Volume 6 — XXV IN PLEASURE AND PAIN (continued 2)

To Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford.

“Campsea Ashe High House, Dec. 27, 1889.—We have had a very pleasant merry week in this most kindly and happy of family homes, not going out much, but the days full of intellectual interest, the evenings of games, acting, &c. The party has been the two really charming Miss Farquhars, their brother Ernest, pretty, attractive Miss Theresa Lister, Lady Cecily Clifton, Captain Sydney, Kenneth and Miss Matheson, James Lowther, young Brooke—a pleasant clever little county magnate, delightful Jack Cator and his remarkably nice sister, a young Macgregor in the Guards, and to-day the Anstruther Thompsons, the Edmund Fanes, Miss Mullholland, and a young Burroughs have come. Last night we acted a play, ‘The Bilious Husband,’ before a large audience of neighbours. Can you fancy me as Captain Marmaduke Mynch of the Royal Berkshire Plungers? Then there was ‘Barnum’s Show’—Miss Matheson as a mermaid, myself as a dwarf, Miss Lowther as the tattooed woman, Miss Farquhar the fat woman, Brooke a Zulu, Ernest Farquhar an Arab, and Mr. Lowther as ‘The Bearded Lady!’ Another day I dressed up and came in as an old aunt of the family—being the first scene of the word Antidote, for which we made a little story. I have liked my frivolous week very much, but it is enough, and I shall be glad to go back to my solitary work at Holmhurst on Monday.

“Kenneth Matheson very kindly said, ‘I know you will consider it sacrilege my pressing you to come to Highcliffe whilst I am its tenant’—which I allowed to be the case!

“I was very glad to hear of Lady Ossington’s will—just like an echo from the generosity, justice, and beneficence of her life.”

From Christmas 1889-90 people were already beginning to talk a great deal about the “Influenza epidemic” which was spreading over Europe, and was like a malarial fever. I was in London for a few hours on January 11, and bringing it back to Holmhurst with me, was very ill for nearly a month, but with the comfort of being in my own home, and, to me, the great comfort of being alone. In illness I quite feel the extreme blessing of religion—not the religion worried and touzled by a thousand million vagaries of personality, but the simple main facts, in which I believe so fully. I find some lines of Elizabeth Trench which exactly express what I feel myself:—

“When all fails, and to stand firm seems impossible, stand on the wood of the Cross; it will float with you,” said Queen Marie Leczinska.

“The Mercy of God—all is included in that word Mercy,” was a saying of the Mère Angelique.

Yet I find it very difficult to endure any other religious book than the Bible itself: all are so self-asserting, so self-seeking; and hymns, with one or two sublime exceptions, are either abjectly foolish or full of the self, even if it be the religious self, of man.

Journal.

“Feb. 13, 1890.—In December my old servant Joe Cornford died, who had been all my lifetime in the family service. For several years he had been too old and infirm to do any work, but, when he was well enough, he made a pretence of picking up a leaf or two, and received his wages all the same. If it had not been for his grumbling old wife, it would have been a pleasure to see him slowly dragging himself about the walks, but her temper was a trial! He was worse for some time. One day I went in to the lodge to see him after breakfast, and at that moment he suddenly died! Again, as often before, I felt the wonderful power of the great mystery of death, actually seeing life ebb downwards: the forehead become white and waxen, then the cheeks, then the whole being. How I was reminded of the lines of Caroline Bowles (Mrs. Southey):—

“I was at his funeral some days afterwards, the poor old man carried to the grave by our workmen, and followed by seventeen of his descendants, children and grandchildren. He has left me a chair which came out of Hurstmonceaux Castle.”

“Feb. 26, 1890.—Went to see Lady De Ros,[485] aged ninety-five. She brought out for me her greatest treasure, a beautifully printed Church of England Prayer-book in Spanish. It belonged to the great Duke of Ormonde, and descended from him to Lady Eleanor Butler, by whom and Miss Ponsonby—‘ladies of Llangollen’—it was given to the Duke of Wellington as a boy. He taught himself Spanish by following its services, as he himself says in an inscription on the fly-leaf. In his old age, when Lady De Ros was with him at Strathfieldsaye, she found it in the library, and told him what a valuable book she thought it. ‘Then, if you think it such a valuable thing, I will give it you, my dear.’—‘So, as Douro and Charles were just coming, I took my book away at once,’ said Lady De Ros, ‘for fear they should stop me.’ Some years afterwards the Duke asked Lady De Ros to lend him the book to show to some great librarian. She let it go, but made it a condition that, before it was returned, the Duke should write its history in the book with his own hands; and this he did.

“Lady De Ros also showed me a brush of hogs’-bristles, mounted in ebony, and with a silver plate. And she told how, when she was hunting wild boars with the Duke on Mont St. Jean near Cambrai, an immense boar sprang out of the thicket close by her. The Duke speared it. It was a horrid sight and she shrank from it. ‘Oh, my dear,’ said the Duke, ‘you must not mind it, for I am prouder of having killed that boar than of the battle of Waterloo.’

“Lady De Ros was very full of her dispute with Sir William Fraser about the house in which the ball was given at Brussels by her father, the Duke of Richmond, on the eve of the battle of Waterloo. She was quite certain of her facts, and that the house was now gone. She had been living in the house itself, in the Rue de la Blanchisserie (‘where the Duke would direct to me “in the wash-house“‘), and cited as a proof that the ball was given in her own house, the fact that her youngest sister, who had been sent to bed, stole out, and watched the company arrive through the banisters. ‘I believe Sir William Fraser asserts,’ said Lady De Ros, ‘that I am confused and doting now through my great age, but you know very old people remember the long-ago as if it was to-day, and that is the case with me. In 1860 I went back to see Brussels, and I could not find our house then; the whole street was swept away. At last, as I was walking up and down, I was attracted by the name on a pastry-cook’s shop: it was a name I remembered in that long-ago time. So I went in and asked if they knew anything of our house. “Oh, a house in the Rue de la Blanchisserie,” they said; “it has been pulled down years and years ago.”’