 | I. A passionate pilgrim |  |
1. I.
INTENDING to sail for America in the early part
of June, I determined to spend the interval of
six weeks in England, of which I had dreamed much
but as yet knew nothing. I had formed in Italy and
France a resolute preference for old inns, deeming that
what they sometimes cost the ungratified body they
repay the delighted mind. On my arrival in London,
therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry far to
the east of Temple Bar, deep in what I used to denominate
the Johnsonian city. Here, on the first evening
of my stay, I descended to the little coffee-room and
bespoke my dinner of the genius of decorum, in the
person of the solitary waiter. No sooner had I crossed
the threshold of this apartment than I felt I had
mown the first swath in my golden-ripe crop of British
“impressions.” The coffee-room of the Red-Lion, like
so many other places and things I was destined to
see in England, seemed to have been waiting for long
on its visage, for me to come and gaze, ravished but
unamazed.
The latent preparedness of the American mind for
even the most delectable features of English life is a
fact which I never fairly probed to its depths. The
roots of it are so deeply buried in the virgin soil of
our primary culture, that, without some great upheaval
of experience, it would be hard to say exactly when
and where and how it begins. It makes an American's
enjoyment of England an emotion more fatal and
sacred than his enjoyment, say, of Italy or Spain. I
had seen the coffee-room of the Red-Lion years ago, at
home, — at Saragossa, Illinois, — in books, in visions,
in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, and Boswell. It
was small, and subdivided into six small compartments
by a series of perpendicular screens of mahogany,
something higher than a man's stature, furnished on
either side with a narrow uncushioned ledge, denominated
in ancient Britain a seat. In each of the little
dining-boxes thus immutably constituted was a small
table, which in crowded seasons was expected to accommodate
the several agents of a fourfold British
hungriness. But crowded seasons had passed away
from the Red-Lion forever. It was crowded only with
memories and ghosts and atmosphere. Round the
room there marched, breast-high, a magnificent panelling
with unremitted friction, that by gazing awhile into its
lucid blackness I fancied I could discern the lingering
images of a party of gentlemen in periwigs and short-clothes,
just arrived from York by the coach. On the
dark yellow walls, coated by the fumes of English coal,
of English mutton, of Scotch whiskey, were a dozen
melancholy prints, sallow-toned with age, — the Derby
favorite of the year 1807, the Bank of England, her
Majesty the Queen. On the floor was a Turkey carpet,
— as old as the mahogany, almost, as the Bank of
England, as the Queen, — into which the waiter in his
lonely revolutions had trodden so many massive soot-flakes
and drops of overflowing beer, that the glowing
looms of Smyrna would certainly not have recognized
it. To say that I ordered my dinner of this superior
being would be altogether to misrepresent the process,
owing to which, having dreamed of lamb and spinach,
and a charlotte-russe, I sat down in penitence to a mutton-chop
and a rice pudding. Bracing my feet against
the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to
the mahogany partition behind me that vigorous dorsal
resistance which expresses the old-English idea of repose.
The sturdy screen refused even to creak; but
my poor Yankee joints made up the deficiency. While
I was waiting for my chop there came into the room a
person whom I took to be my sole fellow-lodger. He
for dinner; the table on the other side of my partition
had been prepared to receive him. He walked up to
the fire, exposed his back to it, consulted his watch,
and looked apparently out of the window, but really
at me. He was a man of something less than middle
age and more than middle stature, though indeed you
would have called him neither young nor tall. He was
chiefly remarkable for his exaggerated leanness. His
hair, very thin on the summit of his head, was dark,
short, and fine. His eye was of a pale, turbid gray,
unsuited, perhaps, to his dark hair and brow, but not
altogether out of harmony with his colorless, bilious
complexion. His nose was aquiline and delicate; beneath
it hung a thin, comely, dark mustache. His
mouth and chin were meagre and uncertain of outline;
not vulgar, perhaps, but weak. A cold, fatal, gentlemanly
weakness, indeed, seemed expressed in his attenuated
person. His eye was restless and deprecating;
his whole physiognomy, his manner of shifting his
weight from foot to foot, the spiritless droop of his
head, told of exhausted purpose, of a will relaxed. His
dress was neat and careful, with an air of half-mourning.
I made up my mind on three points: he was
unmarried, he was ill, he was not an Englishman. The
waiter approached him, and they murmured momentarily
in barely audible tones. I heard the words
finally “beer,” with a gentle affirmative. Perhaps he
was a Russian in reduced circumstances; he reminded
me of a certain type of Russian which I had met on
the Continent. While I was weighing this hypothesis,
— for you see I was interested, — there appeared a
short, brisk man with reddish-brown hair, a vulgar
nose, a sharp blue eye, and a red beard, confined to
his lower jaw and chin. My impecunious Russian was
still standing on the rug, with his mild gaze bent on
vacancy; the other marched up to him, and with his
umbrella gave him a playful poke in the concave frontage
of his melancholy waistcoat. “A penny-ha'penny
for your thoughts!” said the new-comer.
His companion uttered an exclamation, stared, then
laid his two hands on the other's shoulders. The
latter looked round at me keenly, compassing me in
a momentary glance. I read in its own high light
that this was an American eyebeam; and with such
confidence that I hardly needed to see its owner, as
he prepared, with his friend, to seat himself at the
table adjoining my own, take from his overcoat-pocket
three New York papers and lay them beside his plate.
As my neighbors proceeded to dine, I became conscious
that, through no indiscretion of my own, a large
portion of their conversation made its way over the
top of our dividing partition and mingled its savor
tone was lowered, as with the intention of secrecy;
but I heard a phrase here and a phrase there distinctly
enough to grow very curious as to the burden
of the whole, and, in fact, to succeed at last in guessing
it. The two voices were pitched in an unforgotten
key, and equally native to our Cisatlantic air; they
seemed to fall upon the muffled medium of surrounding
parlance as the rattle of pease on the face of a
drum. They were American, however, with a difference;
and I had no hesitation in assigning the lighter
and softer of the two to the pale, thin gentleman,
whom I decidedly preferred to his comrade. The
latter began to question him about his voyage.
“Horrible, horrible! I was deadly sick from the
hour we left New York.”
“Well, you do look considerably reduced,” his friend
affirmed.
“Reduced! I 've been on the verge of the grave.
I have n't slept six hours in three weeks.” This was
said with great gravity. “Well, I have made the
voyage for the last time.”
“The deuce you have! You mean to stay here
forever?”
“Here, or somewhere! It 's likely to be a short
forever.”
There was a pause; after which: “You 're the
eh?”
“I almost wish I were.”
“You 're not in love with England, then? I 've
heard people say at home that you dressed and talked
and acted like an Englishman. But I know Englishmen,
and I know you. You 're not one of them,
Searle, not you. You 'll go under here, sir; you 'll
go under as sure as my name is Simmons.”
Following this, I heard a sudden clatter, as of the
dropping of a knife and fork. “Well, you 're a delicate
sort of creature, Simmons! I have been wandering
about all day in this accursed city, ready to
cry with home-sickness and heart-sickness and every
possible sort of sickness, and thinking, in the absence
of anything better, of meeting you here this evening,
and of your uttering some syllable of cheer and comfort,
and giving me some feeble ray of hope. Go
under? Am I not under now? I can't sink lower,
except to sink into my grave!”
Mr. Simmons seems to have staggered a moment
under this outbreak of passion. But the next,
“Don't cry, Searle,” I heard him say. “Remember
the waiter. I 've grown Englishman enough for
that. For heaven's sake, don't let us have any feelings.
Feelings will do nothing for you here. It 's
best to come to the point. Tell me in three words
what you expect of me.”
I heard another movement, as if poor Searle had
collapsed in his chair. “Upon my word, Simmons,
you are inconceivable. You got my letter?”
“Yes, I got your letter. I was never sorrier to
get anything in my life.”
At this declaration Mr. Searle rattled out an oath,
which it was well perhaps that I but partially heard.
“John Simmons,” he cried, “what devil possesses
you? Are you going to betray me here in a foreign
land, to turn out a false friend, a heartless rogue?”
“Go on, sir,” said sturdy Simmons. “Pour it all
out. I 'll wait till you have done. — Your beer is
very bad,” to the waiter. “I 'll have some more.”
“For God's sake, explain yourself!” cried Searle.
There was a pause, at the end of which I heard
Mr. Simmons set down his empty tankard with emphasis.
“You poor morbid man,” he resumed, “I
don't want to say anything to make you feel sore.
I pity you. But you must allow me to say that
you have acted like a blasted fool!”
Mr. Searle seemed to have made an effort to compose
himself. “Be so good as to tell me what was
the meaning of your letter.”
“I was a fool, myself, to have written that letter.
It came of my infernal meddlesome benevolence. I
had much better have let you alone. To tell you
the plain truth, I never was so horrified in my life
you had come out here to seek your fortune.”
“What did you expect me to do?”
“I expected you to wait patiently till I had made
further inquiries and had written to you again.”
“You have made further inquiries now?”
“Inquiries! I have made assaults.”
“And you find I have no claim?”
“No claim to call a claim. It looked at first as
if you had a very pretty one. I confess the idea
took hold of me —”
“Thanks to your preposterous benevolence!”
Mr. Simmons seemed for a moment to experience
a difficulty in swallowing. “Your beer is undrinkable,”
he said to the waiter. “I 'll have some brandy.
— Come, Searle,” he resumed, “don't challenge me
to the arts of debate, or I 'll settle right down on
you. Benevolence, as I say, was part of it. The
reflection that if I put the thing through it would be
a very pretty feather in my cap and a very pretty
penny in my purse was part of it. And the satisfaction
of seeing a poor nobody of a Yankee walk
right into an old English estate was a good deal of
it. Upon my word, Searle, when I think of it, I
wish with all my heart that, erratic genius as you
are, you had a claim, for the very beauty of it! I
should hardly care what you did with the confounded
turn it into Yankee notions, — into ducks and drakes,
as they call it here. I should like to see you stamping
over it and kicking up its sacred dust in their very
faces!”
“You don't know me, Simmons!” said Searle, for
all response to this untender benediction.
“I should be very glad to think I did n't, Searle.
I have been to no small amount of trouble for you.
I have consulted by main force three first-rate men.
They smile at the idea. I should like you to see
the smile negative of one of these London big-wigs.
If your title were written in letters of fire, it would
n't stand being sniffed at in that fashion. I sounded
in person the solicitor of your distinguished kinsman.
He seemed to have been in a manner forewarned
and forearmed. It seems your brother George, some
twenty years ago, put forth a feeler. So you are
not to have the glory of even frightening them.”
“I never frightened any one,” said Searle. “I
should n't begin at this time of day. I should approach
the subject like a gentleman.”
“Well, if you want very much to do something
like a gentleman, you 've got a capital chance. Take
your disappointment like a gentleman.”
I had finished my dinner, and I had become keenly
interested in poor Mr. Searle's mysterious claim;
reflected in his voice without noting them in
his face. I left my place, went over to the fire, took
up the evening paper, and established a post of observation
behind it.
Lawyer Simmons was in the act of choosing a
soft chop from the dish, — an act accompanied by a
great deal of prying and poking with his own personal
fork. My disillusioned compatriot had pushed
away his plate; he sat with his elbows on the table,
gloomily nursing his head with his hands. His
companion stared at him a moment, I fancied half
tenderly; I am not sure whether it was pity or
whether it was beer and brandy. “I say, Searle,”
— and for my benefit, I think, taking me for an
impressible native, he attuned his voice to something
of a pompous pitch, — “in this country it is
the inestimable privilege of a loyal citizen, under
whatsoever stress of pleasure or of pain, to make a
point of eating his dinner.”
Searle disgustedly gave his plate another push.
“Anything may happen, now!” he said. “I don't
care a straw.”
“You ought to care. Have another chop, and you
will care. Have some brandy. Take my advice!”
Searle from between his two hands looked at him.
“I have had enough of your advice!” he said.
“A little more,” said Simmons, mildly; “I sha' n't
trouble you again. What do you mean to do?”
“Nothing.”
“O, come!”
“Nothing, nothing, nothing!”
“Nothing but starve. How about your money?”
“Why do you ask? You don't care.”
“My dear fellow, if you want to make me offer
you twenty pounds, you set most clumsily about it.
You said just now I don't know you. Possibly!
There is, perhaps, no such enormous difference between
knowing you and not knowing you. At any
rate, you don't know me. I expect you to go
home.”
“I won't go home! I have crossed the ocean for
the last time.”
“What is the matter? Are you afraid?”
“Yes, I 'm afraid! `I thank thee, Jew, for teaching
me that word!”'
“You 're more afraid to go than to stay?”
“I sha' n't stay. I shall die.”
“O, are you sure of that?”
“One can always be sure of that.”
Mr. Simmons started and stared: his mild cynic had
turned grim stoic. “Upon my soul,” he said, “one
would think that Death had named the day!”
“We have named it, between us.”
This was too much even for Mr. Simmons's easy
morality. “I say, Searle,” he cried, “I 'm not more of
a stickler than the next man, but if you are going to
blaspheme, I shall wash my hands of you. If you 'll
consent to return home with me by the steamer of the
23d, I 'll pay your passage down. More than that, I 'll
pay your wine bill.”
Searle meditated. “I believe I never willed anything
in my life,” he said; “but I feel sure that I have
willed this, that I stay here till I take my leave for a
newer world than that poor old New World of ours.
It 's an odd feeling, — I rather like it! What should
I do at home?”
“You said just now you were homesick.”
“So I was — for a morning. But have n't I been
all my life long sick for Europe? And now that I 've
got it, am I to cast it off again? I 'm much obliged to
you for your offer. I have enough for the present. I
have about my person some forty pounds' worth of
British gold and the same amount, say, of Yankee vitality.
They 'll last me out together! After they are
gone, I shall lay my head in some English churchyard;
beside some ivied tower, beneath an English yew.”
I had thus far distinctly followed the dialogue; but
at this point the landlord came in, and, begging my
pardon, would suggest that No. 12, a most superior
apartment, having now been vacated, it would give him
I transferred my attention back to my friends. They
had risen to their feet; Simmons had put on his overcoat;
he stood polishing his rusty black hat with his
napkin. “Do you mean to go down to the place?” he
asked.
“Possibly. I have dreamed of it so much I should
like to see it.”
“Shall you call on Mr. Searle?”
“Heaven forbid!”
“Something has just occurred to me,” Simmons pursued,
with an unhandsome grin, as if Mephistopheles
were playing at malice. “There 's a Miss Searle, the
old man's sister.”
“Well?” said the other, frowning.
“Well, sir! suppose, instead of dying, you should
marry!”
Mr. Searle frowned in silence. Simmons gave him
a tap on the stomach. “Line those ribs a bit first!”
The poor gentleman blushed crimson and his eyes filled
with tears. “You are a coarse brute,” he said. The
scene was pathetic. I was prevented from seeing the
conclusion of it by the reappearance of the landlord,
on behalf of No. 12. He insisted on my coming to
inspect the premises. Half an hour afterwards I was
rattling along in a Hansom toward Covent Garden,
where I heard Madame Bosio in the Barber of Seville.
vaguely fancying I might catch another glimpse
of Mr. Searle. I was not disappointed. I found him
sitting before the fire, with his head fallen on his
breast, sunk in the merciful stupor of tardy sleep. I
looked at him for some moments. His face, pale and
refined in the dim lamplight, impressed me with an
air of helpless, ineffective delicacy. They say fortune
comes while we sleep. Standing there I felt benignant
enough to be poor Mr. Searle's fortune. As I walked
away, I perceived amid the shadows of one of the little
dining stalls which I have described the lonely ever-dressed
waiter, dozing attendance on my friend, and
shifting aside for a while the burden of waiterhood. I
lingered a moment beside the old inn-yard, in which,
upon a time, the coaches and postchaises found space
to turn and disgorge. Above the upward vista of the
enclosing galleries, from which lounging lodgers and
crumpled chambermaids and all the picturesque domesticity
of an antique tavern must have watched the
great entrances and exits of the posting and coaching
drama, I descried the distant lurid twinkle of the London
constellations. At the foot of the stairs, enshrined
in the glittering niche of her well-appointed bar, the
landlady sat napping like some solemn idol amid votive
brass and plate.
The next morning, not finding the innocent object of
from the waiter that he had ordered breakfast in
bed. Into this asylum I was not yet prepared to
pursue him. I spent the morning running about
London, chiefly on business, but snatching by the
way many a vivid impression of its huge metropolitan
interest. Beneath the sullen black and gray of
that hoary civic world the hungry American mind
detects the magic colors of association. As the afternoon
approached, however, my impatient heart began
to babble of green fields; it was of English meadows
I had chiefly dreamed. Thinking over the suburban
lions, I fixed upon Hampton Court. The day was the
more propitious that it yielded just that dim, subaqueous
light which sleeps so fondly upon the English
landscape.
At the end of an hour I found myself wandering
through the multitudinous rooms of the great palace.
They follow each other in infinite succession, with
no great variety of interest or aspect, but with a sort
of regal monotony, and a fine specific flavor. They
are most exactly of their various times. You pass
from great painted and panelled bedchambers and closets,
anterooms, drawing-rooms, council-rooms, through
king's suite, queen's suite, and prince's suite, until
you feel as if you were strolling through the appointed
hours and stages of some decorous monarchical
the vast cold tarnished beds and canopies,
with the circumference of disapparelled royalty attested
by a gilded balustrade, and the great carved
and yawning chimney-places, where dukes-in-waiting
may have warmed their weary heels; on the other
side, in deep recesses, the immense windows, the
framed and draped embrasures where the sovereign
whispered and favorites smiled, looking out on the
terraced gardens and the misty glades of Bushey Park.
The dark walls are gravely decorated by innumerable
dark portraits of persons attached to Court and State,
more especially with various members of the Dutch-looking
entourage of William of Orange, the restorer
of the palace; with good store, too, of the lily-bosomed
models of Lely and Kneller. The whole tone
of this long-drawn interior is immensly sombre, prosaic,
and sad. The tints of all things have sunk to a cold
and melancholy brown, and the great palatial void
seems to hold no stouter tenantry than a sort of pungent
odorous chill. I seemed to be the only visitor.
I held ungrudged communion with the formal genius
of the spot. Poor mortalized kings! ineffective lure
of royalty! This, or something like it, was the
murmured burden of my musings. They were interrupted
suddenly by my coming upon a person standing
in devout contemplation before a simpering countess
this person turned his head, and I recognized my
fellow-lodger at the Red-Lion. I was apparently recognized
as well; I detected an air of overture in his
glance. In a few moments, seeing I had a catalogue,
he asked the name of the portrait. On my
ascertaining it, he inquired, timidly, how I liked
the lady.
“Well,” said I, not quite timidly enough, perhaps,
“I confess she seems to me rather a light piece of
work.”
He remained silent, and a little abashed, I think.
As we strolled away he stole a sidelong glance of
farewell at his leering shepherdess. To speak with
him face to face was to feel keenly that he was
weak and interesting. We talked of our inn, of
London, of the palace; he uttered his mind freely,
but he seemed to struggle with a weight of depression.
It was a simple mind enough, with no great
culture, I fancied, but with a certain appealing
native grace. I foresaw that I should find him a
true American, full of that perplexing interfusion
of refinement and crudity which marks the American
mind. His perceptions, I divined, were delicate;
his opinions, possibly, gross. On my telling him
that I too was an American, he stopped short and
seemed overcome with emotion: then silently passing
him through the rest of the palace and down into
the gardens. A vast gravelled platform stretches itself
before the basement of the palace, taking the
afternoon sun. A portion of the edifice is reserved
as a series of private apartments, occupied by state
pensioners, reduced gentlewomen in receipt of the
Queen's bounty, and other deserving persons. Many
of these apartments have their little private gardens;
and here and there, between their verdure-coated walls,
you catch a glimpse of these dim horticultural closets.
My companion and I took many a turn up and
down this spacious level, looking down on the antique
geometry of the lower garden and on the stoutly woven
tapestry of vine and blossom which muffles the foundations
of the huge red pile. I thought of the various
images of old-world gentility, which, early and late,
must have strolled upon that ancient terrace and felt
the great protecting quietude of the solemn palace.
We looked through an antique grating into one of
the little private gardens, and saw an old lady with
a black mantilla on her head, a decanter of water in
one hand and a crutch in the other, come forth, followed
by three little dogs and a cat, to sprinkle a
plant. She had an opinion, I fancied, on the virtue
of Queen Caroline. There are few sensations so exquisite
in life as to stand with a companion in a
the alien savor of the air and the tonic
picturesqueness of things. This common relish of
local color makes comrades of strangers. My companion
seemed oppressed with vague amazement.
He stared and lingered and scanned the scene with
a gentle scowl. His enjoyment appeared to give
him pain. I proposed, at last, that we should dine
in the neighborhood and take a late train to town.
We made our way out of the gardens into the adjoining
village, where we found an excellent inn.
Mr. Searle sat down to table with small apparent
interest in the repast, but gradually warming to his
work, he declared at the end of half an hour that
for the first time in a month he felt an appetite.
“You 're an invalid?” I said.
“Yes,” he answered. “A hopeless one!”
The little village of Hampton Court stands clustered
about the broad entrance of Bushey Park.
After we had dined we lounged along into the hazy
vista of the great avenue of horse-chestnuts. There
is a rare emotion, familiar to every intelligent traveller,
in which the mind, with a great passionate
throb, achieves a magical synthesis of its impressions.
You feel England; you feel Italy. The reflection
for the moment has an extraordinary poignancy.
I had known it from time to time in Italy,
the Lord. Since my arrival in England I had been
waiting for it to come. A bottle of excellent Burgundy
at dinner had perhaps unlocked to it the
gates of sense; it came now with a conquering
tread. Just the scene around me was the England
of my visions. Over against us, amid the deep-hued
bloom of its ordered gardens, the dark red palace, with
its formal copings and its vacant windows, seemed to
tell of a proud and splendid past; the little village
nestling between park and palace, around a patch of
turfy common, with its tavern of gentility, its ivy-towered
church, its parsonage, retained to my modernized
fancy the lurking semblance of a feudal hamlet.
It was in this dark composite light that I had read all
English prose; it was this mild moist air that had
blown from the verses of English poets; beneath these
broad acres of rain-deepened greenness a thousand
honored dead lay buried.
“Well,” I said to my friend, “I think there is no
mistake about this being England. We may like it
or not, it 's positive! No more dense and stubborn
fact ever settled down on an expectant tourist. It
brings my heart into my throat.”
Searle was silent. I looked at him; he was looking
up at the sky, as if he were watching some visible
descent of the elements. “On me too,” he said, “it 's
give me strength to bear it!”
“O mighty world,” I cried, “to hold at once so rare
an Italy and so brave an England!”
“To say nothing of America,” added Searle.
“O,” I answered, “America has a world to herself!”
“You have the advantage over me,” my companion
resumed, after a pause, “in coming to all this with
an educated eye. You already know the old. I have
never known it but by report. I have always fancied
I should like it. In a small way at home, you know,
I have tried to stick to the old. I must be a conservative
by nature. People at home — a few people —
used to call me a snob.”
“I don't believe you were a snob,” I cried. “You
look too amiable.”
He smiled sadly. “There it is,” he said. “It 's the
old story! I 'm amiable! I know what that means!
I was too great a fool to be even a snob! If I had
been I should probably have come abroad earlier in
life — before — before —” He paused, and his head
dropped sadly on his breast.
The bottle of Burgundy had loosened his tongue.
I felt that my learning his story was merely a question
of time. Something told me that I had gained his
confidence and he would unfold himself. “Before you
lost your health,” I said.
“Before I lost my health,” he answered. “And my
property, — the little I had. And my ambition. And
my self-esteem.”
“Come!” I said. “You shall get them all back.
This tonic English climate will wind you up in a
month. And with the return of health, all the rest
will return.”
He sat musing, with his eyes fixed on the distant
palace. “They are too far gone, — self-esteem especially!
I should like to be an old genteel pensioner,
lodged over there in the palace, and spending my days
in maundering about these classic haunts. I should
go every morning, at the hour when it gets the sun,
into that long gallery where all those pretty women of
Lely's are hung, — I know you despise them! — and
stroll up and down and pay them compliments. Poor,
precious, forsaken creatures! So flattered and courted
in their day, so neglected now! Offering up their
shoulders and ringlets and smiles to that inexorable
solitude!”
I patted my friend on the shoulder. “You shall be
yourself again yet,” I said.
Just at this moment there came cantering down the
shallow glade of the avenue a young girl on a fine
black horse, — one of those lovely budding gentlewomen,
perfectly mounted and equipped, who form to
American eyes the sweetest incident of English scenery.
abreast of us, turned slightly in her saddle and looked
back at him. In the movement she dropped her whip.
Drawing in her horse, she cast upon the ground a
glance of maidenly alarm. “This is something better
than a Lely,” I said. Searle hastened forward, picked
up the whip, and removing his hat with an air of great
devotion, presented it to the young girl. Fluttered
and blushing, she reached forward, took it with softly
murmured gratitude, and the next moment was bounding
over the elastic turf. Searle stood watching her;
the servant, as he passed us, touched his hat. When
Searle turned toward me again, I saw that his face
was glowing with a violent blush. “I doubt of your
having come abroad too late!” I said, laughing.
A short distance from where we had stopped was an
old stone bench. We went and sat down on it and
watched the light mist turning to sullen gold in the
rays of the evening sun. “We ought to be thinking
of the train back to London, I suppose,” I said at last.
“O, hang the train!” said Searle.
“Willingly! There could be no better spot than
this to feel the magic of an English twilight.” So we
lingered, and the twilight lingered around us, — a light
and not a darkness. As we sat, there came trudging
along the road an individual whom, from afar, I recognized
as a member of the genus “tramp.” I had read
him, and I brought my historic consciousness to bear
upon the present specimen. As he approached us he
slackened pace and finally halted, touching his cap.
He was a man of middle age, clad in a greasy bonnet,
with greasy ear-locks depending from its sides. Round
his neck was a grimy red scarf, tucked into his waistcoat;
his coat and trousers had a remote affinity with
those of a reduced hostler. In one hand he had a
stick; on his arm he bore a tattered basket, with a
handful of withered green stuff in the bottom. His
face was pale, haggard, and degraded beyond description,
— a singular mixture of brutality and finesse.
He had a history. From what height had he fallen,
from what depth had he risen? Never was a form of
rascally beggarhood more complete. There was a
merciless fixedness of outline about him which filled
me with a kind of awe. I felt as if I were in the presence
of a personage, — an artist in vagrancy.
“For God's sake, gentlemen,” he said, in that raucous
tone of weather-beaten poverty suggestive of
chronic sore-throat exacerbated by perpetual gin, —
“for God's sake, gentlemen, have pity on a poor fern-collector!”
— turning up his stale dandelions. “Food
has n't passed my lips, gentlemen, in the last three
days.”
We gaped responsive, in the precious pity of guileless
crown would be enough?” And our fasting botanist
went limping away through the park with a mystery
of satirical gratitude superadded to his general mystery.
“I feel as if I had seen my doppel-ganger,” said
Searle. “He reminds me of myself. What am I but
a tramp?”
Upon this hint I spoke. “What are you, my
friend?” I asked. “Who are you?”
A sudden blush rose to his pale face, so that I feared
I had offended him. He poked a moment at the
sod with the point of his umbrella, before answering.
“Who am I?” he said at last. “My name is Clement
Searle. I was born in New York. I have lived in
New York. What am I? That 's easily told. Nothing!
I assure you, nothing.”
“A very good fellow, apparently,” I protested.
“A very good fellow! Ah, there it is! You 've said
more than you mean. It 's by having been a very good
fellow all my days that I 've come to this. I have
drifted through life. I 'm a failure, sir, — a failure as
hopeless and helpless as any that ever swallowed up
the slender investments of the widow and the orphan.
I don't pay five cents on the dollar. Of what I was to
begin with no memory remains. I have been ebbing
away, from the start, in a steady current which, at
with, certainly, I was not a fountain of wisdom. All
the more reason for a definite channel, — for will and
purpose and direction. I walked by chance and sympathy
and sentiment. Take a turn through New York
and you 'll find my tattered sympathies and sentiments
dangling on every bush and fluttering in every breeze;
the men to whom I lent money, the women to whom I
made love, the friends I trusted, the dreams I cherished,
the poisonous fumes of pleasure, amid which
nothing was sweet or precious but the manhood they
stifled! It was my fault that I believed in pleasure
here below. I believe in it still, but as I believe in
God and not in man! I believed in eating your cake
and having it. I respected Pleasure, and she made a
fool of me. Other men, treating her like the arrant
strumpet she is, enjoyed her for the hour, but kept
their good manners for plain-faced Business, with the
larger dowry, to whom they are now lawfully married.
My taste was to be delicate; well, perhaps I
was so! I had a little money; it went the way of
my little wit. Here in my pocket I have forty pounds
of it left. The only thing I have to show for my
money and my wit is a little volume of verses, printed
at my own expense, in which fifteen years ago I made
bold to sing the charms of love and idleness. Six
months since I got hold of the volume; it reads like
I had n't seen Hampton Court then. When I was
thirty I married. It was a sad mistake, but a generous
one. The young girl was poor and obscure, but
beautiful and proud. I fancied she would make an
incomparable woman. It was a sad mistake! She
died at the end of three years, leaving no children.
Since then I have idled long. I have had bad habits.
To this impalpable thread of existence the current of
my life has shrunk. To-morrow I shall be high and
dry. Was I meant to come to this? Upon my
soul I was n't! If I say what I feel, you 'll fancy
my vanity quite equal to my folly, and set me
down as one of those dreary theorizers after the
fact, who draw any moral from their misfortunes
but the damning moral that vice is vice and that 's
an end of it. Take it for what it 's worth. I have
always fancied that I was meant for a gentler world.
Before heaven, sir, — whoever you are, — I 'm in practice
so absurdly tender-hearted that I can afford to
say it, — I came into the world an aristocrat. I was
born with a soul for the picturesque. It condemns
me, I confess; but in a measure, too, it absolves me.
I found it nowhere. I found a world all hard lines
and harsh lights, without shade, without composition,
as they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery
of color. To furnish color, I melted down the very
brush, touching up and toning down; a very pretty
chiaroscuro you 'll find in my track! Sitting here,
in this old park, in this old land, I feel — I feel that
I hover on the misty verge of what might have been!
I should have been born here and not there; here
my vulgar idleness would have been — don't laugh
now! — would have been elegant leisure. How it was
that I never came abroad is more than I can say. It
might have cut the knot; but the knot was too tight.
I was always unwell or in debt or entangled. Besides,
I had a horror of the sea, — with reason, heaven
knows! A year ago I was reminded of the existence
of an old claim to a portion of an English estate,
cherished off and on by various members of my family
for the past eighty years. It 's undeniably slender and
desperately hard to define. I am by no means sure
that to this hour I have mastered it. You look as
if you had a clear head. Some other time, if you 'll
consent, we 'll puzzle it out, such as it is, together.
Poverty was staring me in the face; I sat down and
got my claim by heart, as I used to get nine times
nine as a boy. I dreamed about it for six months,
half expecting to wake up some fine morning to hear
through a latticed casement the cawing of an English
rookery. A couple of months since there came out
here on business of his own a sort of half-friend of
fellow, but a man with an eye for the weak point and
the strong point. It was with him yesterday that you
saw me dining. He undertook, as he expressed it, to
`nose round' and see if anything could be made of
this pretended right. The matter had never seriously
been taken up. A month later I got a letter from
Simmons, assuring me that things looked mighty well,
that he should be vastly amazed if I had n't a case.
I took fire in a humid sort of way; I acted, for the
first time in my life; I sailed for England. I have
been here three days: it seems three months. After
keeping me waiting for thirty-six hours, last evening
my precious Simmons makes his appearance and informs
me, with his mouth full of mutton, that I was
a blasted fool to have taken him at his word; that he
had been precipitate; that I had been precipitate; that
my claim was moonshine; and that I must do penance
and take a ticket for another fortnight of seasickness
in his agreeable society. My friend, my friend! Shall
I say I was disappointed? I 'm already resigned. I
doubted the practicability of my claim. I felt in my
deeper consciousness that it was the crowning illusion
of a life of illusions. Well, it was a pretty one. Poor
Simmons! I forgive him with all my heart. But for
him I should n't be sitting in this place, in this air,
with these thoughts. This is a world I could have
for the last. After this nothing would have been tolerable.
I shall now have a month of it, I hope, and
I shall not have a chance to be disenchanted. There 's
one thing!” — and here, pausing, he laid his hand on
mine; I rose and stood before him, — “I wish it were
possible you should be with me to the end.”
“I promise you,” I said, “to leave you only at your
own request. But it must be on condition of your
omitting from your conversation this intolerable flavor
of mortality. The end! Perhaps it 's the beginning.”
He shook his head. “You don't know me. It 's a
long story. I 'm incurably ill.”
“I know you a little. I have a strong suspicion
that your illness is in great measure a matter of mind
and spirits. All that you 've told me is but another
way of saying that you have lived hitherto in yourself.
The tenement 's haunted! Live abroad! Take
an interest!”
He looked at me for a moment with his sad weak
eyes. Then with a faint smile: “Don't cut down a
man you find hanging. He has had a reason for it.
I 'm bankrupt.”
“O, health is money!” I said. “Get well, and the
rest will take care of itself. I 'm interested in your
claim.”
“Don't ask me to expound it now! It 's a sad
muddle. Let it alone. I know nothing of business.
If I myself were to take the matter in hand, I should
break short off the poor little silken thread of my
expectancy. In a better world than this I think I
should be listened to. But in this hard world there 's
small bestowal of ideal justice. There is no doubt, I
fancy, that, a hundred years ago, we suffered a palpable
wrong. But we made no appeal at the time, and
the dust of a century now lies heaped upon our
silence. Let it rest!”
“What is the estimated value of your interest?”
“We were instructed from the first to accept a
compromise. Compared with the whole property, our
utmost right is extremely small. Simmons talked of
eighty-five thousand dollars. Why eighty-five I 'm
sure I don't know. Don't beguile me into figures.”
“Allow me one more question. Who is actually in
possession?”
“A certain Mr. Richard Searle. I know nothing
about him.”
“He is in some way related to you?”
“Our great-grandfathers were half-brothers. What
does that make?”
“Twentieth cousins, say. And where does your
twentieth cousin live?”
“At Lockley Park, Herefordshire.”
I pondered awhile. “I 'm interested in you, Mr.
Searle,” I said. “In your story, in your title, such as
it is, and in this Lockley Park, Herefordshire. Suppose
we go down and see it.”
He rose to his feet with a certain alertness. “I
shall make a sound man of him, yet,” I said to
myself.
“I should n't have the heart,” he said, “to accomplish
the melancholy pilgrimage alone. But with you
I 'll go anywhere.”
On our return to London we determined to spend
three days there together, and then to go into the
country. We felt to excellent purpose the sombre
charm of London, the mighty mother-city of our
mighty race, the great distributing heart of our traditional
life. Certain London characteristics — monuments,
relics, hints of history, local moods and memories
— are more deeply suggestive to an American
soul than anything else in Europe. With an equal attentive
piety my friend and I glanced at these things.
Their influence on Searle was deep and singular.
His observation I soon perceived to be extremely
acute. His almost passionate relish for the old, the
artificial, and social, wellnigh extinct from its long
inanition, began now to tremble and thrill with a
tardy vitality. I watched in silent wonderment this
strange metaphysical renascence.
Between the fair boundaries of the counties of
Hereford and Worcester rise in a long undulation the
sloping pastures of the Malvern Hills. Consulting a
big red book on the castles and manors of England,
we found Lockley Park to be seated near the base
of this grassy range, — though in which county I
forget. In the pages of this genial volume, Lockley
Park and its appurtenances made a very handsome
figure. We took up our abode at a certain little wayside
inn, at which in the days of leisure the coach
must have stopped for lunch, and burnished pewters
of rustic ale been tenderly exalted to “outsides” athirst
with breezy progression. Here we stopped, for sheer
admiration of its steep thatched roof, its latticed windows,
and its homely porch. We allowed a couple
of days to elapse in vague, undirected strolls and
sweet sentimental observance of the land, before we
prepared to execute the especial purpose of our journey.
This admirable region is a compendium of the
general physiognomy of England. The noble friendliness
of the scenery, its subtle old-friendliness, the
magical familiarity of multitudinous details, appealed
to us at every step and at every glance. Deep in our
souls a natural affection answered. The whole land, in
the full, warm rains of the last of April, had burst into
sudden perfect spring. The dark walls of the hedgerows
had turned into blooming screens; the sodden
ranker freshness. We went forth without loss of time
for a long walk on the hills. Reaching their summits,
you find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen
broad counties, within the vast range of your vision,
commingle their green exhalations. Closely beneath
us lay the dark, rich flats of hedgy Worcestershire and
the copse-checkered slopes of rolling Hereford, white
with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points
of the large expanse two great cathedral towers rise
sharply, taking the light, from the settled shadow
of their circling towns, — the light, the ineffable English
light! “Out of England,” cried Searle, “it 's but
a garish world!”
The whole vast sweep of our surrounding prospect
lay answering in a myriad fleeting shades the cloudy
process of the tremendous sky. The English heaven
is a fit antithesis to the complex English earth. We
possess in America the infinite beauty of the blue;
England possesses the splendor of combined and animated
clouds. Over against us, from our station on
the hills, we saw them piled and dissolved, compacted
and shifted, blotting the azure with sullen rain spots,
stretching, breeze-fretted, into dappled fields of gray,
bursting into a storm of light or melting into a drizzle
of silver. We made our way along the rounded
summits of these well-grazed heights, — mild, breezy
slopes of fields, green to cottage doors, to where a
rural village beckoned us from its seat among the
meadows. Close beside it, I admit, the railway shoots
fiercely from its tunnel in the hills; and yet there
broods upon this charming hamlet an old-time quietude
and privacy, which seems to make it a violation
of confidence to tell its name so far away. We struck
through a narrow lane, a green lane, dim with its
height of hedges; it led us to a superb old farm-house,
now jostled by the multiplied lanes and roads
which have curtailed its ancient appanage. It stands
in stubborn picturesqueness, at the receipt of sad-eyed
contemplation and the sufferance of “sketches.” I
doubt whether out of Nuremberg — or Pompeii! —
you may find so forcible an image of the domiciliary
genius of the past. It is cruelly complete; its bended
beams and joists, beneath the burden of its gables,
seem to ache and groan with memories and regrets.
The short, low windows, where lead and glass combine
in equal proportions to hint to the wondering stranger
of the mediæval gloom within, still prefer their darksome
office to the grace of modern day. Such an old
house fills an American with an indefinable feeling of
respect. So propped and patched and tinkered with
clumsy tenderness, clustered so richly about its central
English sturdiness, its oaken vertebrations, so humanized
it seemed to offer to our grateful eyes a small,
rude synthesis of the great English social order. Passing
out upon the high-road, we came to the common
browsing-patch, the “village green” of the tales of our
youth. Nothing was wanting; the shaggy, mouse-colored
donkey, nosing the turf with his mild and
huge proboscis, the geese, the old woman, — the old
woman, in person, with her red cloak and her black
bonnet, frilled about the face and double-frilled beside
her decent, placid cheeks, — the towering ploughman
with his white smock-frock, puckered on chest and
back, his short corduroys, his mighty calves, his big,
red, rural face. We greeted these things as children
greet the loved pictures in a story-book, lost and
mourned and found again. It was marvellous how
well we knew them. Beside the road we saw a
ploughboy straddle, whistling, on a stile. Gainsborough
might have painted him. Beyond the stile,
across the level velvet of a meadow, a footpath lay,
like a thread of darker woof. We followed it from
field to field and from stile to stile. It was the way
to church. At the church we finally arrived, lost in
its rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the work-day
world by the broad stillness of pastures, — a gray,
gray tower, a huge black yew, a cluster of village
graves, with crooked headstones, in grassy, low relief.
was overcome.
“You must bury me here,” he cried. “It 's the
first church I have seen in my life. How it makes a
Sunday where it stands!”
The next day we saw a church of statelier proportions.
We walked over to Worcester, through such a
mist of local color, that I felt like one of Smollett's
pedestrian heroes, faring tavernward for a night of
adventures. As we neared the provincial city we saw
the steepled mass of the cathedral, long and high, rise
far into the cloud-freckled blue. And as we came
nearer still, we stopped on the bridge and viewed the
solid minster reflected in the yellow Severn. And
going farther yet we entered the town, — where surely
Miss Austen's heroines, in chariots and curricles, must
often have come a shopping for swan's-down boas and
high lace mittens; — we lounged about the gentle
close and gazed insatiably at that most soul-soothing
sight, the waning, wasting afternoon light, the visible
ether which feels the voices of the chimes, far aloft on
the broad perpendicular field of the cathedral tower;
saw it linger and nestle and abide, as it loves to do
on all bold architectural spaces, converting them graciously
into registers and witnesses of nature; tasted,
too, as deeply of the peculiar stillness of this clerical
precinct; saw a rosy English lad come forth and lock
its hoary basement to the soaring Gothic of the church,
and carry his big responsible key into one of the quiet
canonical houses; and then stood musing together on
the effect on one's mind of having in one's boyhood
haunted such cathedral shades as a King's scholar, and
yet kept ruddy with much cricket in misty meadows
by the Severn. On the third morning we betook ourselves
to Lockley Park, having learned that the greater
part of it was open to visitors, and that, indeed, on
application, the house was occasionally shown.
Within its broad enclosure many a declining spur
of the great hills melted into parklike slopes and dells.
A long avenue wound and circled from the outermost
gate through an untrimmed woodland, whence you
glanced at further slopes and glades and copses and
bosky recesses, — at everything except the limits of
the place. It was as free and wild and untended as
the villa of an Italian prince; and I have never seen
the stern English fact of property put on such an air
of innocence. The weather had just become perfect;
it was one of the dozen exquisite days of the English
year, — days stamped with a refinement of purity unknown
in more liberal climes. It was as if the mellow
brightness, as tender as that of the primroses which
starred the dark waysides like petals wind-scattered
over beds of moss, had been meted out to us by the
external region we passed into the heart of the park,
through a second lodge-gate, with weather-worn gilding
on its twisted bars, to the smooth slopes where
the great trees stood singly and the tame deer browsed
along the bed of a woodland stream. Hence, before
us, we perceived the dark Elizabethan manor among
its blooming parterres and terraces.
“Here you can wander all day,” I said to Searle,
“like a proscribed and exiled prince, hovering about
the dominion of the usurper.”
“To think,” he answered, “of people having enjoyed
this all these years! I know what I am, — what
might I have been? What does all this make of
you?”
“That it makes you happy,” I said, “I should hesitate
to believe. But it 's hard to suppose that such a
place has not some beneficent action of its own.”
“What a perfect scene and background it forms!”
Searle went on. “What legends, what histories it
knows! My heart is breaking with unutterable visions.
There 's Tennyson's Talking Oak. What summer
days one could spend here! How I could lounge
my bit of life away on this shady stretch of turf!
Have n't I some maiden-cousin in yon moated grange
who would give me kind leave?” And then turning
almost fiercely upon me: “Why did you bring me
vain regrets?”
At this moment there passed near us a servant
who had emerged from the gardens of the great
house. I hailed him and inquired whether we should
be likely to gain admittance. He answered that Mr.
Searle was away from home, and that he thought
it probable the housekeeper would consent to do
the honors of the mansion. I passed my arm into
Searle's. “Come,” I said. “Drain the cup, bittersweet
though it be. We shall go in.” We passed another
lodge-gate and entered the gardens. The house
was an admirable specimen of complete Elizabethan,
a multitudinous cluster of gables and porches, oriels
and turrets, screens of ivy and pinnacles of slate.
Two broad terraces commanded the great wooded
horizon of the adjacent domain. Our summons was
answered by the butler in person, solemn and tout
de noir habillé. He repeated the statement that Mr.
Searle was away from home, and that he would present
our petition to the housekeeper. We would be so
good, however, as to give him our cards. This request,
following so directly on the assertion that Mr. Searle
was absent, seemed to my companion not distinctly
pertinent. “Surely not for the housekeeper,” he said.
The butler gave a deferential cough. “Miss Searle
is at home.”
“Yours alone will suffice,” said Searle. I took out
a card and pencil, and wrote beneath my name, New
York. Standing with the pencil in my hand I felt
a sudden impulse. Without in the least weighing
proprieties or results, I yielded to it. I added above
my name, Mr. Clement Searle. What would come
of it?
Before many minutes the housekeeper attended us,
— a fresh rosy little old woman in a dowdy clean
cap and a scanty calico gown; an exquisite specimen
of refined and venerable servility. She had the
accent of the country, but the manners of the house.
Under her guidance we passed through a dozen
apartments, duly stocked with old pictures, old tapestry,
old carvings, old armor, with all the constituent
properties of an English manor. The pictures
were especially valuable. The two Vandykes, the trio
of rosy Rubenses, the sole and sombre Rembrandt,
glowed with conscious authenticity. A Claude, a
Murillo, a Greuze, and a Gainsborough hung gracious
in their chosen places. Searle strolled about silent,
pale, and grave, with bloodshot eyes and lips compressed.
He uttered no comment and asked no question.
Missing him, at last, from my side, I retraced
my steps and found him in a room we had just left,
on a tarnished silken divan, with his face buried in
his hands. Before him, ranged on an antique buffet,
huge platters radiant with their steady colors, jugs
and vases nobly bellied and embossed. There came
to me, as I looked, a sudden vision of the young English
gentleman, who, eighty years ago, had travelled
by slow stages to Italy and been waited on at his
inn by persuasive toymen. “What is it, Searle?” I
asked. “Are you unwell?”
He uncovered his haggard face and showed a burning
blush. Then smiling in hot irony: “A memory
of the past! I was thinking of a china vase that
used to stand on the parlor mantel-shelf while I was
a boy, with the portrait of General Jackson painted
on one side and a bunch of flowers on the other.
How long do you suppose that majolica has been
in the family?”
“A long time probably. It was brought hither in
the last century, into old, old England, out of old, old
Italy, by some old young buck of this excellent house
with a taste for chinoiseries. Here it has stood for a
hundred years, keeping its clear, firm hues in this
aristocratic twilight.”
Searle sprang to his feet. “I say,” he cried, “in
heaven's name take me away! I can't stand this.
Before I know it I shall do something I shall be
ashamed of. I shall steal one of their d—d majolicas.
I shall proclaim my identity and assert my rights!
pity's name to keep me here for a month!”
If poor Searle could ever have been said to look
“dangerous,” he looked so now. I began to regret
my officious presentation of his name, and prepared
without delay to lead him out of the house. We
overtook the housekeeper in the last room of the
suite, a small, unused boudoir, over the chimney-piece
of which hung a noble portrait of a young man
in a powdered wig and a brocaded waistcoat. I was
immediately struck with his resemblance to my companion.
“This is Mr. Clement Searle, Mr. Searle's great-uncle,
by Sir Joshua Reynolds,” quoth the housekeeper.
“He died young, poor gentleman. He perished
at sea, going to America.”
“He 's the young buck,” I said, “who brought the
majolica out of Italy.”
“Indeed, sir, I believe he did,” said the housekeeper,
staring.
“He 's the image of you, Searle,” I murmured.
“He 's wonderfully like the gentleman, saving his
presence,” said the housekeeper.
My friend stood gazing. “Clement Searle — at sea
— going to America — ” he muttered. Then harshly,
to the housekeeper, “Why the deuce did he go to
America?”
“Why, indeed, sir? You may well ask. I believe
he had kinsfolk there. It was for them to come to
him.”
Searle broke into a laugh. “It was for them to
have come to him! Well, well,” he said, fixing his
eyes on the little old woman, “they have come to
him at last!”
She blushed like a wrinkled rose-leaf. “Indeed,
sir,” she said, “I verily believe that you are one of
us!”
“My name is the name of that lovely youth,” Searle
went on. “Kinsman, I salute you! Attend!” And
he grasped me by the arm. “I have an idea! He
perished at sea. His spirit came ashore and wandered
forlorn till it got lodgment again in my poor body.
In my poor body it has lived, homesick, these forty
years, shaking its rickety cage, urging me, stupid, to
carry it back to the scenes of its youth. And I never
knew what was the matter with me! Let me exhale
my spirit here!”
The housekeeper essayed a timorous smile. The
scene was embarrassing. My confusion was not allayed
when I suddenly perceived in the doorway the
figure of a lady. “Miss Searle!” whispered the housekeeper.
My first impression of Miss Searle was that
she was neither young nor beautiful. She stood with
a timid air on the threshold, pale, trying to smile, and
Searle, I think, gazed marvelling.
“If I am not mistaken,” said the lady, “one of you
gentlemen is Mr. Clement Searle.”
“My friend is Mr. Clement Searle,” I replied. “Allow
me to add that I alone am responsible for your
having received his name.”
“I should have been sorry not to receive it,” said
Miss Searle, beginning to blush. “Your being from
America has led me to — to interrupt you.”
“The interruption, madam, has been on our part.
And with just that excuse, — that we are from America.”
Miss Searle, while I spoke, had fixed her eyes on
my friend, as he stood silent beneath Sir Joshua's
portrait. The housekeeper, amazed and mystified,
took a liberty. “Heaven preserve us, Miss! It 's
your great-uncle's picture come to life.”
“I 'm not mistaken, then,” said Miss Searle. “We
are distantly related.” She had the aspect of an extremely
modest woman. She was evidently embarrassed
at having to proceed unassisted in her overture.
Searle eyed her with gentle wonder from head to foot.
I fancied I read his thoughts. This, then, was Miss
Searle, his maiden-cousin, prospective heiress of these
manorial acres and treasures. She was a person of
about thirty-three years of age, taller than most women,
of her shape. She had a small blue eye, a
massive chignon of yellow hair, and a mouth at once
broad and comely. She was dressed in a lustreless
black satin gown, with a short train. Around her
neck she wore a blue silk handkerchief, and over
this handkerchief, in many convolutions, a string of
amber beads. Her appearance was singular; she was
large, yet not imposing; girlish, yet mature. Her
glance and accent, in addressing us, were simple, too
simple. Searle, I think, had been fancying some
proud cold beauty of five-and-twenty; he was relieved
at finding the lady timid and plain. His person
was suddenly illumined with an old disused gallantry.
“We are distant cousins, I believe. I am happy
to claim a relationship which you are so good as to
remember. I had not in the least counted on your
doing so.”
“Perhaps I have done wrong,” and Miss Searle
blushed anew and smiled. “But I have always known
of there being people of our blood in America, and I
have often wondered and asked about them; without
learning much, however. To-day, when this card was
brought me and I knew of a Clement Searle wandering
about the house like a stranger, I felt as if I
ought to do something. I hardly knew what! My
would have done. Welcome, as a cousin.” And
with a gesture, at once frank and shy, she put out
her hand.
“I 'm welcome indeed,” said Searle, taking it, “if
he would have done it half as graciously.”
“You 've seen the show,” Miss Searle went on.
“Perhaps now you 'll have some lunch.” We followed
her into a small breakfast-room, where a deep
bay-window opened on the mossy flags of the great
terrace. Here, for some moments, she remained
silent and shy, in the manner of a person resting
from a great effort. Searle, too, was formal and reticent,
so that I had to busy myself with providing
small-talk. It was of course easy to descant on the
beauties of park and mansion. Meanwhile I observed
our hostess. She had small beauty and scanty grace;
her dress was out of taste and out of season; yet
she pleased me well. There was about her a sturdy
sweetness, a homely flavor of the sequestered châtelaine
of feudal days. To be so simple amid this massive
luxury, so mellow and yet so fresh, so modest
and yet so placid, told of just the spacious leisure in
which I had fancied human life to be steeped in
many a park-circled home. Miss Searle was to the
Belle au Bois Dormant what a fact is to a fairy-tale,
an interpretation to a myth. We, on our side, were
possible English breeding still marvels visibly at the
native American. Miss Searle's wonderment was
guileless enough to have been more overt and yet
inoffensive; there was no taint of offence indeed in
her utterance of the unvarying amenity that she had
met an American family on the Lake of Como whom
she would have almost taken to be English.
“If I lived here,” I said, “I think I should hardly
need to go away, even to the Lake of Como.”
“You might perhaps get tired of it. And then
the Lake of Como! If I could only go abroad
again!”
“You have been but once?”
“Only once. Three years ago my brother took me
to Switzerland. We thought it extremely beautiful.
Except for this journey, I have always lived here.
Here I was born. It 's a dear old place, indeed, and I
know it well. Sometimes I fancy I 'm a little tired.”
And on my asking her how she spent her time and
what society she saw, “It 's extremely quiet,” she went
on, proceeding by short steps and simple statements, in
the manner of a person summoned for the first time to
define her situation and enumerate the elements of her
life. “We see very few people. I don't think there
are many nice people hereabouts. At least we don't
know them. Our own family is very small. My
had a great sorrow ten years ago. He lost his wife and
his only son, a dear little boy, who would have succeeded
him in the estates. Do you know that I 'm
likely to have them now? Poor me! Since his loss
my brother has preferred to be quite alone. I 'm sorry
he 's away. But you must wait till he comes back. I
expect him in a day or two.” She talked more and
more, with a rambling, earnest vapidity, about her circumstances,
her solitude, her bad eyes, so that she
could n't read, her flowers, her ferns, her dogs, and the
curate, recently inducted by her brother and warranted
sound orthodox, who had lately begun to light his altar
candles; pausing every now and then to blush in self-surprise,
and yet moving steadily from point to point
in the deepening excitement of temptation and occasion.
Of all the old things I had seen in England,
this mind of Miss Searle's seemed to me the oldest,
the quaintest, the most ripely verdant; so fenced and
protected by convention and precedent and usage; so
passive and mild and docile. I felt as if I were talking
with a potential heroine of Miss Burney. As she
talked, she rested her dull, kind eyes upon her kinsman
with a sort of fascinated stare. At last, “Did you
mean to go away,” she demanded, “without asking for
us?”
“I had thought it over, Miss Searle, and had determined
unfriendly I should have been.”
“But you knew of the place being ours and of our
relationship?”
“Just so. It was because of these things that I
came down here, — because of them, almost, that I
came to England. I have always liked to think of
them.”
“You merely wished to look, then? We don't pretend
to be much to look at.”
“You don't know what you are, Miss Searle,” said
my friend, gravely.
“You like the old place, then?”
Searle looked at her in silence. “If I could only
tell you,” he said at last.
“Do tell me! You must come and stay with us.”
Searle began to laugh. “Take care, take care,” he
cried. “I should surprise you. At least I should bore
you. I should never leave you.”
“O, you 'd get homesick for America!”
At this Searle laughed the more. “By the way,” he
cried to me, “tell Miss Searle about America!” And
he stepped through the window out upon the terrace,
followed by two beautiful dogs, a pointer and a young
stag-hound, who from the moment we came in had established
the fondest relation with him. Miss Searle
looked at him as he went, with a certain tender wonder
she was interested. I suddenly recalled the last words
I had heard spoken by my friend's adviser in London:
“Instead of dying you 'd better marry.” If Miss
Searle could be gently manipulated. O for a certain
divine tact! Something assured me that her heart was
virgin soil; that sentiment had never bloomed there.
If I could but sow the seed! There lurked within her
the perfect image of one of the patient wives of old.
“He has lost his heart to England,” I said. “He
ought to have been born here.”
“And yet,” said Miss Searle, “he 's not in the least
an Englishman.”
“How do you know that?”
“I hardly know how. I never talked with a foreigner
before; but he looks and talks as I have fancied
foreigners.”
“Yes, he 's foreign enough!”
“Is he married?”
“He 's a widower, — without children.”
“Has he property?”
“Very little.”
“But enough to travel?”
I meditated. “He has not expected to travel far,”
I said at last. “You know he 's in poor health.”
“Poor gentleman! So I fancied.”
“He 's better, though, than he thinks. He came
dies.”
“Poor fellow!” And I fancied I perceived in her
eye the lustre of a rising tear. “And he was going off
without my seeing him?”
“He 's a modest man, you see.”
“He 's very much of a gentleman.”
“Assuredly!”
At this moment we heard on the terrace a loud,
harsh cry. “It 's the great peacock!” said Miss Searle,
stepping to the window and passing out. I followed
her. Below us on the terrace, leaning on the parapet,
stood our friend, with his arm round the neck of the
pointer. Before him, on the grand walk, strutted a
splendid peacock, with ruffled neck and expanded tail.
The other dog had apparently indulged in a momentary
attempt to abash the gorgeous fowl; but at Searle's
voice he had bounded back to the terrace and leaped
upon the parapet, where he now stood licking his new
friend's face. The scene had a beautiful old-time air;
the peacock flaunting in the foreground, like the very
genius of antique gardenry; the broad terrace, which
flattered an innate taste of mine for all deserted promenades
to which people may have adjourned from formal
dinners, to drink coffee in old Sêvres, and where
the stiff brocade of women's dresses may have rustled
autumnal leaves; and far around us, with one leafy
park. “The very beasts have made him welcome,” I
said, as we rejoined our companion.
“The peacock has done for you, Mr. Searle,” said his
cousin, “what he does only for very great people. A
year ago there came here a duchess to see my brother.
I don't think that since then he has spread his tail as
wide for any one else by a dozen feathers.”
“It 's not alone the peacock,” said Searle. “Just
now there came slipping across my path a little green
lizard, the first I ever saw, the lizard of literature!
And if you have a ghost, broad daylight though it be,
I expect to see him here. Do you know the annals of
your house, Miss Searle?”
“O dear, no! You must ask my brother for all
those things.”
“You ought to have a book full of legends and traditions.
You ought to have loves and murders and
mysteries by the roomful. I count upon it.”
“O Mr. Searle! We have always been a very well-behaved
family. Nothing out of the way has ever
happened, I think.”
“Nothing out of the way? O horrors! We have
done better than that in America. Why, I myself!” —
and he gazed at her a moment with a gleam of malice,
and then broke into a laugh. “Suppose I should turn
out a better Searle than you? Better than you, nursed
disappoint me. You have some history among you all,
you have some poetry. I have been famished all my
days for these things. Do you understand? Ah, you
can't understand! Tell me something! When I think
of what must have happened here! when I think of
the lovers who must have strolled on this terrace and
wandered through those glades! of all the figures and
passions and purposes that must have haunted these
walls! of the births and deaths, the joys and sufferings,
the young hopes and the old regrets, the intense
experience —” And here he faltered a moment, with
the increase of his vehemence. The gleam in his eye,
which I have called a gleam of malice, had settled into
a deep unnatural light. I began to fear he had become
over-excited. But he went on with redoubled passion.
“To see it all evoked before me,” he cried, “if the
Devil alone could do it, I 'd make a bargain with the
Devil! O Miss Searle, I 'm a most unhappy man!”
“O dear, O dear!” said Miss Searle.
“Look at that window, that blessed oriel!” And
he pointed to a small, protruding casement above us,
relieved against the purple brick-work, framed in chiselled
stone, and curtained with ivy.
“It 's my room,” said Miss Searle.
“Of course it 's a woman's room. Think of the forgotten
loveliness which has peeped from that window;
chiefly that outlook on this bosky world. O gentle
cousins! And you, Miss Searle, you 're one of them
yet.” And he marched towards her and took her
great white hand. She surrendered it, blushing to her
eyes, and pressing her other hand to her breast.
“You 're a woman of the past. You 're nobly simple.
It has been a romance to see you. It does n't matter
what I say to you. You did n't know me yesterday,
you 'll not know me to-morrow. Let me to-day do
a mad, sweet thing. Let me fancy you the soul of
all the dead women who have trod these terrace-flags,
which lie here like sepulchral tablets in the pavement
of a church. Let me say I worship you!” And he
raised her hand to his lips. She gently withdrew it,
and for a moment averted her face. Meeting her
eyes the next moment, I saw that they were filled
with tears. The Belle au Bois Dormant was awake.
There followed an embarrassed pause. An issue
was suddenly presented by the appearance of the butler
bearing a letter. “A telegram, Miss,” he said.
“Dear me!” cried Miss Searle, “I can't open a telegram.
Cousin, help me.”
Searle took the missive, opened it, and read aloud:
“I shall be home to dinner. Keep the American.”
| I. A passionate pilgrim | |