CHAPTER I.

AUNT MARGARET.

WHEN I was a very young man nothing used to surprise me more than the existence of a very old one—one of those patriarchs who, instead of linking the generations ‘each with each,’ include two or three in their protracted span; a habit which runs in families, as in the case[2] of the old gentleman of our own time whose grandsire (once or twice ‘removed,’ it is true, but not nearly so often as ‘by rights’ he should have been) gathered the arrows upon Flodden Field. Such persons seemed to me little inferior in interest to ghosts (whom indeed in appearance they greatly resembled), and I was wont to listen to their experiences of the past with the same rapt attention, (unalloyed by the alarm), that I should have paid to a denizen of another world. There are, it seems to me, very few old persons about now, absolutely none (there used to be plenty) three or four times my age; and this, perhaps, renders the memory (for she did die at last) of my great-aunt Margaret a thing so rare and precious to me.

She was born, as we, her young relatives, were wont to say, ‘ages and ages ago,’ but as a matter of fact just one age ago; that is to say, if she had been alive but a few years back, she would have been exactly one hundred years old. Think of it, my young friends who are about to be so good, in your turn, as to give her story your attention—think of it having[3] been possible that you yourselves should have met this very personage in the flesh (though the poor dear had but little of it)—you perhaps in your goat carriage, upon the King’s Parade, Brighton, and she in her wheeled chair—the two extremities (on wheels) of human life!

To things you have read of as history, matters as dead and gone to you, if not quite so old, as the Peloponnesian war, she was a living witness. She was alive, for example, though not of an age to ‘take notice’ of the circumstances, when the independence of America was acknowledged by the mother country, and when England was beginning to solace herself for that disruption by the acquisition of India. If Aunt Margaret did not know as much about Hyder Ali as became a contemporary, with matters nearer home, such as the loss of the ‘Royal George,’ ‘with all her crew (or nearly so) complete,’ she was very conversant. ‘I saw it,’ she was used to say, ‘with my own eyes;’ and it was only by the strictest cross-examination that you could get her to confess that she was but a child in arms when that[4] catastrophe took place. As to politics, indeed, though we were at war with everybody in those times, the absence of special correspondents, telegraphs, and even newspapers, made public matters of much more limited interest than it is nowadays

easy to imagine. Aunt Margaret, at all events, cared almost nothing about them, with the exception of the doings of the pressgang—an institution of which she always spoke with the liveliest horror. On some one, however, chancing to say in her hearing (and by way of corroboration of her views) that it was marvellous how men who had been so infamously treated should have been got to fight under the national flag, she let fly at him like the broadside of a seventy-gun frigate, and gave him to understand that the sailors of those days had never had their equals. On that, as on all other subjects, she exercised the right of criticism upon the institutions of her time to an unlimited extent, but if they were attacked by others she became their defender.

Her chief concern, however, was with social[5] matters, when speaking of which she seemed entirely to forget the age in which she was living: it was as though some ancestress, in hoop and farthingale, had stepped down from her picture and read us a page of the diary she had written overnight. She seemed hardly like one of ourselves at all, though it was obvious enough that she was of the female gender, from the prominence she gave to the topic of costumes. She confessed that she preferred the hair ‘undressed’—a phrase which misled her more youthful hearers, who imagined her to be praising a dissolute luxuriance of love-locks, which was very far from her intention; on the other hand, she lamented the disuse of black satin breeches, which she ascribed to the general decay of limb among the male sex. There was nothing like your top-boots and hessians, she would say, for morning wear, but in the evening, every man that had a leg was, in her opinion, bound to show it.

I have reason to believe that my aunt Margaret was the last person who ever journeyed from London to Brighton in a post-chaise—a[6] mode of travel, she was wont to remark, justly eulogised by the wisest and best of men and Londoners. If he had been spared to see a railway locomotive, she expressed herself as confident that he would have considered it the direct offspring of the devil; and that conjectural opinion of the great lexicographer she herself shared to her dying day. Like him, she was a Londoner, and took an immense interest, not municipal of course, but social, in the affairs of the great city. ‘My dear,’ she often used to say reprovingly, when speaking of some event of which I was obliged to confess I had never so much as heard, ‘it was the topic of every tongue.’

Although she had never been the theme of London gossip herself, she had been very closely connected with one who had been; and to those who were intimate with her he was the constant subject of her discourse. Her thoughts dwelt more with him, I am sure, than with all the other personages together with whom she had been acquainted during her earthly pilgrimage; and yet she always thought[7] of him in his adolescence, as a very young man.

‘He was just your age, my dear,’ she was wont to say to me, ‘when he became the “Talk of the Town.”’

Perhaps this circumstance gave him an additional interest in my eyes; but certainly her account of this one famous personage was more interesting to me than everything else which Aunt Margaret had to tell me. It has dwelt in my mind for many a year, and when this is the case with any story, I have generally found that I have been able to interest others in its recital. In this particular case, however, my way is not so plain as usual. The story is not my story, nor even Aunt Margaret’s; in its more important details it is common property. On the other hand, not even the oldest inhabitant has any remembrance of it. The hearts that were once wounded to the quick by the occurrences which I am about to describe can be no more pained by any allusion to them; they have long been dust. No relative, to my knowledge, is now living of the unfortunate[8] young man whose memory—execrated by the crowd—was kept so green and fresh (watered by her tears) by one living soul for nearly eighty years. Why should I not tell his ‘pitiful story?’

A second question, however, presents itself at the outset concerning him. Shall I give or conceal his name? I here frankly confess that in its broad details the tale has no novelty to recommend it: it is not only true, but it has been told. The bald, bare facts have been put before the public by the youth himself nearly a hundred years since. There is the rub. To a few ‘persons of culture,’ as the phrase goes nowadays, the main incident of his career will be familiar; though, however cultured, it is unlikely they will know how it affected my great-aunt Margaret; but to tens of thousands (including, I’ll be bound, the upper ten) it will be utterly unknown.

Now I have noticed that there is nothing your well-informed person so much delights in as to make other people aware of his being so. Indeed, the chief use of information in his eyes[9] is not so much to raise oneself above the crowd (though a sense of elevation is agreeable), as to have the privilege of imparting it to others with a noble air of superiority and self-importance. I will therefore call my hero by such a name as will at once be recognised by the learned, whom I shall thus render my intermediaries—exponents of the transparent secret to those who are in blissful ignorance of it. I will call him William Henry Erin.

I must add in justice to myself that the story was not told me in confidence.

How could it be so when at the very beginning of our intimacy the narrator had already almost reached the extreme limit of human life, while I had but just left school? It was the similarity of age on my part with that of the person she had in her mind which no doubt, in part at least, caused her to make me the repository of her long-buried sorrow. She judged, and rightly judged, that for that reason I was more likely to sympathise with it. Indeed, whenever she spoke of it I forgot her age; as in the case of the pictured[10] grandmamma so felicitously described by Mr. Locker, I used to think of her at such times—

As she looked at seventeen

As a bride.

Her rounded form was lean, And her silk was bombazine,

Well I wot.

With her needles she would sit, And for hours would she knit,

Would she not?

Ah, perishable clay! Her charms had dropped away,

One by one.

Yet when she spoke of the lover of her youth, there seemed nothing incongruous in her so doing. I forgot the Long Ago in which her tale was placed; her talk, indeed, on those occasions being of those human feelings which are independent of any epoch, took little or no colour from the past; it seemed to me a story of to-day, and as such I now relate it.

[11]

CHAPTER II.

OUT IN THE COLD.

A few years ago it would have been almost impossible for modern readers to imagine what a coach journey used to be in the good old times; but, thanks to certain gilded youths, more fortunate than persons of a higher intellectual type who have striven in vain to—

Revive old usages thoroughly worn out,

The souls of them fumed forth, the hearts of them torn out,

it is not now so difficult. Any one who has gone by one of our ‘summer coaches’ for a short trip out of town can picture the ‘Rockets’ and ‘Highflyers’ in which our ancestors took their journeys at the end of the last century. Those old mail-coaches were, in fact, their very counterparts; for the ‘basket[12]’ had already made way for ‘the hind seat;’ only, instead of our aristocratic driver, there was a professional ‘whip,’ who in fair weather came out in scarlet like the guard, though in wet and winter-time he was wrapped in heavy drab, as though a butterfly should become a grub again. The roads were good, the milestones in a much better condition than they are at present, and the inns at which the passengers stopped for refreshments greatly superior to their successors, or rather to their few ghastly survivors, all room and no company, which still haunt the roadside. The highwaymen, too, were still extant, which gave an opportunity to young gentlemen of spirit to assure young female fellow-passengers of their being under

safe escort, if not of displaying their own courage. Still, after eight hours in a stage-coach, most ‘insides’ felt that they had had enough of it, and were glad enough to stretch their legs when the chance offered.

This feeling was experienced by two out of the three passengers in the London coach ‘Tantivy,’ which on a certain afternoon in May,[13] at the end of the last century, drew up at the ‘White Hart’ in the town of Banbury: it was their last ‘stopping stage’ before they arrived at their destination—Stratford-on-Avon; and they wished (at least two of them did) that they had reached it already.

Mr. Samuel Erin, the senior and head of the little party, was a man of about sixty years of age, but looked somewhat older. He still wore the attire which had been usual in his youth, but was now pronounced old-fashioned: a powdered wig of moderate dimensions; a plain braided frock coat, with waistcoat to match, almost as long; a hat turned up before and behind, and looking like a cross between a cocked hat and the head-gear of a modern archdeacon; knee-breeches, and buckled shoes. Upon his forehead—their ordinary resting-place when he was not engaged in his profession (that of a draughtsman), or poring over some musty volume—reposed, on a bed of wrinkles, a pair of gold spectacles. His eyes, which, without being very keen, were intelligent enough, appeared smaller than they[14] really were, from a habit he had of puckering their lids, engendered by the more delicate work of his calling, and also by frequent examination of old MSS. and rare editions, of which he was a connoisseur.

As he left the coach with slow, inelastic step, he was followed by his friend Frank Dennis. This gentleman was a much younger man, but he too, though not so retrograde in attire as his senior, paid little attention to the prevailing fashion. He wore, indeed, his own hair, but closely cut; a pepper-and-salt coat and waistcoat, and a neckcloth, that looked like a towel, tied carelessly under his chin. Though not in his first youth, he was still a young man, with frank and comely features; but an expression habitually thoughtful, and a somewhat slow delivery of what he had to say, made him appear of maturer years than belonged to him. He was an architect by profession, but had some private means; his tastes were somewhat similar to those of his friend and neighbour Erin, and he could better afford to indulge them. His present expedition was no business[15] of his own, but undertaken, as he professed, that he might enjoy the other’s society for a week or two in the country. It so happened, however, that Mr. Erin was bringing his niece, Miss Margaret

Slade, with him; and, to judge by the tenderness of Mr. Dennis’s glance when it rested on her, it is probable that the prospect of her companionship had had some attraction for him.

Last of the three, she tripped out of the coach, declining, with a pretty toss of her head, the assistance the younger man would have rendered her in alighting. She could trip and toss her head like any fairy. No tower of hair ‘like a porter’s knot set upon end’ had she; her dress, though to modern eyes very short-waisted, was not, as an annalist of her time has described it, ‘drawn exceeding close over stays drawn still closer;’ her movements were light and free. Her lustrous brown hair fell in natural waves from under a beaver hat turned up on the left side, and ornamented with one grey feather. A grey silk spencer indicated, under pretence of concealing—for it was[16] summer weather, and she could not have worn it for warmth—the graces of her form. Her eyes were bright and eager, and her pretty lips murmured a sigh of relief, as she touched ground, at her release from durance.

‘How I wish this was Stratford-on-Avon’! cried she naïvely.

‘That would be wishing that Shakespeare had been born at Banbury,’ said her uncle, in a tone of reproof.

‘Banbury is it?’ she said; ‘then this is where the lady lived who went about with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and therefore had music wherever she goes—I mean went.’

Mr. Dennis smiled, and murmured very slowly that other young ladies brought music with them without the instruments of which she spoke, or indeed any instruments; they had only to open their mouths.

‘I am hungry,’ observed Miss Margaret, without any reference to that remark about opening her mouth at all—in fact, she studiously ignored it.

[17]

Mr. Dennis sighed.

He was that minority of one who would rather have remained in the coach—that is, if Miss Margaret had done likewise; he would not in the least have objected to Mr. Samuel Erin getting out. A circumstance over which he had no control, the fact of his having been born half a century too early, prevented his being acquainted with the poem in which Mr. Thomas Moore describes the pleasure he felt in travelling in a stage-coach with a fair companion; but he had experienced it all the same. He was not displeased that there was another stage to come yet.

If he was satisfied, however, with the opportunities that had been afforded to him of making himself agreeable to Miss Margaret on the road, he must have been a man thankful for small mercies. She had given him very little encouragement. His attempts to engage her in conversation had been anything but successful. When a young lady wishes to be tender, we know that the mere offer to open or shut a coach window for her may lead to[18] volumes of small-talk, but nothing had come of his little politenesses beyond the bare acknowledgment of them. Even that, however, was something. An ‘I thank you, sir,’ from the pretty lips of Margaret Slade was to Mr. Frank Dennis more than the acceptance of plan, elevation, and section of any proposed town-hall from a municipal council. It is strange how much harder is the heart of the female than the male under certain circumstances. If a young lady obviously endeavours to make herself agreeable to a young gentleman, he never repulses her, or at least I have never known an instance of

it. ‘But suppose,’ I hear some fair one inquire, ‘he should be engaged to be married to some one else?’ ‘Madam,’ I reply to that imaginary questioner, ‘it would not make one halfpennyworth of difference. If the other young woman was not there, you would never guess from his behaviour that she was in existence.’

It must not, however, be concluded from this observation that Miss Margaret Slade was in love with anybody else. She was but[19] seventeen at most; an age at which among well-conducted young persons no such idea enters the head, nor indeed, in her case, as one would think, had there been any opportunity for its entrance. She had been brought up in the country in seclusion, and only a few months ago, upon the death of Mrs. Erin, had been sent for by her uncle to keep house for him. His establishment in Norfolk Street, Strand, was a very simple one, and the company he entertained numbered none of these who, in the language of the day, were called ‘the votaries of Cupid.’ No young beaux ever so much as crossed the threshold. Mr. Erin’s visitors were all grave elderly gentlemen, more interested in a binding than in a petticoat, and preferring some old-world volume to a maiden in her spring-time. There was indeed, ‘though,’ as the song says, ‘it is hardly worth while to put that in,’ a son of Mr. Erin’s, of her own age, who dwelt in

his father’s house. But the young man was out all day engaged in his professional avocation—that of a conveyancer’s clerk; and even when he returned at eve,[20] mixed but little with the family. It seemed to Margaret that his father did not treat him very kindly.

There had been only one mention of him in the long coach journey from town. Mr. Dennis, addressing himself as usual to Margaret, when a chance offered of interrupting Mr. Erin’s interminable talk upon antiquarian subjects, had inquired after her cousin William Henry; and she had replied, with the least rose tint of a blush, that he had gone, she believed, on some business of his employer to Bristol. A statement which her uncle had corroborated, adding drily, ‘The boy has asked to have his holiday with us now instead of later in the year, so I have told him to come on to Stratford; he may be useful to me in collecting information upon Shakespearean matters.’

The remark scarcely breathed the spirit of a doating parent, but then that was not Mr. Erin’s way.