Part 4

We went down to Reading the other day, as so many of Miss Mitford's friends have done before, to look at 'our village' with our own eyes, and at the cottage in which she lived for so long. A phaeton with a fast-stepping horse met us at the station and whirled us through the busy town and along the straight dusty road beyond it. As we drove along in the soft clouded sunshine I looked over the hedges on either side, and I could see fields and hedgerows and red roofs clustering here and there, while the low background of blue hills spread towards the horizon. It was an unpretentious homely prospect intercepted each minute by the detestable advertisement hoardings recommending this or that rival pill. 'Tongues in trees' indeed, in a very different sense from the exiled duke's experience! Then we come within sight of the running brook, uncontaminated as yet; the river flowing cool and swift, without quack medicines stamped upon its waters: we reach Whitley presently, with its pretty gabled hostel (Mrs. Mitford used to drive to Whitley and back for her airing), the dust rises on the fresh keen wind, the scent of the ripe corn is in the air, the cows stoop under the elm trees, looking exactly as they do in Mr. Thomson's pretty pictures, dappled and brown, with delicate legs and horns. We pass very few people, a baby lugged along in its cart, and accompanied by its brothers and sisters; a fox-terrier comes barking at our wheels; at last the phaeton stops abruptly between two or three roadside houses, and the coachman, pointing with his whip, says, 'That is "The Mitford," ma'am.--That's where Miss Mitford used to live!'

Was that all? I saw two or three commonplace houses skirting the dusty road, I saw a comfortable public-house with an elm tree, and beside it another grey unpretentious little house, with a slate roof and square walls, and an inscription, 'The Mitford,' painted over the doorway....

I had been expecting I knew not what; a spire, a pump, a green, a winding street: my preconceived village in the air had immediately to be swept into space, and in its stead, behold the inn with its sign-post, and these half-dozen brick tenements, more or less cut to one square pattern! So this was all! this was 'our village' of which the author had written so charmingly! These were the sights the kind eyes had dwelt upon, seeing in them all, the soul of hidden things, rather than dull bricks and slates. Except for one memory, Three Mile Cross would seem to be one of the dullest and most uninteresting of country places....

But we have Miss Mitford's own description. 'The Cross is not a borough, thank Heaven, either rotten or independent. The inhabitants are quiet, peaceable people who would not think of visiting us, even if we had a knocker to knock at. Our residence is a cottage' (she is writing to her correspondent, Sir William Elford), 'no, not a cottage, it does not deserve the name--a messuage or tenement such as a little farmer who had made 1400 pounds might retire to when he left off business to live on his means. It consists of a series of closets, the largest of which may be about eight feet square, which they call parlours and kitchens and pantries, some of them minus a corner, which has been unnaturally filched for a chimney, others deficient in half a side, which has been truncated by a shelving roof. Behind is a garden about the size of a good drawing-room, with an arbour, which is a complete sentry-box of privet. On one side a public-house, on the other a village shop, and right opposite a cobbler's stall. Notwithstanding all this "the cabin," as Boabdil says, "is convenient." It is within reach of my dear old walks, the banks where I find my violets, the meadows full of cowslips, and the woods where the woodsorrel blows.... Papa has already had the satisfaction of setting the neighbourhood to rights and committing a disorderly person who was the pest of "The Cross" to Bridewell.... Mamma has furbished up an old dairy; I have lost my only key and stuffed the garden with flowers....' So writes the contented young woman.

How much more delightful is all this than any commonplace stagey effect of lattice and gable; and with what pleasant unconscious art the writer of this letter describes what is NOT there and brings in her banks of violets to perfume the dull rooms. The postscript to this letter is Miss Mitford all over. 'Pray excuse my blots and interlineations. They have been caused by my attention being distracted by a nightingale in full song who is pouring a world of music through my window.'

'Do you not like to meet with good company in your friends' hearts?' Miss Mitford says somewhere,--to no one better than to herself does this apply. Her heart was full of gracious things, and the best of company was ever hers, 'La fleur de la hotte,' as Madame de Sevigne says.

We walked into the small square hall where Dr. Mitford's bed was established after his illness, whilst visitors and all the rest of the household came and went through the kitchen door. In the parlour, once kept for his private use, now sat a party of homely friends from Reading, resting and drinking tea: we too were served with smoking cups, and poured our libation to her who once presided in the quiet place; and then the landlady took us round and about, showed us the kitchen with its comfortable corners and low window-frames--'I suppose this is scarcely changed at all?' said one of us.

'Oh yes, ma'am,' says the housekeeper--'WE uses a Kitchener, Miss Mitford always kept an open range.'

The garden, with its sentry-box of privet, exists no longer; an iron mission-room stands in its place, with the harmonium, the rows of straw chairs, the table and the candlesticks de circonstance. Miss Mitford's picture hangs on the wall, a hand-coloured copy of one of her portraits. The kindly homely features smile from the oils, in good humour and attentive intelligence. The sentiment of to-day is assuredly to be found in the spirit of things rather than in their outward signs.... Any one of us can feel the romance of a wayside shrine put up to the memory of some mediaeval well-dressed saint with a nimbus at the back of her head, and a trailing cloak and veil.... Here, after all, is the same sentiment, only translated into nineteenth-century language; uses corrogated iron sheds, and cups of tea, and oakum matting. 'Mr. Palmer, he bought the place,' says the landlady, 'he made it into a Temperance Hotel, and built the Temperance Hall in the garden.'....

No romantic marble shrine, but a square meeting-house of good intent, a tribute not less sincere because it is square, than if it were drawn into Gothic arch and curve. It speaks, not of a holy and mythical saint, but of a good and warm-hearted woman; of a life-long penance borne with charity and cheerfulness; of sweet fancies and blessings which have given innocent pleasure to many generations!

VII.

There is a note, written in a close and pretty writing, something between Sir Walter Scott's and Mrs. Browning's, which the present writer has possessed for years, fastened in a book among other early treasures:--

Thank you, dearest Miss Priscilla, for your great kindness. I return the ninth volume of [illegible], with the four succeeding ones, all that I have; probably all that are yet published. You shall have the rest when I get them. Tell dear Mr. George (I must not call him Vert-Vert) that I have recollected the name of the author of the clever novel 'Le Rouge et le Noir' (that is the right title of the book, which has nothing to do with the name); the author's name is Stendhal, or so he calls himself. I think that he was either a musician or a musical critic, and that he is dead.... My visitor has not yet arrived (6 o'clock, p.m.), frightened no doubt by the abruptness of the two notes which I wrote in reply to hers yesterday morning; and indeed nobody could fancy the hurry in which one is forced to write by this walking post....

Tell my visitors of yesterday with my kind love that they did me all the good in the world, as indeed everybody of your house does.

--Ever, dear Miss Priscilla, very affectionately yours,

M. R. MITFORD.

In the present writer's own early days, when the now owner of Swallowfield was a very young, younger son, she used to hear him and his sister, Mrs. Brackenbury (the Miss Priscilla of the note), speaking with affectionate remembrance of the old friend lately gone, who had dwelt at their very gates; through which friendly gates one is glad, indeed, to realise what delightful companionship and loving help came to cheer the end of that long and toilsome life; and when Messrs. Macmillan suggested this preface the writer looked for her old autograph-book, and at its suggestion wrote (wondering whether any links existed still) to ask for information concerning Miss Mitford, and so it happened that she found herself also kindly entertained at Swallowfield, and invited to visit the scenes of which the author of 'Our Village' had written with so much delight.

I think I should like to reverse the old proverb about letting those who run read, my own particular fancy being for reading first and running afterwards. There are few greater pleasures than to meet with an Individuality, to listen to it speaking from a printed page, recounting, suggesting, growing upon you every hour, gaining in life and presence, and then, while still under its influence, to find oneself suddenly transported into the very scene of that life, to stand among its familiar impressions and experiences, realising another distinct existence by some odd metempsychosis, and what may--or rather, what MUST have been. It is existing a book rather than reading it when this happens to one.

The house in Swallowfield Park is an old English country home, a fastness still piled up against time; whose stately walls and halls within, and beautiful century-old trees in the park without, record great times and striking figures. The manor was a part of the dowry of Henry the VIII.'s luckless queens. The modern house was built by Clarendon, and the old church among the elms dates from 1200, with carved signs and symbols and brasses of knights and burgesses, and names of strange sound and bygone fashion.

Lady Russell, who had sent the phaeton with the fast-stepping horse to meet us, was walking in the park as we drove up, and instead of taking us back to the house, she first led the way across the grass and by the stream to the old church, standing in its trim sweet garden, where Death itself seems smiling and fearless; where kind Mary Mitford's warm heart rests quiet, and 'her busy hand,' as she says herself, 'is lying in peace there, where the sun glances through the great elm trees in the beautiful churchyard of Swallowfield.'

The last baronet, Sir Charles, who fought in the Crimea, and who succeeded his father, Sir Henry, moved the dividing rail so that his old friend should be well within the shadow of these elm trees. Lady Russell showed us the tranquil green place, and told us its story, and how the old church had once been doomed to destruction when Kingsley came over by chance, and pleaded that it should be spared; and how, when rubbish and outward signs of decay had been cleared away, the restorers were rewarded for their piety, by coming upon noble beams of oak, untouched by time, upon some fine old buried monuments and brasses and inscriptions, among which the people still say their prayers in the shrine where their fathers knelt, and of which the tradition is not yet swept away. The present Lady of the Manor, who loves old traditions, has done her part to preserve the records for her children.

So Miss Mitford walked from Three Mile Cross to Swallowfield to end her days, with these kind friends to cheer and to comfort her. Sir Henry Russell was alive when she first established herself, but he was already suffering from some sudden seizure, which she, with her usual impetuosity, describes in her letters as a chronic state of things. After his death, his widow, the Lady Russell of those days, was her kindest friend and comforter.

The little Swallowfield cottage at the meeting of the three roads, to which Mary Mitford came when she left Three Mile Cross, has thrown out a room or two, as cottages do, but otherwise I think it can be little changed. It was here Miss Mitford was visited by so many interesting people, here she used to sit writing at her big table under the 'tassels of her acacia tree.' When the present Lady of the Manor brought us to the gate, the acacia flowers were over, but a balmy breath of summer was everywhere; a beautiful rose was hanging upon the wall beneath the window (it must have taken many years to grow to such a height), and beyond the palings of the garden spread the fields, ripening in the late July, and turning to gold. The farmer and his son were at work with their scythes; the birds were still flying, the sweet scents were in the air.

From a lady who had known her, 'my own Miss Anne' of the letters, we heard something more that day of the author of 'Our Village'; of her charming intellect, her gift of talk, her impulsiveness, her essential sociability, and rapid grace of mind. She had the faults of her qualities; she jumped too easily to conclusions; she was too much under the influence of those with whom she lived. She was born to be a victim,--even after her old tyrant father's death, she was more or less over-ridden by her servants. Neighbours looked somewhat doubtfully on K. and Ben, but they were good to her, on the whole, and tended her carefully. Miss Russell said that when she and her brother took refuge in the cottage, one morning from a storm, while they dried themselves by the fire, they saw the careful meal carried up to the old lady, the kidneys, the custard, for her dejeuner a la fourchette.

When Miss Mitford died, she left everything she had to her beloved K. and to Ben, except that she said she wished that one book from her well-stocked library should be given to each of her friends. The old Doctor, with all his faults, had loved books, and bought handsome and valuable first editions of good authors. K. and Ben also seem to have loved books and first editions. To the Russells, who had nursed Miss Mitford, comforted her, by whose gates she dwelt, in whose arms she died, Ben brought, as a token of remembrance, an old shilling volume of one of G. P. R. James's novels, which was all he could bear to part with. A prettier incident was told me by Miss Russell, who once went to visit Miss Mitford's grave. She found a young man standing there whom she did not know. 'Don't you know me?' said he; 'I am Henry, ma'am. I have just come back from Australia.' He was one of the children of the couple who had lived in the cottage, and his first visit on his return from abroad had been to the tomb of his old protectress.

I also heard a friend who knew Miss Mitford in her latest days, describe going to see her within a very few months of her death; she was still bright and responding as ever, though very ill. The young visitor had herself been laid up and absent from the invalid's bedside for some time. They talked over many things,--an authoress among the rest, concerning whose power of writing a book Miss Mitford seems to have been very doubtful. After her visitor was gone, the sick woman wrote one of her delicate pretty little notes and despatched it with its tiny seal (there it is still unbroken, with its M. R. M. just as she stamped it), and this is the little letter:--

Thank you, dearest Miss... for once again showing me your fair face by the side of the dear, dear friend [Lady Russell] for whose goodness I have neither thanks nor words. To the end of my life I shall go on sinning and repenting. Heartily sorry have I been ever since you went away to have spoken so unkindly to Mrs.... Heaven forgive me for it, and send her a happier conclusion to her life than the beginning might warrant. If you have an idle lover, my dear, present over to him my sermon, for those were words of worth.

God bless you all! Ever, most faithfully and affectionately yours,