had given up her life to save him from anything Uke domestic 95 LEAVES FROM A LIFE worries. When we used to go and see him he lived in a large house surrounded by a vast garden, where, as did Mr. AnsdeU, he kept the' animals he used to paint, and I more than once went with him to the " Zoo " when he made studies for the lions at the base of Nelson's Monument in Trafalgar Square. Nothing made me more savage than to hear these lions criticised and laughed at by ig- noramuses ; I know the lions are good, as well as I know the enormous amount of study Sir Edwin gave to them, and the vast trouble he took about the drawings he made from the great beasts them- selves. Charles Landseer lived near Sir Edwin, and for some years he was the victim of the most ex- traordinary persecution that I should think any man ever met with. An eccentric woman fell desperately in love with him, and used to pester him first with the most extravagant love-letters, and then by Ijnng in wait for him whenever he left the house. Finally she issued invitations to the wedding, prepared a breakfast and an enormous cake, and called for poor Mr. Landseer in a carriage and pair, the horses decked out with white satin streamers, and she herself dressed most gorgeously as a bride. But that was the end of the persecution ; her friends took her away, and Mr. Landseer, relieved from her attentions, breathed freely, and remained a bachelor to the day of his death. Sir Edwin's charming manners were perfect, but Mr. Charles Landseer was, when he was not in the throes of making puns, ratiier brusque than other- 96 MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET wise, and I well remember taking him to see a collection of pictures at a little watering-place in Dorsetshire, when his downright talk covered me with confusion. Of course, I knew the pictures were rubbish quite well I I had told Mr, Landseer this ; at first he refused to go at aU ; but finally, as I felt the owner beheved I was keeping him away on purpose to annoy him, I persuaded Mr. Landseer to go, on condition that he might be allowed to tell the truth. The proud owner took him into the gallery, now the " recreation room " of an hotel, and pointed him out miles of Sir Edwin's, yards of his own and my father's pictures, and ended up with " old masters " enough to stock a new National GaUery. Mr. Landseer never said one word, although he now and then gave one of his grim chuckles or an oc- casional grunt. At last the owner lost patience. " Well, what do you think, sir ? " he said. " Noth- ing," replied Mr. Landseer. " Nothink ? you can't think nothink," exclaimed the old man. " Well 1 if you must know, the lot are not worth a tinker's curse," said Charles Landseer. " The sea is handy ; take and drown 'em ; " and he took up his hat and walked off, followed by me, and I never dare see the owner of those fearsome works again. Albeit I heal-d Mr. Landseer's visit was often quoted as an instance of the " hignorance of them hartist-chaps, who didn't know a good thing, let alone their own works, when they saw it." Charles Landseer valued the collection privately to me afterwards at a shil- ling a yard without the frames; when they were G 97 LEAVES FROM A LIFE sold en masse at the owner's death I do not think they fetched at the rate even of that magnificent sum. Charles and Edwin were both spare men, and very quick in their movements ; but Tom, the third brother, was very ,big and stout, and moreover was absolutely stone-deaf. He attributed this to being close to a great gun while it was being fired; the concussion broke the drums of his ears ; but whatever was the cause, the effect was, very trjdng., He was so deaf that he could not modulate his voice at aU, and would sometimes whisper the most ordinary remarks, as if they were State secrets, while at other times, notably at the private view of the Royal Academy, he would yeU criticisms of the pictures at us which were certainly not meant for the pubhc to hear. Then he would thrust a porcelain slate that he always kept attached to his coat into our hands, and wait for us to write down a reply to what he had just said. I do not know anything more trying than this mode of com- munication, and as in those days lip-reading had not been invented, the conversations were usually very one-sided. I wish Mr. Tom Landseer could have communicated with us in some other way, for he was a most amusing man, and always made us laugh hilariously, but more from his manner than from anything he said, I fancy. He was an admir- able engraver, and engraved many of his brother's pictures in a large studio in St. John's Wood, where his work was done under a great window, 98 MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET while a cunningly arranged shutter threw the light down on the plate on which he was working. Mrs. Tom Landseer was a buxom lady, with a bright complexion and many fair curls, and must have been very pretty ; indeed, we considered her lovely, because she was so kind, but, looking at her portrait in one of my father's pictures, I fear she was not beautiful. " Be careful to get my nostril right," she said to Papa when she was sitting ; " Tom married me for my nostril : " and Papa did his best, albeit we could never see any special reason in that feature of her face why Mr. Tom Landseer should have desired to annex her for his bride. ]Mr. and Mrs. Tom Landseer lived entirely for their one son George, but he died before them, and I have no real recollection of the last days of that most kindly pair. Another most eccentric couple whom I, at any rate, hated, were Mr. and Mrs. George Cruik- shank ; but I have never seen any woman worship her husband as did Mrs. George. She was scraggy, and I think ugly, but she would never allow any one to speak if George wanted to lay down the law on any particular subject, and she invariably took care that some time or other during the evening he should be encouraged to sing, or else to give " in costume " the moving ballad of " Lord Bateman." As the costume consisted always of my very best hat and red feather worn rakishly on the side of his head, and my sacred red "opera cloak " flung over one shoulder, I could scarcely 99 LEAVES FROM A LIFE restrain my rage, especially as he had no more idea of singing than a crow, and he used to declaim the "Ballad" hopping round and round the inner drawing-room, with Mrs. Cruikshank following him with admiring eyes and leading and enforcing applause when he stopped for an instant in his wild career. We possessed in those days an old friend, a banker, who invariably said the most polite things to one's face, and then, in absolute unconsciousness of the fact, spoke out his real opinion without a change of voice or even of intonation. On one of these occasions, after complimenting George Cruikshank profusely on the performance of the " Ballad," he looked first at Mrs. Cruikshank and then at George, and remarking aloud, " I don't know which is the greater fool," he walked away. Fortunately he had the reputation of being a little mad, and he died, poor man, years after in an asylum, but it required all Mrs, Cruikshank's belief in her husband and his doings to pass this over. " Of course, no one who was not insane could be so rude and untruthful," and the matter was not alluded to again. I retrieved my hat and feather, but I think Mrs. Cruikshank must have taken the episode to heart, for we never were regaled with the Ballad again, and I for one was grateful. I do not think anyone ever existed who had greater beUef in himself than had old George ; I have myself heard him declare that he wrote " Oliver Twist," and that Charles Dickens only spoiled the story IOC MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET from the names upwards ; and whenever he was present few of, the other guests could get in a word edgeways into the talk. He believed he wrote the Lord Bateman ballad as well as illustrated it, which he most certainly did not, and in fact he was full of ideas of what he had done, and was perfectly certain that no one on this earth knew more or could do more in the walks of art and literature than he had done and meant to do. I shall never forget what we suffered, too, from his horrible picture, The Worship of Bacchus. Papa was very particular about his wine, and in those days a charming German wine-grower used to come round at a certain time of the year and obtain orders for hock ; we were not so pleased to see the wine which followed his visits, as we were to see the grower, who generally brought us sweets, and was always kind and nice to us ; for we had to sit on the flight of steps leading to the kitchen and count the bottles as they were stowed away by our man- servant. We were employed in this task one day when Mr. Cruikshank called, and to this was due the fact that we were commanded to repair to his house, somewhere in the Regent's Park direction, to see his dreadful work. Papa was the most abstemi- ous of men, and we are one and all teetotalers, not from any matter of principle, but simply because we do not like wine ; and it was a double insult to us to be made to listen to the rabid abstainer while he described bit by bit the hideous picture he had spent years in painting. I have an idea he left it lOI LEAVES FROM A LIFE to the nation ; but I have never seen it since ; still, we went so often that if it were necessary I could describe it perfectly from the start of the infant, at whose christening party most of the guests were hilariously drunk, while the mother was being given a foaming glass of porter by the old nurse, to the end, where a lugubriously black coffin was being carted to a pauper's grave on the shoulders of red-nosed men, with enormous hat-bands round their hats, this being the inevitable conclusion to the career of any one who indulged in any- thing stronger than water. Yet I have seen George Cruikshank eat quantities of the good old - fashioned jellies into the composition of which much sherry had entered, watched him con- sume with gusto soup in which port wine figured to an appreciable extent, and finally end up with plum pudding served with a special sauce composed of butter and sugar and brandy beaten up together until they resembled Devonshire cream, and in which one could smell the brandy quite well. As Mr, Cruikshank had not always been a teetotaler, I can only suppose he had forgotten the taste and smell of aU spirituous liquors ; he could not have been the blatant humbug this consumption of wine in cookery would otherwise make him out to be I I perfectly well recollect that when he first sat down to dinner he collected aU his wine-glasses and placed them ostentatiously as far away from him as he could ; and he finally gave up dining at our house, because I was going to marry a brewer, and 102 MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET he really could not give his countenance to such an outrageous match. I believe his faithful and adoring wife was much put out of countenance at his death by the appearance of a second claimant to her place ; but this may only be gossip ; such a sternly virtuous individual as George Cruik- shank could never have strayed so far from the right paths as to have had a second establishment, any more than he could have known how much in- toxicating stuff he was consuming in my mother's most excellent cookery. Mr. Henry O'Neil was, I think, one of our earhest and greatest friends, and I have sat to him more, perhaps, than to any other of our painter friends. My first appearance in his pic- tures is as a very small child in his once well- known picture. Eastward Ho! the sailing of a troopship for the Crimea ; and my last as one of the terrible young girls strewing primroses before the feet of the present Queen when she landed in England forty-four years ago to marry the King, when, attired in a much be-crinolined white muslin, a red cloak, and a species of mushroom hat, I sat for one of the real girls who had welcomed the Princess, the real ones not being available for some reason or other. The hideous and unsuitable cos- tume for a bitterly cold March day had been selected by the Queen as being typically Enghsh ; we were cold enough under the balcony of the Royal Academy (National Gallery), where, suit- ably clad, we waited for the cortege. I cannot 103 LEAVES FROM A LIFE think what the girls in musUn must have felt like, for not even the red cloaks could have kept them even passably warm. About the year 1858, both Mr. John PhilUp and Mr. O'Neil offered to paint my portrait, but as my eldest sister was offended at this, judi- cious hints from Mama persuaded Mr. O'Neil to paint her, while, I am thankful to say, Mr. Phillip painted me ; for mine is by far the better picture of the two. It represents a small, dark- haired girl clad in a pink print frock ; the trim- ming is black velvet, and it is cut square at the throat and filled in with white lace, while over one shoulder a black silk mantle is gracefiiUy disposed. That pink frock appeared again in front of the Bailway Station picture, only lengthened and made more grown up ; while the mantle, our governess's best Sunday garment, is worn by the lady in the Crossing Sweeper picture, and, moreover, was used in Claude Duval All I recollect of Mr. O'NeU's picture is that a good deal of pale and washy blue enters into the composition, but then my sister, being fair, was always given blue, while pink and scarlet were my portion, because I was her exact opposite in colouring, as in every other single thing. I used to go with my sister to Mr. O'Neil's painting-room, and my great joy used to be allowed to stand behind him while he painted, brushing his longish white hair with the hearth-brush. I had a delightfully fiinny sketch done by him of this, and I only wonder the picture was not worse 104 MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET than it undoubtedly is. We had the most charm- ing meals there, consisting, as far as I can recoUect, of cake and strawberries : always strawberries, in great heaps ; and when I sat to him as a model for odds and ends, the sittings were marked by presents, generally gloves in generous packets of dozens or half-dozens; indeed, I do not think, once I had begun to have an allowance, I ever bought myself gloves again, so good and generous were our artist friends to us ! Mr. O'Neil never married ; he fell desperately in love with one of my mother's brides- maids, who even in her late middle life was beauti- ful to behold, but she was a Roman Catholic. My mother had an idea that Mr. O'Neil was " not steady " ; anyhow, the engagement was never allowed. Mr. O'Neil lived silently and alone until he died, and the lovely bridesmaid made a wretched marriage, and must have thankfully lain down to die when the call came to her. The only fault I could find with Mr. O'Neil was that he always came on Sunday evenings, and invariably commanded us to play to him, and we always had to obey. But I was truly thankful when bed-time struck on the same clock which used to strike the hour for Papa to retire in his childhood, and we knew the piano was closed for our public performances until yet another Sunday came round. We Uked John PhiUip: "Phillip of Spain," as he was always called ; but at the same time I, for one, was afraid of him. He could never tolerate the least amount of movement, and I can see 105 LEAVES FROM A LIFE now how he turned round on his wife with a snap and a snarl which nearly- frightened her into fits because she would sit just behind him while he was painting, drawing her needle in and out of some very stiff material which creaked in the most horrible manner possible. I hated the noise, too, but I would rather have put up with it than been as alarmed as I was at his sudden rage. Poor lady ! she was even then on the borderland, and she soon vanished out of our lives, though I think she is still ahve, being " taken care of" in some remote district of Scotland. I quite well recollect the tragic manner in which Mr. PhiUip was " taken for death " in Papa's painting- room. They had not been friends for years : I do not know why : but people had a way of disappear- ing now and again from our ken and then returning into it as if nothing had happened ; and this occurred with Mr. PhiUip. Papa had met him and made friends, and he came to give an opinion on a picture then on the easel. Something in the draw- ing of a nose was wrong, and Mr. Phillip took a piece of chalk and drew on the painting-ta,ble a few lines to illustrate his meaning. Suddenly he stopped, faltered, staggered, and looked at Papa, who caught him and supported him to a chair, and then he fell back insensible. Mama, I, and some of the servants came rushing at the pealing of the painting-room beU, and we were despatched in wild haste to find a doctor. None of the local ones were at home, and finally I was sent off in a hansom for Sir Henry 1 06 MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET Thompson, who was fortunately in, and he and I came back together as fast as we could. Sir Henry and I rushed into the room, which was reeking of vinegar and burnt feathers, and Sir Henry pushed every one away and went up to Mr. Phillip. He lifted one eyelid with his finger, then he turned to Papa and said, "He mU never speak again." I saw a look come over Mr. PhUlip's face, which told me that, though he could not speak, he could under- stand. But he never did speak again; he was taken home, I fancy in Sir Henry's carriage, and lingered a few days, or it might be weeks ; but the last conscious thing he did was to make that sketch, and Papa had it covered with glass, and there it remains to the present day. Mr. Alfred Elmore was another most intimate friend, though he nearly forfeited my affection by asking me to sit to him for " Katherine " in the Taming of the Shrew, he having seen me in an unguarded moment indulging in one of the tre- mendous tempers which would now be called nerves, and which most certainly were augmented by foohsh feeding, stuffy rooms and improper management. I had often sat to him before, but somehow Katherine was a failure, I could not always look furious, more especially as Mr. Elmore suffered fearfully from neuralgia and must have endured tortures. I have seen the perspiration pouring down his face while he worked, and he has had to go away and come back again, doubtless to take some anodyne or rest ; but the pain grew so awful 107 LEAVES FROM A LIFE that it drew up one leg and made him lame, and finally caused his death. It was an acute form of rheumatic neuralgia, caught by sleeping on the roof of one of the Dutch canal-boats, and I do not believe any one ever suflfered as he did. He had one daughter, a shy, pretty girl, devoted to her father, and looked after by a most kind and excellent lady. Her mother had died in giving birth to a son, who died with her, and to us children there was always a romantic air of sorrow and suffering about the whole house. We never rioted there as we did at the Ansdells' next door, and Edith could no more have romped in the manner we romped than she could have flown. Living just out of our district, but very close to Dickens, were the Stones. Frank Stone was a taU, handsome man, and his wife— who had a story — was bom on the field of the battle of Waterloo while the battle was raging, and she told me she had always a curious impression that she had heard the guns. It may be that some ante-natal influence may have been at work, for she was severely matter-of-fact, and was not given to imagination at aU. The young Stones, three of whom are yet aUve, were all much older than we were, but they used to kindly condescend to allow us to play with them, and I weU recoUect, at the age of seven, being soundly banged and shaken by the present dignified Royal Academician Marcus, because I was too anxious to see the inside of his toy theatre, which he had carefully arranged for a performance which io8 MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET was then " about to begin." The Stone family was singularly handsome. Ellen was dark, tall and stately ; Bertha, who is now dead, had quantities of the most exquisitely vivid red hair, which she loathed, but lived to see the extreme of fashion. I have no vivid recollection of Arthur, who became a barrister ; but Marcus was, despite his drastic treatment, greatly admired by me : he was so tall and big, and had such an amount of wonderful curly hair 1 I have a picture in my gallery of Mr. Stone's short way with a dreadful cook my mother had in the year of the great comet, 1858, when we were at Weymouth and Papa was detained in town on some pretext or other. Mama suspected the cook of theft, and was certain she drank, but was at her wits' end what to do. She confided in Mr. Stone ; he got a police- man in hiding, and then commanded the cook to pack her boxes and go. She must have suspected something, for they were packed, and all she had to do was to go to her room and assume her bonnet and shawl. The boxes were brought down, and then the policeman appeared, and to her rage and consternation demanded the keys. We were in the front room, divided from the other room by folding doors, and through the crack we commanded the whole scene, Mr. Stone towering over cook and policeman alike. Mama and Mrs. Stone cowering in a corner, while article after article came out of the boxes, some of them ours, more belonging evidently to former mistresses, and all obviously belonging to any one save the cook. Mama took 109 LEAVES FROM A LIFE her belongings, the policeman all that was marked Avith a coronet or a name, and finally she was on the point of being allowed to depart, without her wages, when Mr. Stone, with a howl, leaped at her and turned her shawl back over her shoulders. Will it be beheved that she was hung round with bags of groceries, and had a large bar of yellow soap under each arm ? Even the policeman smiled, while we children simply roared with laughter, while the cook turned and fled, soap and all, and never came near us again ! I shall not easily forget the horror we had of Weymouth in those days, and the cook did not add to our enjoyment. First of all there was that dreadful comet ; it swept across the sky like the flaming sword which guarded the gates of paradise, and which was supposed to prophesy a speedy end to the world, and above aU did we suffer from the close proximity of the convicts, who were always visible, and for whom we looked under our beds every night of our lives. There was no railway then from Weymouth to Portland, and we met constantly waggonette loads of the wretched men handcuffed together, and guarded by well-armed warders ; we could see them swarming about in the works then in progress, and above all I was taken to see the prison by a kind friend we had, one of Her Majesty's Inspectors, who little knew what a store of agony he was laying up for me by his kind- ness. Now nothing of the female sex is allowed in Portland, but I recollect it all perfectly, and indeed, no MORE ESPECIALLY OUR SET though it does not sound well, there are few prisons or law courts I have not been into in England, thanks to the same friend ; but Portland was a real terror to us, and we were glad to leave Weymouth because of that. It was the last visit paid us by Mr. Stone ; he was even then suffering from heart-disease, and one morning in the autumn Mrs. Stone went downstairs to get him his breakfast, leaving him to read the Times, and then get up quietly to his work when he had had some food. When she returned he was dead, his glasses still on his nose and the Times in his hand ; he had simply " fallen on sleep" without a cry or a movement. When the model came, to be sent away because Mr. Stone was dead, she remarked, with aU the inconsequence of her class, " Well 1 he might 'a let me know ! " but very soon after the home was broken up ; the mother went one way, the children the other, and I do not think they ever met again after the read- ing of the wUl. Mrs. Stone was a very handsome woman in her way, but personally I did not like her, and after we were married, and she stayed^with me once, I never invited her again ; she asked too many questions and had too many grievances, most of them fancied, to make her a pleasant inmate of any young household. Ill CHAPTER VI ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS No book about the artistic life of the fifties and sixties would be complete without a few words about the picture-dealers of that time, with whom we especially had to do. There were the brothers Agnew, but I think they had more dealings with the AnsdeUs and the Kensington set than with us ; and I more especially recollect the Gambarts and the Flatows as being the most concerned with Papa and his works. Mr. Gambart was a small, thin, and energetic Frenchman, married to a charming wife, who used to have the most wonderful Sunday parties at a big house in St. John's Wood, now swallowed up, with many more delightful places, by the aU-devouring Great Central Railway. In the summer it was his custom to take an equally large house and much bigger garden in the country, close to Stoke Poges, and here the parties became enormous, and we were given vast luncheons and teas in a great tent on the lawn, while whispers went roimd that after the English artists had returned home, dancing and fireworks went on. 113 ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS I often stayed with the Gambarts when I was a little girl, and I know that I, and their adopted daughter Annie, were always marched off to church on Sundays in stiff muslin frocks and muslin " spencers." The latter awful garments were tight- fitting and had a frill round the waist, and took a great deal of time to get into, as the buttons were always broken, and, moreover, as the sleeves were always ironed flat, we had to pull the two sides apart before we could insert our arms into the wretched things. Grey boots laced at the sides, the tags of which used to be pushed in at the top and pricked us as we walked, and very clean white stockings, were donned, and we went off hot and miserable, to be hotter and more miserable as the service pro- gressed, and knowing as we did that Monsieur Lom- binet, the French artist, was painting ia the deli- ciously cool water-meadows where forget-me-nots, ragged robin and water-lilies abounded, and where the birds were singing much more happily and tune- fully than the horrid village choir, we felt generally aggrieved and not any better for our enforced religious exercises. Monsieur Lombinet painted beautiful little landscapes, and one of our duties was to take him his luncheon. We used to talk to him hard all the time he ate it, and here Miss Wright's French came in useful, he, at any rate, understood it, and we exchanged lessons in our different tongues, while he ate Mrs. Gambart's dainty fare, and we gave him valuable hints for his next pictures. Much as we liked him H 113 LEAVES FROM A LIFE we could not refrain from playing him a trick. He had to cross a plank over one of the ditches on his return home, and he was always curiously nervous over this simple performance. We bided our time, got a shorter plank, and placed it so that it looked quite aU right, but so nicely balanced that the moment the unfortunate artist stepped on it, it went up in the air, and he and all his para- phernaUa went headlong into the ditch, from whence he emerged one mass of mud, and speechless with rage and fright. I hope he never knew we did it, but as he never mentioned this adventure before us, I much fear that he did. We were allowed to stay up until the last guest had gone on Sundays, and I certainly never saw any dancing or fireworks — I always hoped I should : but we heard the most divine music and made friends there with Miss Dolby, afterwards Madame Sainton, with Joachim, Mademoiselle ArtSt, and Santley, and all the best-known singers and musicians of the day. When I say we made friends, I mean they were kind and talked to us ; but only the Saintons, Santley, Joachim and Mademoiselle Art6t were our parents' friends. I do not recoUect any others we met at the Gambarts' coming to us at Pembridge Villas. I think Mr. Gambart was a very irritable man, but Mrs. Gambart ruled him with a silken thread : she was very dainty and pretty, and he worshipped her, and her " Dear ^*Vnest " (his name was Ernest, but she always pronounced it like that) quelled the rising storm, and he became an angel in a moment. 114 ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS Later in my life I experienced a severe dis- appointment cannected with the Gambarts. They had given one most successful fancy ball, and were going to give another to which a great many French and Belgian artists were to come, and I was to be attired in my great-grandmother's wedding dress, altered and adapted to the style suitable for the wear of "Dolly Varden," and I was looking forward enormously to the event. The dress, which is still in existence, is composed of very thick cream-coloured striped silk, powdered with tiny rosebuds worked by hand, and was to be looped up en punier over a rose-coloured quilted sUk skirt ; the bodice was long and pointed in front, and laced with cherry-coloured ribands over a full chemisette; the cherry-coloured silk stock- ings were clocked, and the deUghtful little shoes had square paste buckles and cherry-coloured heels ; and a dainty hat with some cherry-coloured ribands lay ready to be placed on my head. The day before the dance was to come off, we had gone up to help Mrs. Gambart with the flowers and arrangements, and Mr. Gambart had showed us all the preparations : the wonderful tents, the supper room, and all the other temporary rooms, and had pointed out the gas which he had had laid on ever5rwhere, and we were on the tenterhooks of expectation. Papa had ruefully contemplated his beautiful black velvet dress and cut steel-handled sword, for he was going as the Evelyn of the Diary, and Mama was to be resplendent in a yeUow satin IIS LEAVES FROM A LIFE and beautiful lace, immortalised in the picture Charles II.'s last Sunday at Whitehall: and then, aU in a moment, the blow came. The cook, poor wretch, who paid for her folly with her life, had smelt gas. The putting on so many new burners and tubes had made her nervous, and she had gone to look for a possible escape in the usual way with a lighted candle, with the effect that the whole of the front of the lower part of the house was destroyed, the tents burned up, the cook, and, I think, the housemaid killed, and the ball made impossible in far less time than it takes me to write about it. The sad business caused a ^eat sensation at the time. A few months afterwards the Gambarts tried to give the ball, but the foreign artists had gone home, and I was not allowed to go, because Papa said the deaths which had occurred should make the ball impossible. Secretly, I believe, he did not rehs'h the idea of appearing as Evelyn ; he was always very averse from what actors call "leg parts," and the sword, which was de rigueur, both in that and in his twice-donned Court dress, was furthermore a distinct drawbacks to his enjoyment. I never heard who and what Mr. and Mrs, Gambart were by parentage, but 1 think they must have been gentlefolk and well educated ; they knew every one and went every- where; but Mr. and Mrs. Flatow were a very different couple. Frankly, nay, hideously vulgar, they were goodness itself to us, and he gave me ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS my first real watch. The one I had to begin with was a " watch " by name, a turnip of large dimen- sions in appearance, and had belonged to my grandmother, who, when she gave it to Papa when he left home to become an art student, objected to his getting it put in order: first, because it could not require it : " it had been thoroughly done up the year Napoleon went to Elba : " and secondly, because it had jewels in and she knew that aU Londoners were thieves, and the watch might return : the jewels most certainly would not. I hated the heavy, cumbrous thing myself, and was allowed to exchange it for a chain to wear with Mr. Flatow's dainty gift; but I have often wished I had had some veneration for the ajitique, for I have no doubt it was a most valuable posses- sion, as valuable as the heavy chairs and " taU-boys " I found in the house I went to when I was married, and never rested — hke the young icMot I was — until I had cleared them all out, and become the proud possessor of clean and up-to-date rubbish of the worst kind. But one lives and learns ; there is generally something valuable somewhere about anything or any one that is really and honestly of great age, Mrs. Flatow had one great sorrow ; she had no children, neither had Mrs. Gambart ; but she at any rate never expressed a wish for any. Mrs. Flatow lamented her fate with tears when she saw our enormous brood, and was never as happy as when she was tipping us, taking us about, and generally 117 LEAVES FROM A LIFE spoiling us to her heart's content. She was quite a nice-looking woman, and as she dressed remarkahly weU and quietly, would have passed muster until she opened her mouth ; then her h's flew about like haU, and her extraordinary statements, made at the top of her voice, used to draw every one's attention to her. Mr. Flatow was not beautiful to look at, and he had the most horrid hands I think I ever saw ; fat, squat and red, and without any perceptible finger-nails ; but these same hideous hands made us most generous gifts, and he never came to our house without something or other for the children. Yet he was an extremely cute hand at a bargain, was hard as a nail in any business transaction, and in- variably attempted to get Papa to take out part of the purchase-money of his picture in what he called " jooUery," which he used to bring in his pockets and persuade Mama to don, in the hope that she would add her persuasions to his in the matter ; but she had ten excellent reasons for preferring the money, and I think the one set of "jooUery" she had, via Mr. Flatow, was a gift after the tremendous success of one of Papa's pictures, the proceeds of which had far exceeded even Mr. Flatow's florid expecta- tion. I know we girls all had brooches, and great was my sorrow when I lost mine down one of the cracks in the flooring of the Crystal Palace, and I was not consoled by the idea that some one paid so much a week to live under the floor, and had made a fortune out of the things which reached him through the cracks. Needless to say this was a fiction of ii8 ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS Mr. Flatow's fertile brain. Papa and he had a most amusing dispute as to where he should appear in that special picture. Mr. Flatow wanted to be the "hengine driver;" "ajFter all, it's my money wiU make the pictur' go," said he ; but the real engine-driver flatly refused to give him the pas, at all events if his engine were to be used. " Me and my hengine goes together," said the man, and Mr. Flatow had to be a humble passenger standing by the engine, and very like the good, fat, vulgar httle Jew the figure is. In these days I have not the least doubt that he and his wife would have possessed a great house and a title, and would have been received everywhere. " H "-lessness and vulgarity are no bar nowadays to being asked to aU the best houses, as all the world [knows, but then he had to be content with his own entourage : often as he came to our house and when no one else was expected, I never knew even where the Flatows lived, and moreover, they never came to dinner ; they would come in late, or else just to see us in the afternoon, and I fancy their own pet evening meal was " high tea," for I recollect Marcus Stone teUing us of having on one occasion shared a meal with them, when, after being pressed to take all that was on the table, Mr. Flatow looked round. " You ain't eating much," he remarked, " 'ave a bit of 'am ? " at which Mrs. Flatow exclaimed in alarm, " Don't mention 'am ; there ain't a bit in the 'ouse. Chum." His name was Louis Victor, but his good and loving wife always called him " Chum " and nothing else 1 119 LEAVES FROM A LIFE Mr. Flatow was the most persistent salesman who ever existed, and he was a clever man indeed who left the " Show " without giving an order for an engraving. He was a most wonderful man of business in every way. He died comparatively young, but had made a great deal of money, all of which he left to his wife. I fancy she did not long survive him; anyhow, once Mr. Flatow was dead, we never saw her again. I do not fancy Flatow got on well with other artists; Papa's sense of humour always carried him over bad passages of arms with him, but many of the other men could not stand him, and he in his turn used to make most unflattering comments on them and on their work. But in the sixties artists were in a very great measure inde- pendent of the picture-dealer, and I never recollect my father sending a picture to the exhibition that was not either sold before it left the easel, or promptly disposed of on the Private View day, while other men were equally fortunate. The big cotton manufacturers in Manchester and Liverpool were making collections for themselves, and giving galleries to their native towns, and it was a point of honour with them that the pictures should be by hving artists, and that they should see them, as it were, " in the making." Another reason for the demand for modern work was that the great families of England had not begun to follow Charles Sur- face's example and sell their ancestors' portraits by auction : and the Romneys and other pictures, 120 ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS which to-day are fetching thousands, while the artist of the day cannot sell a £20 sketch without an immense effort, were all where they had been since they were painted, on the walls of the big houses ; and there was not apparently the chance of buying " old, masters " that there is now. By the way, some curious stories could be told of these same old masters. In one house in the Mid- lands the family apparently still keeps its pictures intact, yet they are only copies ; the originals are aU in America, and some day the unfortunate heirs avUI discover the truth, and great will be their outcry thereat I Again, one very rich and very illiterate man at the present day has his walls hung with " priceless gems : " these are aU turned out " to order " in a certain well-known studio ; they really are quite as good as any " old master," but they are sold as they are painted. One has to be very clever nowadays to know the real from the false in more ways than one. The demand for old pictures, old furniture, old things of all sorts and kinds, has brought about a race of forgers whose clever hands would produce excellent and original work, were there, as there undoubtedly should be, a demand for their wares. Then, too, the market for modem work was in a great measure spoiled by the artists themselves. In the good days money was most plentiful, modern pictures were looked upon as"investments,"and in consequence all the artists raised their prices in a most foolish way. Quite young and unknown men followed suit, and 121, LEAVES FROM A LIFE sad he looked. " I've received my death sentence," he answered ; then, after a moment's pause, he looked up to the sky and took off his hat. " Well, I've had a good time anyhow," he went on, " and every- thing must end some day ; " and so the friends parted. Millais died in August, and his Mend followed him in a very, very short time. Lady MiUais and the eldest son died quickly after Sir John, the first of cancer tooj the second of pneu- monia following on a wetting after shooting. One of the sons, J. G. Millais, inherits his father's talents to some extent, but I have never seen him sinee he was quite a child, and I do not know anything whatever about him personally. SirFrederickLeighton used to come toPembridge Villas in quite early days, and we girls one and all respectfully worshipped him, and to us, at any rate, he was known as " Cupid." He had a magnificent head and torso, but was too short in stature to be quite perfect; he had a wonderful command of foreign languages, and could talk in any tongue and on any subject, and in the days I knew him he used to sing beautifully. He was successful at once and to the end ; but I am not at all sure if his pictures are going to last. I saw one large one at the 1907 winter exhibition of the Royal Academy, and I was much struck by the extreme hardness of the colouring and the lack of light and shade. I recollect the picture perfectly well when it was first exhibited, and I am certain the colours have dulled and hardened immensely, 124 ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS and one can but trust this will not be the case with aU. Sir Frederick was one of the happiest and most unselfish of men, at least in our eyes i he was always bright, eager and enthusiastic, anxious to praise and help other men wherever he could ; and indeed I think all artists had, and I trust still have, this most delightful characteristic. The older men would spend hours in helping younger men forward, and never refused counsel and assistance to any who came to them for it, while they one and all talked over their own work with each other, discussing each point in a manner that no other set of workers does or can do. Among artists in our day jealousy was unknown ; there was work enough and to spare for all ; and if some of the artists lived in palaces life was very much simpler in most ways. They might have fine houses, but they Uved in them ; they were not always " on the go." There were no week-end parties, there was no general exodus at Easter, Whitsuntide and Christmas ; they worked hard and for long hours at a stretch, and the month or six weeks at the seaside, and a run abroad for a fort- night between " sending-in day " and the opening of the exhibition constituted all the change they ever had. Indeed, the run abroad was a very un- usual thing, and it was only occasionally that this occurred. Once my father, Mr. Gambart, and some one else went over to Paris to see some pictures and spend a few hours with Rosa Bonheur, who looked hke some benevolent French abbe in her short black soutane and trousers, and thick I2S LEAVES FROM A LIFE white hair. A second time he went to look at the gambling-rooms at Homburg, and again he went quite a long tour in Italy with my mother and sisters, not long after I was married ; but my sisters enraged him by reading books instead of gazing at the scenery. Mama suffered agonies of fright from the terrible drives they had to take, and I think they were all heartily glad when the time came for their return home. I may here mention a remarkable thing which happened to me, and which almost seemed as if I had inherited my grandmother's detestable powers of second sight. During their absence the house at Pembridge VUlas was being con- siderably added to and altered, and I fancy that year — 1875 — must have seen the very highest water- mark of Papa's prosperity. Our house was always large ; even when we went there in 1852 or 1853 it was big. Then Papa added a large schoolroom, spare bed-room and a night nursery. This latter was built over our play-place the leads ; and the schoolroom and the room above swallowed up our own especial gardens, the disappearance of WiUie's onion-bed making a specially sore spot in his heart. But in 1875 Papa determined to turn his old painting-room into a bUhard-room, to throw out great bow- windows in both drawing-room and dining-room, and to add an almost complete storey to the top of the house, where he placed an enormous painting- room and model-room, a big room for the boys, and some servants' rooms. The painting-room was 126 ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS approached by a terrible iron staircase outside the building, so -that the models should not have to come through the house itself. Unfortunately the painting-room could never be kept reaUy warm. All this was in progress when my parents were away, and Mama kept writing to one or other of us to urge the builders to get on and allow them to come home. I was then staying in London with my eldest sistef, and in my turn I received an urgent prayer from Mama to go and see what they were about and report progress. Alice had had a touch of Roman fever, and she would never be happy until she was at home once more. My sister and I proceeded to Pembridge Villas, and found a chaos of bricks and mortar ; I turned towards the dining- room, opened the door, and jumped back ; I plainly saw a large coffin reposing on the table. I called out to my sister, but, of course, there was nothing there, and we thought no more about it. The next time I went into the dining-room my eldest brother lay there dead in his coffin ! Naturally, this is only a coincidence, but it appears even now rather an extraordinary one. In the course of the alterations my own precious bed-room was done away with, and indeed, the house was never the same to me again, and I do not think that beyond visiting the painting- room I ever penetrated to the top storey or knew how the rooms were arranged ; and the next few years saw first the death of my brother ; a marriage in the family we none of us could bear ; the death 137 LEAVES FROM A LIFE of my mother ; and the final crumble and fall of our once happy and distinguished household. The house itself did not pass from my father's possession for some few years afterwards, but all the home atmosphere was gone ; another evil influence came into force ; my unmarried sisters started in a home of their own ; and bit by bit the old life faded, until the house was sold, altered, and " improved " oh ! Heaven ! the improvements nearly made me ill ! and inhabited by some rich Jews ; they in their turn mamed their daughters from there, lost most of their money, and re-sold the house, but to whom I do not know ; and then they died. I fancy it is now either a boarding-house or flats. A great many of the houses round us are flats nowadays, and the rest are Hved in by Hebrews, who in our time were never allowed to reside there ; they could never keep respectable servants, and the landlords refused to let the houses to them. Now all this is altered ; omnibuses and motors rush by our doors ; people hang out strings of clothes in their back gardens ; and the place resounds at night with shrill laughter and the whistling for cabs, for the Jews are an hilarious set, and appear to visit each other con- tinuously, and keep up large card-parties to a late hour of the night. The place is, indeed, very much altered for the worse from our day, when, though we did not " know " them in a social sense, the opposite neighbours took a keen interest in us and our comings and goings, even decorating their cats with large white satin bows when we had a 128 ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS wedding. Now Bayswater has lost all that friendly- feeling : and I question much if the opposite neighbours there know each other even by sight. I can quite well remember that every evening in the summer, when we were at home, we used to either play croquet or sit in the garden, where we had space enough, not only for croquet, but, when that ceased to be fashionable, for two setts of tennis ; while Mama had the gas laid on from the house to the species of arbour in which we sat, made from the trailing branches of a weeping ash, where before the days of Sunday dinner-parties, we used to have supper in the evening, until Papa struck, added to the domestic staff, and insisted on his usual dinner. Sunday in our time was the great day for the actors of the day to come and see us ; but they must be kept for a chapter to themselves, and I should like to say a few more words still about some of the artists I have known ; for I have said very httle indeed of the " set " I loved personally the best of all, and which then inhabited the classic groves of St. John's Wood. First and foremost will ever live in my heart, as long as it beats, the beloved remembrance of PhiHp Calderon. When I was a small girl of ten or twelve, he first rose on my horizon : I loved him then, and I love him now, as only a small and romantic girl can love, and his very name is precious to me. The first time I saw him was at one of my mother's last parties of the season of 1860 : a brilliant season for us children, for did it not bring the Colleen Bawn within I 129 LEAVES FROM A LIFE our ken, and all the delightful evenings at the theatre that meant so much to us ? I was much struck by the tall and extremely handsome young man, and he was exceedingly good to me, talked to me and danced with me alone, and quite won my heart. Only a few days afterwards I received a severe blow to my affections, I saw the announce- ment of his wedding in the Times : he had played me false, and had gone off on a honeymoon which lasted the whole of his life. 1 was rather inclined to be broken-hearted : twelve takes things far more to heart than twenty does ; but when I saw his dear and dainty little wife, and later on knew and loved the dehghtful boys and girls who rapidly began to fill the nurseries, my affection focused itself, and became and remained strong and true for the whole household as long as it lasted. I never saw such unfailing Ught-heartedness and joviaUty as pervaded the St. John's Wood men ; they were aU young and enthusiastic, all determined to succeed, and all loved each other. AU were married, except George Leshe and DoUy Story, and these two were the spoiled children of the set. Hodgson, Yeames and Marks made up the inner circle, and Yeames is now the sole survivor of that. The enfants gdtes are still alive and both married, and both still paint, though the age is beginning to hint that their best work is done. 1 used to meet aU the set at the Calderons' : the Marks, she, fat, good-tempered, and absolutely without an " h " to her name ; he, with his never-failing humour and his excellent jokes, his 130 ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS delightful talent for amusing us all, and his round and jovial personality. Who that ever heard it will forget the solemn sermon he used to preach, taking as his text : " The wilderness, where the wangdoodel roameth and the mastodon moumeth for its first- born." From the moment he gave out the text to the last sad sentence, which explained why the mastodon mourned its son and heir, we were in fits of laughter, while Marks was absolutely solemn> and would end by gazing at us mournfully and closing his book with an air that intimated to us without words where we might expect to find our- selves on the last day. Marks gave that sermon more than once in our drawiag-room at Pembridge Villas, to be met by a rival preacher in Arthur Cecil, who took for his text the familiar "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man," fi-om which he drew several morals, all more or less absurd, the principal one being that patting a cake must result in the cakes being black and only fit for the bottomless pit. How I wish I had written down at the time how we used to " play " with all these most dis- tinguished men ; but as we hardly ever saw any one who was not distinguished, it never struck me at any rate, that the doings of these, our most familiar Mends, could ever be of any interest to others ; but no written words could give the least idea of the general light-heartedness of the artist sets of those scorned and sneered at " mid- Victorian " days, or what small things amused us all, and how little we aU wanted to make us hilariously happy. 131 LEAVES FROM A LIFE 1 quite well recollect our all playing hide-and-seek all over our house one night, the nurseries alone being considered out of bounds ; while on another one Papa and some of his friends careered round the neighbourhood, ringing beUs, taking off knockers, and behaving in a manner that was quite disgraceful ; but they were never found out, and 1 suppose only did it as boys nowadays go in for a " rag," just to let off the steam. No chapter about the artists would be complete without a few words about the less-known men, some of whom came constantly to our house. The first was called always Tonrniy Brooks : he was lame, and had a furiously red head, and he very often indeed used to come in after dinner to make a fourth at Papa's favourite game of whist, aiid to grumble and growl frantically at the evil doings of the Royal Academy. He painted domestic pictures of Uttle interest and less talent, but one. The Launch of the Lifeboat, took on, and was a great success, and, I think, gave him quite a wrong idea of his position in the world of art. He was immensely kind to us, and we loved him and admired his pictures, for which we often sat ; and he had a good, kind, trim little wife, and two sons, Edward, and, I think, Tom. Always at Christmas he had a grand " party " for us, and there was invariably a " surprise," and I well recollect about a dozen of us sitting roimd the tea-table at the little house on Campden HiU, with Mrs. Brooks, very smart, at the head of the tea- table, when presently we heard a mysterious 132 ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS singing, and in walked Mr, Brooks bearing a large pie. This was supposed to contain the " four and twenty blackbirds " of the nursery rhyme, and we watched the insertion of the knife with agony lest these creatures should fly out and make off with our noses ; but the pie contained charming presents for all of us, all something we particularly wanted, and which he must have remembered to have heard us express a wish for some time or the other. Tommy Brooks, dear man ! could not paint, but he made children very happy, so I trust that the earth lies hghtly on him in the grave he and his good wife have filled for many a year. Then there was another very familiar figure, who has indeed only just passed out of our ken, and whose example under great affliction has been of incalculable service to many a man and woman. When I first knew dear " Billy Fenn " he was just going blind ; he could see me quite plainly, could see the earth and sea and sky he loved, but he could not read without pain, and he knew his work as a painter was over and done. We were at Hastings that year, and he was in rooms close to us, with his devoted mother and her equally devoted maid, and when I had made their acquaintance I used to take him for long walks, and try my best to cheer him up. He would stand for ages, gazing at the view. " It may have to last me years; I want to see all I can while I can; oh, what a sunset ! and I can never paint it I " But 133 LEAVES FROM A LIFE that was the most I ever heard him say that could be called grumbling, and very soon his sight gave way utterly, and I, at any rate, never heard him really repine. I read him book after book, and during one of our walks I said to him, " Now, Mr. Fenn " (he was twenty years or more older than I was, and so I treated him with more reverence than he did me, for he always called me by my pet name), " why should not you write ? You have been about a great deal ; you recoUect all you have seen ; take to pen-painting and you will never be dull." I am glad to be able to chronicle that he jumped at the idea ; he learned to dictate quickly ; kind friends helped him by taking his deHcate and charming httle papers ; and finally an excellent and devoted wife appeared on the scene, and he never once more looked back to the days when he could see and paint. Fortunately he was not dependent on either pen or pencil ; but he made an appreciable addition to his income, and did not have added to his bodily affliction the mental one of narrowed means and financial straits and sufferings. It was remarkable to meet him at any picture-show and to note how keenly he was interested in the work. " Take me up to George LesUe's picture," he would say to me. " Now, teU me all about it]; " and I would describe it accurately ; subject, colour, and the time of day and season of the year it repre- sented ; and so we would pass round the exhibition, where, should I see any picture I liked by an 134 ARTISTS AND PICTURE-DEALERS unknown hand, I would tell him about it, and he would at once grasp its value, and tell me if I were right or wrong in my opinion. It was often curious to notice how the best critics would confirm next day the estimate made by a blind man and a girl still in short dresses ; when they differed it was with me and not with Mr. Fenn, who was as shrewd a critic as I have ever met, and as kindly. Mr. Fenn very soon was independent of all help save in the streets of London ; in the garden his stick seemed as a sixth sense; and once he knew the shape of a room he rarely blundered. He managed his dinner in a way I should recommend to all blind folk, and arranged his plate to imitate the face of a clock : the salt at twelve, potatoes at one, mustard at two, and so on ; and as he gave no trouble was in consequence never anything save a delightful addition to any gathering. In after years I only once heard him allude to his trouble. I met him after the lapse of some time at the Private View of the Academy, and went up and spoke to him. " Y'ou won't know me," I said. " Oh ! yes, I do," he rephed, quickly, naming me at once. "You see, we blind folk have one great advantage over you. Voices don't change, and as I can't see you, you can't change either ; to me you are always sixteen, and always in a short frock and with curls. I suppose," he added, with a humorous twinkle, " you are not in short frocks now ? " As I was nearer fifty than fifteen I disclaimed the costume, but we took up the links just where they 135 LEAVES FROM A LIFE were dropped, and became firm friends always to the day of his death. That was the last time, by the way, I saw Mrs. Lynn Linton, with whom I had not met since a celebrated Christmas party given by Shirley Brooks, where she was looked upon by us with suspicion and dislike, first because she had just electrified the world with her odious article, " The Girl of the Period," and secondly because she had pro- duced "The True Story of Joshua Davidson," a book I learned to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate, but which we heard most emphatically condemned and were not allowed to read. The consequence of being forbidden to read it was, that the book became desirable, I saved up and bought it, and stiU possess the copy I would not part with on amy account whatever. I was a great pet of Shirley Brooks, who first incited me to write, and taught me to read good books, and in a discriminating manner ; and he always made a great deal of me,5and I fancy on that special evening he made me more prominent than Mrs. Lynn Linton approved. At any rate, she snubbed me severely, and I always kept out of her way. But that special afternoon my husband had given up his seat to her : we neither of us knew who she was : she was to us merely an old and very tired lady ; but when Mr. Fenn turned and spoke to her we mutually recalled the long-ago party where we had each a present ; I am not sure hers was not a pen-wiper in the shape of a wasp ; indeed, I am 136 ARTISTS AND PICiTURE-DEALERS certain it was, and it was accompanied by a dulcet rhyme insinuating that the power to sting should always be used mercifully; while mine was a butterfly made out of looking-glass, and my rhyme ended, "A butterfly, but one that can reflect." We parted, promising to meet again later in the year ; I was going to Aix and Mrs. Lynn Linton to Malvern ; but in less than a week she lay dead, and I have only the meeting and parting to remember of her after aU those years ! Then at one time we saw a good deal of the Joys, a painter of small fame, but I fancy a pleasant man ; our acquaintance was, of course, more with the daughters, one of whom was afterwards Mrs.Haweis, and was at one time well known. I mention her here, as it was mainly due to her that I ever took a pen in hand. I think Mr. Joy used occasionally to do a httle work for my father at his back- grounds ; I know at one time he came during working hours, so it must have been for that, at any rate he used to bring his two girls to play with us, Mary Eliza (she was always called by her two names) and her sister, whose name I have forgotten. Mary Ehza invariably came prepared with a story to read us ; she wrote them in books she made herself out of sheets of note-paper cut to a certain size, about four inches square ; and they were always " bound " by her own fair hands, in thick gilt paper. My sister and I were not very long-suffering, but we bore a good deal from Mary Eliza, until at last we struck. We both wrote 137 LEAVES FROM A LIFE very long, very dull essays, and made her listen to us ; we usually sat on the stairs, so that the other members of the family should not be allowed to hear these efforts of genius. But they soon ceased ; Mary Eliza liked to read her immortal works, but did not care to hear ours, and as we refused to listen unless she did, we soon were saved from the little gilt books, and indeed saw little more of the girls once Mr. Joy had finished what he was doing for Papa. 138 CHAPTER VII SOME LITERARY PEOPLE The one name that stands first in my list is the honom-edand magnificent one of William Makepeace Thackeray, and I only wish I had known him one quarter as well as I know the whole of his books. Unfortunately, Papa had met him in his early days at the Garrick Club ; and he had covered him with confusion, first by asking him to sing, and secondly by suggesting that he had better go home, as he was quite sure his maiden aunt was sitting up for him keeping a muffin warm. There was a smack of truth in this latter remark, which made it par- ticularly unpleasant ; for his mother generally knew in those days when he did come in ; anyhow, Papa never forgave Thackeray, and we lost what would have been a splendid possession, the friendship of one whom I shall always consider our greatest author. Personally I saw him twice, once at the Royal Academy, standing much as the sketch done by Freddy Walker shows him, very upright, with his back to one, his great shoulders squared, and his head, with its lion-like shock of hair, thrown well 139 LEAVES FROM A LIFE very long, very dull essays, and made her listen to us ; we usually sat on the stairs, so that the other members of the family should not be allowed to hear these efforts of genius. But they soon ceased ; Mary Eliza liked to read her immortal works, but did not care to hear ours, and as we refused to listen unless she did, we soon were saved from the little gilt books, and indeed saw little more of the girls once Mr. Joy had finished what he was doing for Papa. 138 CHAPTER VII SOME LITERARY PEOPLE The one name that stands first in my list is the honoured and magnificent one of William Makepeace Thackeray, and I only wish I had known him one quarter as well as I know the whole of his books. Unfortunately, Papa had met him in his early days at the Garrick Club ; and he had covered him with confusion, first by asking him to sing, and secondly by suggesting that he had better go home, as he was quite sure his maiden aunt was sitting up for him keeping a muffin warm. There was a smack of truth in this latter remark, which made it par- ticularly unpleasant ; for his mother generally knew in those days when he did come in ; anyhow. Papa never forgave Thackeray, and we lost what would have been a splendid possession, the fiiendship of one whom I shall always consider our greatest author. Personally I saw him twice, once at the Royal Academy, standing much as the sketch done by Freddy Walker shows him, very upright, with his back to one, his great shoulders squared, and his head, with its lion-hke shock of hair, thrown well 139 LEAVES FROM A LIFE back, and his hands clasped behind him as he looked at the pictures ; then I heard him speak and pass on, while my eyes followed him, and I hold for ever the remembrance of him as he was in the flesh : more especially as once again I saw him. Fortu- nately he was with some one I knew; she was aware of my passionate attachment to his books, and he was good enough to smile at me, pat my shoulder, and remark he wished all his critics and readers were as sympathetic. I was awe-struck, too awe-struck to speak, but he little knew the precious memory he gave me, which I shall always retain to my Ufe's end. Very soon after that meeting I was helping Mr. Henry O'Neil off with his coat; he had arrived to join in one of oiu- usual Christmas-Eve parties, when he, not knowing my adoration for the great author, said quite casually, " Oh ! by the way, did you know Thackeray was found dead in bed this morning ? " Thackeray dead ! I could not, would not beUeve it, why, " Denis Duval " was unfinished — oh ! it could not be true. Unfortunately it was : I left the other guests to get out of their wraps as they liked, and, going up to my room, I wept and wept and forgot all about the party until Mama came to look for me, by which time I was far too much dishevelled by grief to appear on the scene. Thackeray had many, many mourners ; yet none were truer than the little fifteen-year-old girl to whom his books were dear, to whom his still dearer memory is ever 140 SOME LITERARY PEOPLE green. All we heard of Thackeray, too, only made us love him more. We knew of his devotion to his poor sad wife; of his loving care for "his girls," and his love for his mother and stepfather, and all his kindly goodness to all, and in my heart, at any rate, he holds a place that none else wUl ever touch or reach. I think, too, that the great friendship Papa had for Charles Dickens somewhat kept the old sore from healing, and we were almost more inti- mate with Edmund Yates, whose quarrel with Thackeray at the Garrick Club, though historic, was very foolish, and is best forgotten as soon as may be, and Thackeray would not have met him, I know, for it was years before they met once more and agreed to forgive and forget ; anyhow, we never had Thackeray in our house, and we are the poorer for that fact. I should think the first time I saw Charles Dickens myself was when Papa was painting his portrait for John Forster : he was rather florid in his dress, and gave me an impression of gold chain and pin and an enormous tie, and he too, as did so many men then, wore his hair long, with the usual waving lock above his forehead. I remember peeping at him through the balustrade of the little stairway which led down to our painting-room, and hearing him tease my youngest sister, for whom I had been sent, by calling her " Mother Bunch," a name which always stuck to her, and prophesying she should marry " Plomish," his youngest son. Dickens was always good at nicknames ; one of his 141 LEAVES FROM A LIFE other sons was nicknamed " the Ocean Spectre ; " he was drowned at sea and so justified sadly indeed the name given to him when he was a long and lanky boy. Yet it must have been before that that we saw him at one of Jacob Bell's cele- brated children's parties, where he was the hfe and soul of the gathering, and where he and some of the bigger children acted charades. I moreover saw either the rehearsal, or the play itself, of The Frozen Deep, but 1 was so small it must have been the rehearsal, for all I recollect is Mr. Egg dressed in what appeared to me to be the fur hearth-rugs off our carpets, carrying a telescope under one arm and pretending he could not stand because of the high wind. The scenery was appa- rently all blocks of ice, and I was rather alarmed altogether and was glad when it was over. I wish now I had been old enough to know on what an historical scene I was allowed to gaze. The Stone and Dickens girls and boys were all a good deal older than we were, too much grown up to put up with very much of our society, and almost before we as children had become familiar with the Dickens family, the world was startled by the " Personal Explanation " of his most intimate domestic arrangements given by Dickens himself in the pages of his own magazine, and despite his better self and the advice of his friends, Mr. Dickens sent Mrs. Dickens away from her home and her children, and to the best of my belief they never spoke to each other again. If a part were taken 142 SOME LITERARY PEOPLE with either side, and I think it must have been, my mother emphatically stood up for the wife and mother, while my father would never allow one word to be said against his much-loved friend. In the matter we are not now called upon to adjudicate, but when any one has reflected, as has been done often in my presence on Mrs. Dickens, by people of later years who knew neither the great author nor his wife, I too have always stood up for Mrs. Dickens. She was a kind, good woman, good in every sense of the word, and when she left her husband's house, she left her heart behind her. I well recollect being in a box at the theatre one evening with my mother and Mrs. Dickens : the latter burst into tears suddenly and went back into the box. Charles Dickens had come into the oppo- site box with some friends, and she could not bear it. My mother took her back to her house in Gloucester Road, Regent's Park, telling me to sit quietly until she returned. When she did she said nothing to me, but I heard her tell Papa about it, and add, " I thought I should never be able to leave her ; that man is a brute." Papa shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. Another time I recollect her bringing a small carte-de-visite out of her pocket and showing it to Mama. " She has a good face and should make Charley a good wife," she said, and handed it to Mama. It represented a round- faced very young girl in the usual crinoUne ; it was Bessy Evans, a daughter of Evans, the pubUsher, who afterwards married Charles Dickens, junior, 143 LEAVES FROM A LIFE and had none of the happiest of lives either, poor girl. Mrs. Dickens was short and rather stout, and must have been very pretty in her youth. She had a charming voice and very nice hands, and was always happy at our house where, after the separa- tion, her husband never came again, so Mama must have taken her part very warmly. Papa used to go to Gad's Hill, and I once went there with him. It was a very hot day, and we all sat out in the garden. I do not remember the year, but the second girl was either engaged, or just married, to Charles Collins, and had to endure a good deal of teasing on the subject. He was even then very deUcate, and, I think, was lying doAvn in a long chair in the garden, wlule " Katie " sat beside him. Mamie Dickens was there too, and Miss Hogarth, the good and faithful aunt, who mothered the children and looked after them, first for her sister's sake, and then for their own. Fechter, the actor, was also present, but I only recollect the picture, the heat of the day, and how tired I was, and I think we must have come over for the day from some adjacent watering-place, Dover most likely, and I must have been very yoimg, for I was too tired to hsten to the talk and only wanted to go home. I think Mamie Dickens took compassion on me and let me rest in the shade with her. I do not think I ever saw her agaio, but I have always loved her for her gentle ways. I have heard Miss Hogarth bitterly assailed for remaining with Mr. Dickens' household 144 SOME LITERARY PEOPLE after her sister left, but I have also often heard Mrs. Dickens say that her presence among " the children " was her one comfort and consolation, and that she wished people who did not know aU would not talk. Fortunately there were no society papers then, or else I am aftaid a good deal more would have got into print than did on a matter that always has made, for me at any rate, all Charles Dickens' pathos ring untrue, and all his bits of "goody- goody " moralising suggest to me that they were written with his tongue in his cheek. Yet I should think no man ever had more enthusiastic friends than had Charles Dickens, both known and unknown. Men, at any rate, worshipped him, and even I can remember how his books were waited for and dis- cussed as they came out, while each Christmas book or Christmas number of his magazine made an epoch and must have been sold by the million. Papa, of course, remembered the first books, and he has often 'told me that when the " Pickwick Papers " came out in numbers he could not always afford to buy the monthly parts, and so he used to go from shop to shop to read the open copies as they were laid out to attract purchasers, much as copies of some of the illustrated papers are laid out in Fleet Street at the present day. Undoubtedly no books ever had such a tremendous effect as his. The scandal of the Yorkshire schools was stopped by " Nicholas Nickleby," the procedure of the Law Courts was altered after "Bleak House," while funerals which used to ruin the poor, and be an K 145 LEAVES FROM A LIFE almost unbearable tax on the rich, were simplified and made decent after attacks from his pen, not only in " Dombey and Son," but in shorter papers and letters to the press. 1 can quite wellrecoUect the orthodox funeral of the fifties and sixties when two red-nosed men, similar to those in George Cruikshank's picture, stood outside the door from early morning until the funeral was over, each bearing a mysterious bauble, something like a broom tied up in black silk squares at the head and finished at the middle of the stave with black silk bows. TheseworthieswerecaIledmutes,and were supposed to stand motionless, no matter what the weather ; indeed, a rather good story was told about a couple who, on a very cold winter day, sent in to ask for " a glass of somethink 'ot to keep them alive." Unfortunately, the request was made to a man who had neither generosity nor humour, and who in return sent back a message : " Nonsense ! Certainly not ! if they are cold, teU them to jump about and warm themselves " — the idea of the melancholy, silent, black-garbed mutes jumping hilariously about on the doorstep not having struck him as being either indecorous or absurd ! The hearse itself was a nightmare : an enormous black vehicle, crowned with nodding plumes of ostrich feathers, the number and splendour of which determined the financial status of the " corpse," or the esteem in which he was held by his friends ; the four splendid black horses, with tremendous manes and tails, were adorned with more plumes of feathers on their 146 SOME LITERARY PEOPLE heads, and great velvet coverings on their backs, and as all the attendants wore vast cloaks, and wide silk hat-bands round their hats, and the mourners were one and all provided with hat-bands and wide scarfs of sUk and black gloves, and were lent cloaks by the undertaker, I leave my readers to imagine the actual amount of money that used to be spent, often enough at a time when the unfortu- nate survivors could iU afford it. I am glad to say that in one place I was instrumental, at the price of a frightful disturbance with my father-in-law, in doing away with one of these abominable customs. Not only were the scarf and hat-band worn at the funeral, but aU the male " mourners " used to don these cheerful articles on the following Sunday, and sit in a row with the ladies of the family to listen to funeral hymns and a sermon. This was more than I could stand ; the relationship in question was distant, and the family immediately concerned was yet more distant ; all the same my husband was expected to appear in public in this extraordinary guise. I would have none of it, neither would I don more than grey and black for a distant connection I had only seen once in my life. I can well recoUect the stir in the congregation when we appeared clad much as usual, but I was not prepared for the speechless rage that met us outside at the abode of my father-in-law ; I let him storm ; it didn't hurt me and he could not interfere ; but never again did hat-bands and scarfs appear in that special church : while mourning itself nowadays goes to the opposite 147 LEAVES FROM A LIFiE direction and, despite all the efforts of the Court, bids fair to disappear altogether. I quite well remember my aunt, who was the wife of a doctor, never bought herself a black silk dress ; neither did another aunt, whose husband was alawyer. They used to collect all the hat-bands and scarves of the year and take them to some undertaker's : who in the coxmtry, at any rate, was always a haberdasher as well: and he always exchanged them for so many yards of silk cut off the same piece, the hat- bands and scarves differing not only in the shades of black but in the quality of the sQk as well. The gloves were also treated in the same way, and were exchanged for others, either for husband or wife as was required at the time. Gloves were much more worn by men than they are now ; clergymen were expected to wear one at least in the pulpit, and a Welsh parson told me he always had to have packets of gloves made for him for the left hand only. He would wear one and carry the other ; when the one he was wearing became shabby he would carry that and wear another from the packet. He was obliged to wear one glove ; two were too troublesome, and as he had to be economical. Dent obhged, him in the manner described above. I am not quite sure if the amount of money spent on flowers nowadays for a funeral does not require some caustic pen to write on the subject ; but, at any rate, the expense is more equally distributed, it does not all fall on the unhappy family itself. It is fortunate for Charles 148 SOME LITERARY PEOPLE Dickens that he lived in a time when people had leisure to read. 1 wonder what puhlisher nowadays would dare to undertake such lengthy books as his, and yet it seems a pity no one arises to really give us pictures of our own time. Sairey Gamp is gone, never to return, yet I recollect her type, without quite so much gin though, quite well ; and though very few Londoners drop their h's nowadays, and I am sure none of them turn their w's into V as Sam Weller did : stiU, there must be many things that deserve description in the same walk in life ! Shall we ever have another Dickens, I wonder, or has the School Board made every one alike in the same way it has made all girls and boys write alike ? I am quite sure individuality is not encouraged nowadays, and whatever the conse- quence of all this sameness will be who can teU ? I was present in the ladies' gallery at the dinner given to Charles Dickens before he sailed for America, and for years I treasured the hst of speakers, but I have managed to lose it, and all I can recoUect is the tremendous ovation he received when he rose to speak, the remarkable effect his speech had on his audience, and how his voice played on us all as he spoke of the friends he was leaving and those to whom he was going. George Dolby came up and talked to us, and so did Mr. Parkinson, when we sat scarcely able to breathe for the smoke and heat, and presently we went into an ante-room and were given ices and straw- berries, and Charles Dickens himself came up and 149 LEAVES FROM A LIFE spoke to us all and remained talking for a short while. But the air was full of electricity ; he was himself moved, and had moved his audience greatly, and we were glad to get away. This would be either late in 1867 or early in 1868, for in June 1868 I wrote : " We were at a party last night and had a long talk to Charles Dickens, who has just returned from America, looking extremely well." Mr. Dolby, brother to dear Madame Sainton- Dolby, was even then anxious about him, and he only lived just two years longer, dying almost suddenly, leaving " Edwin Drood " in a great state of incompleteness. It was in June that Dickens died : he had been complaining very much of feeling tired and of numbness in one foot, but thought nothing really of it, and had been writing all day in the Swiss chalet Fechter had given him. When called to dinner he came, took his seat at the table, and then put his hand to his head, looked round and slipped to the floor. Miss Hogarth who was alone in the room with him, rushed to him and got him on the sofa, but he never spoke again, and either early the next morning or very late at night, he died, and Mrs. Dickens saw the notice on the poster, the first intimation she had of her husband's death ! We went more than once to the celebrated readings, and I must confess that while Nancy's murder made me ill, it was so truly realistic and ghastly that I only went once ; I " could not away with " the pathos of "Little Nell" and Paul Dombey, ISO SOME LITERARY PEOPLE and while I have seen nearly every one in the hall in floods of tears, and furthermore noticed that Dickens himself could hardly bear up under the weight of the woe he was creating, I could not share the sentimental wave, and could not hear that the pathos rang true. But then I fear I have not much sympathy with paper sorrows. I laughed over " Misunderstood," while Du Maurier, who illustrated it, told me he had to draw the odious little hero (for himself only, of course, not for publication) with a pipe in his mouth and a mug of beer by his side, or he should have wept aloud over Miss Montgomery's very maudlin infant and his own beautiful and pathetic sketches. I was not in London at the time of Dickens' death and burial in the Abbey, so can give no account of it, but I constantly see his slab, bearing name and date only, and on the anniversary of his death a few flowers ; but had I been in his place, I would rather have been laid to sleep near Gad's Hill, the home he coveted as a small and very poor boy, and which he earned by the might of his own right hand. To me, at any rate, the present grotesque appearance given to the Abbey by the frightful statues, which make it look like Madame Tussaud's, does away with the honour of the interment there, but as I am never likely to be a candidate for it, it need not trouble me ; all the same, I should like to see the place cleared of all the horrors, and the noble architecture displayed to advantage. Then, if in the future our heroes were LEAVES FROM A LIFE cremated and neatly arranged in beautifully de- signed urns in some splendid colonnade, the honour would remain, while the Abbey would be beautiful, which no one can honestly say it is now. Neither do I care to sit over the graves of the great de- parted, yet rows of chairs are placed over most of them, and I, at least, do not like to walk over the Gladstones, or many another well-known man or woman who is there laid to rest, notably Robert Browning, for I knew him well, and at one time often met him at many of the houses we used to frequent. In the dajrtftne he always wore a red tie, and had beside that, to mark him out from the rest, the most perfect manner and dehghtfiil way of talking that was possible to find. I was quite young when we met, but I was then enthusiastic over Mrs. Browning's works, and was never tired of reading her "Sonnets from the Portuguese" and " Aurora Leigh," and some timid words of mine made Mr. Browning talk to me on the subject. One could see quite weU he was prouder of her work than of his own, and honestly, much as I like his books, and appreciate, after very severe struggles, " The Ring and the Book," I still prefer her to her husband ; but then I love Longfellow's poetry and Adelaide Anne Proctor's, though I do appreciate Swinburne's marvellous "Atalanta in Calydon," and many modern men, notably the author of " Drake's Drum," and WiUiam Watson at times, which shows I must have a very eclectic mind, at any rate, 152 SOME LITERARY PEOPLE Browning was a short man, always most carefully dressed ; he had a splendid head, and in the days when I knew him his hair and pointed beard were quite white ; he was immensely fond of going into society, and was out every night of the season, while every Svmday afternoon when he was in London he was at Mrs. Proctor's, " Barry Cornwall's "widow, whose gatherings were famous because she never admitted a bore twice, or any one who had not in some way or other contributed to the mental wealth of nations. The last time I saw Mr. Browning was at Mr. Boughton's splendid house on Campden Hill, where we were looking at the pictures ready for the Academy ; he had the usual red tie, and was rather tired and bent; he was good and sweet enough to remember me and to praise — imagine my rapture — some verses of mine which were in the current number of the World ; he then gave me his autograph for a lame invalid friend of mine, whose one great pleasure was the collection of auto- graphs of celebrities, and he not only wrote his name and the date, but a sentence in four or five different languages : French, Italian, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew I am sure of, and I think German was also used, but of this I am not certain. Then he talked of his son Pen, or Pennino, as he was called, and anxiously discussed his pictures. Mr. Browning was certain he would be either a very great artist or a very great sculptor, and asked Papa's advice on the subject. Papa advised pictures; they were less expensive, he remarked, than sculpture, and I 153 LEAVES FROM A LIFE have a slight remembrance of seeing a picture painted by young Browning, but as far as I know he has never become famous in either line. Well ! it does not matter ; he was the worshipped son of two of the great people of our time, and if he has not fulfilled all they wished for him, they," at any rate, were quite satisfied with their boy, I can well recollect Robert Browning waxing enthusiastic over his wife's work and his son's future; I do not recollect his saying much about his own poems. I know the "Browning" Societies used to amuse him, and he was particularly tickled by the solemn dissolving of the Browning Society of Girton ; a girl I knew from her "long-clothes" stage was the treasurer, and when the society came to an end, the treasurer voted that the money in hand should be spent on chocolate. Much to the wrath of the authorities, the matter reached the ear of " Mr. Punch," and an account of the episode was given in Browningesque metre, that caused the unrighteous to laugh and drew down scorn on Girton generally. In those days, too, the sweet girl graduate was not taken very seriously, and her general unkempt appearance, and her supposed scorn for men and the domestic life, made it easy to wax hilarious at her expense. I had never any personal acquaintance with Tennyson, and I have only seen him once or twice, the last time at The Promise of May, a play he wrote, and which was produced by Charles Kelly, the actor, and which I could never com- 154 SOME LITERARY PEOPLE prehend the failure of. It was a charming play, I thought, so dainty and pretty, but the British public would have none of it, although the late Lord Queensberry gave it a splendid advertisement by rising in the stalls and denouncing the hero, who was supposed to be an agnostic, as a caricature of the real thing. It was an extremely amusing episode, but I do not think Tennyson enjoyed it ; anyhow the play soon came off, and neither Chris- tian nor agnostic was a penny the worse. I always regret the fiasco ; the scene in the hayfield was charming, and I especially remember the song, " The Promise of May," and the delightful scenery that really did get the look of the country over the footlights, if not the scent of the hay itself. One of the most delightful members of our especial set was Dr. John Doran, for many years the editor of the Athenceum, whose memory appears very faint nowadays, for few people appear to have heard of him. He was a slight, precise man, with delightfiil manners, and a charming way of talking that I think is now well-nigh extinct. His wife, we always privately thought, must have stood as a model to Dickens for Mrs. Nickleby ; if she did not, all I can say is that she was a re-incarnation of that good lady. She had the same flow of inconsequent talk, which never stopped for one moment, and the same happy way of mixing her metaphors. All the same, she was very kind and good and much adored by her husband, and I fancy she must have been very LEAVES FROM A LIFE pretty, but she was not young when I knew her first, and had a couple of grown-up children, one married, and the other a celebrated doctor, who is now the sole survivor of the family. Dr. Doran told me that he had the most vivid recollection of the Princess Charlotte, and that he considered her very hke the late Queen in her youth; he also told me that she had extremely pretty feet and ankles, and that once he met her coming out of Carlton House to get into her carriage, and as he stood on one side waiting to see her depart,- she raised the edge of her scanty skirt coquettishly and glanced at him under her eyelashes, as much as to say, " Young man, I hope you saw and duly admired my foot." He also told me that nothing any one had experienced in our time could equal the awful week that succeeded her early death. People went about as if they were stunned, a black cloud seemed to envelop England, and no one appeared to laugh or even smile for weeks after. No one, he said, could conceive the effect it had : there was only the life of the Regent and the mad King between England and the hated and loathed Duke of Cumberland, and he declared no one breathed freely until the Regent's brothers married and children once more began to be found in the royal nurseries. From his description of the days after Princess Charlotte's death I should think they resembled that awftd, never-to-be-forgotten week of the Boer War, when our lads were shot down by the hundred, and what 156 SOME LITERARY PEOPLE for ? At the moment of writing the British public is going mad over Botha, and it seems to me that the blood of our boys is crying aloud from the stained and blackened soil. At all events, the death of the Princess had none of the shame we felt that hideous week, and after all it was the best thing that could have happened for our country, another reason for waiting to judge the meaning of events until we can get them well into focus through the help of time. Another thing Dr. Doran told me was that Queen Adelaide had given the very strictest orders that when she died she should not be embalmed, and par- ticular instructions were written down by her and handed to the proper authorities. She died at Bentley Priory, a big house at Stanmore, afterwards a hotel, and the moment she was dead three loud knocks came at the front door. One of the weeping domestics went to open the door, and a couple of black figures glided into the hall and were making their way up the stairs without a word. The servant sprang after them and barred the way. "You cannot go up; the Queen Dowager has only just died." " We must ; we are the Queen's embalmers," replied the men, whom the terrified footman really began to think were ghosts or something uncanny, and were passing on and upward when, fortunately, some one in authority came, explained that their gruesome services were not required, and two very disappointed and dis- comfited ghouls returned home, and the Queen 157 LEAVES FROM A LIFJl was buried in a natural and proper manner in the ordinary course. Dr. Doran was never a very strong man, and always looked fragile, but I think was over seventy when he died. He was devoted to my mother, and when she went to see him on his death-bed he told her that if it were possible he would live every moment of his life over again, and he meant it. His last words were, " Nearihg the great mystery," and he died, as he had lived, one of the gentlest, kindest and most charming of men. I do not think there was anything he did not know or could not talk about, or anything that he had not seen, and we were aU very fond of hirn and also of his daughter, whose pathetic life was brought to a close in middle life, one of the victims of the Boer War. Her eldest and darling boy was shut up in Ladysmith and reported kiUed on Waggon HiU ; it was not true, and she never believed it really, yet the cruel suspense preyed on her, developed and accentuated the disease of which she ostensibly died, and though the boy lived to come home, she was dead and buried ; and now he, too, is dead out in South Africa, that land of horror and crime ; for though he did not die in the siege, he died of it, as did more than one mother and son I have known. No daughter ever wor- shipped her father as Florence Holtz worshipped Dr. Doran ; her heart broke when he died, and when one of her own boys died from an accident at school, her last whisper to him was a message for " Dear JS8 SOME LITERARY PEOPLE Grandpapa." It is to be hoped they are all together now, or at any rate sleep on unrecking of the griefs and sorrows they here endured. Shirley Brooks was, I think, by far the most intimate friend we had among the hterary men of the time, for though Mrs. Dickens was a very close friend of my mother's, and Papa saw Dickens con- stantly, we really only knew him through his books, and he never made one of our Sunday dinner- parties. It was a barren week indeed when we did not see the Brookses when we were in toWn, and when we were not they either stayed with us for at least ten days or took rooms in the same watering- place we honoured by our presence. Shirley Brooks was the most genial and riotously amusing of men, and he used to " play " with us all in the extra- ordinary manner that we loved. I have known us all, from Papa downwards, steeplechase all up and down the two drawing-rooms, leaping over every obstacle which came in our way in the shape of chairs and sofas, while Mama and Mrs. Shirley Brooks tried in vain to look severe and stop us, until we were too breathless to speak ; then we would have a " quiet " game of cards, grab, animal grab, or some such peaceable pastime, the quietness of which once resulted in a call from the police. This is an absolute truth, because we were all screaming at the top of our voices, and they thought something must be wrong. A half-crown and a glass of something proved to their satisfac- tion that things were very much aU right, and we ^S9 LEAVES FROM A LIFE were never troubled by the authorities again. But, oh ! what should I say now if my opposite neigh- bours acted as we used to do ? Well, I can only hope they will not, and that if they do, I shall try and remember that we once were raided by the police. 1 60 CHAPTER VIII MORE LITERARY FOLK : BUT PARTICULARLY SHIRLEY BROOKS I CANNOT remember the first time I saw Shirley Brooks, but as he was a pretty regular visitor to Pembridge Villas in 1864, he must have been an early acquaintance, and from the first I was his especial pet and companion. Whenever he stayed with us, he and I used to take long steady walks, and I well recoUect a very long one we took in the year 1867, when we were staying at Ramsgate, when he and 1 tramped to Sandwich and back in a small drizzling rain, talking hard aU the time on every subject under the sun. From my earliest days, even before Mary Eliza Joy's efforts spurred us into action, I was always intending to write, and Shirley Brooks often told me . he had not the least doubt that some day I might be able to do so. But at the same time he duly impressed upon me the fact — ^which, despite the extreme youth of the journalist of to-day, I still believe in — that a young person of seventeen or so could not possibly have anything to tell the world that the world wanted L i6i LEAVES FROM A LIFE to hear, and that the best thing 1 could do was to read good literature, and the second best to listen to the pearls of wisdom which fell from his own lips, and from those of other equally distinguished people who dined at our father's house. I possess a power that Edmund Yates used to share of hearing aU that is said by every one at the table or in a room, while carrying on a conversation with some one particular person, and a more tiresome characteristic I for one do not know. Edmund Yates, however, could refrain from dashing head- long into some one else's part of the talk should it be more interesting than his special one. I cannot, especially if some one is speaking on a subject I understand, and he or she does not : then dash in I must, often to the unspeakable annoyance of those who were interrupted. I am very much afraid that Shirley Brooks used to incite me to this, and as one or two of the people who came to our house were disliked by him, notably a relation by mar- riage, hght skirmishing would often occur across the flowers on the dinner-table, while Shirley chuckled hilariously and egged me on to the fray. I do not believe people laugh, or know how to laugh, nowadays as we used to laugh ; but oh ! how we did enjoy life ; and oh ! what small and absurd things we used to laugh at ! Furthermore, 1 suppose people had more time then than they have now, for Mr. Brooks used to write us endless letters, and carried on a long and ridiculous corres- pondence with Papa on the model of some mad 162 MORE LITERARY FOLK letters which were sent about broadcast in those days by a rehgious maniac who called herself Cottle, and worshipped some creature known to her as " She- gog." Papa was always Cottle, and I fancy Mr. Brooks posed as the immaculate and all-powerful Shegog ! and I for one never remember Papa being called anything but Cottle by Shirley Brooks. Mr. Brooks was a squarely-made man, about the usual middle-height of those days, and aU the time 1 knew him his hair and beard were grey, an iron grey, streaked with white ; he, too, wore his hair rather long, and had a most hilarious laugh, which he varied by a veritable " snort " — there is no other word for it — when he was annoyed, which, however, was not very often. He had the delightful habit of telling us his jokes before they appeared in Punch ; and when he became Editor in 1870 — alas ! I was then married and out of that bright and jovial circle — he used to show us the coming number on the Sunday, before the public could have it on Wednesday ; and for the last four years of his life he used to write to me once a week, because he knew what I did not realise, how frightfully I should miss the happy household and circle at home ; and furthermore, he used to send me what he called "the waste-paper basket from Mr. Punch's office ; " a collection of the so-called jokes and the many suggestions sent to Mr. Punch to embellish his pages. Those were not the days o snap-shots, and, will it be beheved, that one of these offerings consisted of a careful photograph of a 163 LEAVES FROM A LIFE room ; more photographs of all the people present on the momentous occasion; and finally the por- trait, carefiilly drawn and tinted in water-colour, of the talented infant whose sayings were " sent to Punch" and consigned to the waste-paper basket, via which capacious vehicle they came on to me ? I have a great horror of letters that were never meant to be printed being published, and so had Shirley Brooks ; he would never have written to me as fully as he did had I not burned every letter he wrote me when it was replied to, and I was never more thankful in my life that I had done so than when, after his ever-to-be-lamented death, his son Reginald wrote to me and demanded his father's letters in the character of executor ; saying he had a legal right to do so. I am glad to say I had not one scrap of his writing left ; had those letters been published, there would have been a considerable amount of " fat in the fire," and a good deal of pain given to many worthy, if duU folk, and small and aspiring literati. Shirley Brooks was the best of fiiends, but he was also the most excellent hater I think I ever met ; and if we wanted to obtain a rise out of him, we had nothing to do but mention the " Claimant," and he would go off wildly at a tangent and hit out all round. I had special means of tormenting him, for my husband had tenants in Poole and the neighbourhood who swore by " Sir Roger," and who even to this day are convinced he was the rightful heir. I am afraid some of them argued very much on the lines that a man did we 164 MORE LITERARY FOLK once heard holding forth in the Park : " Well ! pore chap, if he is a butcher, there's no reason why he shouldn't have his rights ; " but all the same, there were those who honestly believed in the man, and to such an extent that they invested in the " Titch- borne " bonds, which Grantley Berkeley, and others who ought to have known better, raised to keep the wretched creature going until he came " into his rights." Of course, those " in the know " knew there was a near relationship to Sir Roger's father, and that the Orton blend was sup- phed by the mother ; all the same, I used to delight in retailing to Mr. Brooks how such and such a tenant had recognised the shirts she used to wash for him; and, indeed, if the man had had the " plenty brains " he suggested he pos- sessed, he must have won his case, there were so many good and respectable folk ready to swear to his identity. But I heard him describe the house near Poole he was supposed to own quite wrongly, when, for the mere railway fare, he could have gone down and verified his facts, while no one but an idiot would have gone near Wapping, a thing which Shirley Brooks remarked, with one of his fiercest snorts, gave the man away at once. Anytiiing like pretence or sham roused the lion in Mr. Brooks in a moment, and I once had the pleas ui e of seeing him sit hard and heavUy on a well-known explorer, who had just returned from an historic and somewhat theatrically-managed expedition into the then little-known Central African forests. The I.6S LEAVES FROM A LIFE origin of this man was not aristocratic, but it was nothing to be ashamed of, and Mr. Brooks honestly thought he was doing him a good turn by teUing him he had seen his parents in Wales quite recently, and they were longing to welcome their- son as soon as he could be spared from the lion- ising he would have to undergo. " I have no people in Wales," he replied, and turned his back on Mr. Brooks, who stood flabbergasted. " Well ! that's a good 'un," he remarked ; " they keep a toU-bar ; their name is Thomas, and they showed me your letters ; but if you don't care to know they are aUve and your parents, I don't see why 1 should trouble about it;" and he turned away and left me to the tender mercies of the explorer, who was, hke Pet Marjorie's turkey, "imusual carlm, and did not say a single darmn," at least loud enough for me to hear. I find I wrote of that evening : " The great man took me in to dinner, much to my alarm, and I do not like him at all ; he is short, and speaks with a snap and a snarl, and I am certain he is a cruel wretch." After events proved my theory to be a correct one, but all the same I foxmd him interesting to talk with, though Shirley Brooks kept an angry eye on him, and never forgot that he had denied his own folk. Another still more trying episode took place in our drawing-room some five or six years before, or rather more than that, perhaps, between Sala and Bret Harte, and for once in my life I really did 1 66 MORE LITERARY FOLK wish I were dead. Sala had not long come back from the American War, where he had served as special correspondent with the North, I think for the Daily Telegraph, and we found him most enthral- lingly interesting, more especially as he knew all the battle-songs, and sang " Maryland, my Mary- land," in a way I have never forgotten. I do not mean to say he sang in the accepted or professional sense of the word, but he declaimed the words to music in such a manner that one longed to go out and fight, and 1 for one could have wept with sheer delight at the melodies. I have often wished a collection could be made of the words and music of the songs of both North and South. Another song, which began, "Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord," yet haunts me, and I should dearly like to hear them all over again. Papa had just made the acquaintance of Bret Harte, and he thought it would be charming to arrange a meeting between him and Sala, and one of our great dinner-parties was organised, with Bret Harte as the guest of the evening. I cannot recollect who else was present, for what happened put every- thing else out of our heads. Mr. and Mrs. Sala arrived early, and Mr. Sala was talking to me in the inner drawing-room when Bret Harte was announced. I noticed Mr. Sala start and look out eagerly into the other room ; but before he could move. Papa came up with Bret Harte, saying, " I want to introduce my old friend Sala to you, Mr. Harte." Sala got up ; but before anything else could be said, Bret Harte 167 LEAVES FROM A LIFE looked straight at Sala, and remarked quite coolly, " Sorry to make unpleasant scenes, but I am not going to be introduced to that scoundrel." Imagine the sensation, if you can 1 Papa protested, and tried to make some sort of a modus vivendi between the two men, but it ended by poor Sala and his wife going into the httle library, and waiting there until a cab could be fetched, and they left us without their dinner. Afterwards Mr. Sala said that Bret Harte had been furiously angry with him about the manner in which he had written of some lady who had carried despatches during the American War. I beheve she was an individual well known to a great many people, and that her name was fair game ; all the same, Bret Harte had taken up the cudgels in her defence frantically in America, had tried to find Sala there, and had absolutely sworn to shoot him if ever he came across him in any eligible spot. Fortunately, he did not come to Pembridge Villas armed ; had he done so, I really am afraid he would have done as he had sworn, and shot poor Mr. Sala on sight, for never before nor since have I seen a man in such a fearful rage as he was on that occasion. Sala owned he had given Bret Harte provocation, and suggested that he should be the one to leave, and, indeed, I do not think Bret Harte himself thought of going, but merely that he would kick Sala, despite the presence of ladies, if he remained ; but the evening was naturally not a success, and per- sonally I could never like Bret Harte at all. i68 MORE LITERARY FOLK Sala was a stout man, and I principally connect him with a very wide white waistcoat and a very florid face. He was an acute critic, and was always present at the Private View of the Royal Academy, when he and Papa used to squabble amicably, yet frantiqally, for the mere sight of a critic drove the former wild, and though he was greatly attached to Mr. Sala as Sala, Sala as a critic roused him to frenzy, and they used to go at " Art " hammer and tongs in the most entertaining manner possible. Bret Harte was a very different- looking man : he had bushy hair, very piercing eyes, and a moustache which soon became white. He was apparently deeply attached to his children, and he told me a very funny story about one of them which, I fear, has appeared in print, but not with the names attached. Anyhow it is, I think, worth re-teUing. Harte was sitting in his study half asleep, when he heard a small voice say, in very small tones, " Does oo love Dord, fly ? " Then in a still smaller voice the fly was supposed to reply, " Yes." Bret Harte turned round, and as the youth gently squashed the fly on the window-pane he heard him say, " Then oo s'aU see Dord, fly." His poem, " On the Staircase," was suggested by his children, but he could not have been really fond of them, for he joined forces with some one else's establishment where he lived very comfortably until the day of his death, leaving his family to its own devices. Sala and his quiet wife, who died in Australia 169 LEAVES FROM A LIFE when he was there on a lecturing tour, and to whose tender care he owed very much of his success, were very often at our house, and we hked Mrs. Sala very much. She was very retiring and timid, and we heard afterwards that she had not been Mrs. Sala quite as long as she ought to have been, but really in those very Bohemian days marriage certificates were taken much as a matter of course, and I am sure no women ever made better wives than those I knew in the days long before " votes for women," or the " emancipated female," were ever heard of. Sala was a most tremendously hard worker, and was, I should think, one of the greatest among the *' young lions" of ,the Daily Telegraph. His criticisms on art made Papa rabid, but I believe they were good. All the same. Papa invariably declared that no man became an art critic until he had failed as an artist, a remark which had sufficient truth in it to sting, and which drew down vials of wrath on his own head naturaUy on every possible occasion. There were two critics who used to "make for" him especially, and never failed for years to drive us, as a family, raving wild. Papa never read any criticisms, good, bad or indifferent, and remarked very truly, that as long as his pictures sold as they did, what people said about them mattered nothing at all to him, and 1 am equally certain he said what he meant and thought. But I am sure that neither Ruskin nor Stephens, of the Athenceum, could have had the least idea how their ridiculous censure of his work pained his wife and family, or 170 MORE LITERARY FOLK else, if they could not have praised the pictures they would have left them alone, or at least attacked them a little less bitterly and with more fairness than they employed whe;re, at all events, he was concerned. " I ups and paints, hears no complaints. And sells before I'm dry. Till savage Ruskin sticks his tusk in. And all is up with I," was one of the verses Shirley Brooks used to scribble on the name-card put to mark his place at dinner, and either hand to me, or else throw it across the table, retrieving it afterwards with an eye to Punch. But Ruskin never hurt Papa, who had actually to give evidence in his favour in the cele- brated Whistler-Ruskin case, in which Whistler was awarded a farthing damages, which he insisted on having, and wore on his watch-chain for years after ; and Papa's pictures had ceased to sell when Stephens took to praising him in the Athenoeum, a fact which always struck me as very curious. Mr. Stephens was a man one always saw at all of the Private Views, and no doubt elsewhere, though we never did. He wore his hair very long, and was usually attired in a wide " artistic " hat and cloak, while his wife, in an old-fashioned bonnet and shawl, accompanied him and looked after him in a manner touching to behold. He was very lame and plain, and we, as young people, looked upon him as the old gentleman himself, and believed the 171 LEAVES FROM A LIFE lameness came from an ill-concealed cloven hoof. How hilarious the Private Views used to be for us ; and surely the weather must have been warmer then than it is now, for on those occasions we always looked to put on for the first time our summer " Sunday dresses," and these naturally were of thin material, and we were always rather anxious until we had passed the censor, in the shape of Papa, anything outre or "artistic" in dress calling down upon us the most fearful scorn from him. Indeed, I do think he would have kept us to black or white if he could : black because it was unobtrusive, and white because it would not interfere with the colour on the walls ; but London and our very shallow purses forbade white, while what young girl can cheerfully don black ? StiU I remember we often did do so, brightening it up with colour as much as we dared. Once started, we were quite happy and thoroughly enjoyed our- selves ; but then the Private View meant seeing all our friends; it did not mean gaping at actresses and " beauties," or listening to the vapid talk one hears nowadays, and that can be found in the columns of any so-called Society paper. People used to be enthusiastic about the pictures and the literary people who were always present, and it was dehghtful to go round the rooms vsdth Shirley Brooks and hear all he had to say, while every now and then a specially loud snort would draw attention to some outrageous picture, or perhaps to the presence of some one or other he par- 172 MORE LITERARY FOLK ticularly disliked. One person he did not like was, astonishing to say, the present poet laureate, to whom we, as girls, were deeply attached ; indeed I may say romantically attached in a school-girl sort of fashion ; and personally 1 shall always like him extremely, though 1 think the last time I saw him was at his wedding on the 14th of November, 1865. It was a very quiet ceremony, in one of the churches in the Marylebone Road. I suppose a first ceremony must have taken place at a registry office, for Alfred Austin is a Roman Catholic, and I think the Yateses and I were about the only wit- nesses. The bride was perfectly beautiful, tall and stately, and with quantities of the most exquisite hair, and we were all very much struck by her appearance : they went off from the church on their honeymoon, and I have certainly never seen her since that day. In 1863 and 1864 we used to see a very great deal of Austin, and he most certainly was a very delightful companion, and used to talk to us as if we were grown up, which naturally flat- tered us ; but I see, on referring to a diary I kept, he used to be considered a bore by me, possibly because he preferred my eldest sister, which, of course, must have been very annoying. He leaped into sudden fashion by the production of a " poem " called " The Season : A Satire." All I can remember of it is the one pleasing line, "Where men half-drunk lean over the half- dressed " ; and I have no doubt the rest was equally 173 LEAVES FROM A LIFE pretty, for Mama took the book away from us forcibly, and she never did that unless she had some excellent reasons for proceeding to extremities. I think, after my sister became engaged to be mar- ried, Mr. Austin transferred his affections (strictly platonic ones) to me, for in 1864 I went to stay with him at a charming house he had in Hertford- shire, where I and Mr. and Mrs. Yates had a most delightful time. It was the middle of summer, and blazing hot, and the red geraniums appeared to glow against the green of the lawn, while the blue lobelias and yellow calceolarias glowed too, and glittered in the great heat of the sun. The house was built in the shape of an L ; the first part contained the dining-room and study, and the bottom of the letter was the drawing-room, and all, of course, had bed-rooms over. Mr. Austin was then engaged in novel- writing : he wrote three, but not one was a success ; and he used to retire to his study as soon as he had located us in the drawing- room, with strict injunctions not to fidget about in the garden in front of his windows ; he would then be unseen until luncheon, when he would emerge from his study triumphant, or downcast, as the morning's work had turned out ; if triumphant, we heard aU that he had done, if downcast, the faithful Mary suffered a good bit, and I fancy we should have done so too had he been able to snub us. But it would have taken a very great deal to snub the Yateses and myself in those halcyon 174 MORE LITERARY FOLK days. Mr. Austin was always rather haughty and distant in his dealings with domestics, but Mama had found him Mary, and she secretly worshipped him. I remember he was on the point, one morn- ing, of leaving Mrs. Yates and myself to repair to the study as usual, when, just as he was turning to go, he saw that Mary had left some of her implements behind her. He rang the bell, and when she appeared he drew himself up to his full height, something under five feet, and remarked severely, " Mary, take away yon dush and bruster." We simply screamed with laughter, and he, wither- ing us with one of his severest glances, stalked away to his study and did not forgive us until the evening was half gone. Then he invited me to walk up the delicious grass walk under the roses to the top of the garden, ostensibly to hear the nightingales, really to lecture me on my behaviour before a maid- servant; but the Yateses were up to him, and before he had half done they came and rescued me, and we then found he really was not aware of the ridiculous turn he had given to the domestic tragedy of the brush and duster. This was years and years before the publication of his delightful and faultless book, " The Garden that I Love ; " and I have no doubt, if I could see it now, I should not admire the glow of " primary colours," as we all did then ; but even in those days Mr. Austin was a splendid gardener, and the garden always remains to me as one perfect picture of beauty and real summer weather. 175 LEAVES FROM A LIFE When we were good, Mr. Austin used to give us each a rose, and I really think I ceased to worship him from afar when I caught him stand- ing on a chair to put Mrs. Yates' rose in her splendid black hair; she was very tall and he was not ; yet if he wanted to be worshipped, he should not have done such a ridiculous thing. Edmund Yates and I simply doubled up with laughter and escaped to the uttermost ends of the garden; we dare not let him discover that we had seen him, though Mrs. Yates had perceived us, and was hardly able to be stiU until the rose was arranged to his satisfaction. After luncheon we always used to go for a drive, Mr. Yates and 1 clinging on to the back of a dog-cart, and Mrs. Yates sitting in front with Mr. Austin as driver ; but Edmund and I generally "came walking home ; " the back seat of a dog-cart is rather a desperate place, and really sometimes I think we were both a little de trap. No one who ever saw Mrs. Yates could avoid falling in love with her ; I am sure I could not, and Edmund was quite used to men being hopelessly " gone " on his exquisite wife ; indeed, we have all laughed together after seeing some of her rapid conquests ; but she was actually and positively the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and I have seen and worshipped many. No one ever came up to, or can come up to, what she was, to my mind, to the date of her death, only two or three years ago, and when I knew her first she was in the very zenith of her J 76 MORE LITERARY FOLK beauty Tall, with exquisite hands and feet, and a perfect figure, and, as I said before, a wealth of magnificent hair, she had one of the most charming speaking voices 1 ever heard ; and she was kindness and goodness itself to me; but no one has ever preserved her beauty for posterity; photographs were ridiculous caricatures, and though Papa painted her, the picture was not a success : it was like and yet not like : anyhow, it never gave one the slightest idea of her loveliness of form and feature. Under the most foolish advice from some woman, who, I can but think, was jealous of its splendour, she once was siUy enough to turn her hair the " fashionable " auburn shade ; but we all exclaimed we could not bear it, and soon it was allowed to return in a measure to its first state ; but it never really was at its best again untU it turned grey ; then it was once more perfect, and remained so until she passed away. I must relate one or two sUly httle'incidents about our stay with Mr. Austin before I speak of dear, good, kind Edmund Yates, who was my never- failing, true, staunch friend, and whom I loved from the day when I saw him first, when I was nine, and he was about twenty-nine or thirty, until he too died. While we were at Austin's there was in London a perfect rage for table-turning, an account of which wUl be found in another chapter, and of course we were one and all the greatest non- believers ; and being reinforced that special even- ing by Papa, who had arrived, I think, to take M 177 LEAVES FROM A LIFE me home the next day, were very scornful when Mr. Austin, in his most didactic manner, declared that there might be something in it after all; " some force we do not understand ; nothing to do with spirits ; ridiculous, that ; but still a force ; " and at last we aU sat round a very heavy marble- topped table he had imported from Italy, and joining our little fingers, waited solemnly for the thing to move. We did behave ; Mr. Austin kept a severe eye on us, and we were as meek as we could be, when suddenly the great heavy table began to revolve slowly, slowly, then faster, and we had to rise and allow it to walk down the two or three steps which led into the garden and a little way up the garden path. Mrs. Yates, the moment the movement began, had gone back to the sofa, declaring she would have nothing to do with the uncanny thing, but we four others kept our hands on it the whole time. Finally it walked back up the steps. Papa took his hands oflF, and so did I and the others ; we most hkely gave it some impetus, I cannot tell ; but the table span across the room by itself, and finally anchored in Mrs. Yates' lap, and she rose with a wild yeU and fled from -the room. The three men declared they had not pushed. I know I did not. I am equally certain that spirits had nothing to do with it ; we may have exercised some unknown power, just as people can lift enormous weights if they know how to adjust their strength in the right place. I cannot explain, any more than I can explain how Home — 178 MORE LITERARY FOLK Daniel Home or Hume, he spelled his name some- times one way, sometimes in another — caused the grand piano in the Bellew's drawing-room to rise a couple of feet from the floor apparently by merely placing his hands upon it. I saw him do it, but as surely as I saw it so surely did the " spirits," who- ever they may be, have nothing whatever to do with the matter. The other incident was that I was saved by my sense of the ludicrous from being embarrassed by a first proposal ; but never can 1 forget the sheer agony of the poor young man's mother lest I should have sinister designs on her one ewe lamb. I met the youth at a charming garden party at Panshanger, where we had seen the beautiful pictures and place, and had thoroughly enjoyed ourselves before the rest of the people arrived, for we were asked to luncheon, and I believe the young man really did admire me, though I was not quite sixteen, and stUl in short frocks, for he began to haunt us, and turned up at every party or gathering at which we were present. I then had not the smallest notion of the tremendous and absolutely idiotic idea county famihes had of their own importance, and that in their eyes an enormous gulf yawned between the daughter of an artist in a Bohemian set and the stodgy exclusive- ness of the dull old people, whose only claim to being considered at all, consisted in their having lived in one place for a certain number of years, during which time they had neither added to their 179 LEAVES FROM A LIFE knowledge or anything else. To me that special family was a mere butt for satire ; the widowed mother was propriety itself; she had one very good and very dowdy daughter in very plain raiment, and she was the proud proprietor also of this one son. I can yet see her species of "turkey-cock" agitation when her beloved Charles eagerly joined our train and endeavoured to inveigle me away from the crowd to a more retired spot, where he bored me consumedly by cross-examining me on my hkes and dislikes, while his Mama, puffing and grunting, "faint, but pursuing," followed us and endeavoured to save her boy from my contamina- ting presence. I really was so innocent that I had not the smallest idea of the tragi-comedy ia which I was acting a principal part. Charles did not appeal to me at all, and I was more astonished than I can say when Mrs. Yates called me out to her in the garden and handed me a letter to read. It was a very civil invitation to us all to repair to Charles's house to luncheon on the following day. Then she handed me another from Charles himself begging her to accept his mother's invitation, and to excuse the formality of the wording : " My dear mother does not often entertain." I read that and looked at Mrs. Yates. "Oh! don't let us go," I said; " the old woman is such a bore, and she hates me," I said. " Well," said easy Mrs. Yates, " of course it rests with you ; " and she then explained that if we did go it would be tantamount to my accepting " Charles " and becoming a member of that any- i8o MOUE LITERARY FOLK thing but hilarious family party. Needless to state, the invitation was politely but firmly declined, but the next day the family barouche appeared at Mr. Austin's gate, and mother and son ahghted ; but I at once and immediately behaved so disgracefully that they both departed, and I lost my one and only chance of becoming a member of a " county family." Long afterwards I saw the marriage of the foolish Charles in the Times, and I have often wondered if his mother were satisfied, and if the unfortunate bride were as duU as her husband's people ; if not, and if she had the least originality about her, she must have expired from sheer ennui years and years ago. i8i CHAPTER IX STILL MOBE LITERARY FOLK I THINK I have said a good deal about Mrs. Yates, but not anything about Edmund, who was always called by his Christian name except when we wished to annoy him ; then we called him Hodg- son ; the fact that he possessed this hideous cogno- men, as well as his more euphonious one of Edmund, being one that he carefully concealed from every one as long as he could do so. I have had and known many good and delightful friends, but I have never had such a true and constant one as Mr. Yates. When I married I passed out of the im- mediate ken of my acquaintance. Londoners have short memories, and I was soon forgotten by most. But never for one instant did Edmund Yates forget me ; he always wrote to me, always made a point of seeing me whenever I was in town, and when I began to write, about 1881, he it was who en- couraged me to the utmost, gave me aU the space he could in his paper and magazines, and made a very bright spot always in my life. When I first knew him Edmund Yates was a clerk in the Post 182 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK Office, and 1 think he, Mrs. Yates, and their four boys lived in Avenue Road, St. John's Wood, but they so often moved their residence that I am not quite sure if they were there or at Notting Hill. When he was first married he lived in Doughty Street, close to the Dickenses, and his mother shared their establishment, and both he and his wife have told me how they all quarrelled ; the imperious old lady, once a distinguished actress, would not take a back seat, while Mrs. Edmund flatly refused to obey her mother-in-law, and in consequence ructions were constantly taking place between them. I fear the book is forgotten long ago, but Mr. Yates' novel, " Broken to Harness," was founded on the experiences of the first year or two in Doughty Street, and we used to tease Mrs. Yates about this whenever we got a chance. It is curious that Edmund Yates, who was born in a theatre practically, also practically died in one. His mother was acting in Edin- burgh just before he put in an appearance in this world, and the theatre was in those days connected either with an hotel or some house where his birth took place ; while he fell stricken for death at the theatre, and was taken to an hotel to die two or three days before he would have signed a lease for a house he was about to take, as he told me pathetically, because one must have a place to die in. But in the early days no one thought less of death or loved life more than did Edmund Yates, and he was one of the most joyfiil of our joyous band. 183 LEAVES FROM A LIFE When he was in the Post Office he used to save me all kinds of " tentative " stamps, designs sent in by ambitious folk, who thought they could improve on the ones in use, and went to endless expense in placing their effiarts before the authori- ties. One was for an vmiversal " ocean penny postage." I much regret that I sold my collection of stamps when I did. These, and the Mulready envelopes, would be much more valuable nowadays, • but money was scarce, and I never could keep a proper look-out for a future that, after all, might never come at all. More than once, too, he brought us specimens from what was called the "blind" department of the Post Office, weird envelopes, the addresses on which had been deciphered by the experts, who were called " blind " because they could see so extremely well. I recollect one that had some German's name on followed by this cryptic sentence: "Braidbant, Don brischwelsch." This is really Parade Band, Tunbridge Wells. One has to say it aloud once or twice and allow for the Teutonic pronunciation, and then one sees quite weU how it was reached at last. The way people went out of their way to trouble the Post Office was remark- able ; they would draw objects supposed to repre- sent the names of houses or districts, and when an arrangement of very long letters crossing each other was much used for puzzles, folks were found feeble enough to address their envelopes in a similar style, while yet another form of idiot would use a cypher, never thinking how he was 184 ^ STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK adding to the work of an always over- worked departnient. The Post Office is and was very clever, but it has never yet found out a means of tracing letters either lost in the post or stolen on their way through the hands of the postal authorities. One writes, has a visit from a pohte official, and finally, after a long time, receives a further form regretting that no trace can be found of the missing letter, and really I am always surprised that letters arrive at all, and it speaks volumes for the postmen that so few are lost. All the same, Yates was always endeavouring to find some scheme that would answer, but he never did. He was particularly anxious to find out how and when letters were posted, because Mama consulted him on a question that for months puzzled our whole household : except myself : in the most mysterious manner. My eldest sister was always romantic, always hoping some one would fall in love with her, and always meant to be married as soon as she possibly could, and as she was engaged twice, if not three times, and married just after her eighteenth birth- day, I must confess she carried out her plans in a remarkably systematic manner. When she was just seventeen, she was not only very pretty but very sentimental, and I had very little patience with her, and as we had nothing at all in common, we did not get on as weU as sisters are supposed to do. I have a very peppery temper ; she had not, and in consequence managed, by putting me into i8s LEAVES FROM A LIFE one of my rages, to show that I was in the wrong whether I was or not. At last I all by myself declared to myself I would score off her, and by playing on her vanities and affectations amuse myself and enrage her at the same time. I started by writing her frantic love-letters signed " Gerald." The first begged her to go out wearing a red bow on her jacket, and when I saw her come down attired for our usual walk with the governess wearing the red bow, I well-nigh expired with joy. Of course the letters went on and on, getting warmer and warmer, untQ she coyly consulted Mama, who was immensely shocked and promptly impounded the red bow. Considering I was not fifteen, and had no confederate until it became necessary to post the letters in different parts of Englanfl, I really cannot understand how I conducted the business. The letters took in not only my sister, but Mama and Papa and Edmund Yates as weU, for when he was called into a species of family council and asked if the postal authorities could not trace the letters, not even he had a suspicion they were a hoax, and he agreed with my people that such a persecution should be stopped. In one I suggested an answer should be sent at such a time to such a shop, and I had the supreme joy of seeing Mama and a poUceman waiting for " Gerald," Gerald walking meekly past in frock and hat with the governess, and being able to keep her coun- tenance under even these trying circumstances. i86 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK Finally "Gerald" became a bore, his death was announced in some paper, I think the York Herald, the Times would have been far beyond my purse, a black-edged letter posted for me by a young uncle in some northern town announced his demise, heartbroken, to my sister, and the whole thing bid fair to die and be forgotten when, to my horror, one of my smaller sisters, looking in my desk for something she wanted, and which she had no earthly business to touch, found copies of some of the " Gerald " letters, and I can never forget the fearful explosion of wrath that they evoked. Edmund Yates, however, simply screamed with laughter. That 1 had succeeded in taking them all in, including himself, struck him as simply too splendid a joke for words. He calmed the maternal wrath, and made a joke out of what bid fair to be a very uncomfortable matter for some time at least for me. My sister herself never mentioned " Gerald " to me : she had believed in him far too implicitly for that, and I really do think, albeit I confessed freely how all had been managed in the way of postage, letter paper, and so on, she always believed that there was a real " Gerald," and that I had only invented my part in it, and that I had never really written the letters at all. When Edmund Yates was at the Post Office, he used to write hard at home as well: and I think myself he was one of the best all-round men of that particular date in the journalistic world, for nothing came amiss to him. He would describe the first 187 LEAVES FROM A LIFE night of a play, criticise an exhibition of pictures, write stories and novels and some of the brightest and wittiest verses possible, and all without the smallest efFort. I do not know when he left the Post OflSce, but I should think about the same time as Anthony Trollope did, but he worked fear- fully hard and was always jolly and dehghtful. At one time of his career he and his lovely wife were taken in hand by a "great lady," and were very prominently put forward in the world of fashion, and with dire results : work as hard as he could, he could not make enough to keep himself afloat ; it was the case of the iron pot and the china pot going down the stream together ; he came a finan- cial cropper, and for a time at least retired into more private life. The great lady's affection was for Mrs. Yates, but the husband chose to think it was for Edmund, and he made what in lower life would be called " a row." I think the family, which hated the Yateses for some reason or other, egged the husband on ; at any rate, there was a last interview arranged for when letters were given up, letters about house-hunting and other fooUsh matters, and Yates left the room while the footmen were bringing in the tea. Fortimately for him, for not long after he left, the great lady was found dead, her head on the fender where she had fallen in a fit, and had her servants not seen her alive after Edmimd had gone out, Heaven alone knows what might not have been suggested. That special family was one year at the same i88 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK watering-placewherewe were,andwe then saw a good deal of them, and I fancy, too, that at that special place they made the Yates' acquaintance; at any rate, they made ours, and it was one we none of us could bear. There were three or four girls and one son ; he was quiet and nice, but mother and daughters were our abominations : the eldest girl was engaged to be married, and she used to take me out for walks and cry and declare she hated her future husband, but when I suggested no one could make her marry him unless she chose, she stared at me as if she thought I was demented ; evidently in that rank " a marriage is arranged " meant what it said and nothing else whatever. After we returned to London I carefully avoided the whole lot, and used to abuse the Yateses for still seeing so much of them, and I think I only saw the young women twice after : once at a dinner at the Yates', when the door flew open and the eldest girl, then married and a mother, rushed into the room and cast herself round her mother's neck and proceeded to go into hysterics, for her httle boy had scarlet fever, and she was in a terrible fright lest she should take it too. Then 1 met one of the younger girls by appoint- ment at one of the Kensington studios to show her some of the pictures of the year : she was attired in her habit, and when we came out the horses had not arrived. Presently the groom came up and was sworn at roundly by her ladyship. I ventured to remark on this, and she repUed, " Nonsense ! it's the only language these people understand." One and 189 LEAVES FROM A LIFE all these girls had very stormy careers, which I watched with interest and with not the least sur- prise at what has happened to them. After Edmund Yates' connection with this family came to an end, we saw a very great deal more of him, and I fancy it was about this time that he started the World, in connection with Henry Labouch^re, and I well recollect my father betting Mr. J. C. Parkinson a new hat that a year would see the end of the paper, and Edmund Yates in greater difficulties than ever, even if he and Labouch^re were not landed in gaol. But for once Papa was wrong, as wrong as when he refused to avail himself of some of the first shares in the Graphic, because he was certain there was not room for another illus- trated paper except our adored Illustrated London News, and when he scoflPed at the notion of a Daily Graphic ever being a success. The World proved an immediate and enormous success ; some financial articles by Mr. Labouch^re, for whose sturdy and witty pen I have the most profound admiration, gave it the first start. Yates made money hand over fist, paid every one every single penny he had ever owed or could be thought to owe, and I should think that for the rest of his life he was in very smooth financial water. To me the World died when he died ; after Mrs. Yates' death I ceased to take it in, and any numbers I have seen casually since then do not appear to me to come within miles of the World as carried on by Edmund Yates, though he did fulfil part of Papa's prophecy, and 190 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK found himself in Holloway, because during his absence abroad, a trusted contributor used the pages of the World to pay off some fancied shght. A criminal action was commenced, Yates would not give his contributor away, and she did not confess ; and he was sent to prison as a first-class misde- meanant. But he could not stand it. Used to come and go as he liked, and when he liked, the confinement nearly maddened him ; he had to rise and go to bed at nursery hours, and soon became so ill the authorities had to release him, and I always think that episode was the first thing which made an inroad into his health, and was the beginning of the end. Yates was a tall, finely-made man, with curly hair and a heavy moustache, which concealed in a measure the fact that he was underhung, and he had a most powerful chin and jaw. He was not good-looking, and naturally the old joke of Beauty and the Beast was repeated more than once about him and his beautiful wife. But he was anything but a beast ; he was the truest, dearest, most honourable of men and friends, and when he died with tragic swiftness I, at any rate, was much poorer by his loss. When one lives out of London for years, and only comes back at intervals for a short space at a time, it is astonishing how utterly out of everything one feels ; the language is different, the subjects of interest are changed, and though in the seventies one did not move as rapidly as one 191 LEAVES FROM A LIFE does nowadays, I used to feel very much out of it, and fearfully " provincial " when I appeared now and again at my father's festive board. But Edmund Yates, and as long as he lived, Shirley Brooks, and of course Mr. Calderon took care that 1 should not be utterly in the shadow, and I have always remembered them gratefully for that. All the same, after I was married, until I began to write myself and make myself heard, I was an " out- sider," and suffered as only an outsider can who has once been not only inside, but part of the very kernel itself. I think just before the starting of the World Edmund Yates and Harold Power got up an entertainment that was to be a vast success, and yet that somehow was not, even in those days of " entertainments " which, from about 1854 until the German Reeds died, were most numerous and successful. The first I remember, but only very slightly, is Albert Smith's, and I should not recollect that if he had not had the splendid St. Bernard dog immortalised by Leech on show, and furthermore sold, or caused to be sold, a species of toy peep-show, which reproduced most of the scenery he described in his lecture on Mont Blanc. This horrible thing drew out in a way similar to a concertina, and had a couple of eye-holes ; the show was rested on a table, and one gazed through the holes while some obliging brother or sister changed the scenes. One was a specially gruesome one ; it represented the charnel house of the St. 192 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK Bernard Monastery, and both my brother and 1 found a horrid fascination in the dreadful thing. Miss Wright had no patience with anything Uke morbidity — I wonder how she would have treated some of the fancifial young persons of the day ! — and got quite out of patience with us ; fmaUy, she made us both look at the picture until I have never forgotten it; and I certainly never again was found by any one else looking at the peep- show. I cannot quite recollect what Yates and Power were supposed to do, but the "entertain- ment " was a complete failure. One night when I was there the curtain caught fire, and there would have been a stampede, but Yates shouted for silence ; he and Harold Power tore down the curtain, and the danger was over, and I fancy the entertainment too from that night on. How curious those old entertainments used to be ! and oh ! how bored we, as confirmed theatre-goers, when we had to be present at them, even when our friend John Parry took us, and we knew we should have the delight, at any rate, of listening to him ; but as his part of the " show " had generally come to life in our drawing-room at Pembridge Villas, we knew every word of them, and took quite a proprietary interest in them, of course. Harold Power was also a civil servant, and a very clever amateur actor, and sang extremely well. His father, a most excellent actor, too, by profession, had been drowned in the London, and this always gave him a romantic interest in our N 193 LEAVES FROM A LIFE eyes; we saw and heard a great deal of him, but we never cared for him himself, though we were most sincere admirers of anything he used to do. I think almost the first time I saw him was in Les Deux Aveugles, a small French play, which was given at Arthur Lewis's most hospitable house in connection with the Moray Minstrel perform- ances, which at one time were known all over the world. As a rule, these entertainments were for " men only," but sometimes the weaker sex must have been admitted, for I distinctly remember Harold Power and Mr. Du Maurier as the blind men, as distinctly as I recollect Box and Cox, given first at Moray Lodge, the rival lodgers being enacted by Du Maurier and Harold Power, Mr. Quintin Twiss, another delightful amateur of that date, being Serjeant Bouncer, and Arthur Sullivan himself conducting the performance. It is difficult to me to place Mr. Du Maurier in these random recollections of the beaux jours de ma jeunesse, for he was not only the most exquisite artist but a marvellous author as well ; he was furthermore a musician of talent, and indeed I do not know any delightful attribute that was not his ; but perhaps, as almost my first sight was of him as an artist, he wiU not be out of place among those whom I love so well. When I knew Du Maurier first he was hving in rooms over a shop quite close to the British Museum, and was in daily deadly terror of losing his sight ; 194 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK one eye had gone, but the other was to do him good service and to remain his own until his hfe's end. He was never a robust man, but had immense virihty, and was one of those charming natures which give out hope, hfe, and amusement to all who come in contact with them, and I should essentially sum him up in one word — joyous. Naturally he had his dark days and times, but these he never showed to the public. In the days I knew him first he was not at aU well off, and he had an increasing family, but he had married one of the wives of that period, the women who hved for their homes and their husbands, and there was not a load Mrs. Du Maurier did not take from his shoulders when she could, not a thing she would not do to help him, 'and see that no small worries stood between him and his work. Next to Mrs. Yates, Mrs. Du Maurier was the loveliest creature of the time, and from her statuesque beauty her husband drew his inspiration, and has immortalised her over and over again in his pictures in Punch. She had quantities of lovely dark hair, and in those days often twisted a yellow riband among her locks with a most ravishing effect. It was always a delight to me to climb the stairs and watch Du Maurier draw, while Mrs. Du Maurier sat and sewed, and the children played about the room unchecked. Du Maurier became a rich man, and had a big house, and all the amenities of his position, but I ques- tion if any days were happier, although all were happy, than those first days when he sang at his work I9S LEAVES FROM A LIFE in the front room over the corner shop. The romance attached to his parentage was always present in his mind, and he had always fantastic imaginings ; his talk was most delightful, but above all, the delight caused me by his charming singing is a thing I shall never forget. He would sit down to the piano, and in a moment the room would be full of divine melody, not loud, not declamatory, but music in the fullest sense of the word ; a nightingale singing in an orchard full of pink apple-blossom was not as sweet, and I have heard a sudden hush come over a large assembly should he sing, albeit he liked best a small audience, and one he knew really loved to hear his tender trainante voice. 1 have only to close my eyes for a moment, and I see once more the Shirley Brookses, Mama, the Calderons, and DoUy Storey in a seaside drawing-room, while Mrs. Du Maurier, Yates, and I are at one end of the balcony, and Papa and Mrs. Yates at the other, I very much fear playing at flirtation, which naturally shocked me intensely when Papa was the victim, when suddenly Mr. Du Maurier began to sing ; a perfect silence fell on us aU. " Den lieben lange Tag " wailed out across the night, and I was gazing at the moon on the sea, hstening to the mingled ripple of the waves on the shore and the lovely voice in the drawing-room, my eyes fiUing with tears, I do not quite know why, and my heart beating as sentimentally as that of any love-sick maiden in her teens. Never did any moon shine before or since as that moon did, or any sea and 196 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK voice mingle as did those. Then the tune would change ; dainty little ripples ran along the keys of the piano ; we were in France ; despite the very obvious moonlight on the sea, the sun shone, soldiers clanked along the Boulevards, girls came out and beckoned and smiled, the leaves rustled on the trees, and all was spring, and gaiety, and pleasure. One never had to ask him to continue ; one little song after the other would make the evening memorable ; he knew his audience, knew that we could never have enough, and he played upon us all with his voice, another Orpheus with his lute, until we travelled miles into the " Country of Make-believe," and wandered with him along his myriad roads of fancy. How I wish I could reproduce that voix d'or / At any rate, I possess it always and can never forget the even- ings when we were sung to by Mr. Du Maurier. I always think those who knew and loved such a genius as his was never can lose him ; he may die, he himself may pass into the shadows, but how much he leaves behind ! There are aU the Punch pictures to look at, all the remembrances connected with most of his sketches. I, at any rate, still hear him sing when the moon lies fuU on a heaving ocean ; and then there are his books, at least there is " Trilby," the divine, deathless " Trilby," with its tender personal touches and side-hghts and remem- brances that touch me so much I can scarcely even read the book ; while to those who know, " The 197 LEAVES FROM A LIFE Martian " tells a great deal, while those who do not can revel in the fantastic imaginings of which the book is full. Personally, deeply as I sorrowed when he died, I am not sorry Du Maurier faded away before his last book came out as a whole. It was not a success, and would most likely have provoked hostile criticism had he been alive, but he was laid to rest at Hampstead, and his memory is one of the most fragrant and delightful that any one can possess. I did not see very much of him when he became rich and famous, but in the early days I sat to him more than once, and finally he made a full- length sketch of me in Punch, the Punch of 1868, I think, in which I am plajdng croquet with a curate. I am wearing a sailor hat almost poised on my nose, and a dress that used to amuse them all immensely, as it had points outhned in white braid over a dark skirt, and this skirt used to be draMTi on the sands by Mr. Calderon to show which way he and I had gone, if we, as we often did, started before the others and wished them to know where they were to foUow. Indeed, the sketch consisted of a tall lank figure in three or four lines, which meant himself, and of me in the celebrated skirt and sailor hat, and I often wondered what people would think when they saw it before the tide had washed it away. After I married, the Du Mauriers used to go to Whitby for their autumn holidays, and one of his sketches shows one of my brothers 198 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK in a Bath chair being drawn and pushed along by two of my sisters, while Fred Cosens walks along- side and makes some remark or other appropriate to the occasion. One of my brothers' wives appears also in some of the Whitby pictures. What wonder then that we all feel as if Mr. Punch was a family possession, and I, for one, would rather go without my dinner than without his dear and familiar countenance. For though I only know one or two men now on the staff, who were probably in their cradles forty years ago, I maintain that the dear old gentleman gets better every volume he adds to his pile, and I ought to know, for I read every word in them. " Read Punch," said a man once, before Shirley Brooks, to me, " I thought no one ever did anything but look at the pictures." " They never do when they can't read," growled Shirley, and I reminded the tactless idiot that one of the most prominent Punch men was present, and stiU he only repeated " Read Punch ! " as if the idea was so new he could not possibly manage to take it in ! Whitby was given up for France, and then Whitby was gone back to once more, but the travels of the Du Mauriers can be traced in Punch and need not be farther dwelt on here. Perhaps his most curious trait was his intense attachment to anything large. He owned the biggest dog, called Chang, I ever saw, and he simply worshipped strength and size in man or woman. Indeed, people are found to say he invented the six-foot young woman of the day. I do not see how he could, 199 LEAVES FROM A LIFE though the seductive pictures he drew of his Greek gods and goddesses may have made young girls pine to grow to their fiall stature, which they certainly could not do in the days when the utmost exercise allowed was a walk with the governess, and when athletic exercises were considered most unladyhke. Personally I was always a trial to my relations in that line. Mama fortunately was fond of fresh air, but I was fonder, and I invariably had my window open — if I could have a fire, that is to say — in the wildest weather, and walked and rowed whenever 1 got a chance. Rowing thickened and burned my hands, which annoyed Papa when he wanted to paint them, and the blackness of my complexion desperately displeased Mama, though at last she gave me up as a bad job and allowed me to go my own way as far as exercise was concerned. In speaking of Harold Power 1 forgot to mention one most amusing episode. When we had known him for some years he married, and Mama asked him and his wife to the house, not troubling to learn anything at all, in a cheerful way she had, about the " who was she ? " aspect of the matter. I do not know who she was, but I do know that at this special party she volunteered to dance for our amusement. Mama did not hke the dance ; we were trotted off to bed, the dance stopped, and I do not recoUect Mrs. Harold Power ever being asked again. Of course, those were not the days of skirt-dancing, and the performance may have been all it should be ; I cannot say. I only remember 200 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK the effect it had on us, thdugh I have seen dancing by ladies in the most exclusive drawing-rooms that was a thousand times more curious than any I saw in our own drawing-room by Mrs. Power or any one else. We were very much attached in those days both to Mr. and Mrs. Anthony TroUope, and I recollect once going with them to Harrow, where my brothers were at school, to look at the old house the TroUopes used to inhabit in their childhood, and which in our time was a preparatory school, in the possession of a very dear old friend, Mr. Hastings, always called " Teddy " by aU his boys, and indeed by every one else when he was not likely to hear them. Teddy was very pleased to see us, and led us down from his house to the old home of the TroUopes, where were the boys' class-rooms and rooms for the use of the masters, and Mr. Trollope told us that the house was the original of " Orley Farm," where, indeed, a most excellent sketch appears of the place, drawn most exquisitely by Mr. MUlais. The house stUl exists, and I think is still a school, though " Teddy " outhved his popu- larity. I always told him he fed his boys far too well ; they had chickens and strawberries at school when they most certainly would not have had them at home; he moreover entertained royally and drove a splendid little pair of cobs. Could they have brought him up from Harrow — nine miles — in something under three-quarters of an hour? I have a slight remembrance of such a 201 LEAVES FROM A LIFE boast, and I am sure if " Teddy " made it it must indeed be true ; but his last years were lean ones ; he gave up the school and went away to some friends, where he died ; he left his heart in Harrow, and could not hve anywhere else, I am sure. Mr. TroUope pointed us out, with many chuckles, where had been a hole in the hedge, through which he and his brother used to smuggle out things to pawn when the bailiffs were in the house, as they often were in his parents' days, and he spoke with real feehng of his shabby clothes, and how much he suffered from them among the other Harrow boys ; but very soon his mother went abroad and wrote heaps and heaps of novels and made a great deal of money, enough to keep the wolf at bay, at any rate, and send her boys out comfortably into the world. A dauntless woman, too, she must have been, and Mr. TroUope spoke of her affectionately ; keeping the creditors at bay with her pen and making a home and a future for her bairns. Mr. TroUope wrote immensely and never waited for inspiration ; he said the best receipt he knew for novel-writing was a patch of cobbler's wax on his chair, and to take great care he sat on it ; and he invariably wrote so many pages a day, always 'so many, say twenty, no less, though if he were in a good vein he would go straight on until he was tired. If any one is curious to know exactly how people lived, spoke and moved in the sixties and seventies, I say to him or her, read the 202 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK " Chronicles of Barchester," and especially read those illustrated by Millais and Freddy Walker. You see the people and feel the atmosphere and know just exactly that they did and saw and had. Mrs. TroUope was very nice indeed ; late in life she had beautiful white hair, and she lived for some years after her husband ; they were people we always loved to have at Pembridge Villas, but they were not very brilliant talkers, and said very little generally, unless to the special folk they sat next at dinner. I recollect Mr. Trollope telUng me he had disposed of Mrs. Proudie because he heard two men at the club talking about the book and saying how they wished she were dead, and " I went straight home and killed her," he added, " and some day I mean to tell those fellows they incited me to murder." I remember one special dinner-party when Mr. Trollope was there when we had Matthew Arnold from Harrow, where he was then a master ; he was quite the ugliest man I ever saw in my life until he spoke ; then he looked and was delightful, and we were sorry we saw but little of him. I do not think he cared for school-mastering ; anyhow, he obtained a Government appointment as a stand-by and then went in heart and soul for literature, which was of course the thing he really loved. Mr. Farrar, afterwards Dean Farrar, was of the party ; one of my brothers was in his house. " Flowery Farrar " the boys all called him, but he was a delightful companion, always kind and nice. 203 LEAVES FROM A LIFE He had a pretty young wife in those days, and a troop of boys and girls, and we always heard he had beeH engaged first of aU to a girl who jilted him and in whose honour he had published a volume of beautifully sentimental verse. When he found his real fate in his wife, he tried hard to collect and suppress the wretched book, but copies were always turning up and quotations made from it to tease him. It may have teased him, but it certainly had not the least effect on his wife. Long years after the Harrow days the Farrars were stay- ing close by my home, and I asked him to preach in our church ; he did so, and most beautifully, to a sparse congregation of rustics and provincials who could not think what he was talking about, and gaped in his face. I never again asked any celebrity to preach to those people, and never told them when one or the other came my way and looked me up. Pearls before swine was not in it with Dean Farrar and that special congregation, and I never felt so ashamed in aU my life. Reggie stayed with us over the Sunday ; he is now Dr. Farrar, and I believe a great light on sanitary matters, but I trust he will forgive me if I mention that his visit has considerably shortened my life. There was no mischief a boy could get into that he did not, no tree he did not climb, not a thing in the adjacent brewery he did not investigate, and I trembled first for his Sunday clothes and then for his life, and it was with heartfelt joy I handed him over to his parents on Monday morning undamaged 204 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK either in person or raiment, and watched them drive away over the Causeway to the httle seaside place at which they were staying beyond the hills. Those were not the days of many women novel- ists, but I knew three or four to whom we were much attached. Mrs. Riddell, who never received the praise " or pudding " she deserved, was the first one I knew intimately, and I met her at one of Elizabeth Philps' entertaining musical parties, where one had " supper in the cellar " Papa said ; really, I think, in a sort of servants' sitting-room in the basement, and where there was always a great deal more talking than music, although what there was of the latter was the best of its kind. Mrs. Riddell was in those days tall and rather severe- looking, and I well remember Shirley Brooks asking first who she was and then who her husband was, and on being told " An iron-master," he said, " Well, she looks as if the iron had entered into her soul." All the same she was gentleness itself, and her husband having met with reverses, she turned to and wrote for a living, and her " George Geith of Fen Court " made a sensation rarely caused by the ephemeral literature of the present day. Mrs. Riddell's other books were successful, but later on in hfe she started a magazine, indeed, I am not sure she did not start two ; I know she printed a very great deal of my work ; but though she had the " copy " for nothing, perhaps because of this, the magazine came to grief, and I fear the latter years of her life were a hard struggle. 205 LEAVES FROM A LIFE Miss Broughton came later on; but I can per- fectly well recollect the way she scandahsed the world, though honestly I never could understand why. Her books were always amusing, and if, as in " Behnda," one fancied one could recognise a portrait, I maintain that her books invariably enter- tain and leave a good taste behind. Miss Broughton was very fond of my mother, and of my eldest boy when he was about three years old and talked broad Dorset, and she and her old maid, " Mrs. Brown," used to make him chatter, and spoilt him because they liked to hear his prattle ; he once took a great fancy to a button in the shape of a shell on Miss Broughton's dress ; off came the button, and for days he carried it about in his pocket. The dearest of all to me was Mrs. Maxwell, the wonderful Miss Braddon, who stUl writes, and writes as well as or better than in those olden days. She first made our acquaintance when I was in the short frock stage, when my father was painting her portrait, and she is one of the few who do remember me always, and with whom I exchange now and then friendly letters about her books. Two more pictures before we go on to other matters ; one is that of Kegan Paul's drawing-room in the seventies, an upstairs room in Kensington Square. Mrs. Paul, herself an authoress, very dehcate, very ailing, is sitting in a deep chair by the fireplace, and presently out of the gloom Mr. Paul brings a short, frail-looking man, and introduces him to us. It is Thomas Hardy, a name to be 206 STILL MORE LITERARY FOLK written in gold, to be placed next to Shake- speare's, and to be honoured as the greatest writer of the time. Directly he knew I was then living in his native country we became friends. We both loved Dorsetshire, and we talked and talked. " Far from the Madding Crowd " had just burst on an astonished world and I knew it by heart, and I was too much engrossed then to think about a slight, dark young man, who was Robert Louis Stevenson, and whom I was to meet later on at Bournemouth, at the house of Sir Henry Taylor, who looked the poet he was, with his venerable white head and beard, and the scarlet cloak he threw round his shoulders. But I was never lucky in my meetings with R. L. S. ; at the Pauls' I was engrossed with Mr. Hardy, and when- ever I met him at Bournemouth Stevenson was Ul, or had been ill, or was going to be ; and I never was anything but depressed by his presence at the Taylors', though perhaps I should be ashamed of even saying such a thing. 207 CHAPTER X PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES In our day anything like an " entertainment " was always spoken of as a "party," just as the theatre was invariably the "play," and nothing more nor less ; and about Christmas time our excitement ran high, as we looked out for the envelopes, the appearance of which seemed to denote that our season was about to begin. The envelopes were often pink, very often embellished by a highly ornate edge, and always in some way had a festive look about them ; but as they were addressed to Mama we could only guess and surmise until the " higher powers " had consulted and made up their minds on the subject of rejection or acceptation. What agonies we suffered until the reply was made known ; and how our hopes fluctuated from "set fair" to "much rain," ac- cording to the time that passed between the receipt of the invitation and the contents of the epistle being made known to us 1 Nowadays I think children issue their own invita- tions ; 1 know dogs do, for I have had more than one 208 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES of these imbecile things supposed to be issued by the poor animals ; but in our time nothing of the kind had ever been thought of, and the matters were left quite in the parents' hands ; and as calculations had to be made on the subject of party frocks and cost of the necessary " flies " in which we proceeded to the festive spot, it was not always possible to say at once whether we could go or not. Then, too, we had to consider the weather, very often too bad for words in winter ; but once we knew how many " parties " were accepted, we thought of little else, and counted the days untU the first was to begin. The Charles Dickenses always had a " party " on Twelfth Night, as it was Charley Dickens' birthday, and there was invariably a cake, and the proper " characters " were drawn by the children from a bag and were acted up to. I think my portion must always have been a blank, for I have no recollection of "acting" any- thing, and as acting was always our passion, I must have remembered if I had done so. The most tre- mendous "parties" were those given by Charles Lucas, the builder, and by the Cosenses, who both then lived at Clapham, and wHj^n we went to either house, we drove there in our warm winter frocks and coats, our " party " frocks packed up and carried on the top of the fly, to be donned when we arrived there. I quite well remember one special gathering at the Charles Lucas', when it was bitterly cold, and we were suffering agonies until the last moment before the fly came, lest Mama should declare the 209 LEAVES FROM A LIFE weather impossible and forbid us to go ; we stood at a window from which we could see the " fly " in the process of being got ready in the livery-stable yard, and when we perceived that the horse was brought out, we fled to our rooms, crammed on all the garments we could gather, and stood ready for the long and awful drive. Our excitement kept us going, though Miss Wright croaked out that she was sure the roads were not safe, and that the horse would never reach Clapham ; but the gallant beast did ; the house was a blaze of Mght, and we were bundled upstairs to a room where a beautiful fire awaited us, and we were put into our very starched and stiff" white frocks, silk stockings, and white shoes ; these latter, having been carefully cleaned by Miss Wright, as well as had been our gloves, gave out a faint odour of benzine, that always recalls to me our earliest party days. Then Miss Wright had to unpin and shake herself out, to prune her feathers generally at the glass, and arrange her curls with an eye to conquest, of whom I don't quite know, while we began to rage, for we could hear the hum of the "company" downstairs and the clatter of tea-cups ; but at last she felt quite satis- fied, gave a final smirk at herself in the mirror, and ordered us to descend, WiUie coming first in a smart velvet tunic belted round the waist and long white trousers, and then my sister and 1 hand-in-hand, I with my scarlet and she with her blue sashes and rosettes, looking, no doubt, a picture of prim sisterly affection, while 1, at any rate, was raging to get 210 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES away from her and to find more congenial company downstairs. Mr. Lucas always stood at the foot of the stairs to greet us, and he had one odious habit : he used to catch me up off my feet, twirl me round his head, kiss me, and then restore me, and my out- raged dignity and crumpled frock, to the floor, but I soon forgave him ; for we were at once seated at tea, which we required very badly, and plied with food of the most gorgeous description, always end- ing up with a large slice of iced cake and any amount of crackers, the mottoes from which we cherished for years, and I think looked upon as a species of fortune-telling treasure. Crackers were very expensive things then, and it was only at the Lucas' and Cosens' that we ever had many, or enough to be able to take one home for each of the "little ones," which we invariably did if it could possibly be managed. I never in aU my life before or since saw such Christmas trees as Mr. Lucas had ; the last one, I remember, was placed in the Clapham conservatory, and reached to its very roof, and we were supposed to draw tickets from a bag and be given the toy from the tree which corresponded to our number. I say supposed, for, alas ! nothing of the kind occurred. I was overjoyed once to see my ticket on an enormous basket-work fish (I can't think why, for I should say when it was emptied of its chocolates it was meant to hold some old lady's knitting), and 1 never forgave Mr. Lucas, despite all his kindness, because he handed the fish to Mrs. 21 I LEAVES FROM A LIFE Lucas' mother and gave me something utterly different and much more suitable, a doll, in fact ; but not the thing which bore my ticket and on which I had set my heart. The beautiful fairy, too, at the top of the tree, went to Katie, his black eyed little niece, his brother's daughter ; and Mr. Lucas little thought how I resented his favouritism or how I hankered after my fish for many a long day. It must be quite fifty years since that party, but I stiU recollect the fish, our frocks, and the superior quality of the Lucas girls' frocks to ours ; but this latter fact never troubled me much ; and at the next " party " I had a beautiful soft Indian muslin given me by my dear Mr. Boxall (after- wards Sir William and curator (?) of the National Gallery), which I wore for years, and which after- wards made a smart first frock for my dear little niece, the first baby I ever liked and indeed loved ; and I think I may truly say, also the last. I do not like " long clothes," the dose we had of them in youth has lasted me for the rest of my life. That Indian muslin, which one could really draw through a ring, and which had a tiny hand- worked sprig on it, a stiif grenadine, and a muslin without a pattern, were all the " party frocks " I ever possessed, and I cannot think how they stood the wear and tear, the lettings out and the lengthen- ings they endured, but they always " came up smiling," thanks in a great measure to Miss Wright, whose needle was always at work as well 212 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES as Mama's ; and as we were always content with our clothes, except on one or two occasions, I think we must have been as well dressed as the rest of our friends. The two occasions were when the Lucas' cousins came out in white silks — oh 1 rage and despair 1 — and when our own cousins had long and beautiful ostrich feathers in their hats ; the horrid monkey at the Zoo had eaten my beauty, and naturally I did not get another for many a long day. But I do recollect hating and detesting a certain frock, and how I blessed the cotton famine in Lancashire caused by the American War, because a collection of garments was being made for the wives and daughters of the " out-of-works," and these hateful garments went too. They were of a material I have never seen since, I am thankful to say, so I fancy it must have been an experiment which did not succeed. It was extremely shiny and " sleezy," and horrible to touch ; and as it was a shot pale blue and green, with a line of darker blue which made squares aU over it, it must have been weU worthy my dishke ; out of doors, with these hideous frocks, we wore scarfs of the same material which were pinned by Miss Wright in the centre of our backs, and very often the pins went into us as well. I am amused to see similar scarfs reviving, and indeed they are quite as much "the thing " now as they were in 1864. But to return to our parties. After the great event, the Christmas tree, was over, we used to dance, generally together, as boys loathed 213 LEAVES FROM A LIFE dancing as much then as most men appear to do now; yet we generally had our small and gallant following of youths; all of those who are alive have no doubt forgotten how they loved me when I was eight or nine, but, alas ! most of them are dead ; the last of my dear boyish sweet- hearts being laid to rest only a month ago, 1 wonder if boys now do as Frank used to I For he always spent his pocket-money on gorgeous bouquets for me, and once, forgetting his dignity and his fifteen years, he retired to bed to weep because the weather had been too bad for us to reach Clapham and I had not come to his party. Frank was a few months younger than I was, and I can safely say I had never given him anything but scorn and derision in return for his bouquets and his most unselfish devotion ! The most delightful parties were, I am sure, those which used to take place in our own drawing-room, especially on Christmas Eve, or as near to that date as was practicable. My mother's birthday began the festivities with a big dinner-party : then came the evening party, and oh ! how we did enjoy ourselves. We first trimmed up the house with ivy and holly, with Papa stamping about and declaring (every year) that we were ruining the walls and scratching the picture frames, while Mama begged us not to fall off the steps or catch fire while we were embellishing the looking-glass, an enormous square of glass being placed over the mantelpiece ; then, when the decorations were done, 214 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES we had to wash, piece by piece, the cut-glass chandeliers in the drawing-room : they were com- posed of chains of cut glass, each chain hooking into the other and making a gUttering and bewilder- ing whole, reflecting the sunlight in the day-time, and being a prismatic wonder when the gas was hghted. One never sees these glass chandeliers now, and no doubt they were a frightful trouble to wash and polish; but I must confess I admire them, and in our youth I was more proud than I can say of them. The last thing to do was to take all the loose covers off the scarlet silk damask furniture, while Mama arranged the fireplaces with flowers and holly and virgin cork ; for except it was very cold, the gas and the warmth of the conservatory made our rooms warm enough ; but if wre had to have fires, the nursery fenders were brought down and all made safe for the whirling crinoletted petticoats. Then we weeded out all the furniture, turned the library into a cloak-room, and the schoolroom into a place for refreshments, and finally the supper-table was laid. Even in our most prosperous days Mama saw to these things herself, and made creams and jellies and custards, while one aunt sent a turkey, and another a goose, and lots of curd cheesecakes, from York, and anxiously did we, from the red sofa, look out for the carrier's carts, the unpacking of those hampers being an event of the most important and delight- ful nature possible. For there was always a sur- prise in the York hamper, a packet of " humbugs " 2ie LEAVES FROM A LIFE for me, or aeid drops and hunting nuts for Papa. I wonder if Terry, who made my wedding cake, makes those beautiful things now; while in the Dorset hamper one never knew if one would find apples laid carefully in the straw ; a couple of splendid cock-pheasants, always cocks, because their plumage gave us as much pleasure as their flesh ; ducks, quince jelly, or a special cake from " Bennett's," a cake we buy to this day, and than which there is nothing better in the whole world. I do not believe country cousins send hampers to town cousins nowadays; all produce seems to be sold, even the game ; but I know the joy our hampers were to us, and I can but be sorry at the disappear- ance of a good old custom. " Now, girls, go and dress ; " that was the word for action, the supper- table was laid and the key in Mama's pocket : the boys were not always above trying some of the sweets while Papa and the man wrestled over the wine ; then the " music " arrived, and the first guest, and the " party " began. One year we had John Parry as Master of the Ceremonies, and a splendid one he made; he was attired in a loose belted tunic of some white stuff, I think it was merely a couple of sheets, and had thrown over his shoulder a cloak composed of one of the red damask drawing- room curtains. He bore in his hand a staff crowned with holly and mistletoe, and he pranced about giving out the "events," and finally coming in as an ordinary person in his own turn, he sat down 216 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES to the piano and gave us one of his never-to-be- forgotten or copied sketches, which were and are unique. I think this special one was " Mrs. Rosel^f s evening party," and from the first moment when he sat down on the music-stool, arranged his imaginary skirts in both hands, looked coyly round the room, and went through the pantomime of removing his gloves and bracelets, pulUng out each finger of the former, and then laying aU on the piano, before he arranged his curls and sighed and began ; to the end, one never saw John Parry, but in some mysterious way he brought before our eyes Mrs. Roseleaf and her guests, as one by one he went through the event of the evening, and finally, after shaking hands wearily with the last imaginary guest, sank back exhausted on to what was supposed to be Mr. Roseleaf s shoulder, and gave way to the hysterics of mingled fatigue and joy that the whole thing was over. Then Mr. Twiss and Arthur Blunt would sing, he was not Arthur Cecil until he dropped his surname in deference to the wish of his clerical father and went, via the German Reeds, on the stage. Dundas Gardner would sing too, or Lizzie Philp, while Dolly Story would give us his cats' concert, beginning, " Will you come over the waaalU ? " " No, I will not come over your waaall ; there is glass on the top of your waaall," until we were all in shrieks of laughter, and Papa declared it was far too much like the sort of thing we had in the back garden whenever there was a moon, to be endured a moment longer. Then we had never-to- 217 LEAVES FROM A LIFE be-forgotten " Dumb Crambo," when Elisha, the prophet, was enacted by Mr. J. C. Parkinson, the best " bald head " present : the mockers were the " Uttle boys," and the bears. Papa and Shirley Brooks, who with mighty roars came out from the curtains behind the piano and gobbled them up. Then we had the beheading of Charles the First, when Papa caused a perfect thrill of horror by suddenly drawing in his own head under the cloak in which, despite the " unities," he was attired for the scaffold, and dropping the lay figure's head on the floor at the moment when he was beheaded by Mr. O'NeiU with the fire-shovel. It had quite a horrid effect, and reaUy for a moment we beheved something untoward and ghastly had reaUy occurred ! On that auspicious occasion somie one found the sherry at supper distinctly queer, and handed it on to Papa for inspection ; he discovered that our man had been tasting the wine until he had got a little the worse for liquor, and had mixed the port and sherry, and I can see him sitting on the stairs, quite too overcome to stir, arguing with Papa, a glass in one hand and the bottle in the other, drinking, and then waving both round his head, as he assured Papa it was " or righ," and " the gen'l'- men were rely much too partick'lar." It is im- possible to put down in writing the manner in which he swallowed his words. That special man ended his days, or, I should say, continued them after he left us, as a bath-chair man ; but as he left an old 218 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES lady in the middle of Kensington Gardens, while he went to " see the time," ie., get a drink, and quite forgot to call for her, and she had to be dragged home by two sympathetic young men, I fancy his career in that capacity was even shorter than it had been as a butler ; and I never heard any more about him after the chair episode. Our dinner-parties were usually on a Sunday, because actors could come then, and many others ; notably John Parry, Sala and Shirley Brooks, and men who were busy at the newspaper offices until late on Saturday night, and always treated Sunday as a day off; but whatever happened we were always walked to church Sunday mornings ; though Papa never went himself, he took care we did, and I even remember his falling foul of me because I was reading one of the Waverley Novels and not a " Sunday book." But that I could not stand, and I proceeded to argue the question until he laughed ; then he was done for, and from that day to this I never heard another word about a book being fit for a Sunday or not. At one dinner- party I was taken in by Arthur Lewis, and he turned to me and said, " I have been introduced to-day to the lady I have been told for months I am going to marry." I said, " Are you going to marry her, Mr. Lewis ? " He laughed. " How can I tell ? I have only exchanged a few words with her." The next time I met him was at a Green- wich dinner after the Private View, where he brought Kate Terry to be introduced to his artist 219 LEAVES FROM A LIFE friends; indeed, I think the dinner was given in her honour; and in the October following they were married. What a dehghtful party that was, to be sure ! We went down by steamer to the Ship at Greenwich, and were all most hilarious. I do not think we " behaved ; " we laughed so much and so continuously; but it was spring, most of us were young, and we had a splendid time, driving back in a vast omnibus, while some of the men sang, untQ we all became tired and were glad to reach home after all. I remember one party at Mr. Trubner's, the publisher, which, although it is slightly improper, or wcLs improper, it is hard nowadays to say what is and is not so, people speak so openly of such extraordinary things: I will take the risk, it was so extremely funny and tell it here. Mr. and Mrs. Triibner hved then in Upper Hamilton Terrace, and more delightful people I, for one, never met; he was the kindest and best of men, and she was charming, talented, well bom, and better bred than the most. They had one child, called Lina, and she was most awfully spoiled; I often wonder what she was like as a wife and mother herself, but really it was not her fault; the Triibners simply lived for the imperious Uttle maiden ; wiU it be believed that thay came late to one " party " and apologised 1 Liria had found out they were going ; she would not be left; and she cried and screamed her- self into such a state that the devoted parents had 220 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES to undress and go to bed ; then, and then only, did Lina believe she would not be left ; when she at last slept, the parents rose stealthily and dressed and went off to their party, where they told the story with great gusto, as a proof of their offspring's devotion to their company. But on this special evening Lina was in bed and fast asleep, and we were enjoying ourselves madly ; it was New Year's Eve, the beUs had rung out, " Bina " Triibner was at the piano, and all the guests were clinking glasses, and " Prosit Neujahrs " and " Happy New Years " were being exchanged between the repre- sentatives of three or four nations, for it was a cosmopolitan gathering, for Belgians, French and Italians were there, as weU as Germans and English ; when there was a sudden stir in the room, our party became imperceptibly larger and different, very gaily dressed ladies and hilarious gentlemen joined ia the music, and finally one of the ladies was discovered going peacefully to sleep in the centre of the Triibners' very best spare-room bed. I wonder if the elderly Peer who has represented Her Majesty in one of her Colonies since then as Governor-General, and who is a husband and father, if not a grandfather, and is altogether most respectable and respected, remembers that New Year's night ? At any rate, I have never forgotten it, though at the time I did not know what the " ladies " were ; but he had to come forward and ask my brother-in-law, who had some business 221 LEAVES FROM A LIFE acquaintance with him, to vouch for him, but my brother-in-law would not ; however, the police were not sent for as first threatened. Lord X. collected his party, which, being slightly exhilarated, had mistaken the house for that of a boon companion in the same terrace, and cleared out ; Mr. Triibner threw up every window to get rid of the contami- nating odour of mingled scent, champagne and cigars, and we walked home roaring with laughter ; it had aU been so fiinny ; though naturally, had we xmderstood it, we might not have found it all quite so hilarious after all. I remember another party where I distinguished myself greatly. I was talking, and, indeed, had been talking for some time, to a very good-looking young man, and we were enjoying ourselves, when I saw the " turkey-cock " appearance made familiar to me by Charles' mother, when I was staying at Alfred Austin's, come over the countenance and figure of a venerable dame. At first I took no notice, but at last the poor old thing got so uneasy that I felt sure she required the attentions of the youth I was talking to for some reason or other, and at last I said : " That old lady, your mother, I think, wants you." He glanced at her. "That's not my mother, it's my wife," he said, whUe, as he turned to go, I improved the occasion by gasping out, " Oh I no ! impossible " ; but I trust he did not hear; anyhow, I did not feel happy until that special party was over. It was given by some very remarkable people ; the daughters are well-known 223 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES stnd very elever artists, and the father and mother were extremely clever too ; but the father, an Italian by birth, was always a great mystery to us. Every now and then he would have heaps of money and spend it royally ; then he would disappear for months at a time, while the female members of the family lived quietly and worked hard. We always believed he was a pirate, but I think a more prosaic fact was nearer the truth. He had a concession to dig guano on some very small and smelly island ; he used to dig up enough to last, and when the money obtained by its sale was exhausted, out he would go once more. I do not know if this be the real solution of his disappearances, but I am quite sure, at any rate, that he was not a pirate ; I only suspected him because sometimes he brought back strange and barbaric jewels as well as the money that enabled him to give his parties. Then there were Elizabeth Philp's parties, which never failed us, any more than she did herself when she was wanted to sing at our house, or to make up an odd number at our table. Miss Philp was a great personality, and worked harder than most men, teaching, composing and singing, and keeping the roof over the heads of her old father and mother, and I think helping her brother Franklin, who married and went out to America. Proud indeed was I when Lizzie Philp set my verses to music and sang them too, not only at our house, but at a concert; they were sad stuff, and I little knew then how small a part words take in a song ; but I 223 LEAVES FROM A LIFE was much uplifted and felt I was a poet from that day ! She was a very masculine-looking woman, with more of a moustache than is generally con- sidered becoming on a female face, and she accentuated her manly appearance by wearing velvet jackets and fiiU white shirts or Garibaldis over her widely extended crinolined skirt ; and, moreover, she smoked ; not the dainty, if odious, cigarette of to-day, but a cigar ; and never refused one of Papa's big ones, though, as they cost either Sd. or Is. each, he did not often press them upon her. I recollect our candid friend, mentioned in a former chapter, speaking out once or twice to poor Lizzie, quite unconscious that he had been anything but most scrupulously polite. Once he offered her a cigar and she took it ; " D d bad form in a woman 1 " he said aloud, and she never turned a hair, she knew him too well ; while another evening Papa was, as usual, looking round for some one going in her direction in a cab who would take her and so save a cab-fare, a real consideration to her, when he came across this special man. "I'm looking for some one to take Lizzie home," he said, " but I can't find any one going her way." " Oh ! I shall be delighted," he said. " Miss Philp, I will take you home ; " and before she could thank him he remarked aloud, "Bother the old girl, why can't she take her own cab like other people ? " We aU laughed, behind his back, of course, and Lizzie told us afterwards he had not only made himself especially agreeable on the drive, but had 224 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES given her a second cigar to sinoke, as he put it, " while she was curling her hair." The " cellar-supper " at Lizzie's was a " thing of shreds and patches," and rarely went round ; stiU, as we knew that, we were always prepared. The cul- minating moment of the evening was when her old father used to emerge from some fastness in the base- ment bearing a large jug taken from a washing-stand, and followed by old Mrs. Philp carrying a tray fuU of glasses. Being averse from spirituous hquors myseK I never tasted it, and I do not know what the enormous jug held ; it is suggested to me it may have been " Punch." I know it took Mr. Philp all the evening to make, and its arrival generally broke up the party, which became stOl more hilarious as the jug went round. One of these parties began by being very stiff. Lizzie expected Mr. and Mrs. Milner-Gibson and a man called Louis Engel, who was afterwards musical critic on the World, and disappeared suddenly, not iu a very satisfactory manner, some time in the late seventies or early eighties. We were all to wait the arrival of the distinguished guests before we began to enjoy our- selves, and I can see myself seated, I regret to say, on the round table in the centre of the room, and my legs swinging in the air, while Lizzie fussed up and down to see if the small maid were ready to open the door the moment the footman knocked. Presently we aU came to attention ; the door opened ; Mrs. Milner-Gibson, very thin and small, came in, to be followed by the others. Lizzie rushed up to p 225 LEAVES FROM A LIFE her, seized her warmly by the hand, when suddenly Mrs. Gibson gave vent to the loudest, most piercing shriek I have ever heard ; the poor dear lady had rheumatic gout in her fingers badly, and the warmth of her welcome had caused her the acutest anguish, and, though Mr. Philp remarked plaintively the stuff was nothing Uke ready, she had to be refreshed from the contents of the washing-stand jug before she was restored to anything resembling equaninaity. Then the evening began and ended in a blaze of glory. Mr. Philp had made a second jug full of his mixture : " My contribution to the feast," he always said ; and when we went away we left him and Mrs. Philp beaming on the sofa, while Lizzie looked anxious, and began, as was her wont, to count the spoons and lock up. I know, because 1 very often stayed until the last to help her with her housewifely task. Once a year, too, she gave a concert ; we were aU expected to buy tickets, sell more tickets to our friends, and above aU, to go. As she was a general favourite she usually had a fuU house, and made a nice httle sum, as she had few ex- penses ; even her friends showed us into our seats, a fact I did not know at first, and which covered me with confusion, for I gave the young man who showed me into my seat the usual sixpence. A few evenings after the concert I met the same youth at a party, and he showed me the coin on his watch- chain : " The only money I ever earned in my hfe," he said unashamedly, " and I certainly never mean 226 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES to part with it." As I never saw him agaia, I have no means of ascertaining if either statement were true ; I only know I lost my sixpence. One " party " we went to when I was quite small was at Stirling Coyne's, the dramatist, and I really believe that remarkable name was his own, and not manufactured as a pseudonym. There were private theatricals, but all I remember about them is the fact that a plank stretched down from somewhere at the top of the "theatre royal back drawing- room" towards the audience, seated in the front. Down this plank came walking a slight yoimg man with a fair moustache, brandishing a knife: this was W. S. Gilbert, then in some Government office, but already beginning to amuse the world with his dehcious " Bab Ballads " in Fun. I have often wondered what he was doing, and I really think some day 1 must pluck up courage enough to ask him if he recollects. Then there were the stupendous Sunday parties given by J. M. Levy of the Telegraph, who had a big house in Lancaster Gate, and could never see his friends too often or do too much for them. I beheve he started in life in a toll-bar. I know he bought the Daily Telegraph for 2/6, plus the liabihties, for I have heard him say so myself ; and what a wonderful power he made it, he and his young Uons, who all roared in concert and worked together for the paper and its proprietor heart and soul ! Mr. Levy used to have a very great many celebrities from the musical and theatrical 237 LEAVES FROM A LIFE world at his house, and I beheve it was there that Christine Nilsson sang for the! first time in England. It was a very hot evening in June or July, and she was a slight pale girl in white, sitting by a chaperon and bearing a roU of music in her hand, which slightly trembled as it lay on her lap. Suddenly people began to feel ill, horribly ill ; windows were open, water fetched, fans phed ; the house had been lavishly decorated with Mary-hly branches ; we were gradually being poisoned, and before Christine Nilsson could sing, all the costly floral decorations had to be removed. Clement Scott was there that evening ; he married Du Maurier's cherished sister Isabelle ; she was very pretty and dainty, but not very happy, and she died years before her children had grown up. I just recollect one splendid party at a big house, given for Garibaldi ; we were only allowed to stand on the marvellous staircase and look on the people coming and going; but we saw our hero, in the red shirt and grey trousers known to fame, and so were happy. On that evening a lady persisted in going to the party, though she certainly should have been kept at home ; however, no one had sufficient authority I she went ; but when she did return to her own roof it was some days after, if not weeks, and she was accompanied by a " long- clothes " clad in borrowed ducal raiment, and born unexpectedly in ducal haUs. Garibaldi's enthusi- astic reception was not smiled on by royalty, and I do not think he did one half the things Society 228 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES had prepared for him, but we saw him several times out and about, and were great admirers of the splendid patriot. In later years I went to several grand balls : the Yorkshire, the Goldsmiths', and a special baU at the Mansion House, where, for the one and only time in my hfe, I danced with a minor royalty, and hated it profoundly. At one of these balls Mama had left a magnificent opera-cloak in the cloak-room, and was horrified to find on her return that it was gone, and a most disgustingly dirty old red thing left in its place. Mama's cloak was unique : it had been given her by a very rich man, who had brought it back from the East ; no one could take such a cloak by mistake ; it was one mass of splendid hand- embroidery in the most wonderful blending of colours ; it had a deep fringe which cost £5 a yard, and it was lined with a specially made shot red and yellow satin, and altogether was an immistakable possession. Mama sent for some one in authority, the attendants were closely questioned, and the matter finally placed in the hands of Scotland Yard. But nothing happened until one evening I was following Mama up the steps of the Royal Academy, when just at my side appeared the cloak. Mama saw it and dashed forward. " You are wearing my cloak," she said firmly ; the lady went on, turning deadly pale, but taking no other notice. Mama placed herself in front. " You are wearing my cloak," she repeated stUl more firmly. " What is this ? " asked a gentleman, fussing up. " Only a 229 LEAVES FROM A LIFE lunatic," replied the female, attempting once more to pass on ; but the gentleman stopped her ; explana- tions ensued ; Mama described a mark she had put under the coUar in the lining ; the cloak was restored, and a very angry and cloakless woman, and a very shamed and apologetic man, did not put in an appearance that year, at any rate, at the Academy soiree. We met a great friend of mine there who had a splendid bouquet, and she insisted on my taking it from her as she had no farther use for it. We were going on to a dance at the Mansion House, and when I was going to dance I was much embarrassed by the enormous thing, and as Mama was not visible, I did not know what to do ; presently a gentle old lady came up and took it, and I finished the dance and went to retrieve my bouquet, I did not hke my partner, and was tired, and so I was not sorry when she begged me to talk to her for a few moments until I was claimed once more. " I am Mrs. Alderman Figgins, my dear " (this is a real name, not made up), " and I once had a daughter hke you ; did 'e give you this beautiful thing ? " Poor old lady, she had woven a romance about me and my bouquet, and 1 had to undeceive her, though I made her quite happy by telling her there was an " 'e " and I was soon going to be married. She then told me that she and the Alder- man were not asked, as a rule, " to these very select affairs," but they were imable to go when they had been invited to some other party, and the Lord Mayor, " being a kind man," had asked them to 230 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES this. I have never seen or heard of her since, but her remarkable name and her sweet kindness have never been forgotten by me, any more than the swan and peacock we had for supper, and the splendid gold plate that makes it worth while for any one to go once, and once only, to the Gold- smiths' baU. Some of the other " parties " were out of doors, and these I liked the best of aU : they generally meant a long drive, or a short journey by train, and then a drive, or else an excursion on the river. One was made, I recollect, to see and wonder at the Great Eastern when she was Ijring off Mr. Penn's wharf, I think, to have her engines fitted. She was then called The Leviathan, and fearful prophe- cies were made of how she would end. I am no judge of the size of ships, but I know she looked enormous to us then ; but were she placed by some of the tremendous steamers of the day, I expect she would not look much bigger than a torpedo boat. We went also to see the laimch of the first ship of war Germany possessed ; it was launched on April 6, 1867, by the wife of the German Ambas- sador, Baroness Bernsdorf, from Mr. Samuda's wharf, and I have never forgotten the ghastly manner in which the whole earth seemed to dis- appear when the great vessel left the stays and glided away from us standing by the Ambassadress and the Samudas. One of the parties was marred to me somewhat by the autocratic conduct of Mr. Matthews, the 231 LEAVES FROM A LIFE brewer, who had bought one of my father's pictures. During 1868 and 186& pirated photographs were constantly on the market, and I was always bujdng them. Papa used to storm, and storm rightly, at me for purchasing them and at the folks who sold them, and more than one trial was graced by his presence as a witness against the thief or thieves. I had pounced on a beautiful photograph, which I had shown to Mr. Graves, the owner of the copy- right of that especial picture, but he behaved hke a gentleman, asked me to give it up, and in exchange sent me a proof of the same picture. Not so Mr. Matthews ; he was talking about the piracies, and remarked triumphantly, " Well ! at all events I am safe," when I, like an idiot, exclaimed, " Oh ! no, you are not, Mr. Matthews, 1 have a beauty of your picture ! " He turned white, but said quietly, " You'll let me see it, won't you ? ". and I went and fetched it. He took it in his hand, looked at it, and without another word tore it into four or five pieces and flung it in the grate. The picture has never been engraved ; it is in my humble opinion by far the best my father ever did, and I never for one moment from that day to this, when he has long been dead, forgave Mr. Matthews, though no doubt he was in the right and I was in the wrong entirely in the matter. Some of the best times we had were at the now much-despised Crystal Palace ; we knew one of the directors, and he often took us down to dinner in his carriage, whUe, as a matter of course, we went 232 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES to the Handel festivals to hear our beloved Mme. Sainton-Dolby and Mr. Santley. I recollect sitting by dear Mme. Sainton on one of these occasions, when one of her enthusiastic pupils, who all loved her, rushed up to her. " Oh, darling Miss Dolby, how is your baby ? " she shouted, and quite a wave of surprise passed over her hearers. " ReaUy, my dear, when you ask after baby, you might remember to call me Madame Sainton," she said, and laughed. Her neighbours were evidently reheved and smiled again. We were very fond of the dear httle feUow, and I think my father's advice to his people first caused him to be brought up as an artist. How- ever that may be, he is an artist, and a very clever one, and is the Charles Sainton of the silver-point drawings. I have never seen him since he was " Charley," and wore white frocks, but I have always followed his successful career with interest, for the sake of his sweet mother, and for the sake, too, of his own delightful baby days. Naturally among our parties there were some that bored us as much to go to as it would bore me to write about them, and much as we liked Sir WiUiam Fergusson and his girls, their big gatherings almost caused blows to be come to between Mama and myself ; we always " went on " to them from somewhere else when I was tired to death, and more- over, as the Fergussons were immensely popular, their rooms were crowded. One seemed first to fall over their dogs, who rejoiced in the names of " Viva " and " Mario," tokens of enthusiasm for the 233 LEAVES FROM A LIFE great singer, and then to be jammed in a comer on the stairs whence one might catch sound of the music going on, always super-excellent, I beheve, though as I never heard it I reaUy cannot say. Crowds passed up and down, squeezing and crowd- ing ; one said a word to Jones or to Smith, and finally Mama agreed to go home, while I vowed for the thousandth time that no, never would I go to one of the Fergussons' squashes ever again. At one time the Fergussons dined with us on Christmas Day, and we dined with them on New Year's Day ; and at one of these gatherings a most untoward event happened. The butler was bearing in the plum-pudding, flaming with brandy-sauce, and just as he was placing it before Sir William, some one jogged his arm ; the burning fluid fell on the tarlatan skirts of a girl sitting next Sir WiUiam ; they began to flare ; when Sir William, the butler, and I — I was always on in any scene — flew at the dining-room curtains ; they came down, pole and all, with a rush ; some one else had applied the hearth-rug, and when the curtains were added the flames were out in a second, and no one was any the worse, though the dress was spoiled, and both rug and curtains were rather the sufferers in the fray. The girl was not hurt, but never have I allowed a fiery pudding to be carried to the table, even at Christmas, because I have never forgotten that most alarming event. Sir William had the old-fashioned habit of making speeches, and ex- cellent ones he made too, though we did not always 234 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES appreciate them. I recollect he embarrassed me dreadfully by a speech he made just before I was married, in which he extoUed my virtues to my future husband in a manner that was quite dreadful, while he remarked further he was quite sure he was unaware of the prize he had obtained. He con- cluded by saying that a doctor was the worst person to propose the health of any one, especially of mine, as I never gave them any employment. Unfortu- nately I have had occasion to give them a very great deal at one time or the other, and I have often wondered what Sir William would have said now if he had had to propose that toast again. In our time the parties we hked best were those which were given in the late autumn and winter; they were generally dinners without any "going on" after ; for the regular season was a perfect rush, and the year I was married I saw the sun rise every day for six weeks straight on end, Sundays included. Some- times it was not worth while to go to bed ; I used to undress, have a bath, and then dress again and read or write until breakfast time at 8.30. What- ever had happened the night before, breakfast was always at half-past eight ; if I were a minute late. Papa would look over his glasses and remark sar- donically, "Now, do not let this occur again." What he would have said if I had been later I do not know, as I never thought it wise to run the risk of finding out. With Papa that meal was a large and composite one, and during the time he progressed from fish through York ham and a couple of eggs to 235 LEAVES FROM A LIFE marmalade and toast, he wrote most of his letters ; his writing-case was always on the breakfast-table, and he wrote qtiickly, in a fearfuUy illegible hand, and drew the necessary cheques. We always for years thought he had only to draw a cheque to obtain any amount of money, and had not the least idea that the money had to be put into the bank first. When he drew a cheque for Mama to pay for my eldest sister's wedding-cake, he threw it across the table and gave one of his most expressive glances. " I know what you are thinking," I ex- claimed, " you are wondering when you wiU write Terry just such another ; well, you won't do it yet ;" a safe prophecy, as I was not much more than six- teen. But he merely remarked, " The sooner the better," and locked up his case with the key he always had on his watch-chain, and departed down the stairs to the painting-room; he was always there at nine, and read the Times until the model came. I think his punctual habits and his general abstemi- ousness are the causes of his great age ; anyhow, these punctual habits made me punctual, even if I had not been in bed before four, or, indeed, in bed at all ; though I often wonder how I lived to tell the tale of aU those wonderful parties ! I recollect just one more that took place in York that is worth a passing mention ; it was a ball given in honour of the Prince and Princess of Wales some httle time after they were married, and I went with a friend of my aunt's. I wore yeUow sUk trimmed with bands of black velvet, and very hideous it must have 236 PARTIES IN THE SIXTIES been, although it was greatly admired by the crowd, whose frank comments on the guests were most entertaining to hear, and as the carriages took almost an hour to get to the Guildhall, the crowd was so enormous, we heard a good deal from the hoi polloi of their opinion of us. It amused me, but my chaperon nearly went mad ; anyhow, we reached our destination, and had the overwhelming joy of seeing the royalties dance a square dance within four red ropes to keep off our contaminating presence. The Princess looked very tired and pale, while the Prince was most hilarious, perhaps because he was dancing with a most lovely girl, one of Lord Wenlock's daughters, who appeared rather embar- rassed by her prominent position in the ball-room ; she was tall and slight, and had quantities of beautiful red hair and a dazzling white skin. I have never seen her since, but I have never forgotten how pretty she was ; she was quite a delight to look at ! When the dance was over, as there was no chance of our dancing, I suggested we should go home ; the room was packed, it bored me to distraction, and one could neither see the dresses nor the people ; and I for one did not want to see any more performances within the four red ropes, and we all gathered up our skirts and put on our cloaks and walked home, voting all public balls a bore and a nuisance, and public balls plus royalty simply too stupid an enter- tainment for words. Afternoon parties were not begun in my time, for those we went to in daylight comprised the evening 237 LEAVES FROM A LIFE and supper as well, and I have no recollection of any afternoon engagements even to tea in London ; those entertainments were all kept for the country. If we were at the seaside all together they were deUght- ful, as we still kept all our own London atmosphere about us ; but if I were staying in the country and went out with my relatives to local gatherings, I was bored untU I could have screamed, I love the country, but to be perfect it should be deprived of its local celebrities, and above all should it be cleared from its parsons and the ordinary folk who now inhabit the big old houses as shooting-tenants, or else take them for a term of years and, in con- sequence of their addresses, call and think them- selves the County. Real " county " folk are dull, but they are respectable, and used to be of immense service to their own especial neighbourhoods ; these substitutes are no use at aU ; they import their owti friends, food and forage, take no interest in the village or local town, and are often enough the cause of scandals that are most unpleasant. We hear a good deal of " back to the land " nowadays ; but until the owners of the land live on it them- selves and see to the comfort of their own people the labourer wiU never return. Indeed, I am quite sure that imder any circumstances he will never go back until he sees his future secure, and has some- thing to look forward to. Give the labourer " security of tenure," and a good cottage and garden, and back he wdU go gladly ; of that I, for one, am perfectly certain. 238 CHAPTER XI THEATRES, ACTORS, AND AUDIENCES I DO not know from whom Papa inherited or obtained his inherent love of the play, for his mother, at any rate, was entirely averse from it. " The first thing you see," she said severely, " when you enter the doors is ' This way to the Pit.' " " And how dreadful it would be if you died in the theatre," our other grandmother used to remark to us re- provingly. I never could see why it should be dreadful, though, as I mentioned to her at the time, it would probably be very uncomfortable, and give other people a very great deal of trouble that was quite unnecessary, a remark that shocked her im- mensely, but then we were always shocking that particular relation. One Sunday evening she was left with us and our Uncle Tom, while Mama and Papa went out to dinner, a fact that caused her many groans ; and when we had had our meal she insisted on our all sitting round the table and reading verse by verse with her the lessons for the evening. Of course we ought to have been 239 LEAVES FROM A LIFE delighted to do it, but we were not, and we hastily concocted a plan, while searching for Bibles enough to go round, that effectively put a stop to her ever asking us again to join in her pious exercises. Grandmama read her verse solemnly and I followed on, reading not out of the Bible at all, but out ot my head. Grandmama could not make it out, but said nothing until two or three of us followed suit, when she declared that we were reading nonsense. I sadly reproved her for calling the Bible nonsense, and as we all stuck together and declared we were reading not only what we saw in our own books but in hers, I think she began to think the dreaded paralytic stroke she was always looking out for, and which never came — for she died years after of some- thing else — had fallen, and that, at any rate, her mind was affected though her body apparently was not. We found great joy in furtively watching her pinch herself now and then to be quite sure that feeling had not left her arms and legs, while she occasionally groaned and shook her head in the dreadful manner she affected when she thought we were worse than usual. All the same she gave up asking us to read the Bible with her, and in time ceased to expostulate when we announced with shrieks of joy that we were going to the theatre. I do not know when T. P. Cooke died, but I dis tinctly remember going to some benefit perform- ance made up of snippets out of various plays in which he appeared, danced a hornpipe, and used most unseemly language, while he hitched up his 240 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES nether garments in the true stage-sailor style.* I recollect both him and his swearing perfectly, and I know the scene was taken from Black-Eyed Susan, the play of that name, and not the burlesque, which to the best of my belief was written by F. C. Burnand, was acted at the Strand Theatre, and had Marie Wilton, afterwards Mrs. Bancroft, in the cast. No one who cannot recollect the theatres of the early sixties can have the least idea of the enormous difference there is nowadays in everything connected with the play then and now, a difference that I am bold enough to say is not all for the better, though of course I should be the last to insist that all the old times and things were best. All the same, I do not admire the extremely serious way in which actors and actresses take themselves nowadays, talking about their " art," their aims and their ambitions, while all they really want is to have their own theatre, be their own star, their own manager, and to swagger about just as they like and when they like, keeping the public eye fixed on them alone and caring very little indeed about the play. We went to the play ; nowadays folk frequent the theatre: two very different things, at least in my opinion : while there is none of the real discipline there used to be in the old travelling companies when every one worked hard and took his or her share, whether it was acting, scene-shifting, * Since this was written I have discovered that it was a benefit performance given after Douglas Jerrold's death — in 1857. Q 241 LEAVES FROM A LIFE carpentering or costume-making, all came alike to all in the company in the day's work. Papa used to declare that the cry, " Th' laakers is coom- ing," in Yorkshire sent all the folk to the hedges to gather in their washing, and naturally one does not want to return to those days. Still I do think the gloom of the hideous problem play, and the over- weighting of Shakespeare by expensive dresses and scenery, have cast a shadow over the theatre that it will take some time to remove. Is there anything better than a really good play ? Let us hope some day some one will rediscover or else write something like School, Caste, and Ours, and bring back the play to the play-house once again. When I first recollect the theatre the actors and actresses never changed their dresses all through the play, and I especially recollect seeing one performance where the ladies wore evening dress at breakfast and the men were attired in whatever they may have had in their wardrobes; one, for example, was in evening costume, another in formal day attire, while a third was in loud checks ; all these costumes being considered appropriate for a play that began in the morning and ended some time at night. There was very little scene-shifting either. A "back cloth" appropriately painted and the removal of the furniture turned a house into a garden, but no thrills were lacking, and having no conception of what the future held in store, we enjoyed ourselves mightily and listened to the play, our attention not 242 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES being distracted from that either to the gowns or the scenery. We must have gone perpetually to the theatre. We never missed the pantomime, I know, for we had a great many friends who gave us boxes, and in our early days that was the only part of the theatre we ever honoured with our pre- sence. In the pantomime times we suffered a good deal for our exclusiveness, for when we had the stage-box the clown has more than once drawn attention to us horribly by joining us in it and cracking jokes at our expense, and we suffered agonies of terror when the " Cat " in Dick Whitting- ton sprang from the stage on to the ledge of our box, grinned at us horribly, and insisted on our shaking his terror-striking furry hand. We used, for all our terror, to enjoy the part the clown took in the pantomime immensely, and Willie once earned a round of applause from the house, and very especial attentions from the clown, by calling out at the top of his voice, " Oh, hooray, girls, hooray! I see the clown!" We used to see a great deal more of behind the scenes from our box than I for one cared to. I like illusion, and to be allowed to believe in the good fairies and evil spirits. One could not quite believe in either when one saw the " Fairy Good- will " drinking porter out of a pewter pot in the wings, while the evil spirit tickled her with his wand and demanded a share of the drink. I recollect, too, going behind the scenes at Drury Lane once when the pantomime 243 LEAVES FROM A LIFE was on, and being given a private view of the traps, wings and other mysteries, and on that same occa- sion I was led across the stage in a pantomime crowd to see the audience from the stage, but I was very much alarmed, gave only a short glance, and saw nothing but the glare of footlights and what appeared to me to be an immense black hole behind them. We must have been taken to many a play besides the pantomime and the one in which T. P. Cooke appeared, but my real remembrance of the theatre dates from the year 1860, when the Bouci- caults burst upon London and we were thrilled night after night by the Colleen Bawn. I do not know how many times I saw that play, but as we knew the Boucicaults, who were extremely good to us, we could always have a box, and were it neces- sary I could, I am sure, stage-manage the play from beginning to end. Dion Boucicault was, without exception, the most fascinating man I ever met. Even as a child he fascinated me. I don't know what it might have been had I been grown up. He was also extremely good-looking, and one of the most amusing talkers possible, and as he had children of his own he used to play with them, us and the little Fechters in a way that would have won the heart of any child. He had married an exquisite Irish girl called Agnes Robertson, and oh I how pretty she was ! She had the most beauti- ful blue eyes with black lashes, quantities of lovely black hair, and spoke with the sweetest voice 244 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES possible. She wore a red cloak in the Colleen Bawn, and for some time these cloaks were greatly in the fashion. I saw in some paper the other day that the scarlet cloak of the sixties worn at the theatre marked out the wearer for contumely as a "dead- head " ; it was nothing of the kind, the red cloak was a remembrance of the Colleen Bawn and the red- hooded garment Mrs. Dion Boucicault used to wear. How simple were the Boucicaults, and the Feehters, and the delightful Sotherns in those days ! and for years after too, and how we loved going the round of the theatres at which they were to be seen! Honestly I never cared for Lord Dun- dreary, and I never really admired Sothern as an actor, but he was the most amusing of men. His wife was extremely nice, and he had some charming children, and we all were very happy together. I do not think Sothern could have refrained from practical joking to save his hfe, and he was really a past master in the art, if art it could be called. I well remember going with him, Papa and Shirley Brooks to the theatre at Scarborough, where we were to encourage by our presence a " distinguished amateur." This man was quite elderly, consider- ably over sixty I should say, and Papa made a sketch of him standing with bent knees in the manner an old cab-horse stands when it is extremely tired, and he not only had not the smallest idea of acting, but did not know his part at all. We saw him twice ; why, I cannot think, except that we were all very good-natured, and being " out for the 24s LEAVES FROM A LIFE holidays," were delighted to have anjrwhere to go. The man had been a clerk of some kind, and had all his life pined to go on the stage, but the fact that he had to work for his living had kept him, luckily for him, closely tied to his desk. How- ever, when he was of mature age he not only re- tired on a pension but was left money by some relation. The pension was fortunately safe, but the money was at once spent, as he thought, in realising the ambition of a life-time and going on the stage, and he got a company together and hired the Scarborough theatre and proceeded to become famous. This was in 1866, yet it is quite impossible to forget any item of those two nights. The first evening the theatre was fairly full, and the poor man gave us his idea of Claude Melnotte, trembling like a leaf, with his poor old knees bent and his eyes constantly going towards the prompter who stood at the wings, and once even advanced and lent him the book, but nothing very dreadful happened, though the shrieks of uncontrolled laughter from the house were louder and more frequent than the applause. The next day the wretched man met Sothern on the Spa. " Well, how did I get on?" he asked. "Well," said Sothern, " to be quite candid with you, you spoke so low that very often we none of us could hear a word you said ; otherwise — " and he lifted his hand and expressed in pantomime that rarely, if ever, had he seen a finer performance. The poor actor was delighted. "You are all coming to-night, 246 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES aren't you ? " he asked. " Of course, of course, we none of us would miss it for the world." " Now let me ask you a favour," said the would-be actor ; "when you can't hear me, raise your hand with your handkerchief in it. The moment I see it I will raise my voice, and I am certain you will hear every word I say." Sothern promised, but as we were not taken into his confidence we could not understand why " Othello " kept an anxious eye on our party, and when Sothern produced his handker- chief began to bellow like a bull. We had the theatre pretty much to ourselves that night, and I never remember laughing so much as we did then, before or since. The unhappy " Othello," between his anxiety to make himself heard and to see Sothern's handkerchief, kept losing his place, and notwithstanding that he smothered Desdemona with one hand while he turned over the book with the other, and was furthermore prompted by an enthusiastic friend lying under Desdemona's bed, whose face appeared now and again beneath the valance, he quite collapsed; and had, I think, a sudden and bad attack of stage fright ; the curtain came down precipitately, and we rolled out of the theatre exhausted with laughing, which was renewed when Sothern told us about the handkerchief, and we had to sit down many times to laugh and laugh again during our walk from the theatre in the town to the South Cliff, where we were then staying. During that especial sojourn at beloved Scar- borough we used to attend every performance that 24; LEAVES FROM A LIFE came our way, and long accounts of some of them may be found in Punch, written by Shirley Brooks when he was staying with us. They were signed with the pseudonym of " Epicurus Rotundus," and amongst these special entertainments was an ex- tremely good circus. The proprietor was very grateful to Shirley for the help his notices had given him, and we used to go whenever we liked to the circus and have " command " performances in a small way, and indeed do very much as we liked there. One evening, just as we were leaving the circus, the proprietor came rushing up to Papa and Shirley in an excited manner. He had an extremely pretty daughter, who had attracted con- siderable attention among the young men about the place, and going to call her unexpectedly for some special " act " we had asked for, he had dis- covered the usual note on the pincushion to tell him she had fled to meet her lover, a man of posi- tion, who most certainly would not have the least idea of marrying the girl. At first neither Papa nor Shirley Brooks saw what they could do, but on the latter representing that as gentlemen they would know better than he did the way to put it, and that they could draw forcibly before her eyes the picture of what the end must be, they went off* to the station, stopped the girl, and for about half an hour they both drew the most vivid pictures of what would certainly be her fate if she persisted in her stupid and wicked course. The girl was a good girl, very pretty and very charming, and had not the 248 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES least doubt that the man meant to many her ; but "when Papa told her that he would be an earl some day, and that she was neither fit to be a countess, nor did her " lover " intend her to be one, she re- lented, burst into tears and returned home, where her father met her with open arms and tears of joy. I think some one had an interview with the would-be seducer. At any rate, he did not appear again at Scarborough, and some years afterwards we had a very grateful letter from the girl telling us she had married the ring-master, and never had been so happy in all her life. I think of all the actors I have ever known per- sonally no one was quite so delightful as Joseph Jefferson, the American actor. He was not only a most perfect actor, but a clever artist and a most entertaining companion. The first time he came to England he was a widower, and we used to see a very great deal of him. He was acting Rip van Winkle, and also The Cricket on the Hearth, where he took Toole's part of Caleb Plummer, and I think he did Jingle in a dramatised version of " Pickwick," but of this I am not quite sure. I saw him over and over again as Rip, and I am sorry for the generation which can neither hear nor see Jefferson in this charming play. The next time Jefferson came he had married a delightful girl, and she and his daughter accompanied him ; but he was more tied than he was on his first visit, and we did not see so much of him. He gave me a warm invitation to spend the winter with them in Florida, where he 249 LEAVES FROM A LIFE had an orange-grove, and I always regret that T never availed myself of the oflFer ; but in our days girls did not travel alone, and distances were more than double what they are now ; if it had been nowadays I should most certainly have gone, as I was invited both by the Sotherns and Boucicaults to visit the States first, and then go on to Florida. We never knew as much of the actresses as we did of the actors, and I fancy their time was much more taken up in domesticities than it is now, for Mrs. Boucicault rarely, if ever, dined at our house on Sundays ; she worked most frightfully hard, and was one of the sweetest actresses of the time, and we used generally to see her and the children in the afternoon before the early meal which preceded the theatre. In the same way we used to see the Fechters, who were living close to them. Fechter was a remarkable actor ; he was a stout, fleshy- looking man, with rather long hair and very beau- tiful hands, feet, and legs ; and his voice, despite his extremely strong accent, was very delightful. He would persist in playing Hamlet in a fair wig, declaring that as he was a Dane he could not pos- sibly be dark ; and at first that, and the accent, brought a perfect storm of criticism about his ears. All the same, he persevered. He was careful of his company, and all were good, especially Mr, Compton, whose Grave-digger could never be for- gotten — so perfect, so absolutely Shakespearean was his manner of enacting it. But Fechter never rose to his zenith until he came out in The Duke's 250 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES Motto, with Kate Terry as his leading lady. Night after night we children used to sit and watch the couple, until we knew every line of the play, and did not know which of the two actors we admired the most. Those who have never seen Kate Terry can never have the smallest idea of what an actress she was ; she had the most perfect intonation, the greatest charm of any woman I ever saw, and we simply raved about her. She was just "getting into her stride," as they say, when she married, and she was a loss to the English stage that it can never recover. I know people go mad about Ellen Terry, and she is (or was) a great actress, and I suppose her Beatrice and the palmy days of the Lyceum have never been surpassed ; all the same, she never possessed for me the charm her sister Kate did ; there was a purity, a fragrance about Kate that was unmistakable, and a charm of voice and manner that must always be hers. It is sad to think how unhappily most of those bright spirits of the theatre in the sixties ended their days. The Fechters are all dead, they quarrelled and parted before the end came; the Boucicaults fell apart, too, as did the Sotherns. There seems something about the stage that does not make for domestic bliss ; but in the days we knew them they were the happiest of people, and we were all happy together. Let us hope that somewhere the old delightful days may be found again, and all misunderstanding and miseries be vnped out. 251 LEAVES FROM A LIFE Of course the Bancrofts and the little house out of Tottenham Court Road were the first real begin- nings of the renaissance of the drama. We never knew them socially in my time, but we knew Robertson the dramatist, and in consequence were deeply interested in the plays which were to revo- lutionise the scenery and dresses, at any rate of that period, and I think the first play of his I saw was Caste. George Honey was Eccles, Bancroft the heavy swell, John Hare Gerridge, and Marie Wilton Polly. I do not recollect who did George D' Alroy, or the most lachrymose and sentimental Esther, but the others I hear as I write, the tone of their voices, and the very look of the " Marquissey," although I cannot recollect who took that special r6le. I know it was excellently done, or I should not have remembered her at all. The dresses were to us the most extraordinary thing possible, for the characters wore the clothes appropriate for the day and year, but from the first the Prince of Wales' Theatre was a success, and money must simply have been coined there. Mrs. Bancroft was an actress similar in one particular to Kate Terry — we have never replaced her on the stage; her actual laugh was contagious, and from the moment she appeared before the footlights until she disap- peared, it was impossible to forget her. She always took her audience by storm, and 1 have seen her in many parts, from burlesque at the Strand upward to the Haymarket, but I consider her Polly in Caste her chef-d'oeuvre, and I do not think I am a bad 252 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES judge. By the way, their first night at the Hay- market nearly brought the house about their ears : they had abolished the pit, and the noise was so terrific that they had to restore it, or rather promised to restore it, or they would never have been allowed to proceed. Robertson was very ill when we knew him, and he had just married for a second time a German girl, very good-looking, with a quantity of red hair. He lived long enough to taste his success, but died before he could obtain the full benefit. Perhaps it was as well. Society, Caste, Ours, School, all were successes, but Home and another one, I think called Lady Clare, were not, and I am not sorry that he did not live to see his popularity wane. We knew Madge Robertson well, kind and charming Mrs. Kendall, one of the few against whom never a word has been said, and her, too, I have always considered one of our finest actresses in her own line ; the actresses of to-day are all more or less good, generally more, but I do not recall one who stands out from the ruck as those I have named used to do, and who do not owe as much to their perfect dressing and surroundings as they do to their own work. Put one of them down in the theatres of the sixties and seventies, and I venture to remark they would soon learn that more was required of them than appears to satisfy nowa- days the most exigeante audience. We did not always stick to the West End theatres either, and in 1869 we made several expe- 253 LEAVES FROM A LIFE ditions by the Underground Railway, then a new toy, to the Standard Theatre to see a young man called " Irving." When Irving died I was quite astonished to see no reference to these performances. He was acting in Dearer than Life for one play, and we were enchanted with him. Mr. Bateman went with us, and from those evenings started the Lyceum combination, first with Miss Bateman and the Bateman family, and then with Ellen Terry, from which aU his fame was to spring. I always think that Irving was much more of an actor in the days oi Dearer than Life and The Two Roses than at any other time ; he was excellent of course in many, many parts : Louis XI., Charles I., Cardinal RicheUeu, all stand out well in my memory, but I own his Macbeth moved me to tears of laughter; I could not stand his Hamlet, remembering my dear Fechter; while Claude Melnotte was made quite as ridiculous by him as by the unhappy Scarborough amateur ; and his Romeo — ^but over his Romeo it would be kinder to draw a veil and say nothing at all about it ! When we first knew Henry Irving he was without any mannerisms at aU ; he neither dragged his leg nor spoke so that one could not understand one half he said, and he was a dehghtful companion. I knew him before he was married, which was the week before I was, and I was at his wedding, and he later on was at ours with his bride, I think only at the dance given in the evening, but any- how I know he was there. I was very sorry 254 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES when that first home was broken up and the husband and wife quarrelled and parted, for the boys were dear little fellows ; but incompatibility of temper does not make for happiness, still I cannot help thinking that all that was wanted was a little common sense and a candid friend and things would have gone on harmoniously until the end. It must, however, be very trying to be the wife of an actor if one does not act oneself ; the evenings are very long and very dull, and as the Garrick Club used to be visited by most of the actors after they had finished their work, I suspect it was very late indeed when Irving returned to his little home. I think the Standard audiences must have been most respectable, far more so than that of the Surrey Theatre, to which the Twisses, poor Fred Clay, Arthur Blunt and I went one never-to-be-forgotten evening to see the pantomime. When we gave the cabman the address he remarked cheerfully, "That's the place that was burned down once, wasn't it ? " We could not enlighten him on this score, but when he was carefully told where the theatre was he stared in amazement and evidently thought very little indeed of us. When we got to the place I for one had fearful dreads and terrors lest the fire should occur again, for if it had we must have sat still and frizzled ; the place was packed from floor to ceiling by the most extraordi- nary people I ever saw in my life, and as it was before the days of the County Council regulations, 255 LEAVES FROM A LIFE the gangways were filled in with chairs and people standing, and much as I was amused I was truly glad to get home safely again. Before the pantomime began a solemn-faced super came in front of the curtain and remarked, "You har requisted by Messrs. Shepherd and Criswick not to crack nuts during the performance." He fled before a volley of orange-peel and nut-shells, and Mr. Twiss told me he had seen an unpopular actor pelted with ginger-beer bottles, some of which missed their aim and fell with horrid consequences on the dwellers in the "pit." Fortunately nothing of the kind happened when we were there, for the pit was filled by loving couples. At the commencement of the pantomime they sat hand in hand ; as it progressed they clasped each other round the waist, and at the end were sitting so " intimate," as the livery-stable man said when asked how many his waggonette would hold, that there really would have been room for quite half as many people again as there were there already, I think we must have had a box, but I quite well recollect Mr. Twiss telling a cheerful story of some one looking out from the dress-circle to gaze at the gallery with the dire results that his action was taken for curiosity and " side," and some one resenting the action of the " swell," first swore at him horribly, then launched a ginger-beer bottle, which hit a friendly pittite, and finally spat right straight into the unfortunate " swell's " eye. "Don't put your head out too far," said Mr. Twiss with a twinkle ; "we might be taken for swells and then — " 256 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES I do not recollect much about the pantomime, but in referring to old letters under the date January 21, 1869, 1 wrote : " I never enjoyed a pantomime so much in my life. Why, I cannot tell, for I do not believe it was particularly good, but the audience was so funny, and altogether everything was so different from anything I had ever seen before that I was immensely amused. The moral sentiments and the political hits and references were lovely, and evidently Disraeli and his politics are at a dis- count on the other side of the water. Indeed, any hit at him, and the references were decidedly and richly personal, was received with rapture, and these Surrey audiences are not very enthusi- astic, and neither applaud nor disapprove loudly, and were in fact remarkably quiet, except when Disraeli was mentioned, much to my astonishment, for I rather expected a row." The letter ends : " I have fallen in love, as usual when I go out, but this time only with a baby, the dearest thing ; he is Mrs. Twiss's youngest, about two, I think, and a perfect picture." Alas ! the dear little chap did not live long, but I always recollect him standing up in his cot, rosy in his long white night-dress, to kiss us good-bye, and very very sorry I was to hear he was dead. Another reference to Mr. Twiss may be in- teresting here ; another of these same letters says : " This evening (May 13th, 1869) we went to the Gallery of Illustration to see Arthur Blunt (Cecil), he acts and makes up beautifully and sings charm- R 2S7 LEAVES FROM A LIFE ingly, but the people he has to support him are simply odious. Mr. Twiss was there, and he kept making Arthur Blunt burst out laughing, much to the detriment of his part and the ill-concealed wrath of the others." I find from these same letters that I went constantly to the theatre in 1868-9 with Mr. and Mrs. Twiss, and as he was a most admirable actor — he was one of the original " stroUing players," and was actually preparing to take his part in the " Canterbury Week " performances when he died — a mention of that delightful household may not be out of place. Mr. Twiss was a rather short man, with a very humorous smile, and an extremely alert look, while she was very pretty and dainty, and had some of the nicest children 1 have ever seen. I saw her after a lapse of quite thirty years, and 1 knew her again at once, so little had she changed in ap- pearance, for she was the kind of woman who ages but does not alter, and I found her unaltered in more ways than one. Fond as we were of the Twisses, and fond as I believe she was of me, she once had a sort of idea I meant to appropriate one of her tame cats, quite a^ame and platonic cat, but I had really no notion of the kind, neither had he the least intention of abandoning his allegiance, but he had an intense admiration for Browning's works, and begged and implored me to read " The Ring and the Book," and as he lent me the volumes one after the other, and called to bring them and take them away, and discussed them thread -bare, I learned to understand and love Browning, and that accomplished, the 258 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES gallant captain departed, and I saw no more of him. I was just going to be married, but all the same I had given the most awful offence, and 1 am quite sure that even to this day it has never been for- given. Mr. Levy of the Telegraph was another person who was always sending us boxes both for the theatre and opera, and indeed I was most emphati- cally a " dead head," for I am sure in the days of our youth we never paid for our seats. I heard all the great singers, Mario, Grisi, Patti, and the rest, but until much later on, when Wagner burst on the horizon, I never really cared for the opera, except to see the beautiful women and handsome men who were on view there. I well recollect the year when Lord Hastings was ruined, and came to a sudden and unhappy end, for I saw Lady Hastings at the opera that same Derby week covered with the most splendid diamonds, and heard that that was the last appearance of the jewels on her person, because everything would have to be sold, and that her husband had already gone off to Paris. We always felt a great deal of interest in her, for her elopement from Marshall and Snel- grove's shop caused an enormous sensation. The man to whom she was engaged sat outside in the carriage at the Oxford Street entrance, while Lady Florence calmly emerged from the Vere Street entrance, met Lord Hastings, and married him, and was off on her honeymoon almost before her fiancd was aware that she had been some time 259 LEAVES FROM A LIFE longer in the shop than she had told him she would be, and went to look for her. Both Marquis and ]\Iarchioness are dead, and no doubt the first lover has long forgotten the hate and rage which filled his heart, and made him burn to avenge himself on his successful rival. Among the extraordinary successes of that same period must be mentioned that of Mrs. Rousby, whose name I have no doubt is quite unknown to the present generation, and who caused an enthu- siasm in the late sixties and early seventies that has rarely been equalled. We had known her husband for years ; his father was a colour-maker in HuU, and this son had taken to the stage, very much to the grief of his father. He used to make periodical visits to London, and always came to see us, and as he generally arrived unannounced in the evening when our people were out, he would come into the schoolroom and thrill us with recitations. His pet one was an address to a mummy, and began, " And thou hast walked about — how strange a story — in Thebeses' Street two thousand years ago." He always said "Thebeses' Street" ; all the same, we loved it, and the moment he appeared we begged hard for the mummy, and got it ; the only difficulty we had was to stop him once he had fairly started on his recitation. One day he appeared earlier than usual, and was evidently in a most perturbed state of mind. I think he owned the Jersey Theatre, where he was an enormous favourite; but at that moment his company was at Ports- a6o THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES mouth, where he had fallen in love with, and married secretly, the daughter of some petty official in the dockyard. When 1 see the airs and graces even the smallest and youngest actor or actress puts on nowadays, I really can hardly contain myself when 1 recollect how barely anything like a " play-actor " was tolerated in the days I am writing about. Irving was of no particular family, but even he changed his name ; while for any one not connected by birth or relationship with the stage to join it was a matter that was never mentioned again by the " disgraced " family. Mrs. Rousby had raised the parental wrath by her devotion to the drama and Rousby ; they had run away ; he did not dare return to Portsmouth ; could Papa advise him at all what to do, and above all might he bring his wife to see us ? " You would admire her, I am sure," he added, "she is the most beautiful creature in the whole world." The necessary permission was given, and on one Sun- day afternoon they duly arrived. I have no words to describe Mrs. Rousby's exquisite beauty, for among the many beautiful women I have known and worshipped she struck me at first sight as being the loveliest I had ever seen. I say at first sight advisedly, for she had no more brains than a statue and no more animation, and apparently had had the smallest possible amount of education. She spoke as a lady should, but had no acquaintance 261 LEAVES FROM A LIFE at all with literature or with the most ordinary events of English history. All the same we gathered round her with amazement at her beauty, while Papa made her walk up and down the room, stand, sit, and move about generally in order that he might gather some idea of how she would be likely to move on the stage. Finally, at a word from Mr. Rousby, she took off her hat and let down her hair. A woman's hair, I freely confess, is my weakest point ; the hair that ripples and waves away naturally from the forehead to be coiled round the head or plaited into great plaits, is a joy to me, and I always admire it more than anything else. I cannot bear the so-called " Royal " fringes ; we used to call them birds' nests in our time. Neither can I endure false hair, nor hair waved by tongs. But Mrs. Rousby 's hair was as natural as the rest of her ; she appeared to take out three or four big pins and in a moment her hair rippled down to the floor, and she was a tall woman; while we stood and gazed until I advanced a finger and touched the marvellous thing. Without an atom of vanity, and with three or four graceful twists of her hands, the hair was rolled up, and I could see thatPapa, captivated as he always was, as indeed as 1 am even now, female as I am, by a beautiful woman, said he would do his best, and the Rousbys went away rejoicing, for Papa's best was very good indeed. At last all was arranged ; the theatre at Richmond was taken, and we drove down accompanied by Mr. Tom Taylor and good old jovial Mark Lemon. 262 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES I shall never forget that evening; there was a soldier in the pit and a nursemaid in the gallery, and a slight sprinkling of folks in the other parts of the house, but the moment the curtain went up the play was acted at us. Rousby stamped and raved at us, the play was either The Man in the Iron Mask, or a still more lurid one called Sir Giles Overreach, but I cannot remember, and I never put down the name of the play, while.Mrs. Rousby smiled, sighed, ogled and let down her hair until both Tom Taylor and Mark Lemon were entranced, and vowed they would make her the greatest actress the world had ever seen, and the rage of London. No one could have made her the former ; her good and adoring hus- band coached her ; Mr. Taylor did his utmost, taught her, read to her, and wrote plays for her, but they did most undoubtedly make her the rage of London. She was run after everywhere, and finally, poor creature, went very swiftly to the bad, took to drink and died from a fall from her horse, 1 think, or something equally tragic and sudden. Her devoted husband put down all her failings to a ghastly shock she had one night on returning from the theatre, when she found a child she had left in a slightly ailing condition dead of sudden suppressed scarlet fever ; let us hope that was the cause, but I for one shall always regret her squan- dered beauty, and wonder what would have been her fate had she remained at Portsmouth and never set London raving about her at all. 263 LEAVES FROM A LIFE I think the most embarrassing evening I ever spent at the play was when I accompanied Wilkie Collins to see a three -act mystery which he and Charles Reade had concocted together. Both were in the most intense state of nervousness, Wilkie sitting behind the curtain biting his nails, and Charles Reade was in and out of the box constantly, using the strongest of strong language and driving me nearly wild. The whole play turned on the finding of some document which had been hidden behind a brick in a bed-room wall, a most obvious brick, plainly to be seen by the least observant person. The detectives came in and tapped in every place save the right one, until the gallery could bear it no longer and called out which the brick was. That damned the play ; all thefine sentiments of the herowere screamed at, and howls and cat-calls finally brought down the curtain, while Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade fiercely condemned the British public to eternal damnation, and we went home delighted to get away from the company of the unhappy authors. We used to see a great deal of Wilkie Collins, and hear a great deal about his books as he wrote them. I do not think many better stories of the kind have been written than "The Woman in White," "Armadale," or " The Moonstone." Most of this latter was written when he was suffering agonies from gout, to which he was a martyr, " but if a fellow lives on pigs' eyelids and port wine," remarked Papa, " what can he expect ? " I do not believe those were 264 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES his " pertickler wanities," as Sam Weller says, but I do know he loved my mother's good dinners and used to make one of her most appreciative guests. We only met Charles Reade occasionally ; and I do not think he was much of a society man, and, moreover, he was always full of cranks and notions of the most extraordinary kind, one being that half the people shut up in lunatic asylums had no business to be there, and he used to make the lives of some of our friends a burden to them when he was writing " Hard Cash," and looking into the lunacy laws and all the lunatic asylums he was allowed to enter. One day he told Papa he had picked out twelve quite sane men from among the supposed lunatics, and one of the doctors had promised to ask them all to dinner and give them another chance ; would Papa come too ? As Papa knew the doctor and knew also that ample precau- tions would be taken, he agreed, and the dinner duly came off. AH went well, the twelve lunatics behaved ad- mirably, and Charles Reade became more and more sure that he had rescued twelve unfortu- nates from worse than prison, until the dessert was placed on the table. Then the doctor, turning to the man on his left, said, "Have you been introduced to your next-door neighbour? He is the Virgin Mary." The lunatic leapt to his feet. " You lie ! " he screamed ; " I am the Virgin Mary," and in a moment all the twelve lunatics began to show themselves in their real colours ; 265 LEAVES FROM A LIFE the attendants arrived, and Charles Reade had to confess that he was in the wrong, at all events, in those special cases. Still I believe he did call attention by his book to certain things that required immediate attention in the asylums, just as his play It is Never too late to Mend called atten- tion to the bad management of certain prisons ; we often saw that play, but I always hated it, the flog- ging scene was brutal ; but much as I love the play I always hate horrors, pistols and shooting, and above all I dread fire and the sight of a movable lamp and candles with shades. Mrs. Kendall told me that every naked light behind the scenes has its own guardian ; all the same I have more than once seen the candle-shades catch fire and dreaded the stampede that might ensue. I have once or twice been in a theatre when it has caught fire, to be put out immediately, it is true, but frightening, all the same, and I saw Her Majesty's burned to the ground, a most marvellous sight, but one that made one wonder what would have hap- pened had it been the night before, when the theatre was crowded and I made one of the audience. But theatres generally do burn down when the audience is not there : all the same, I always sit in dread if there are any lights on the stage that may be over- turned by a careless hand. One of the most wonderful performances I ever saw was that given by a one-legged dancer called Donato who, despite his one-leggedness, danced in the most graceful and charming manner ;_but he only appeared for one 266 THEATRES, ACTORS, AUDIENCES season at Drury Lane or Cpvent Garden, I forget which, and few people will recollect him. In the seventies there began to be a change on the boards : one or two " talented amateurs " took the stage, notably Lady Sebright and Mrs. Monck- ton, but the latter was the only real actress I have ever seen among many amateurs ; she held and kept the stage from the moment she came on, to the moment she left it, and her acting later on, when she ceased to be an amateur and became a professional, was marvellous, especially good being her reading of a letter in Jim the Penman. She never spoke, but one knew exactly what she was thinking, and a better piece of acting I, for one, never saw. With the arrival of the amateur, theatres altered at once ; for years I could hardly stand the stuff, nauseous for the most part, that was our fare. Recently things are better ; the stage is finding its level, which is to amuse, not to bore, preach, or instruct, and when one or two of the most swelled headed actor-managers still left have departed, I have great hopes that the stage, actors and all, may return to its proper station once more and be a place for plays, and not an exhibition, as it all too often is nowadays, of dresses and furniture. 267 CHAPTER XII ODD HAPPENINGS On looking over old letters and diaries I am really quite astonished to see how much we used to do, how much I read and wrote, and moreover how many and varied were our interests. It is also singular to note how diUgently I read the papers, and how dominated we were by the opinions of the Saturday Review, which used to be sent on to me by a friend, and sent on again by me to two others, the last recipient posting it on to another dear friend in Australia, I do not think any newspaper ever had the same extraordinary effect the Saturday had in 1868 and 1869, and I, for one, burned with indignation over the reaUy abominable articles on my sex which culminated in the "Girl of the Period," and which were universally supposed to have been written by a man ; no woman could, we said, be so untrue to her own sex ; then the reviews of books were most reliable, and I could really trust to them ; while the Times was another power, placed on a very high pedestal. The pedestal shook for a moment when the Times discovered 268 ODD HAPPENINGS that the Money Articles, written by a man called Sampson, were discovered to have been in- spired by bribes. Sampson disappeared, and the scandal was in a measure hushed up, and his sister, Mrs. Gabrielli, a well-known but most mysterious figure in those days, went about much as usual and knew nothing whatever about her brother "s be- haviour ; she said so repeatedly, so I suppose it must have been true. Mrs. Gabrielli is one of the characters in Hichens' most amusing book, " The Green Carnation," while she appears also in one of my father's pictures peering through her eyeglass at a picture on the waU ; she was something like the Italian "pirate," for no one knew where she came from, or what she really was, except that she was very rich and most amusing and gave large parties, at which one used to meet every one. She was under a temporary cloud caused by her brother's doings when I was going out, and personally I only saw her very little and I did not like her ; but she made heaps of friends, and died not long ago in the best of odour with every one. The Sampson scandal is long since forgotten, except by those who, like ourselves, believed in the mighty paper, and were sorry to see it was taken in. But the Times was shaken to its foundations by the Parnell scandal ; it feU from its pedestal ; no one beheved in it ever again, and at the present time it has ceased to be, for me at any rate, anything but a threepenny paper one is obliged to see, because if one did not, one would miss the announcement of 269 LEAVES FROM A LIFE one's friends' births, deaths, and marriages, and the correspondence. That at any rate is as good as ever, for still every one with a real or fancied grievance sits down and writes at once to the Times. If I were asked to state what I regret most in the old days I should say unhesitatingly the newspapers of that date. They were honest ex- pressions of honest opinions, written by weU- educated men, and one could no more bribe a newspaper man than one of Her Majesty's judges. But now aU is altered : the newspaper man is not bribed, but the newspaper is ; half the articles are concealed, and very badly concealed, advertise- ments, while any one can get into print nowadays. One has but to resemble the British pubUc of Rudyard Kipling's "pay, pay, pay" doggerel to have anything described or extoUed that one desires. "It must be true, it is in the paper," used to be an axiom ; now I do not think the most ignorant frequenter of a free library would make this bold assertion. What a power, too, was the Daily News in the days of Sir John Robinson, with Archibald Forbes as war correspondent, and the little maps Sir John so dearly loved ! Now who reads a news- paper to be instructed or entertained ? Except for the excellent Spectator, the Morning Post, and the beloved Mr. Punch, the whole lot might cease to exist, and the world would not be a penny the worse ; indeed in some cases it would be the better. I may add the Daily Graphic to my list ; it is an excellent 270 ODD HAPPENINGS little paper in every Way, and I can but hope it may continue so as long as I live. Of course nowadays competition is most keen, and folk must live, and I regret to say that the ephemeral papers of the day cause me extreme joy, though I know they ought not to ; aU the same 1 am glad I was not tempted by them in my girlhood. I should have fallen without a doubt, and should have missed the solid education obtained from the better papers of the sixties and seventies. Just as photography has killed the beautiful wood- engravings which embellished Once a Week to say nothing of PmmcA, and some of the novels of that time, so, too, the easy scribblement of to-day killed the real leader-writer and reviewer ; indeed, nowadays, book follows book at such a rate that one would have to be a second Shakespeare to be remembered more than a week, and how could the honest and cul- tured reviewer of our day keep up with the mass of literature poured out at the present time day after day and all day long ? All the same, I am always being amazed at the excellent books one can get week after week from Mudie's, and I only wish the one -volume book had been in fashion when I lived in the depths of the country, and when my box contained about three sets of three-volume stories and the rest history, or something of that kind ! In our day it was a distinction to write or have written a book ; now it will soon be a distinction never to have taken a pen in hand. But in my strenuous youth I wrote regularly month after month and week 271 LEAVES FROM A LIFE after week for a MS. magazine which we got up between twelve criticising members and a certain number of outsiders, and that magazine survived to quite a late date, and may, for aU I know, be going on now. None of the twelve critics, if I except my sister and myself, ever did much printed work, but the magazine was really a good one, and 1 see that, in the five years I had to do with it, I contributed at the rate of three and four poems a month, and as aU were published much later in the World, AU the Year Round, Chambers, and other less-known papers, and moreover paid for, they must have been what the boys caU " rather decent " after all. One long poem I worked at night and day ia 1868 and 1869 was pubhshed in 1880 ; the whole edition sold ; unfortunately I had entrusted the publication to CecU Brooks, Shirley's son, for the sake of " auld lang sjnie." He was not successful as a pubhsher, and I never got a sixpence from that precious book; neither did I from my second work, for David Bogue, the publisher, " bankraipt and left," as Carlyle says ; but as aU the articles which composed it had been published in the Daily News, Pall Mall, St. James's and other papers, and had been paid for, I did not have aU my work for nothing, which was some small consolation, though it was none to find the copyright sold to another publisher without my consent, or indeed mthout my being asked ; and when a second edition was asked for, he refused either to bring it out himself or to allow me to do so, though he kindly offered to seU me my own 272 ODD HArPENINGS property for a sum of money, I forget now how much, but I think it was £25. I always had great encouragement from Shirley Brooks, but, as I remarked before, he always advised me to wait. 1 did so, and it was not until the winter of 1881 I took to really writing again, though 1880 was punctuated with poems which were produced as a volume in the December of the same year. But all the same, in the " sixties " I wrote steadily some time during the day, which was divided between that, an enormous amount of letter- writing and reading, and walking, and a great deal of going out. About that time, too, spirit-rapping was engaging the attention of nearly every one, and indeed from about 1864, onwards, there were always people ready to turn the tables, use " planchette " and attend stances, which were aU the very greatest humbug that ever was seen. We once had the celebrated Davenport brothers to our house, and they did the old box trick, allowed themselves to float gracefully over our heads, and flung tambourines and guitars about broadcast. Sothern was there that night, and after- wards he told Papa he could do every one of their tricks, and proceeded to demonstrate how they were accomplished. Not long before, he had been to a stance in the usual darkened room, and had caused a fearful rumpus by seizing first the spirit hand that was supposed to have touched him, and which turned out to be a white kid glove stuffed with cotton-wool at the end of a long pole, and s 273 LEAVES FROM A LIFE then by lighting the gas and suddenly disclosing the medium in the act of rigging up the " flying " tambourines and the spirit music, and so brought her means of hvehhood to a very sudden end. Wehadgreatfunone special evening over this same spirit-rapping, for we had some friends who, despite all we could say, were determined that nothing should induce them to beMeve that the " dear spirits " would not communicate with them, and that this miserable humbug was not a means by which they could com- mimicate with those they had loved and lost. If it were not so absolutely absurd, there wotild be something very pathetic in the way people en- deavour to reach their dead, but as no one ever has seen a ghost, or heard one that could not be ex- plained in broad diayhght and cold blood, I am quite certain there are no means whatever of touch- ing hands Avith those who have, as Dr. Doran expressed it, " solved the great mystery," Anyhow, on that special evening we had a clear proof of how easy, how very easy it was to take people in, who wished to be taken in. Indeed, given the " wish to believe," there is nothing human credulity will not take in, and be the better for, they think, whether it is a patent medicine or Christian Science, the latest and most dangerous form of the idiotcy, that in our day took the form of table-turning and spirit-rapping. We were a large party, and among the rest were Sothem, Harold Power, Mr. Twiss, and, I think, the Bellews, who had not then persuaded 274 ODD HAPPENINGS themselves that they were mediums of the highest class, and were quite as sceptical as we were on the subject. The performance began by throw- ing Harold Power into a trance ; this was of course quite easy, a few passes of the hand in front of his face by Sothem, a few murmured incanta- tions from some one else, and Power sank rigid and stiff into a conveniently placed chair ; then he was requested to describe Papa's painting-room, an extremely easy feat, as he had often seen it ; then to say exactly what Papa had been doing during the day, and at every fresh statement Papa ejacu- lated, " wonderful, marvellous," until Harold Power became rather too descriptive, and had to be roused by much cold water and flapping of towels in his face ; when he came to, groaned aloud, and declared himself so exhausted that he had to be helped to a sofa, and given a refresher of some sort or the other. When he had recovered the serious business began: we aU sat round the table, which in due course began to turn ; raps of the most blood- curdling nature proceeded from all parts of the room, and finally, the table announced in the usual way, a full stop and then three solemn bows, that it was ready to answer questions. I cannot recollect what stuff it talked, via Sothern, Harold Power, and others, after all these years, but I do well remember that the spirits asked for a glass of wine to be placed on the ground under the table for them to drink, Harold Power waiting 275 LEAVES FROM A LIFE while they drank it, with the result that he came back to his seat looking very solemn and bearing the empty glass ; but the climax was reached when Sothem, having in some mysterious manner divested himself of his boot and sock and plunged his foot into cold water, placed this damp chilly member on the hand of one of the most fervent believers, with the result that he shrieked aloud, almost fainted, and looked so queer that our most successful stance was brought to a sudden end. I think we turned the table religiously for many months, assfsted now and again by Dr. Maurice Davies, who was the author of Heterodox London, Orthodox London, and one or two other books, and who at that special time kept a boys' school somewhere in the Queen's Road, and was rather an interesting personahty. He told me a ghost story, not one word of which do I believe, but which was rather creepy and which may be repeated here. He and some of his friends, BeUew among the number, had heard of a haimted house, and they all determined to spend a night there. They went down in the usual way to the usual house, received the usual warnings from the person who kept the keys and found the usual ivy-clad, dam^ and deserted building, and proceeded to make themselves comfortable, still in the usual way. They were accompanied by a dog, and they were beginning to scoff greatly at the ghost, more espe- cially as it was nearer two than twelve, when 276 ODD HAPPENINGS suddenly Mr. Davies said he felt some one was in the room ; it was quite light with lamp and fire- hght, and though no one was visible all felt the presence ; then every hair on the dog's back rose ; he snarled and drew back his lips ; then, with a yell, he precipitated himself towards the object, finally dashing out through the window and making off, and he at any rate was never seen again. Nothing else happened, however ; the " presence " dis- appeared with the dog, and not any of the ghost hunters was a penny the worse. The only part of the story that I believe is the disappearance of the dog, and that may be accounted for in a hundred different ways at least. I have seen good and religious old ladies imploring the table to move: " Dear spirits, oh, dear spirits, do answer," while I have know younger women get into a most hyste- rical condition from spending hour after hour at this silly amusement when they ought to be out in the air. The most successful, if the most unscrupulous, man of that time was the original of Browning's " Sludge, the Medium," and was called David Home. I always think he did possess some power — not occult though — that he would not own to, or properly develop, and that as spirit-rapping was the fashion, he put down to spirit aid what could have been perfectly weU explained, had he chosen to do so, and obtained scientific help to extend that which really existed, and yet which he understood so little, he had to supplement it by fraud, so easily 277 LEAVES FROM A LIFE detected that he had to leave the country, and was pronounced even worse than he really was. In those days no one had heard of wireless telegraphy, a phonograph or telephone was unknown ; why should Home not have been on the brink of dis- covering some power in nature that enabled him to lift tremendous objects and move heavy bodies about from one place to the other ? I think it is possible, and far more probable, than that the spirits on whom he called so ghbly were helpiag him to obtain money by the falsest of false pretences. The saddest effect of the spirit craze that I ever saw, was the mental breakdown of an unfortunate little creature who fancied she was inspired by angel hands to draw the most fearsome collection of scratches, one could not call them sketches, which represented to her an inspired illustration of the Trinity. They resembled nothing so much as highly coloured anatomical charts, and the spirits had sug- gested to her to take a Bond Street Gallery, where she repaired daily to receive the visitors who never came, and lecture to them on the wonders unveiled by her for them in the spirit sketches. It is a pity that the spirits did not warn her that she would lose aU her little capital in this venture, but they did not, and when I saw her she was in rooms in a dismal Bayswater Terrace, exploited by a man who murmured as you left that half a crown would be a great help, and as the people who went to see her generally thought the interview worth the money, he usually received the asked-for sum. But I think 278 ODD HAPPENINGS the half-crowns were few and far between, and when I saw her, the poor little woman was in very low water ; she still eagerly explained the terrible drawings, and waxed enthusiastic about the revela- tions she had received ; but she was cold and half- starved, and I was very sorry for her, for she sadly wanted a friend to get her out of the hands of the man, and indeed she required beside that skilled medical care. I delicately hinted that a female friend would be a good thing, but she told me with tears in her eyes that her last friend had died quite recently, and that if it had not been for her spirit supporters she would not have seen that friend before she died ; and she related solemnly, too, that the night she received an urgent summons to go to her it was pouring with rain ; she had had bronchitis badly, she had not the money to pay for a cab, and she was sitting crying, when suddenly she was wafted through the air, found herself by her friend's bed, and remained by her until she " passed over," as the spirit-jargon puts it, when back she was wafted home, and at such a rate that not one single drop of the pouring rain fell on her. I asked her, rather cruelly, but I could not help it, how she knew she had not dreamed it aU, and she said triumphantly, "Oh, I have proof; I dropped my shoe half-way between this and my friend's house, and next day it was brought back and left at the door." I did not think it worth while to argue about the shoe, and then she showed me a bouquet of flowers under a glass case her friend had sent her from Heaven. 279 LEAVES FROM A LIFE One could have purchased far better flowers in the neighbouring Westbourne Grove, and it seemed scarcely worth while to have gone so far to obtain what could have been bought for a few pence in the nearest milliner's shop ! Mrs. Milner-Gibson was another spiritualist. She had lost a child, and she always beUeved this child returned to her at night and talked to her. Naturally she did not find very many people to share her behef, so at last she begged the chUd to give her some sign she could show; the child clasped her hand and left the imprint of three fingers on her wrist, and she furthermore floated up to the ceiling and knocked a piece out of the plaster ; this latter feat could comfortably have been accompHshed by a " turk's head " broom, and I beheve-doctors account for marks suddenly appearing even if iodine had not been used, as it might have been, to outline the Uttle fingers. Among the hundreds of table-turnings and seances I have seen and helped at, I have never but once come across a thing I could not quite explain, and I have no doubt some explanation could have been made at the time of the one I am about to relate, only we were too astonished to seek for one. Some of our most intimate friends were a Dr. and Mrs. Hodges and their two sons, and Dr. Hodges had more than once told us how idiotic we were. My sister was a most empha;tic behever in spirits, and she was on that special afternoon deeply intent on the table. Dr. Hodges came in from a cricket match. 280 ODD HAPPENINGS The boys knew where he had been if we did not, and he expressed as usual his great contempt for our wasted time. My sister said he was rather unfair, he had never tried it himself, how could he say anything about it. " WeU," rephed the old doctor, " I will put my hands on yours, ask a mental question, remove my hands, and then let the table answer if can." He did this and then the table rapped out in the usual way : " Kensington Park ten runs." Dr. Hodges had asked which side had won a cricket match then proceeding. He sent round Tom to find out the result, and Kensington Park had won by ten runs at the very moment he had asked the mental question. I expect the boys had had some idea of what the question would be ; the first K supplied the rest, and the number of runs was one of those coincidences which occur over and over again, and that without the least need of the inter- vention of spirits ! I have seen and talked with, I think, most of the cranks and faddists of the time, and I have always found them one of two things, mani- festly humbugs and money-getters, or else trem- bling on the borderland and only requiring the very smallest push to become lunatics fit for an asylum. One of the saddest of the many sad cases was that of Mrs. Girling, who lived for some years on the borders of the New Forest. She was abso- lutely mad, and as she either came from or had married into a very good eastern county family I cannot understand how she and her wretched 281 LEAVES PROM A LIFE following were allowed to exist in the poverty, cold and squalor in which they were when I saw them. I was profoundly interested in her, and I have always found the best way to treat these people is to listen to them, draw them out, and assent to their wildest hypotheses rather than to argue with them. The poor creature declared she was the mother of Our Lord and bore the stigmata, but although she showed me her hands, and I pretended to see all she did, there was no mark of any kind ; she was liter- ally too unbalanced to require ocular demonstration, or I am sure the man who appeared to run the place would have produced them for her. Mrs. Girling had had at one time quite a large following, and she had practised the curious creed of the " Shakers," but she found so many people came in crowds to see them shake or dance, that these exercises were given up. She gave me a reaUy heart- breaking account of their sufferings in a great snow- storm, when no one could reach them for ten days, and they were so cold and himgry they nearly died, and they all lay in bed to keep themselves warm, and sang hymns to make them forget how hungry they were ; but they knewthey would be saved, and so they were. One of her ideas was that she was immortal, and that all who had her faith were immortal too. I ventured to ask how it was that graves were already in the small compound ; when she assured me that want of faith had filled them, " now I have perfect faith, so shall never die." Poor woman, her troubled brain is at rest, and, of course, the com- 282 ODD HAPPENINGS munity broke up, but I often wondered what became of the many girls with long magnificent curls who were there in my time, the women never wore hats, and it was believed that the length of their hair was increased by this custom. I have also heard that lunatics usually have very good hair ; I should think this is rather the reason for the abundance of the Shakers' locks than because of the open-air treat- ment they received. In the days when I first visited Mrs. Girhng I was writing a great deal for the Daily News, and 1 made a really interesting article, though I say it myself, out of this meeting. The next time I went I took Mr. Anstey Guthrie and one of my brothers, and I saw Mrs. Girling was a little anxious ; at last she walked up to me : " A moment, did you see an article in the Daily News about us ? " " Yes, I did," I replied ; " I hope you did not dislike it." " Oh ! no, far from it ; but it was so like what we told your party, we can't help wondering if the gentleman who came with you on Ash Wednesday wrote it." I replied emphatically, " Oh, I am sure he didn't ; I don't think he writes, and if he did I am sure he would have told me." We were both relieved ; she evidently never suspected a female pen, and I was saved from denying my work, which I fear I should have done had she asked me straight out if I were the author. I had more than one interview with Madame Blavatsky, but there was nothing of the simpleton or lunatic about her, and she was a strong, disagree- 283 LEAVES FROM A LIFE able, hard-headed woman of business ; her books were on sale, and you could only escape the purchase of a very expensive and absolutely unintelligible work by stating boldly that you neither could nor would buy it. The moment she found you were neither customer nor dupe, you lost all interest for her, and she talked to other more malleable subjects, though I should have thought so astute a person would have seen one was taking mental notes, at least of her conversation. I asked her to materialise for me The Times of India for that day, and hinted that such a test once fulfilled would bring her in a royal revenue. " But," she remarked, " if I did that what use would Faith be ? " and she would not see that one Times of India of the current date was worth many poimds of faith in her powers. She could, with the help of the confederates, who afterwards gave her away, materiahse a tea-cup, or even the forgotten salt at a picnic, but the Times of India test was refused at once, as, of course, I knew quite weU it would be. When I went to see Madame Blavatsky she was somewhere in the Ladbroke Grove direc- tion, and she had a double room downstairs in which she received her visitors ; in the front part two or three men and a female secretary were seated round an ordinary dining-table, heavily laden with her books and other Theosophic htera- ture, while the High Priestess sat on a sofa in the inner room, the air heavy with tobacco smoke and coffee, both of which she appeared to consume 284 ODD HAPPENINGS at an alarming rate. Madame Blavatsky was short and stout and swarthy, and appeared ungirt about the middle, and she was clad in a black silk garment apparently folded across her under her mighty chin and belted in round where her waist should have been. One day — I only went twice, I really could not buy the book which was almost as dear as Mrs. Eddy's celebrated work, and quite as useless — Madame de Novikoff was there, smoking hard, but as she and Madame Blavatsky were talking in Russian, and the secretaries seemed rather more hungry than usual, I did not stay long, and I never made another call. The first time I went, was with a very curious American, who appeared suddenly one London season with his wife, stayed a year or two, and then disappeared in the same way in which he had come. He had descended on London in a way Americans have, to teach us poor be- nighted folk what art really is, and then, how we ought to speak, sit and move on Delsartean principles. He had an enormous amount of faith in himself and his wife, and proceeded first to give lectures on art and decoration, to which about six people, including myself, sent by different newspapers, duly went, and then wax- ing bolder he took the Princess' Theatre and gave two performances on the Delsartean system. I think one play was Bulwer Lytton's Ion, or some such name, but I was in such fits of laughter at the time that I never really grasped the idea of the play 285 LEAVES FROM A LIFE at all ; the lady expressed all she should have said by movement, and as she was very thin and tall, and she waved her arms and clasped and unclasped herself, and gurgled and flopped and fell about the stage, never uttering a sound, by the time she had been ten minutes on the stage the audience was in uncontrollable yells of laughter; the poor soul burst into tears, the curtain came down, and we all fled for fear that she would make another effort to get through her task. I do not know if the second play came off", I did not go to see it, anyhow. Not long after I went to a house where I had been asked to hear a girl recite, with an eye to giving her " a notice," and I met this weird couple there. I happened to notice a very beautiful frieze at the top of the room, and heard to my profound astonishment that the follower of Del Sarte had painted it ; I got him several orders, but he could not bear sustained work, he would " flit from flower to flower," recite, act, borrow money, anything you like, but he would not work, and I do not know what became of him. I know he once tried to recite at a party I gave in a garden where the railway ran close by ; he went on for what appeared to us hours, we never knew if we were meant to smile or cry ; all I do know is that despite the whistling of the expresses and the shunting of goods trains on the line beneath the garden, he continued until his audience melted away, and I alone was left in poUte attendance on him. Once I had a letter from a despairing land- lady in the country begging for their address, as 286 ODD HAPPENINGS their children had been left with her, and she wanted to know their whereabouts. I told her where I had last seen the couple and that is the very last I heard about them. I never could make out why he did not stick to his decoration ; he had charming taste and very clever fingers, and I cannot help thinking there would have been far more money in that than in all the Delsartean teaching that was ever done. Another sad and erratic genius I knew was Oscar Wilde ; when he was at Oxford he wrote to me about a sonnet I had had in the World, and when I met him in a London drawing-room he came up and talked to me in his then most affected style ; but I soon showed him I did not care for either symphonies or neurotics, and when I mentioned casuaUy he was casting pearls before swine and wasting jewels many others would be glad of, he gave a good-humoured laugh and talked delight- fully until retrieved by his mother, who was most eccentric to look at, at any rate, and who on that occasion wore no less than three skirts one above the other, tfeUing us she was afraid if she left them at home her landlady would wear them. She showed them to her hostess one by one, so I am quite certain I am correct in my statement. I always think the mother and sons should have been separated, and each given appropriate medical treat- ment. I am sure Oscar Wilde was a brUUant genius, as sure as I am that he was mad, and that the absurd adulation he received from man and woman alike turned his head. He was evil even in the Oxford 287 LEAVES FROM A LIFE days, but with the evil of insanity, and I wish the days would come when such brilliant and un- balanced men could be taken early and so treated by scientific men that their brains could be used for good instead of for doing awful harm. Many a gallant lad owes his damnation to Oscar Wilde ; as for me I never Uked him ; he was sensual looking and always appeared to me to exhale an un- happy and disgusting atmosphere, and I was not sur- prised at his fall or at his dreadful fate. The first time I saw him he was fawned on and feted hy aU ; the last time I saw him was in France ; he was standing in a httle wood by a bicycle, and as I came by his hand went up to his hat. I did not appear to know him, but I shall never forget his face ; it was thai of a lost soul gazing through the gates of paradise. He had always met me when he was the guest ; now there lay between that time and then the long sufferings and disgrace he had sold his briUiant birthright for, and he was hankering, I am sure, for the return of what would never come back. There have been many attempts made since his death to whitewash his memory ; I think his friends would be wiser to let him rest in peace. He was a genius ; he was a bad and disgusting man ; and nothing any one can write of him can alter either fact. But we were not always in an atmosphere of cranks and faddists, and some of our most deHghtful happenings were when we migrated to the seaside for our annual hohday. We generally left London the last week in July, and returned about the second 28§ ODD HAPPENINGS week of October, in time to keep my birthday. For at least six weeks before we went away our agitation on the subject was great, and many people had to be consulted, for we had to ensure that some of our friends were going to the same place, for wherever we were we had to have some of our London atmosphere about us, and when we were children the positive rapture began with the packing, which in those days must have been awful. For each box was sewn up in a wrapper and then corded, the latest " long-clothes " had to have its cradle sewn up and packed, and finally the very last morning the bath was packed with the last oddments, sewn up in its wrapper and corded, and we breathed again. The first thing we did was to put the dolls '-house to bed, and make our wiUs, which we left in' the dolls' desk, the last to sit on the stairs and wait for the omnibus, my heart torn between the anguish of leaving my cat and several beloved dolls behind me, and the deUght of knowing I should once more see, smell and taste the sea. Prawns, shrimps, sands, very hot pears, long walks on very staring-white cliffs, where we used to look for the small striped snaU-shells and the creeping bindweed which never failed us, are lasting impressions, as are our terrors in Weymouth of the convicts, and in Kent of the hop-pickers. These worthies used to swarm in the neighbourhood of Kamsgate and Dover and Hastings, or if they did not, we thought they did, and the idea made us very unhappy. Hastings, Ramsgate, Eastbourne and Dover were our favourite places, in the order T 289 LEAVES FROM A LIFE in which they are put ; we simply adored Hastings, there were such splendid walks, and our great joy used to be to get off for the day, carrying our food and buying pears on the way, returning at night to a large tea and falling to sleep to the never-ceasing sound of the delicious waves. The houses Mama took always faced the sea, and once away from London we were never out of sight of the lovely thing. Once when I was quite small I was asked my idea of Heaven. I promptly replied an upstairs sitting room with a view of the sea, and I do not think I have changed that idea since, though I do not love it in winter, when the wind screams round the house and the sea roars, and the noise bids fair to drive one raving mad. We had once an awful experience connected with the taking a house that is worth recaUing. Mama had gone down to Eastbourne to look for a house, and we were allowed to wait up to hear if she had been successful or not. During the evening Miss Wright sent my sister upstairs to fetch her thimble, but she returned pale and trembling, de- claring she heard some one in the dining-room, and she dared not go. Miss Wright was furious and marched off herself, returning with the thimble, and pouring scorn on my sister's unhappy head. Mama did not retinrn until so late that we went off to bed volimtarily, to be wakened shortly after by two policemen looking under our beds. When Mama had entered the dining-room she saw at once that 290 ODD HAPPENINGS the gentle burglar had been there ; a silver inkstand was gone, the ink being playfully poured on the Turkey carpet ; some very handsome candlesticks and a salver had also vanished, and there were foot- marks on the red sofa, which showed how the burglar had entered and left the house. But all the silver then kept in the dining-room sideboard was untouched, my sister's passing had disturbed the men who had been in the act of breaking open the cupboard doors, and aU was left. Papa after that bought a safe, and there reposed, in company with our own silver at one time, aU the splendid jewels of the Maharajah Duleep Singh and his magnificent King-cob coats. Nobody except Papa and the Maharajah's valet knew about this, or I am sure we should have been reaUy burgled, and we, at any rate, would have suffered more than our nightly portion of terror and dread. I recollect Papa endeavouring to get some jewels out of a particular duchess which he required to paint to complete her costume, but she flatly reftised, said she was never allowed to let them leave wherever she happened to be her- self, and altogether made herself so detestable that Papa gave it up as a bad job. He had an acquaintance with a pawnbroker ; not, I beg to state, a professional acquaintance, except that this particular individual was very good in lending him things to paint, and, as jewels were necessary. Papa went to his friend and unburdened himself. The pawnbroker turned to his safe, " I'll not only lend 291 LEAVES FROM A LIFE you some diamonds, but the diamonds. I only let her have them for the day of the wedding ; those she keeps are paste," and Papa returned rejoicing. I am glad to say we did not know this for long afterwards, or else we should have been frightened to death. But to return to the seaside. Once, in one of her searches after a house, Mama came back and related how disappointed she had been. The house itseK was perfect, had a small garden which sloped down to the sea, and was altogether desirable, but she was quite sure she had smelt an uncanny odour, and most reluctantly she had declined the house and taken another one not nearly as desirable, but it would do. Mama was lamenting the house before some people who were then making their own annual search, and she was asked for the address, and gave it, warning them over and over again of the dreadful smeU. Mama was rather famous for finding out smeUs. Drains and fire were always scented out by her, often enough without the least cause, and these people knew her fads. They went down, saw the house, and were enchanted and took it. They went, a large family of six or seven children. Five of the children died there of diph- theria and we only escaped the same fate through Mama's power of perceiving smeUs. I suppose in those days drains were never tested or sanitary certi- ficates asked for. I am sure nowadays such a thing would be quite an impossibility. Eastbourne in our day was a small fishing ham- 292 ODD HAPPENINGS let, and I well recoUect how we used to rush round the end of the Parade to escape the sea rolling in at the end of what is now the beginning of a tre- mendous town. Then the sea and wind used to be terrific. Tiles used to fly about, and the sea too more than once dashed itself against our sitting- room windows, both at Eastbourne and Hastings. Either the storms have moderated since our youth or the coast has altered. One never hears now of the sea arriving in at the drawing-room windows,' nor of tiles and chimney-pots waltzing down the parades. The two best holidays we had were at Scarborough in 1866 and at Ramsgate, beloved Ramsgate, in 1867. Here we were all in Royal Crescent, the Calderons and Storeys, the Sotherns, the Du Mauriers, and Twisses, each with their overcrowding families of children. There were nine of us, four or five Du Mauriers, four or five Cal- derons, four or five Twisses, but I was the most grown-up of all ; indeed the rest were mere children. I suppose the eldest of aU was not more than seven ; and also there were the Sotherns. But I had nothing to do with the children. Oscar Deutsch, of the British Museum, was down too. He had just leaped into fame by an article on the Talmud, and I used to be a good deal with him. I recollect once making an appointment to meet him on Ramsgate Pier to investigate the fishing part of the town together. Ramsgate Pier was very, very long ; we forgot to specify which end, and I arrived at one to see Mr. Deutsch on the other, mopping his brow 293 LEAVES FROM A LIFE and fanning himself with a curious little round felt hat he always wore ; and we met at the town end only to find our time up, and all we could do was to walk home again. I think Du Maurier drew this episode^ in PmwcA y I know both Mr. Deutsch and I heard a good deal about it from the party. Mr. Deutsch was an excellent correspondent, and for almost a year we wrote to each other. He told me once he had the choice of remaining at the British Museum or joining some exploring expedi- tion to Abyssinia, and I was to tell him which he was to do. I liked him very much, but I never liked science and what we irreverently called " stodge." His income hardly kept himself, and I voted for the exploration. I do not think it came off; but he died somewhere out in the East alone, of cancer, and I hardly ever saw him again after the delightful v Ramsgate days. When we were not compelled by extreme fatigue to stay at home in the evening we used to walk round and round the Royal Crescent aU together, all talking hard, and often laughing at nothing in the cheerful way we had. Then the Shirley Brooks came, and more laughter, while we made the acquaintance of sundry of the Ramsgate folk, notably the Pugins, he living with his mother in what I thought a hideous house, with painful and hideous furniture too, demonstrating what was supposed to be a Gothic revival, which I am truly thankful to say never took on; she handsome, elderly, and severe, always much afraid of any girl who might want to catch her " Augustine," and 294 ODD HAPPENINGS scornful to a degree to any one the least bit under forty-five. One friend we made who was a model of patience and goodness. He used to lie out in a long chair motionless, and he often saw no one day after day save his valet or an occasional clerical brother. I often longed to speak to him, but dare not. At last one day a sudden gust of wind blew his paper out of his hand, and I gave it back to him, and he then asked me to sit for a few moments and talk to him, which I did, and he was very excited to hear who all our party was. He had not the least idea of the many celebrities by whom he was surrounded, though he told me he had longed to be able to join in our games, for he had never seen such hght- hearted folk in his life. As long as we were at Ramsgate he was never alone for long, and I used to write him long letters, until his disease touched his brain. He knew no one, and finally died peace- ably at a very early age, I think thirty at most. I often wish I had those letters in which I used to tell him aU our doings, for he belonged to a set quite outside our merry band, and, though very rich, had never mixed with people who were of the least interest to him at all. Well, I hope we aU light- ened his last year for him. I know Du Maurier's songs must have done so, at any rate, and that the games I played with him at chess and bdzique helped him on his weary way. AU the same, I never heard him grumble or complain, and it was only his faithful valet who would look out for me, teU me " Mr, Charles " was rather low, and would I 295 LEAVES FROM A LIFE mind talking to him, for he could not find anything to interest him. " Mr. Charles " was very handsome and very nice : when we left Ramsgate he gave me an enormous bouquet and a great box of chocolate, and I never saw him again. All the same, I have never forgotten that gaUant, courageous man, and wish I had gone and talked to him long before I summoned up courage enough to do so. Just one more story about Ramsgate. Mr. Burnand, now Sir Francis, was not hving there then, but he may have been in the neighbourhood ; anyhow, he was coming to Ixmcheon with us, by the way, it was in 1868, the next year, not in the one I have been writing about, and my second sister was deputed to meet him and escort him up the cHff. She was then just eighteen, and I think one of the daintiest and prettiest httle creatures X ever saw. At the same time she had a most con- sequential air, which made up, in her mind at all events, for her lack of iaches. She duly met Mr. Burnand, and they were walking home, my sister instructing him on all the beauties of the place, when, waving a hand towards the town, she said grandly, " That is Ramsgate proper, Mr. Burnand." " Indeed," he replied ; " and which is Ramsgate im- proper ? " But Louey was too shocked to reply, and she told us the story as a proof of how rude men could be when they Uked. 296 CHAPTER XIII SOME PARSONS From my very earliest days I have always thought out my own rehgious opinions, and while, copying Disraeli, I confess that they are the opinions of all sensible people, once more copying Disraeli, I say, what those opinions are no sensible person ever tells. I am deeply and profoundly attached to the Church of England ; but I should be still more attached if one could eliminate aU her parsons, or at least alter them considerably from what they are and always have been to a new and entirely different type of man. When they have been charming men they have been as httle of a parson as they could help ; when they have been parsons they have been any- thing but charming ; and, in fact, those I have known have more than once ended their careers in prison, and, moreover, those who did not were only rescued in time and sent away from England to save that worst of aU scandals, that of a parson in the dock. I do not think anything has more altered since the days of the sixties than the form and substance of the Church as by law established, and I for one 297 LEAVES FROM A LIFE cannot but think the change is all for the worse, though naturally in some places one must own that the effect has been for the better. Sometimes the Kensitites " rage together and imagine vain things " ; aU the same, we do not have assault and battery as in thfe early days of the Puseyites, when Stoke New- ington was a battle-ground and St. Alban's in Holbom the scene of many a free fight. Yet is this for the better or not? I think nowadays people don't care to fight about anything. We take everything lying down, simply shrugging our shoul- ders and passing by, until it touches us individually ; then we rise and scream, and find that our screams are all too often unheard. In the days of my youth I had a large and varied experience of parsons, for I possessed an energetic atmt who' made a special cult of the tribe, and as I was the only individual who would go wherever she wanted I used to see a good many different kinds, all more or less of a truly boresome nature. My aunt used always to come up to London some time in the spring, when she was least required, and made a point of going everywhere and anywhere she could. I was per- sonally very fond of her ; she was always goodness itself to me ; and as she was invariably ready and wiUing to have me to stay with her at any moment, I was really glad to chaperon her about the London streets, and I only regretted that she had such an ex- cessive attachment to parsons. I quite well remember going with her to St. Alban's, Holborn, when it 298 SOME PARSONS was surrounded by slums, and when we had to accept the guidance of a friendly policeman ; and, moreover, it was with her. Cockney as I am, that I first discovered St. Paul's, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, and many other similar deUghts. Aunt Jane was " not strong," but she was capable of putting more sight-seeing into a fortnight than we were in the rest of the year. Her first remark at breakfast was, " Well, what shall we do to-day ? " the second, "Are we going anywhere to-night?" and she never could understand that a London dinner-table was not elastic, or that arrangements made weeks and sometimes months beforehand could not be given up, or at least altered to include herself. But then I threw myself into the breach, got places for the theatre or opera via some of our numerous friends, and she was quite happy ; albeit I think she romanced somewhat on her return home, and added the dinner-parties she had not attended to the numerous other places that she had. I will say this for her, that the one or two really decent parsons I have known were Aunt Jane's friends, notably Mr. Charles Gutch, of St. Cj^rian's, Baker Street ; and a better man, if at the same time I confess I consider him a trifle mis- taken, smrely never lived. When I knew him first he was a dreamy creature, fuU of mystic yearnings and intentions, and with capacities for self-sacrifice and work that are almost unknown in the present day. He was then officiating in a church he had made 299 LEAVES FROM A LIFE out of a stable, and was always begging and praying the landlord for a better site for a better building; but his extreme opinions offended the owner of the site, and the better church never ap- peared until after he died, when it was erected for a memorial to him. Mr. Charles, as we always called him, to distinguish him from his elder brother, a lawyer in York, was very tall and thin and dark when I first knew him. Then he had a habit that aggravated me extremely, viz., that of caUing me " my child " ; but I soon broke him of that, and we were for many years the very best of friends. Whenever I was hard up for an amusement, if one can put it hke that, I used to wander off to " St. Cyp's," as we called it, and watch Mr. Charles read the evening service to a couple of sisters, the verger, and my humble self. But he persevered, and, notwithstanding his sparse congregation, he used to alter his draperies about the altar and arrange the flowers himself as if he expected a record attendance. He started homes for this kind of undeserving female, and penitentiaries for that class of stiU more wretched creatures, and he spent himself, mind, body, and substance, in the " Cause." The last time I saw him he was white-haired, bent, and old ; his mind was wandering, he did not know who I was ; and I was not sorry to hear that he was dead. In fact, when he died a great effort was made ; his long wished-for church was built, and I think all his pet " homes " are stiU carried on in the most vigorous manner possible. I was far too 300 SOME PARSONS independent in my ideas ever to listen to Mr. Charles, and he vainly tried to talk to me, from the age of nine upwards, about the special dogmas which were so dear to his soul ; but as he would never argue, and resembled Madame Blavatsky, inasmuch as he fell back when "cornered" upon Faith, he gave me up as a bad job ; albeit we were always the best of friends, and remained so, until he did not know me in the last sad days of his strenuous hfe. Yet another of Aunt Jane's clerics was the late vicar of Burford, Oxfordshire, who in the days I knew him first was a mad young deacon up to the very wildest of pranks. We used to torment his life out, and played him the most hideous practical jokes, but he was always hilarious, always good- tempered, and above all never retaliated but once, when, accompanied by our uncle, the beloved York doctor of whom I shall speak later on, he playfully filled our beds on averyhot July night with hot- water bottles, and we duly cursed him in the orthodox way. AU the same, we never mentioned how hard it was to cool our resting-places, and came down- stairs smiling and never aUuded to the fact that we had all slept on the floors of our different rooms in a vain attempt to get cool. Mr. Cass was just on the point of marriage, and I only saw him once again, the year of the first Church Congress, which was held in York, until he was a widower, having lost his wife after the birth of her second boy, through the carelessness of her medical attendant, 301 LEAVES FROM A LIFE who had conveyed scarlet fever to her ; and I never forgot the way he told me about the end. He had returned to her from his usual afternoon service, and found her, as he thought, aU right, when his father, a doctor, came in, and then went up to see his new grandson. He was gone some little time, and Mr. Cass was writing hilarious letters to us to tell us of the arrival of No. 2 when his father came down and, closing the study door, looked at his son. In an instant he leapt to his feet. "My poor boy ! " " What is it ? " he gasped. Then his father told him. The virus was spreading rapidly ; she was unconscious before Mr. Cass got upstairs, and she died in the night. Such a tragedy of a few hours sounds incredible ; it is not the less awful because it happened to a man who had only a local fame. At the Church Congress he was in the highest possible spirits. I think it was held in October 1864, and I know he behaved quite disgrace- fully. At that special Congress Sir Fitzjames Stephen, the brother of Leslie Stephen, was to speak ; but as he had taken some part in the active ritualistic prosecutions of the time, and had alluded to the mixed chalice, one of the bones of contention, in a most irreverent way as " grog," Mr. Cass, among many others, went to the Congress hall determined that Mr. Stephen, as he was then, should not be allowed to speak ; and never in all my life have I heard such a ghastly racket as rose the moment the wretched man appeared on the platform. " Blas- 302 SOME PARSONS phemer ! " " Renegade I " " Blackguard ! " were among the mildest epithets ; and finally, as he stood his ground, we one and all left the hall, Mr. Cass dragging and pushing us with him, for really I should like to have stopped and seen what happened ; but he would not hear of such a thing, and out we had to go, and the meeting, as far as the audience was concerned, was broV jn up, although I heard the paper was duly read to those on the platform who could not leave and to a " beggarly array of empty benches." The last evening was rounded off by a conversazione, at which different articles of clerical millinery were shown, and many other objects of interest, and Mr. Cass persuaded me to go with him. I was only about sixteen, and my dresses were certainly rather abbreviated, but what did that Avretched man do but introduce me as his wife to one of his most influential parishioners, who had happened to be abroad during the time that had elapsed since Mr. Cass had brought his bride to Wakefield. I saw the man look furtively at my curls and my petticoats ; all the same, we completely took him in, and we talked together for a blood- curdling half-hour about places and people I had never seen, and was not destined to see until some- thing like thirty years afterwards. When he saw the real Mrs. Cass she carried on the joke, and to the end of his days that man must have thought that his exjierience at the Church Congress was one of those things " no fellah could make out." I was much amazed to see the old banner of 1864 303 LEAVES FROM A LIFE at the Weymouth Congress of 1905. It was merely a poor little bit of red silk or paper, with bands of yellow on it decorated with the name and date of the York Congress ; the Weymouth banner was magnificent, and showed in a most extraordinary manner the way in which in forty years things had advanced ; and a most cheerful spirit of tolerance prevailed, and no one screamed any one down. The Kensitites, I think, had come prepared for battle, but the astute chief constable asked them to help him to keep the route open for the bishops' procession, and they were sworn in as specials before they knew where they were, and all was peace. Yet I cannot help thinking that the fighting spirit of the sixties was the better of the two. Then there was some life in the matter ; now I fear there is nothing of the kind. Playing at Rome, miUinery, incense, and all the rest of it, may attract the weaker part of the younger folk, but it disgusts most thinking people, and I am amazed to see the flock of men and women intent on aU kinds of open-air sports on Sunday, attendance at which would have ostracised them from anjrthing like decent society in the old days. I say amazed, nothing more, nothing less. I am not prepared to judge. AU depends on how one has been brought up or where one hves. I have not one single orthodox belief myself ; aU the same, I should ex- pect the devil, who I know does not exist, to arrive, pitchfork and all, to fetch me if 1 played cards on Sunday, though I am well aware he leaves my sons 304 SOME PARSONS alone, who, I'am convinced, carefully brought up as they were, all play bridge on that day without any arriere pensSe at all. When Mr. Cass left Wakefield he married again and went to Burford, a place in Oxfordshire about eight miles from a station, and one of the most perfect spots I have ever been in. The old Manor House, where Lenthall, the Speaker of the Long Parliament, hved, is almost in ruins, and has been painted over and over again by S. Waller, notably in his picture of The Empty Saddle. The vicarage dates from the reign of James I., and is the most charming of abodes, albeit one of the coldest and dampest 1 was ever in, and the church is an epitome of history, and is worth any one's while to visit. I beUeve when Mr. Cass went there it was anjrthing but what it ought to be, but he set to at once, and when I saw it it was in the most exquisite order ; and he told me that he had dis- covered some very old plate built into the wall of one of the side aisles, evidently hidden when Cromwell descended on the town and shot down a regiment of CavaUers from the roof of the Bar- tholomew aisle in the cheerful way he affected when any one opposed him. Two interesting events happened during the very short stay I made at the vicarage. One was the return of an American Bartholomew to search out the pedigree of the family after whom one aisle wa§ named, the other was the death of the last member of the family after which the u 30s LEAVES FROM A LIFE other aisle was named. And it was curious to note that while that family began as "vintners," and had three tuns as a species of crest on the tablet in the aisle, which dated from the fifteen hundreds, the last kept the village public- house, and that therefore the race, which had climbed considerably in the interim, had come down once more, and literally ended where it had begun. Now Mr. Cass sleeps by his beloved church, close to the altar, near to the splendid httle inner chapel he discovered and restored, and to the pulpit he restored too, and to which excellent object I gave the proceeds of articles I wrote on Burford ; for the place is a perfect mine of interest, and I only wish I could go there again. On our drive from the station Mr. Cass pointed me out a house where the butler of the late owner lived. The late owner had murdered one of his servants in a fit of passion, and the butler had caught him red- handed. Instead of giving his master up to justice a " masterly compromise " was arranged ; the master remained ostensibly in possession imtil he died, when he left a full confession, and the whole of his goods and chattels to his good friend the butler 1 I do not suppose he mentioned the compact between them; there is such a crime as "compounding a felony " ; but Mr. Cass knew the truth somehow, and I knew that for once he was not yielding to the perfect passion he had for taking one in. Another butler somewhere near Biuford got tired of service, and gave his two old maiden-lady mistresses 306 SOME PARSONS notice, saying he wanted a change. The good ladies could not bear it, and at last, after long and thoughtfiil consideration of all aspects of the case, they resolved to ask him to marry one of them. He did. After an equally lengthy amount of thought he married the younger of the two. They aU got on capitally, and when the wife died Mr. Cass declared the old husband always went to arrange flowers on her grave once a week, just exactly as if he were laying the table. He used to watch him over the church- yard gate, and notice him put down the flowers, and then go away a short distance and gaze at them critically with his head on one side, returning again and again, until he was quite satisfied that they were all right. From Mr. Cass and Mr. Gutch one turns first to some of Mama's proUgds, two of whom, Edward Ker Gray and the Rev. J. C. M. BeUew, were the greatest trials to us in more ways than one. I have mentioned "Teddy," as we always irreverently called him, in reference to Colenso, but he is worthy of a more lengthy notice, if only because he was the only man in the world who was ever known to lose the big drum. We met him first at the Creswicks', and I know it must have been late in 1862 or early in 1863, for I was wearing a horrid black rep frock in the mornings, which had been procured as mourning for us when the Prince Consort died in 1861, and which had come out again trimmed for me with four rows of magenta- coloured braid, and for my sister with the same 307 LEAVES FROM A LIFE chaste arrangement in blue, no doubt to hide where the tucks had been let down, and which we wore aU through that winter as our everyday- frocks. Of course 1 did not wear it at the party, where I was resplendent in white muslin; but " Teddy," a newly-fledged undergraduate at Cam- bridge, had paid me what I fondly hoped was marked attention, and when 1 met him in the " Grove " next day I could only utter a silent but agonised prayer that he would not notice that my frock did not reach to the top of my boots. For years and years Teddy Gray was the tamest of tame cats about our house, and I do not think I am wrong when I state he proposed to aU of us one after the other as we emerged from the school- room. I am quite certain he would have died with mingled fright and anguish if we had accepted him ; but he not only escaped us, but the much warmer attentions of one of his parishioners, who told him severely one Sunday as he emerged from church and found her waiting for him in the vestry that she had just been told he was engaged to her daughter, and she would be glad to know if the report were true. " Certainly not," spluttered " Teddy," and^ tearing off his surpHce, he fled to Mama for advice and consolation, and together they concocted a diplomatic and manly letter, which plainly showed the mother that he did not intend to be bluffed into matrimony, and he was never again troubled by either the girl or her mother, who found another church and another curate, who, not 308 SOME PARSONS having Mama to rescue him, was promptly caught, and carried quite as promptly to the "hymeneal altar." Edward Gray had the most charming of parents, who lived in Linden Grove, and we were asked to make their acquaintance. I think his mother was an invalid. Anyhow, I know Mama made the first call, and she took me and one of my friends with her. Mrs. Gray proposed that "Edward" should show us the garden, and we were getting on very nicely when he suggested gooseberries, and opened the door that led to the kitchen-garden, where, exposed to the cruel assaults of a very high breeze, hung out gaily all the family washing. He ex- claimed, " Oh ! good gracious I " and closed the gate hurriedly, but Maude and I simply screamed with laughter. One thing we could never do, and that was to refrain from seeing any kind of joke. It was astonishing how madly fond Edward Gray was of anything that appertained to the stage, to music, and to the Volunteer movement. He was well off then, and he used to take his particular company off for days in the country ; and though I think he was always in the band plajdng his comet or the big drum, as he was moved at the moment, he generally " bossed the show," and as he paid for everything, even to the retrieving of the big drum, he had quite as much authority as any officer, and far more popularity. Until he took Orders he invariably helped us with our private theatricals, and though I am sure a worse actor 309 LEAVES FROM A LIFE was never found even on an amateur stage, he was useful, and his vagaries were forgotten in his unfailing good temper. In later years his lov6 for the stage landed him in more than one awkward place, and he had nothing like the amount of money he had to spend at one time. He died suddenly in Scotland, where he had gone to preach, and left very little behind him. Almost the last time I saw him was the day before I was married, at which august ceremony he had begged and implored me to allow him to assist. Mama insisted on her pet being granted the permission, but on the mouning before the marriage he flounced into the drawing-room, told me that on reflection he found his feelings would not aUow him to assist, and almost before I could speak he was out of the room and out of the house. Oh ! base deceiver I he had proposed to one of my sisters and at least three other girls since he had to me ; he had merely been asked suddenly up to Scotland, whither he went flying that night. The next time I saw him was at the wedding of one of my brothers, where he gave the address, informing the pretty and delightful bride she ought to consider herself most honoured at being allowed to enter our talented family. Had I been the bride I think I should have had some- thing to say ; but as she had not, I ean only hope she was too embarrassed to even hear what he was talking about. At one time he came every morning to play his horrible silver cornet to 310 SOME PARSONS my accompaniment, but at last I struck, and would have no more of it. He made a little use of my sisters, but they were less long-suffering even than I was, and the cornet disappeared as far as we were concerned at any rate. Mr. J. C. M. Bellew was such a familiar and strik- ing figure in the sixties that I am always astonished to find how his name and fame have been forgotten. His name was really Higgins, but he took the more euphonious name of BeUew, which was his mother's, and I really do not think any one can blame him for doing so. Mr. BeUew began life in India as an Indian chaplain, where his children were bom ; but his wife left him lamenting with some one else. He procured a divorce and came to England, where, when we knew him first, he was vicar of St. Mark's, Hamilton Terrace. He was a singularly handsome man, with very fine white hair, which, after his second marriage, all the ladies of his congregation declared he had had bleached ; and he furthermore possessed the most beautiful hands and feet. The former he used to wave gracefully over the heads of his congregation ; the latter he encased in open-worked silk socks and patent leather shoes with broad steel buckles, and he used to raise his cassock to show them as he went up the steps of the pulpit. I do not think I am a fair person to write about this family ; I did so cordially detest them ; but more because they were forced down our throats in and out of season, at first at any rate, than for anything else. Mr. Bellew was a most eloquent preacher and a 311 LEAVES FROM A LIFE splendid elocutionist, and to hear him read the Com- mandments was quite a revelation. " Thou shalt not steal " he always pronounced in such a way as to lead his hearers to believe he was apologising for having to read them such an unnecessary injunction, while the emphasis he placed on the rest depended on where he was, and what people were present in the church. Personally I knew him best when he held forth at Bedford Chapel, a proprietary chapel which has now ceased to exist as such. I have often walked there and back Avith him, and then I could get on with him weU. He was full of speculation, informa- tion, and anecdote; but any one less fitted to have a " cure of souls " I could not imagine. We one and aU detested Mrs. Bellew and the girls. Harold Bellew, who now acts under his second name of Kyrle BeUew, we liked ; he was a frank and handsome lad, and as he often came to our house I think he liked us as much as we did him. Evelyn, the eldest son, disappeared ; I once saw him in a traveUing circus in a small country town, and was going round to speak to him when he rushed away. The girls are either dead or in convents ; they none of them fulfilled Mama's prophecies for them, and I have often wished she could have known how far more right we were than she was in our estimate of them. In the Bedford Chapel days Mr. Bellew had already begun to waver in his allegiance to the Church of England, but before he quite ceased to exercise his function therein he started giving a 312 SOME PATISONS series of readings from the poets and others, which had an enormous success among the good folk of those days, who adored German Reed's performances and would not have entered a theatre to save their lives ; but personally we had too much Bellew to appreciate these readings. He did read most magnificently, but I have always preferred to read to myself; and his popularity did not last long, a season or two at most. Then he had the mad idea of reading all the different parts of Hamlet in dif- ferent voices while actors moved about the stage and never spoke at all. Finally, after dallying with table-turning, the whole family, if I except the boys, became ardent followers of Home and learned some of his tricks. I once saw Mrs. Bellew beckon a book to come to her from a table two or three feet from where she was sitting, and it came ; but how she managed it I do not know. Then they all suddenly and rapidly became Roman Catholics, and Mama had a most agitating time of it. Mr. Bellew was a divorced man; Rome did not recognise divorce. Mr. Bellew was in Orders ; Rome neither recognised his orders nor a married priesthood, and fearful qualms and questions were asked and debated day after day in our drawing- room. How the impasse was got over I do not know, but Mr. and Mrs. Bellew remained together. The girls married and did aU sorts of weird things, ending one and aU, I think, in convents, when the Bellews became poorer and poorer. His means of liviilg went ; he could not preach, and no one wanted 313 LEAVES FROM A LIFE to hear him read; he became ill, and soon died, helped by kind friends to the last, who, moreover, cared for his widow, who soon died too, in the Isle of Wight; and both are forgotten by this rapidly moving age. All the same the Bellews were a feature in the sixties; they were both handsome and both clever; but they had the "dramatic instinct " too strongly in them to live the ordinary life of an English cleric and his wife, and so came to grief that in another age and in another place than London would no doubt have been avoided. Another rage Mama had was for a most extraor- dinary person called either Marchmont or Mordaunt, I cannot remember which, but as neither was his own name it really'does not matter. He was a magnifi- cent preacher, and first came as curate to a church we used to attend, where the vicar dropped his h's freely, and where, as he talked the most awful stuff, the new curate came as a great relief. Something happened ; either the vicar resented his popularity, or else what I think was the truth came out, namely, that his Orders were invalid ; and he started on his own in a " tin tabernacle," where he drew the most tremendous congregations for a short time, and then too he suddenly disappeared. The music was magnificent, but as the doctrines he taught were the reverse of orthodox the bishop came down on him in some way, and one Sunday when, led by Mama, we presented ourselves at the door of the iron church we found it closed, and had to return to our old place. I shall never 314 SOME PARSONS forget the first sermon I heard there ; for the vicar gave out the text, " My 'ouse is the 'ouse of prayer," and paused astonished at the ripple of laughter that went through the building. He never could under- stand why so many cardboard h's were put in the alms-bags ; any more than he could understand that his peroration, " And a good job for them they did it, too," was not considered an appropriate end to the story of our Lord in the storm on the Sea of Galilee ! I do not remember a single parson in my day in the part of Bayswater that was particularly our own who had not a " story " more or less disreput- able hanging to his name. One we used to call " Good Evans " likewise dropped his h's, and used to sing rather well ; but as most of his words were mispronounced and his favourite song of aU had for its refrain " Do you reely think 'e did ? " he was not much in request. He and his vicar " had words " about the alms collected in the church, and he dis- appeared. While if I were to tell the true story of more than one man who " preached the Gospel " in our day I do not think I should be believed, and I might perhaps hm*t the feelings of any relations they may stiU have left behind them. But they were nothing like as bad as some others I have known. One especially bad case was that of a parson in the North, whose wife was a perfect martyr, and whose whole life was a struggle to drive him along in the right path ; but the poor woman could never keep a servant. He got into trouble in connection 315 LEAVES FROM A LIFE with a school for boys of which he was the head, and had to come south ; and as I saw quite an elaborate panegyric over him the other day when he died, I think the forty years' hard labour his wife had keeping him out of mischief must have told, and I only hope she lived to see the result of her work. It is almost incredible that some of these men were ever given a second chance ; but I never found yet a "criminous clerk," and oh! how many I have known, who was not given, not one chance, but many. One of these beauties turned up at a southern watering-place, and on the strength of an old friend- ship with my uncle, one of them came constantly to our house ; and I, at his earnest request, procured him and his wife an extremely nice little housemaid. Before the week was out the girl ran back home. I drove over to hear the rights of the story, saw his unhappy wife, and found out that years ago my good uncle had sent him abroad after a most disgraceful scandal. He used his letter of Orders to obtain a berth at a missionary station, where he married his wife, he then brought her home, and started a boys' school. The wretch had to leave Bournemouth in the night, and years after I heard of him elsewhere, stUl exercising his priestly functions. Had he been keeping a school I should most undoubtedly have written to his bishop, and I am not at aU sure that I was right to refrain. Should no one, then, be given a second chance? Certainly they should ; but at manual work, not as a priest or a teacher ; for surely if the men who 316 SOME PARSONS administer these " holy rites " are not kept out of disgusting sins by their Orders their Orders are of small use, and they only serve to show how little reaUty there is in a religion that uses these men as its servants. No less than three other men have I known who have had to fly secretly and never return to England again. One did return once, and, hoping his unpleasant record had been forgotten, came into church one Wednesday evening, sat down in the parental pew, and looked round. The man had the face of a handsome devil, and I was wondering who he was when the churchwarden, the father of one of his victims, walked up the aisle and touched him on the shoulder. I do not know which man was the whiter; but both went out, and before the news had gone the round of the town the sinner had departed. Years after that evening he turned up once more in England at a boys' school. I got my husband to tell a legal friend the story ; he wrote a letter. The wretch tried to bluff, but when he heard whence the news came he fled once more, and now I hope and believe he is dead and safely buried out of sight. One man happened to have influential friends, and though he had fled he had very astute advisers, and, moreover, his victims were young girls whose mothers would certainly have refused to prosecute and take the children into court to speak of details they did not understand, but which amazed and frightened them. He returned, took up his work where he laid it 317 LEAVES FROM A LIFE down, and is still very much in the odour of sanctity. Yet another man I knew would have been aU right had he had the smallest power of governing himself ; but he was more hysterical than any woman I ever met, and, losing his rudder, a most excellent wife, early went all to pieces, and finally got himself into serious trouble. This par- ticular man had not the shghtest sense of humour or even decency. He denounced our brewery from the pulpit one night, and the next day he asked us to lend him the waggons to take the school children for their annual picnic. He preached at us out of the pulpit, and then was surprised and pained that we went to another church, and that I told him he ought to be kicked ; while his faithful curate understudied him to such an extent that he had to speak to him himself about the imitation, which made the con- gregation scoff. All the same, the curate left, and did well, while the rector passed from bad to worse ; and heaven alone knows where he wiU end his days, if, indeed, they are not ended already. During an interregnum we once had a man who was not in Orders at all, and who caused no end of trouble ; while perhaps the saddest, most hopeless of all was a fluent Irishman, who took us all by storm, and preached in a manner which was only equalled in my mind by the late Archbishop Magee. He had a delicate wife and three or four very, very dehcate httle girls, and they lived in a tiny house, more like an Irish cabin than an Enghsh clergy- man's dwelling; and I principally recollect the 318 SOME PARSONS passage, the filthy passage, where they used to hang up the game they were continually sent ; for neither had private means, and so they were bitterly poor. Every one hked them ; every one slaved for the wife and children ; one friend I had made all their little clothes, and we one and all turned our- selves into amateur nursemaids and took the little ones out for walks and drives ; and though that special friend and I had once picked the reverend gentleman out of a ditch when we were skating on the meadows one bitterly cold winter, and had to help him home, we really only thought he was hurt, and did our utmost for him. The climax came one Sunday evening when he and his wife had come to supper after church, and I could not quite make him out. At first I thought he was very tired, but suddenly he began to tell a story which appeared to me to be quaint, and I touched my hus- band's foot under the table as a hint to him to change the subject. The poor Avife saw me. She and I left the men together, and she burst into tears and told me all. Even then I had no idea that he drank. But oh ! what an awful, terrible story she toldl he would sell and exchange all the game sent them for drink ; he took the little " tips " kindly friends gave the children ; he was in debt aU over the place, but he was on such excellent terms with his boon companions the tradespeople that they would not press him, and she was at her wits' end. I could oflFer neither advice nor help, but one Sunday he attacked me about some rather unor- 319 LEAVES FROM A LIFE thodox articles I had been writing, when I told him plainly that when I saw the rehgion he preached had no power either to keep him sober, make him kind to his wife, or to allow him to use his brUhant talents to make money for them, I had no use for it ; and finally he broke down and wept and wept. I told him he was hysterical, not repentant ; but we were always friends, and I think for a short time he tried his best. But finally he dropped the chaHce when he was administering the Sacrament on Christmas Day, and though the accident was not put down to its real cause, a stir was made and people began to talk. When he was about to leave the town I was asked by a deputation of tradesfolk to sign a petition to the patron of the hving, then vacant, in his favour, and if that failed to promote a testimonial ; but that was too much. I " up and spake." He left the place. The poor wife died, her death greatly accelerated by dragging his bath- water up a long flight of stairs, he was far too lazy to bring it up himself, and by the amount of gas he would bum when he was at home. She had tuberculous disease of the brain, and the doctor had told him that gas was the very worst thing she could have burned in the room. He had two or three curacies afterwards, and if we were within reach he would always come and see us. Whatever his faults were, he was a faithful fi-iend. He never tried to borrow money ; and, moreover, he never, aU the time I knew him, bore mahce in word or deed. 320 SOME PARSONS Yet how did that man contrive to pass from diocese to diocese as he did, leaving curacy after curacy for the same cause ? In one, indeed, he was found with nothing whatever on under the dining-room table by the rector, while finally he passed to London, where he married a second time, a woman with a good deal of money and in a good position, whose people apparently made no inquiries into his past, and who very soon left him to his own devices. He brought her down to dinner with us one night when he was in London, and we were in the suburbs ; and to my horror the moment we were alone, she sprang at me. " You knew him years ago ; you knew his first wife. Was he always Uke this ? " I promptly said, " Like what ? " I should be sorry to describe the six-months bride's experi- ences, and I am sure if I did no one would ever beheve them. She left him shortly after to manage the best way he could without her; she was of much sterner stuff than the first poor httle thing ; and he went back to Ireland, to die quite suddenly at his father's house. The return of the prodigal, without the fatted calf, all over again ! Have I never known any good men, then, except the first two 1 described ? Yes, one or two, notably my beloved " Idstone," of the Field, the very best of men, and in his way the very best of parsons. In the same manner that I felt rather incompetent to write about the Bellews, I disHked them so, so I feel about dear Mr. Pearce, only in quite another way. I loved him so dearly I can see no fault in X 321 LEAVES FROM A LIFE him at all ! I first saw him at Weymouth stepping out of an omnibus bearing partridges in his hand ; and from that day to the last, when he lay in bed dying by inches, my affection neither changed nor wavered. He was a great, strong, broad-shouldered man ; and as he was rather more passionately attached to dogs even than I was, we began to talk dog at once, and he soon introduced me to his darling setters, which were of the celebrated " Kent" strain. When he came to London he and I used to make expeditions to aU the dog shbps in the neighbourhood of Seven Dials, and we always paid a visit to the celebrated dog-fancier called BUI George, who Hved at " Canine Castle," somewhere near Kensal Green, and who had the most remark- able collection of dogs I ever saw. Mr. Pearce came to town to perform the ceremony when my sister was married, and the moment the bridal pair had departed he turned to me. " Off with that finery; I am going to see BiU George." In less than five seconds I was into my walking dress, and off we started, and had a lovely time hearing about all the dogs, and finally seeing a splendid fox-terrier turned into a species of pit, where he disposed of about a dozen rats in less time than it takes to teU of it. Mr. Pearce was not like Aunt Jane, and though he and I went about immensely I do not recollect calling on any parsons ; but we went to see the first Japanese jugglers who ever came to England in 1867, and we watched with delight how 322 SOME PARSONS they made butterflies out of paper and blew them about the stage from plant to plant with fans, until one really thought they must be the real thing, and not paper at all. Then they made flowers for the butteiffies out of more paper; and finally they wrestled in the way that is now most familiar, but in those days had never been seen, and Mr. Pearee went up to the interpreter and had a lesson, return- ing to practise on Papa until he flatly refused to allow him to touch him again. Then we saw and heard poor Artemus Ward, whose feeble excuse that his moonist was unwell and he must go behind to look after the moon himself, gave him time to cough ; but, funny as Artemus Ward was, and much as we loved his books, he was so near death's door that it was agony to hear him lecture. We only went once, and then he soon died, at Southampton, on his way home. Well, he reached home long before he thought to do so ! Once Mr. Pearee, Shirley Brooks, and I went to hear Mark Twain lecture, but we aU hated it, and were so bored we left in the middle. The American accent was strong, and we were perhaps not educated up to American humour ; yet we all liked the books we had read, and were very disappointed we did not enjoy the lecture. But delightful as Mr. Pearee was in London, he was a million times more so in his Dorset vicarage ; there was not a bird he did not know all about, and I have had the most perfect walks with him, the sweet setters bounding about all 323 LEAVES FROM A LIFE over the place and almost knocking us down, while he spoke cheerily to any one he met, gave advice here, game or fruit there, and sometimes instructed them to come up to " the shop " after tea to get medicine for some of their many fancied diseases. " Whenever it has rained for a couple of days," Mr. Pearce told me, "some old woman is sure to send seven miles across the heath for that poor devil the parish doctor, in order to hear the news and have a chat. Now I physic them, and he doesn't come unless he gets a note from me, and knows it really is serious and he must come." Then we would repair to " the shop," where he had a lathe — he was an expert turner — and a carpenter's bench ; for there was nothing he could not mend or make ; and we would set to work on his two specifics, bread piUs coloured with a little ground ginger, and a species of chalk mixture prepared for the principal complaint the men appeared to suffer from ; and I have never known these homely remedies to fail. Sometimes a whole precious htter of the setter pups was left motherless. If we could not find a foster- mother we used to " bring them up by hand " literally, for at first they sucked the milk from our fingers ; then they took to bottles, and finally were able to do for themselves. Anyhow, they were always most truly dehghtfiil. In my time the church was one mass of Mardchal Niel roses, and the field opposite the vicarage was turned into a rosary and vegetable and ftuit garden, and I have never before or since 324 SOME EARSONS seen such fruit and flowers. The roses on the church are dead and the field is no longer a garden, but I am glad to say the place is in worthy hands again, and I can go and look at my dear old friend's grave and feel his work is still being carried on. I think I loved best a walk over the stubble with him and a brace of pointers. There was no battue shooting, no enormous " bags " in his day. We used to prowl out as soon as we could, and the cartridges having been loaded in the " shop " overnight, we proceeded, the dogs working beautifully and the deUcious air scented with peat blowing towards us from the open heath. A sporting parson, yes ; but one who put his work first and his sport last, who lived the fife he preached, and was adored by man, woman, and child. I have known one or two sporting parsons in later days : one whose one object in life was to set his special neighbourhood by the ears ; another one who would sell his own and his people's souls for " sport," and whose one idea was to shirk his duty and make money out of everything he can. Let the precious memory of " Idstone " make up for their remembrance, and let me forget the other couple of " sportsmen " as soon as I conveniently can. There are many hard-working men nowadays that I admire from a distance and regret their mis- directed energies, half of which, devoted to the housing question and moral reformation of the poor, would send the good old world on the road to cleanliness of mind and body and true reform ; 325 LEAVES FROM A LIFE and above all do I admire one or two country parsons who wiU die as they have lived, unknown, unsung, but whose care for the children in their parishes is marvellous, who spend and are spent in directing cricket clubs, " entertainments," teas, and treats, sometimes out of their own scanty means, sometimes begging from unwUling richer folk, but always doing their best according to their special if somewhat limited lights. Of late years I have known more of the country than the town genus, but, judging from what I see of the London churches, I should say the regular church-goer is weU-nigh extinct. Of course beautiful music and elaborate services fetch the " gaper " and star- gazer, but the quiet folk stay at home and read, while golf, bridge, and the river claim the rest. True that the Church's seasons are weU advertised nowadays, and no one can help knowing when they occur ; but they are inextricably mixed up with Bank holidays, and as far as I can see make no more real difference to the world at large than they did in my day, when I first heard Lent mentioned by my aunt as a reason why she should abstain from going to some theatrical performance or other. As she wanted badly to see that special play, she went, despite the Lenten season ; and I have always wondered how she expected all concerned in thea- trical performances to live, if the theatres were closed for the whole of the six weeks of which Lent is composed. Good Friday used to be the first holiday of the year, when potatoes 326 SOME PARSONS could be planted, and was celebrated only by its buns, while very few people in the sixties and seventies thought about Ascension Day ; indeed, I have often heard the Queen's accession day called Ascension Day, and that was always a hohday. Then the clubs walked first to church, where their weird banners and emblems filled us with dehght, and finally to an enormous feast in a field, followed by dancing. But clubs " walk " no longer. Bank hohday succeeds Bank hohday, and they are poor indeed who do not put in twenty-four hours at least of misery going somewhere and coming back, very tired and very dirty, but generally sober. Let the teetotalers rave as they will, England is a far soberer country in this twentieth century than it was in earher days. But the Church is not to be thanked. Wider education, which the parsons have always set their faces against, has made for sobriety ; cheap trips have made the country accessible : and although education is anything but perfect, and we old-fashioned folk are inchned to groan, I say once more, wait. We are, so to speak, "in the wash- tub." But it will not be the Church that wiQ see we are thoroughly cleansed, and that we aU dry straight I At the last Church Congress parson after parson came into the hall. " Why has the Church lost her power ? " asked some one on the platform, and K. P. and I exchanged glances. We looked at the clerics, and thought we had there a very good reply to the question. 327 CHAPTER XIV SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES If one thing enraged Papa more than anything else it was to receive a summons to serve on a jury, or else to appear as witness in the many trials caused by the photographic piracies of his pictures, by the Belt case, the Whistler-Ruskin case, and one or two other causes celebres of the time of which I am more especially writing. In some mysterious way he generally avoided the juries. He always maintained it would cost him far less to pay the necessary fine, and he either did this or trusted to Providence to see a sufficient number were present to serve without calling him away from his work. I think it was James Pajm, if it were not he it was some one quite as famous, who told me a story of how he escaped performing his duty as a citizen. He was bewailing his untoward fate in some public place when a most respectable man informed him that for some small sum he would ensure his never being called upon again to serve. James Payn gave him what he asked, and being consumed with curiosity to see how he would 328 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES manage, he repaired to the court whither he had been summoned, and waited. His name was called, and then a sad figure in deep black arose from the well of the court bearing a spotless handkerchief in his hand. The man simply said, " Dead, my lord ! " The judge uttered a few commonplace condolences, the name was struck off the Ust, and he was never again called upon to act, though as he was writing vigorously then and for long after one is rather at a loss to account for the ignorance of his personahty by all concerned. Indeed, one would like to know how jurymen are secured. I have been married over thirty-eight years, and only once has my husband been sent a summons. As he is well over sixty I can do no harm by mentioning the circum- stance. I fancy the place of one's initial on the list has a good deal to do with it. Ours is pretty low down, and therefore that is one of the reasons, no doubt, why he escaped. We had at one time a considerable acquaintance among legal folk, and I remember well both Seqeant Ballantyne and Sir Alexander Cockburn. They were both very Bohemian, and I fancy were seen more by the men of the family than the female members, but I have distinct recollections of hearing of big and apparently very amusing parties to which the higher powers went, especially Papa, who when implored by us to teU us what had happened used to wax hilarious, but would never disclose any of the details. The lawyer I saw the most of personally was Montagu Williams, and he used to be a good 329 LEAVES FROM A LIFE deal at our house. He married Louise Keeley, the sister of Mrs. Albert Smith, the daughter of Mrs. Keeley the weU-known actress, and she had been, I believe, an excellent actress herself. Montagu Wilhams told me that if ever I found myself in the witness-box I was to confine myself to " Yes " and " No " and " I don't know." " Nothing baffles a counsel so much as keeping to these monosyllable replies," he remarked. " Once embark on description or explanation, you are done for, for even a fool can twist what you say then in any way he likes." I have, I am glad to say, never found myself in this position, but I am quite sure if 1 did any coimsel could make me say anything he chose, and that were I accused of any crime my demeanour would be such that I should be found guilty on the spot. Owing to Papa's acquaintance with many of the hghts of the law we were able always to attend almost any trial we wanted to see, and though I have never frequented the Divorce Court or murder trials, feeling I should hate it all, I must freely confess that I enjoy nothing so much as a good trial, and I can spend hours even listening to the driest of dry cases in the Chancery and common law courts. I think the first case I ever heard was in York, where the judge's arrival was, and is still, no doubt, a splendid sight. He was met by the High Sheriff and his beautiful carriage and horses, and javelin men, and a quantity of troops, and there was always a service at the Minster that 330 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES we never missed if we could possibly help it, for the colours of the judge's robes and of the military uniforms were a joy to me always, while generally the sermon was well worth hearing, although, as it was generally calculated to inspire the profoundest terror in the hearts of the prisoners, who, after all, were not there to hear it, it usually fell rather flat. At that special assize my uncle had to give evidence, and he put us up in the gaUery of the Court House, telling us not to stir until he returned to us. The case turned on the special amount of injury done to one of my uncle's patients by some one else, and he produced pieces of the man's skull, very thin and nasty looking, from his pocket, and handed them to the judge, who afterwards gave them to the jury- men. The case did not last long, and a second one was called. That too was brief; but when the verdict was given and the judge was about to pronounce sentence the prisoner, a great strong, hulking, navvy kind of man, bent down, and in one moment had off his heavy, nailed boot, and before any one could realise what he was about he threw it at the judge. Naturally it did not reach him, but it struck the prisoner's own counsel, who had nothing to say when the sentence the judge would have given the man was doubled because of this unprovoked assault on the majesty of the law. We were so hemmed in by the crowd that my uncle could not reach us and withdraw us before a trial for murder came on, and for the first and last time 331 LEAVES FROM A LIFE in my life I endured the horror of seeing a man who richly deserved his fate sentenced to death. The poor wretch expected his sentence, and all we saw was his white face gazing at the judge almost as if he were half dead already, while his hands clutched the rail of the dock, and the two warders closed up, thinking to support him should he faint. But he did nothing of the kind ; he just gave one despairing look round the court, ducked his head to the judge, and disappeared below. I always think a condemned criminal must feel much like a fashionable bride after the fuss and flummery of her wedding-day is over. For weeks and weeks beforehand both are the centre of a curious crowd, both are fuU of plots and plans of aU sorts and sizes. The day comes and departs ; criminal and bride disappear alike from the public gaze, and become in a moment as uninteresting as the rest of the world. Another more important bride is married ; another greater crime is committed. The first are forgotten, and the next are discussed thread- bare until their time comes too to disappear into obscurity. I never realised until the York trial that the judge's black cap is not a cap at all, but a square of velvet that he puts on, one point coming on the forehead, before pronouncing the death sentence ; and it must be a callous soul indeed that does not tremble at the solemn adjustment of the " cap," the still more solemn words, and the final " Amen " from the chaplain, who on that occasion 332 SOME LEGAL A.DVENTURES wore a full black silk gown and white bands, and rose when the judge assumed the black cap, and stood close to the elbow of his chair. My only acquaintance with what I consider the disgrace of any country calling itself Christian, the Divorce Court, was through one of my small brothers, who, to our rage and despair, had to be a witness in a most heart-breaking case. We had made the ac- quaintance at Scarborough of an extremely amusing woman, who took to the boy immensely, and was never happy unless he was going about with her, and he often stayed with her in her own house. Her husband was a most charming man, a stipendiary magistrate, and one every one liked, and though both Mama and I dishked the wife, of whom we always spoke derisively as the " F.F.," or fast female, she seemed so devoted to Charley that we put up Avith her for his sake. In those days crinoUnes were large, but she wore quite the largest on record, and her dress was drawn up over a startling red petticoat. Moreover, she wore, wherever she could hang one, a collection of small tinkling silver bells. She had them on her wrists and at her collar and attached to her belt, and furthermore she wore, as did nearly every one then, long pieces of velvet or narrow riband tied round the neck, called by the maid-servants and suchlike " FoUow-me-lads," though why I for one do not know. At each end of these streamers another small beU hung ; while the pug which accompanied her wherever she went also wore them, so there was a fidgeting tinkling whenever she appeared. 333 LEAVES FROM A LIFE One day, after we had known her some httle time, we were astonished to receive a sudden visit from the husband. She had disappeared with the last baby and the pug-dog, annoiineing she had gone to join her lover, and that her husband and family would never see her again, Charley had been made a complete cat's-paw of. Under the guise of taking the boy of twelve or thirteen about, she had driven to the house of her lover constantly, leaving Charley in the calvor carriage with the pug, and he had to give evidence as to the number of the visits. The divorce was obtained ; her money, being her own, could not be touched ; and, getting tired of the baby, she returned him to the unfortu- nate husband, who had to keep him, educate and bring him up, although he knew he was none of his. The child was " bom in wedlock," and there- fore had to be considered the same as the rest of the family. One of the boys turned out a great bother. He was once sent to us to spend a night on his way to school, and I was deputed to see the little brute into the train. I took his ticket while he was supposed to stand by me, but when I turned round he had vanished, and it took his father, and a couple of detectives, several days before he was found. I ought to have been warned of his pro- pensities ; he had played the trick before ; and then I should most certainly have refused the job. Fur- thermore, his lavish supply of pocket-money should have waited his arrival at school. Anyhow, he never did any good, and was a constant source of trouble 334 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES to his father and his sisters, who were as pretty and nice as girls could be. I have always been greatly struck by the fact that it is quite impossible for any one who has not been at a trial and carefully watched all the witnesses, the accused, and the prosecution to give an opinion that is worth a farthing on the merits of the case, and even in these days of " descriptive reporting " one is not much helped. In the first place, the evidence is not and cannot be given verbatim, and one never understands what has really happened unless one has been in court. It is, therefore, to be greatly deprecated that when a jury and a judge have come, after most patient hearing, to the con- clusion that a man or woman is guUty, the British pubhc should be allowed to interfere. By all means have a Court of Criminal Appeal, where any fresh facts that arise during or after the trial can be discussed, but untU that is called into being the informal trial by newspaper clamour that is allowed, given a weak Home Secretary to upset a formal verdict, should be at once forbidden. I venture to say that for the one innocent man who is sent to goal five or six most guilty creatures are kept ahve at our expense, because nowadays sentiment is rife and we have not strength of mind to carry out the sentence of the law. I shall never forget being first struck by the impossibility of judging from a newspaper report when I had spent some time in the Old Bailey listening to what was to me a most amusing case 335 LEAVES FROM A LIFE which turned on the spirituaUstic craze of which 1 have ah-eady spoken. A rich Jewess had fallen into the clutches of a couple of so-called mediums who, trading on her credulity, had gradually stripped her of aU her valuable jewels and a good deal of other property as well. I was in a good position to see both witness and accused, the latter gorgeously apparelled and wearing most of her victim's diamonds sat in the dock smiling serenely; the husband was not there, he having found pressing business to cause him to flee to the other side of the Atlantic from whence both the precious pair hailed, and it was quite evident that until the two women had quarrelled bitterly over the attentions the husband had paid the victim, who began to give him the jewels which at first were handed unhesitatingly to the wife, that no suspicion of their bond fides had been aroused. But, after an unusually bitter discussion between the trio, the owner of the jewels had flown to her friends for advice, not before she required it, and they had put her on the track of the antecedents of the couple with the result that the trial in the Old Bailey took place. But how any sane creature could have been taken in by the shallow humbug that imposed on the Jewess I for one cannot understand ; spirit- writing appeared on closed slates in the good old way, giving her orders from her dead mother to hand over certain jewels most carefuUy described to the female prisoner, spirit voices gave the same commands, and finally she was bidden to hand over 336 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES all she possessed to the couple, and would have done so, had not the two women quarrelled ; and the whole matter was exposed. I watched the witness carefully and I could not understand in the least how she had been so frightfully gulled. She was shrewd, clever, and fenced admirably with the Counsel who cross-examined her, while she confessed without a qualm that she had lost the mother to whom she was devotedly attached, and was only too glad to think she was able to communicate with her and to carry out her wishes to think for a moment that she was being taken in. Perhaps the nastiest remark she managed to get out was that she and the so-called husband were deeply attached, and had meant to marry, as he had confessed that the so-caUed wife was not his wife, but his mother. " Sensation in Court," as reporters put it, feebly describes the result of this statement ; the audience gasped, the witness glared triumphantly at the prisoner, who rose from her seat and shook her fist, while I firmly believe if the quiet warder had not put a hand on her shoulder and reminded her of her position, she would have sprung on the witness and considerably disarranged the " sit " of her hat. The statement was at once impugned by the prisoner's Counsel, but the witness had got it in and was quite content. The result of the trial was so many months' hard labour for the prisoner for obtaining a quantity of valuable property by false pretences, and an order was made foi^ the restitution Y 337 LEAVES FROM A LIFE of the jewels, some of which the prisoner had been flourishing in the eyes of the witness. I never heard any more of either woman, and the man was never found in England. At any rate, if he ever met his wife again I expect he had to suflFer greatly for the words he had put into the mouth of the prosecutor. Another celebrated trial I very much enjoyed was the Belt case, which took place in the old law- courts close to Westminster Hall. I sat on the bench by Baron Huddleston, who was a great friend of my father's, and I saw the Royal Academicians come up one after the other to testify unanimously to what, I think, was the undoubted fact that Belt the "sculptor" did employ a ghost, or indeed several ghosts, and that very Uttle, if any of the work he was supposed to do had been touched by him. Belt had been taken up immensely by people who could not bear to be thought wrong, and indeed Baron Huddleston did not for one moment conceal the fact that he was dead against Lawes and all for Belt, and he snapped at every one of the R.A.S, including my father, in the most unkind manner possible. At last Belt and a lump of clay were shut up together to prove whether he could mould a bust or not ; he did produce something that could by very prejudiced people be called sculpture, and he obtained his verdict against Lawes, whose father was a very rich man. But I have some sort of an idea that Lawes allowed himself to be made bank- rupt rather than ask his father for the law expenses he had incurred, and as I am quite certain he was 338 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES in the right and that Belt was not, I do not think he was wrong to get out of the result of the verdict in any manner he could. Belt died some years ago in great ppverty, and I do not suppose any one ever heard or will hear the rights of the case. Not long after this trial my father went down to Ascot to spend a " week-end " with the Baron and Lady Di at their beautiful place there, and he had not returned from there for more than a few days when some one told me he was not well. I happened to be close to his house and went in, and was shown a scrawl he had just produced and which purported to be a letter he had written a few moments before to put off his model. I went up and saw him in bed — for the first time after eight o'clock all the years I had known him — and he was evidently very ill, and off I went and fetched Sir Henry Thompson. I waited for his verdict, and when he came downstairs he looked very grave. " It's the Ascot water," he said. " Your father win drink a glass of water in the night ; he had forgotten to ask for it specially, and I gather that he emptied the caraife on the wash-stand. He is in for typhoid, can you nurse ? " " Not I," I said ; "beside I can't stay here. I have my home and children to look after, and my work to do — beside — beside " Sir Henry knew it was out of the question, and that my father's domestic arrangements made it likewise impossible for my unmarried sisters to go, so there was nothing for it apparently 339 LEAVES FROM A LIFE but the usual couple of trained typhoid nurses. But Papa was quite able to protest and swear he would sooner die; we had had two when my mother died, and I think he not only disHked the genus as much as I do, but looked upon them almost as a death-warrant, and so Sir Henry got him to promise to remain quietly in bed until he came back at six, " and by that time," he remarked rather maliciously, " I shall find, I have no doubt, that he will not have an opinion on the subject ; his temperature is already — " (after all these years I forget the exact height it had reached, but it was something alarming) — " and by night " and Sir Henry shrugged his shoulders, and departed. WiQ it be beheved' that my remarkablej parent had apparently a severe attack of typhoid fever in some- thing less than twenty-two hours, every symptom complete, and recovered — or, shall I say was well on the road to recovery — ^long before six o'clock? and it required aU I could say to keep him in bed, where he began to clamour for his dinner before Sir Henry returned. I shall never forget Sir Henry when he did come back ; the nurses had been spoken to and only awaited his wire, but the tempera- ture was normal. Papa was quite himself, and utterly repudiated the scrawl we showed him as his morn- ing's letter ; the next day he got up, and on the third day he was at work quite happily. It was, I think, Mr. Horsley who told him there was nothing he did not deserve to have for staying with Baron Huddleston after the 340 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES manner he had treated the Academicians during the Belt trial, but the Baron and Lady Di were good friends to Papa. She had been a lovely girl, and to our great astonishment, she not only prided herself on her illegitimate descent from Charles II., but was equally proud of her hkeness to Nell Gwynne. It struck us as singular, but then we had not the reverence for kings which suggested that a bar-sinister is no drawback to a relationship to one ! Lady Di had been one of the figures in one of Papa's pictures, and she then had exquisite, reaUy golden hair and the sweetest smile. She is the one in the bevy of bridesmaids looking up to the sad, Avidowed Queen in her closet, an attitude which struck Papa immensely ; she seemed to realise in all her youth and beauty the pathetic con- trast between the broken woman who had lost her all and her own self. I had to be model for that dress and the arms and hands when Lady Di was not available, and I cannot say I appreciate it my- self at all. She had had several romances in her life, but she was deeply attached to " the last of the Barons ; " as Shirley Brooks, I think, called Huddleston, and when she died she left wishes that his robes, which she had kept carefully aU her life-time, should be burned and her body cremated and her ashes mixed with his ; and so passed away one of the beautiful and romantic figures of the mid- Victorian age. I had a rather unhappy experience myself with the wife of a well-known lawyer, and 341 LEAVES FROM A LIFE although every one concerned is now dead, and she left no one behind her, I will not give any names. The husband and wife came constantly to our house, and no one would ever expect to hear that they were not the best of Mends, though from hints she dropped now and again I had some idea that things were not aU they should be ; at the same time I was too young for confidences, which I neither asked nor required. Mama had said something to me and asked me to be kind if I could to her ; " she has no children and has trouble at home ; " and when we met at a dance and she offered to drive me home I accepted, but instead of going towards Pem- bridge Villas we drove aimlessly about the streets and at last she burst into tears. I gathered that she could bear no more ; her husband had brought home an illegitimate son, and meant to adopt him and bring him up to his own profession, and she had refused to Uve in the house if the lad did, and then the husband had struck her and sworn at her horribly ; she could not go home, what was she to do ? I do not think I was twenty, and I certainly did not feel competent to advise ; at last I got her to promise to come up and talk things over with Mama the next day ; it was nearly one o'clock, and I knew Mama was in bed and sleeping as much as she could when any of us were out and she was not certain we were all at home, and that neither burglars nor fire had turned up. She promised me and I left her at her own door. Fortu- 342 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES nately I never said a word to a soul, only to Mama, who warned me to keep all I heard to myself. The day wore on and she never came, and the evening papers told us she had been found dead in bed. An overdose of the chloral she was in the habit of taking for sleeplessness had stilled the broken heart, of which as no one had heard, though many sus- pected, there was no apparent reason to think of suicide, and aU was ended. After aU it might have been an overdose, though I for one, who heard aU she said the night before, never believed it was an accidental death for one moment. I think the longest trial I ever attended was that of the Claimant ; at any rate it appeared to me to go on for months and I cannot help beUeving there were two separate cases connected with him, but whenever we went we were thoroughly amused. It was in connection with this case that that extra- ordinary man Dr. Kenealy was disbarred and very soon after vanished from public life altogether. He was an extremely clever man, but had a violent temper, and indeed had nearly come to utter grief in some way that was connected with the savage beating of one of his sons. There was no S.P.C.C. then, or else I fear he would not have got off without some punishment. As aU the sons I know of turned out extremely well, perhaps the beating did no harm after all. I only recollect the wave of rage against him at the time, so the beating must have been rather bad, for flogging was not in those days retained exclusively for the use of Harrow and 343 LEAVES FROM A LIFE Eton boys ; then all shared and shared alike, and were, I venture to state, all the better for the judicious application of the rod. I recollect how the Counsel quarrelled and fought, and more especially do I remember the enormously stout man with the extremely small and delicate hands and feet who was the " Claimant." I do not think any one ever reached the size the putative " Sir Roger " did, and I believe he even emerged from prison after his long years of penal servitude not so very much smaller, though I never saw him again. The last time I had that pleasure was when the jury was fihng into the box to give the verdict. He turned round, gave his watch and chain, ring and money to some one behind him, so he knew from the look of the jury what it would be, and in those days to the best of my belief a convict's pro- perty was escheated to the Crown. The verdict not being given he thought it best to be on the safe side. He then heard the verdict and sentence, and disappeared for some time, at any rate, from the public gaze, though of course he turned up, as is usual, long before the fourteen years were up. He was an exemplary prisoner, and earned the marks which gave him the utmost remission possible of the term of his sentence. A great fuss was made about " Lady Tichborne," and his admirers clubbed together and kept her for a short time, until they discovered she was not all she might be. When Sir Roger returned from prison he found quite a perceptible addition to his family. He was deeply 344 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES pained and left his wife altogether, ending his days in some publican's service, where he was ready at any moment to discuss the trial and talk over the great hardship of his untoward fate. He was a curious mixture, just too clever to be found out at once, and yet not clever enough to carry through the imposture to the end. The last long trial of any note that I recollect was the Parnell Commission, some time in the eighties, and there again I learned how utterly impossible it is to judge from a mere report of a trial what has really occurred in the Courts ; not one of the five daily papers we saw gave half, no, not one quarter of the case, and indeed I do not see how it is possible for them to do so. I was fortunate enough to have a seat in a species of tiny box high up in the wall of the Court, and as few women appeared interested, I was able to attend almost regularly ; indeed, when I did miss, it was because I was literally obliged to go somewhere else, but I shall never forget how it all enthralled me : the long row of Irishmen each with his griev- ance, ParneU with his fateful countenance, Davitt burning with a patriot's fire, Biggar and others less known to fame, deeply impressed me, and I could hardly take my eyes from Parnell's tragic face. He appeared to me to be there under protest, the accusation was too absurd to be taken seriously, he thought, yet he was obliged to do so, and he sat with his arms folded glowering in front of him, while Michael Davitt repeatedly sprang to his 345 LEAVES FROM A LIFE feet and challenged one statement after the other. I shall never forget how he described an eviction he had seen, and the way my blood boiled at his account of the sick grandmother, with the roof torn oflP the house and the windows and doors taken out, turned out by the Irish constabulary to die in a ditch, while the land agent, who was the witness in the box at the moment, had given an entirely different description of the affair. This man was calm, imperturbable, and never took the least notice of Davitt's questions and accusations, but one felt the wave of hate passing between them, red-hot on the part of the Irishman, cold as steel and as deadly from the English land-agent's side. Another time I heard Davitt elicit from a most unwilling witness the fact that the whole of the rents gathered and pressed out from starving peasants was spent on some huge City banquet. That special land belonged to one of the City companies, and the rents wrung from the land went merely on one of those tremen- dous feeds. Neither fact ever appeared in the reports, though I looked eagerly for them, and none save those who were at the trial ever heard of either case. Parnell always had a great fascination for me, and I really believe he was a true lover of his country; he was brought to his end and ruined by a woman who, having done her worst, had not sufficient sense to efface herself, and whose husband having received his price could not refrain from playing into the enemy's hand. If the divorce had not made his 346 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES sin public property the sin would have been no smaller, but he would not have been trampled in the dust, as he was by his own countrymen, and driven to his death by the very people he was trying to save. One sin found out kUled Parnell ; I have known far worse sinners than he who still live, hold honourable office and are forgiven. One wonders why that great Irishman was selected to bear the cross on which he ultimately died ! I happened to be in Court when the har Piggott gave his perjured evidence, and when I returned home I remarked to my husband, " I bet you six- pence that Piggott will never enter the witness- box again; when Monday comes he will be missing," and I told him how he had floundered and flinched and flounced about the box during his cross-examination, and that I was perfectly convinced, as I had been from the first moment of the trial, that Piggott had forged or procured the letters, and that Parnell was no more the author of them than I was. Sure enough when Monday came Piggott had been turned inside out by the astute Mr. Labouch^re and Sala ; they had his confession duly signed and witnessed in their pockets, and Piggott was off" to Spain, where in a day or two, three at most, he shot himself, and so deprived the world of a very poor scoundrel and rogue. How the Times ever fell so low as to publish these letters I for one can never understand ; the Piggott scandal killed Mr. Macdonald, but in later 347 LEAVES FROM A LIFE years when the Jameson raid letter proved to have been connected with this same paper, I do not think any one died of the shame. Papers are absolutely without shame nowadays, and editors only want to make a sensation, and I think even the old eleventh commandment : " Thou shalt not be found out," means nothing at the present time, for no one cares in the least if he or she is found out or not so long as he or she is talked about. I have known some fraudulent lawyers, too, whose record will almost break that of the parsons, and indeed I often wonder, considering the implicit trust so many folks have in them, that there are not a great many more than there are, and I must say, too, that the very worst men I have known have been those who robbed their clients all the week to keep up more than one establishment, while on Sundays they marched to church with their wives and families, carrying large Bibles and prayer-books under their predatory arms. One of these men lived very many years ago in Sussex Gardens, Hyde Park, and a kinder, more benevolent old gentleman never lived, I still use the silver salt-cellars he gave me when I was married, despite the fact that the money to pay for them must have come out of one of his clients' pockets. He and his old wife and one son (who earned miserable fame by being turned out of the Army for bullying some time in the sixties, an event commemorated by a cartoon in Punch), lived all together, and this son was sup- posed to have broken the sinless heart of his father 348 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES by his crimes, and to be the subject of daily and nightly prayer and tears. In real truth he was not anything save an idiot. He married ultimately very respectably, and lived a decent life. But despite the old father's exemplary attendance at church, when he died it was found he had spent all his clients' money, and I do not think there was a penny for his unfortunate old wife, let alone the son. This couple were absolutely devoted to dogs, and they particularly affected King Charles spaniels. The little wretches used to walk about the table at dinner and eat anything they fancied, and the guests often enough could not restrain their disgust. Another man ruined poor John Parry, who had to return to the boards ; while the Lake scandal cannot be forgotten surely ! Though now I come to think of it, it is quite six or seven years ago. I have particularly noticed, too, in different parts of the country how some small solicitor will gradually absorb the property of those around him. If he be an astute man he first worms himself into their confidence, then suggests improvements, addi- tions, and consequent mortgages in either their busi- nesses or their land. He bides his time and waits ; times are hard, something happens in the business, and bit by bit he gathers in the oysters, leaving the shells to the disconsolate owners of all. I daresay things are more difficult now than they used to be, but before my day I have heard of the doings of men who in my time were rich and prosperous, and even large landowners, all owing to their astute 349 LEAVES FROM A LIFE management of their clients" affairs in their own interests, and I have moreover yet to learn who benefits beside the lawyer in any action at law. I know we had to defend one outrageous action brought against us which Lord Chief Justice Cole- ridge diagnosed as the most disgraceful that was ever brought into Court. We were given costs and damages — damages ! The man had not a three- penny piece to call his own, and he had been backed by rich and unscrupulous people. All T know is that we had to pay all our own costs, and as to the damages we certainly got them, but they were damages to our health, our temper, and our faith, and anything more substantial we are waiting for patiently to this day. Even if one wins a case against a rich man and he can pay, all he has to pay are taxed costs, the difference comes out of the successful suitor's pocket. The only persons, I take it, who benefit by the law are the men who live by it, and after all I do not know many more charm- ing men than these same licensed robbers in the name of the law. One of my greatest friends, a friendship ex- tending to the third generation and, I hope, may some day even reach the fourth, was the very last of the Sergeants-at-law, who ended his days as a County Court Judge in Dorsetshire. He had the most remarkable memory of any man I ever knew and I do not think there was one quotation from Shake- speare, and indeed from most of the poets, which he could not have capped. His judgments even on such 350 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES small matters apparently as those appertaining to the County Court were always remarkable, and he never, as far as I knew him, was in the wrong ; he appeared to grasp the rights of the case in a moment, and I have often wondered how he escaped reaching the Bench. It is good to re- member him : good to think of one man of whom no evil could be said or even thought, while one is obliged to recollect the others, many of whom were anything but what they should be. One man in particular had the most extraordinary career, and if my diagnosis of his character had been taken, it would have been a most excellent thing. He came of a very well-known family of poachers, one of whom ended his days in Portland, having very narrowly escaped being hanged for the murder of a gamekeeper, but this special man determined to rise above the ruck, educated himself and became a pupil-teacher. In this condition of life he met and married the deformed daughter of a small country solicitor, whose household was one of the most singular I ever saw. It consisted of the wife, three or four daughters, all more or less deformed, one being deaf and dumb, and one son who died many many years ago. These people never once opened their windows, and their dread of a draught sur- passed that of the most sensitive of Frenchmen, while to see them come into their pew in church and slowly unpack themselves, used to be a perfect joy to me when I was a child. They would enter the seat apparently quite stout and bulky, but by 351 LEAVES FROM A LIFE the time they had cast shawl after shawl and cloak after cloak we had reached the psalms and they were merely ordinary-sized individuals. They began to wrap up when the parson had got to the third head of his sermon and waddled home to their airless house in the same garments in which they had come. It was currently reported that they put on shawls to go upstairs, but I know nothing of that. My acquaintance with them was restricted to what I saw in church, and that was quite sufficient for me. It was into this interesting family the pupil- teacher entered, having secured the fair hand of the lady by eloping with her on the top of a hay- cart, and he at once set to work, passed his exami- nations, qualified as a lawyer, and proceeded to absorb his father-in-law's business and his father-in- law body and soul. Before he arrived on the scene the old man was kind, good, and honest, but this unhappy man was cursed by a love for power that made him a small Napoleon in his way, and as he was utterly unscrupulous, every one began to feel his grip. I used to watch him from a window I had that raked a public-house fore and aft, and I inva- riably said, " A man who gets through the amount of brandy and water that man does in the morning is not really dangerous ; all he wants is to be stuck up to and he will soon cave in." But I think he must have been sent as a chastisement to that special place, a chastisement it richly deserved, and I cannot account for him in any other way. For apparently he flourished mightily for awhile, took 352 SOME LEGAL ADVENTURES a very large house outside the town and spent hundreds on it; then people began to talk, look askance, and finally he was "wanted" — wanted very much, and could not be found. He served a short term of imprisonment in some other county, and at the last died in the workhouse infirmary, leaving debts untold and not a shilling of any sort or kind behind him. But during his wild career he decimated the place ; some people he ruined, others went away because they would not stand the perpetual pin-prick of his abominable doings ; he taught the younger men to drink and the older ones to get drunk and gamble, and then the old father-in-law died of real shame and misery, for he had always been kind and respectable. All the money went altogether, and I think now all are dead and none remember him any more save when one of his victims curses his fate and the memory of the man who robbed him, or now and then the whole town recollects what it once was and what it now is. Yet properly trained by proper people, and his mind bent in the right way, he might have done well ; aU the same I do not say peace to his ashes, for wherever they are I hope they are a thousand times more uncomfortable than he once made me. We never had to do with the law, except when Papa was in the witness-box, until I married. Since then, what with one thing and another, the new licensing laws and mjustices and one thing and another, one never seems free. One more z 353 LEAVES FROM A LIFE amusing case in which Papa was witness had to do with this same man ; he had claimed "user " of a wall that belonged to a dear old friend of mine, and she gallantly fought and won her case. Her case came on before old Judge Bacon, who was as deaf as a post, but when he realised Papa was a witness he invited him on the Bench, and they two drew all the witnesses, counsel, &c., and much enjoyed themselves. Papa said that Judge Bacon's drawings were better than his ; they both drew this special man, and I do not think he would have liked it could he have seen these sketches. " His face is enough to hang him," said Judge Bacon, and pro- ceeded to draw him suspended from a gallows. The house was a very old one, and Papa was able to prove the date without a doubt from the old powdering closets that the house contained, and other points I had luckily shown him long before there was any idea of the case being tried. It was merely a bit of spite, but naturally it worried the old lady who owned the property, and whose for- bears had owned it for generations ; and though she won her case, it simply resulted in her being given her own property, and having to pay the difference to her lawyers between the taxed cost? the judge gave her and what they really came to Law is fifty thousand times better and speedier than it was when Dickens wrote about " Jarndyce V. Jarndyce," but I venture to suggest there are yet a great many ways in which the administration thereof may be improved. 354 CHAPTER XV THE TOP OF THE HILL When one has reached a certain age it always seems to me that one resembles a pedestrian who has climbed up, up and up, and finally emerged somewhat spent and panting from the exertion, on the top of a hill. I know the proper thing to do when one has reached there is to mop one's brow, sit down and rest, and then calmly begin to descend on the other side. All the same I have not the smallest intention of doing anything of the kind ; rather, having reached what I may consider the summit of my special mountain, do I stand and look back at the road by which I have come, and make up my mind to remain there as long as I possibly can. When 1 descend some one will carry me ; I certainly will not go down of my own free will. It is unfortunate, too, that there are limits to human endurance, and likewise to the size of a book, for it seems to me that I have not related one half of the delightful happenings that have made my life a pure joy to me, nor told of one quarter of the people whose lives have touched mine, and made me 355 LEAVES FROM A LIFE wonder at the dramatic possibilities which are to be discovered in the most commonplace-looking exist- ences, and among what appear to be the most ordi- nary surroundings possible. From the top of the hill I look back and perceive how many extraordinary things I have seen and heard, and how many kind and delightful people I have known ; and if, owing to my being buried in the country for thirty-seven years of my life, I have not known the men and women who attempt, sometimes very successfully, too, to fill the places of the giants of the past, I am not inclined to be sorry. Had I been acquainted with them, their images might have blurred the recollections of all I knew so well, and as most of them are still alive, I have no doubt some other young person in curls and short frocks is hanging on their words, and summing them up in the way I did when I was young, and that in due time they will be written about as they really and truly are. Yet there are just a few men of whom I should like to say a few words, notably some of the doctors I have known, and while some one suggests that 1 should include in this volume the history of my thirty-seven years in the wilderness, I say not so ; at any rate just now. Their story may come later, for the conditions of country life have changed so marvellously since I first made my real acquaint- ance with it, that people nowadays have no idea of what they were really like. For example, when I was first married and drove my ponies out of the little town, every day 1 went out it cost me nine- 356 THE TOP OF THE HILL pence, for there at each of the three separate entrances to the place stood a toll-bar and we had to stand and deliver our ninepence before we were allowed to leave the town at all ; then, too, our parliamentary elections generally began and ended with a free fight ; great evils were unchecked because there was no one to draw attention to them, and no one independent enough to brave the wrath of those in authority ; health was absolutely unstudied, and the condition of the poor, especially of the farm-labourer, was such that my blood boils to remember what I have seen and known for myself of what he had to endure and endure speechlessly in those very bad old days. Well do I recollect the first visit that Joseph Arch paid to Dorsetshire ; how he was refused the use of either school-room or town hall in which to speak, and how we stood out in the grey mist and gently falling rain to listen to him as he described, quietly and pacifically enough, things scarcely credible nowadays, while the farmers raged and swore around him and scarcely allowed us to live because we agreed — as who could help agreeing who knew the real truth ? — with him and with his honest endeavours to obtain for them something better than the disgraceful cottages and the pittance of wages which they had to take or starve ! 1 have seen cottages with water welling up past the doorstep in the winter, where the old folk were crippled with rheumatism before their time, and I have known father, mother, sons, and daughters distributed in one bedroom and a 3S7 LEAVES FROM A LIFE half landing, the latter being the only place where the lads of the family could be put. But once enter on the country, this book would never end ; let me rather gather up the threads and tie them together, holding them in my hand, while I rest for a while and think on the top of the hill. But before I close I must say a few words about the doctors, and the first one I ever recollect was, of course, our own particular Esculapius, who re- joiced in the name of Jones. " When Jones wants half a crown," said Papa, " he comes here " ; which sounds as if Jones's charges were not high; and certainly we did see a good deal of him ; but 1 do not think we ever loved any one quite so • much in our very early days as we loved our dear Doctor Jones. He was a very small and precise man, always spotlessly clean and immaculately dressed, and he lived in the Strand over a place very like a chemist's shop, where he dispensed his own medicines, and where he used to allow us to take tamarinds out of a jar — one among many which we believed for years were the preserves from whence he obtained our never-failing supply of infant brothers and sisters, ;and which we used to implore him to keep sealed and fastened down tightly lest one should escape when least expected and come our way, after all. Dr. Jones had a very prim wife, and a very prim parlour over the surgery which always smelled of drugs, but which was the delight of our existence, as from its windows we always 358 THE TOP OF THE HILL saw all the Lord Mayors' Shows, and, indeed, any sights that might be going. I especially recollect seeing the Emperor of the French and the beautiful Empress driving to the City, and as she was so lovely I have never forgotten her for one moment. The Emperor even then looked ill and wretched, and sat with his chin sunk on his chest, and I do not think it was later than 1855 ; but the Empress was delicious, there is no other word for it ; her lovely hair was brushed back off her face, and she smiled and looked as an Empress should, and, child as I was, I simply adored her. The next time I saw her she was still beautiful ; it was in 1869, the year before Sedan, and she was driving with the Emperor and Prince Imperial ; and then she, too, looked sad, although not so sad as did the Emperor, who was quite yellow, and was almost bent double in the carriage ; while the Prince smiled and laughed and bowed, and was all a boy of twelve should be. I am always truly glad that I saw Paris as Imperial Paris, for the Paris of to-day is a very different thing ; it may be on a far more solid foun- dation ; it may be — and no doubt is— far more real, far more prosperous ; but it has not the splendour, the gUtter, the inexpressible charm of Paris before the war, when the Palais Royal was a resplendent mass of jeweller's shops, when the 2f. 50c. restaurants were each a separate and delightful adventure to investigate, when the Cent Gardes made the streets memorable, and the Tuileries 359 LEAVES FROM A LIFE were worth crossing the Channel to see. Of course all the splendour and happiness were on the surface, beneath which were what caused the Commune and the unspeakable horrors of the fol- lowing years ; but, all the same, it is good to have seen it, and to recoUect the brilliancy, even if I know quite well the present days are far better all round than they were then. I never saw either Emperor or Prince again, but I saw the Empress two or three days after her son had been buried at Chislehurst ; she was walking up and down the drawing-room of the house she then rented like a caged lioness, throwing her arms up to the ceiling now and then, and then cowering down with her face on the table as if she could bear no more. It is a curious fact that when the Emperor was taken prisoner after Sedan I met a man at Swanage who had heard the news and told them to me, and that when the Prince was kUled in South Africa I met the same man in the same place, and he gave me the sad intelUgence of his loss. Yet I do not think it was sad, except for his mother, for as long as he lived France would never have been at peace. He would always have been a rallying-point for the Buonaparte faction, and he himself would always have been endeavouring to get back to France, where a Buonaparte never yet has been anything save a scourge and an evil thing. I have heard it asserted over and over again that the Prince Imperial was not the son of the Emperor, but I am quite certain, whoever's son he was, he was the 360 THE TOP OF THE HILL son of the Empress, and that no " warming-pan " scandal had anything to do with his birth, I saw her after he died. No foster-mother could have looked as she did. No ; the lad who fell with all the murderous assegai thrusts in his breast facing the foe was a true son of France, a son of the most gallant nation that exists on this world of ours. Dr. Jones was not inclined to be enthusiastic over that procession, but very few English people either liked or trusted Napoleon. Anyhow, he was a true friend to England, and he never forgot those who had helped him and given him shelter in his days of poverty and despair. Dr. Jones had a partner, but I fancy he merely attended the aristocracy among the patients, and so we only saw him once. Then he arrived in a gorgeous bright yellow chariot, and sat talking to Mama while I first looked at him curiously, and then, creeping nearer, played with the tassels which hung from the tops of his high boots. I can recollect those boots precisely, as well as I recollect a very large watch he took out of his fob pocket, which had a good many seals attached to a broad black moird riband ; that he had a heavy gold-headed cane, and took snuff out of a very large gold box. He also told us he was the real Earl of Derwentwater. As his name was Radclyffe he may have been right. I only recoUect that one visit ; and I think both Dr. and Mrs. Jones were rather afraid of him, for we never saw him at the house in the Strand, and never heard anything much more about him, and if it had not been for 361 LEAVES FROM A LIFE his name and his boot-tassels and his splendid yellow carriage I do not suppose I should have remem- bered him either. I had two or three very pet doctors, one, my beloved Uncle Henry, who most certainly was one of the best as he was one of the most skilful of men. He was the original of the doctor who, having mended a dog's leg at the York Hospital, found his patient waiting for him on the step, having brought a sick friend to have his kind attention too. The story has often been told of many doctors and many hospitals, but this is the true, one, and my aunt cherishes to this day the photograph of the dog. Uncle Henry taught me to ride, and he and T used to take long rides together, and as he very often left me outside cottages to hold his horse and my own steed while he went inside and interviewed his patients, I have had some awful half-hours, for his horses were always the best he could get, and I had all I could do to keep the wretched animals quiet. He always laughed so at my fears that it was no good to remonstrate ; and, moreover, he used to in- sist on my going with him to the hospital, because I am an idiotic coward and such places fill me with the most abject dread and disgust.- I went duti- fully for some weeks, but at last I met a man in an epileptic fit on the stairs. I turned and fled, and never from that day to this have I gone inside a hospital. Even Uncle Henry could not make me, and I am always more thankful than I can say that there are plenty of people in the world who reaUy 362 THE TOP OF THE HILL like horrors, for then my services can never be re- quired. One day Uncle Henry and I got lost on some vast moor, I think Marston Moor, and I have never forgotten the misery of that awful ride. One can get wetter on horseback than anywhere else. My lap appeared full of water, and the rain simply streamed off my haj, and I could hardly hold the reins, but my uncle never lost his eager look and his good-humour. I can see him now peering into the mist, laughing at our misfortunes and making jokes where another man would have found nothing to smile at. His never-failing cheerfulness carried us through it all, and we arrived back in York about 4 a.m., wet to the skin, but none the worse after all for our adventure. Only a country doctor ! Yet he had been a pupil of Simpson, and was one of the j&rst to experiment with him with chloroform; and he told me that not only had Mrs. Simpson come in one night to see why they had not come into the drawing-room after dinner, and that she had found them under the dinner-table, half unconscious with their experiments, but he had also been in the house when the people broke every window in the place : Dr. Simpson had used chloroform in some confinement: he was inter- fering with the curse laid on Eve. " Smash his windows I " History in the making once more I I think a doctor who refused chloroform now to a patient would be in more danger than was ever good Dr. Simpson in those far-off days. 363 LEAVES FROM A LIFE Some day some one should write an epic and call it " The Country Doctor " ; for what excellent men have I known, what good men, what brave men! always ready to turn out at a moment's notice and drive away into the dark and rain, only content to know they can save a life, worth- less very often, or help to spare some wretched wastrel the pain he or she all too often deserves. Here among all my heroes one stands out pre- eminent ; such a commonplace figure, too, scarcely what one would call a gentleman, but so good, so true and kind, that when he died his patients mourned him as one mourns one's dearest and best, as, indeed, to his patients no one ever could be dearer or better. He used to be fond of me, and he often told me extraordinary happenings that one would hardly credit could occur in such prosaic surroundings as were his. On one occasion one of the proudest mothers in the country round had sent for him. What was she to do ? Great disgrace was imminent. Could the doctor suggest a way out ? A hcum tenens was installed, and the good doctor, his wife, and the girl went abroad. Fortunately the child died. The father, a footman, be it noted, was drowned on his way to Australia, where he was sent with ample means to try his fortune on the goldfields. They all returned, the young lady's health quite established by her residence abroad. The doctor was paid and thanked, but never sent for to that house again. 364 THE TOP OF THE HILL Neither was he asked to the grand wedding that took place some months after. But he held his tongue, and only told me as we stood at his win- dow watching the funeral of the last of the race, quite simply, as a happening, and as if it were nothing very much out of the way after all. Once he came back from a ride into the country and told me that some ravens had been hovering over the farmyard refuse heap in some small village, and that at last he had advised the farmer to distribute the manure about and see if there were any reason for the ravens' presence. The farmer's wife was ill, and she was very superstitious. He did so, and discovered the body of an infant. Every one at the farm knew whose it was, but there was no good making a fuss ; the child evidently was still-born. It was quietly buried somewhere, the ravens disappeared, and no one was any the worse. An even greater tragedy happened in yet another farmhouse, but nothing much came of that. A pretty servant girl was left alone while the farmer was out in one direction and the farmer's wife in another, neither returning home that special night. To protect the girl from possible tramps and frights, said the farmer's wife, she locked the girl into her room. The next morning she was found dead of arsenic poisoning, poison kept for rats, said the farm-folk. There was an excellent reason foip her suicide, and suicide it was brought in. But the farmer's wife was jealous of her husband ; she very soon pined and died, and he followed her. Of 36s LEAVES FROM A LIFE course the farmhouse was haunted, it would be, and for years that farm was without a tenant, and the house when I saw it last was a ruin, for no one would live in it for anything, no, not even if they had it rent-free. I have often looked at the apparently uninteresting fronts of houses, and wondered at the comedies and tragedies which are being enacted behind those closed doors and windows ; but the doctor gets inside, and he, if he would, could write true histories that would shake the world, and do away with half the novels we all of us read so eagerly. Well for us that as a rule a doctor holds his tongue. When he does not he loses not only his practice, but the esteem and love the right man can always obtain from the right sort of patient It is extraordinary to notice, from the top of the hill, how much less the doctor is sent for nowadays than he used to be. The surgeon has it all his own way, and the bacteriologist runs him a fair second. The kindly gossip with his nasty medicine and his "bedside manner" will soon be extinct. Patent filth is taken by the quart ; we read medical details in all the lay papers ; and all too soon the dear old doctors, whose cures were not unseldom faith cures, but none the less real for all that, and whose pleasant faces and merry talk did far more good than their " treatment," will disappear ; and I at any rate shall lament their passing. Thank Heaven I have never had anything to do with surgeons, and I most devoutly trust I never shalL I know that they are ■366 THE TOP OF THE HILL invaluable men, and that Lord Lister has made operations possible that no sane man would have attempted before his time, but I cannot help think- ing that they are far too fond of the knife nowadays, and that people know, and talk too, a great deal too much about their insides. " It's not nice, and it frightens Jane," as the vUlage mother said when she called to remonstrate with the teacher at the school on the subject of some simple lessons she had been giving on hygiene ; " and beside, it's rude." Let us leave our interior arrangements alone. It may not frighten an intellectual Jane, but I am very certain it is rude. It is very hard to know how best to conclude these random recollections of the good times I have had, and of the friendships which have punctuated my days with many a jewel, and there are a great many things I should still like to talk about, but I suppose an end is necessary. " I wake in the night," said one of my nieces to me the other day, " and I cry to think I am grow- ing old." Oh ! foolish girl ! I am twenty years on in front, and I would not go back one single step, not for all the wealth of the Indies; and I would not be young again for anything the world can give. I have had the long climb ; and if tombstones mark the road, not only where the beloved dead lie with their faces towards the morning, but of dead faith in man, dead hopes, dead ambitions, I am on the top: I can see where I fell, where I faltered, where I sinned, and I most certainly 367 LEAVES FROM A LIFE intend to benefit by the view, and remain looking at it as long as I possibly can. When I think of the passionate desires I used to have to reform the world, to do something marvellous, to make my mark on my generation, when I_ used to love to dream, and how I ached for what I could never have, no one can tell how glad I am to be out of it all. Life is now a most delightful pageant, that I watch every day with the most unfailing interest ; and if many I have dearly loved have fallen " on sleep," I remember them so well that for me, at least, they are only in another country ; and as long as I live they are still my friends, and no one can take them away from me. No, most certainly I would not go back and be young again; it is far too much trouble. Rather let me remain looking out from my vantage-ground, where I can see the march of the seasons and hear the happenings all around me, content to know that I have lived once, and that I still keep those beside me who make every day I possess a real delight to me. I cannot echo Dr. Doran's wish that he could live every day of his life over again, but I most certainly should like to go on just as I am for ever. I love the world, and, on the whole, the world, and his wife too, have been very good indeed to me. April 28, 1907. Printed by Ballahtvne £7° Co. Limited Tavistock Street, London irlliHiliii 1 P iliiiilijHl ''I'lpiiil--.--.'"-- ■■ill Hi: ..>.^;;;i^i;^iii!iiiiiii|i«W^^