Augustus John Cuthbert Hare

“ Winton Castle, Oct. 20.—When I awoke on Saturday, I was surprised to see a fine old tower opposite my windows, with high turrets and richly-carved chimneys and windows; but the castle has been miserably added to. Lady Ruthven is most original, with a wonderfully poetical mind, and is very different from her regal-looking sister, Lady Belhaven, who, still very handsome, sweeps about the long rooms, and for whom ‘gracious’ is the only befitting expression. All the guests are pushed together by Lady Ruthven in a way which makes it impossible that they should not be intimate. ”

“ Yesterday I came to Chillingham from Belford, a beautiful drive, over hills first, and then descending into moorland, purple with heather, and bounded by the Cheviots, which rose deep blue against the sunset sky. The castle, which is partly as old as King John, is built round a great courtyard, from which flights of stone steps go up to the principal apartments. On the stairs I found Lord Tankerville, a handsome middle-aged man, with grey hair, romping with his children. ”

“ The last of these is ‘the ghost-room,’ and Wallington is still a haunted house: awful noises are heard all through the night; footsteps rush up and down the untrodden passages; wings flap and beat against the windows; bodiless people unpack and put away their things all night long, and invisible beings are felt to breathe over you as you lie in bed. ”

“ Lady Waterford is indeed perfectly delightful—brimming with originality and enthusiasm, and with the power—which so few people have—of putting all her wonderfully poetical thoughts into words, and so letting others have the benefit of them. Sometimes she will sit down to the pianoforte and sing in the most thrilling way—Handel or Beethoven, or old Spanish ballads—without having the music or words before her. At others she will draw, suddenly and at once, the beautiful inspirations which come to her. ”

“ Miss Robinson has lived with ‘my Sister Surtees’ for the last fifteen years, and thinks there is no place in the world like Mainsforth: and indeed it is a most pleasant old house, thoroughly unpretending, but roomy and comfortable, close to the road on one side, but a very quiet road, with a fringe of ancient trees and a rookery, and on the other looking out on the wide green lawn and broad terrace-walk, bordered by clumps of hyacinths and tall turncap lilies. ”

“ Then we lighted a fire between two rocks, and Lady Tankerville and her children boiled a kettle and cooked omelets over a fire of heather and fern, and beautiful grapes, greengages, jam, and cakes unfitted us for the eight-o’clock dinner. Then we came down like bushrangers, breaking a path through the bracken, a great deal taller than ourselves, and seeing in the distance the herds of wild white bulls. ”

“ The house is quite full of people, to whom it is amusing to help to do the honours. Great is the autumnal beauty of the place. I have been with Cousin Susan up the Birky Brae, and down by the Craggy Pass and the Hawk’s Nest—streams of sunlight falling upon the rocks and river, and lighting up the yellow and red leaves which now mingle with the green. ”

“ The butler answered. ‘Why did you not attend to my bell?’ said the old gentleman. ‘Because no bell rang,’ answered the butler. ‘Oh, but I have rung very often,’ said the old gentleman; ‘go downstairs again, and I will pull the bell again; watch if it rings.’ So the butler went downstairs, and the old man pulled the bell, but no bell rang. ‘Then,’ said the old gentleman, ‘you must send for the bell-hanger at once; one cannot live with broken bells; that sort of thing cannot he allowed to go on in the house,’—and he dressed and went down to breakfast. ”

“ Rutherford had an opportunity of speaking to her two cousins alone. She said, ‘You will be excessively surprised at what I ask, but I shall measure your affection for me entirely by whether you grant it: it is that you will sit up to-night in the room next to your mother’s, and that you will tell no one.’ They promised, but they were very much surprised.
“As they were going to bed, Mrs. Rutherford said to Lady Leslie, ‘Aunt, shall I lock the door?’ and Lady Leslie laughed at her and said, ‘No, my dear; I am much too old-fashioned a person for that,’ and forbade it. ”

“ She paints foxgloves in fresco and makes little sketches à la Ruskin in the tiniest of books—chiefly of pollard willows, which she declares are the most beautiful things in nature. To see pollard willows in perfection she spent six weeks last spring in the flattest parts of Holland, and thought it lovely—‘the willows so fine and the boat-life so healthy.’ ‘Well, you will go to the bad,’ she said to me yesterday, because I did not admire a miserable little drawing of Ruskin: my own sketches she thinks quite monstrous. ”

“ She was a very strong-minded person, and when she heard of the servants alarm, she said, ’Oh, Lady Pennyman, do let me sleep in that room; I shall not be frightened, and if I sleep there, perhaps the ghost will be laid.’ So she sent away her carriage and stayed; but the next morning she came down quite pale and haggard, and said certainly she had seen the figure of a young man in a dressing-gown standing opposite her bed, and yet the door was locked, and there could have been no real person there. ”

“ The whole family are inclined to abundant rude hospitality, and delight to entice visitors into these deserts. They have taken me to Elsdon, a curious desolate village in the hills, where the Baillies are rectors, and live in a dismal old castle, built to fortify the rector in mosstrooping times. It is a place quite out of the world, so very high up, that the coming of any chance stranger is quite an event: its people live entirely by keeping sheep and rearing geese in large flocks. ”

“ A bad cold the Greys always call a Shelley, because of a famous cold old Lady Shelley had when she came to stay with them. This was the Lady Shelley who, when her carriage, full of people, upset, and there was a great entanglement of legs, called out to the footman, who came to extricate them, ‘John, the black ones are mine—the black ones are mine.’
“Warkworth, Oct. 6.—It is very pleasant being here with my kind Clutterbuck cousins, [6] and this old-fashioned house, though small, is most refined and comfortable, with its pervading smell of rose-leaves and lavender.” ”

“ When people are dead, how they are glorified in one’s mind! I was almost as much grieved as my mother herself, and I also felt a desolation. Yet, on looking back, how few words of tenderness can I remember receiving from Aunt Kitty—some marigolds picked for me in the palace garden when I was ill at Norwich—a few acknowledgments of my later devotion to my mother in illness—an occasional interest in my drawing: this is almost all. ”

“ And the first figure was the butler, and the second figure was the bell-hanger, and the third figure, from having been long a magistrate on a London bench, he recognised as the most notorious ruffian of a well-known London gang. He heard the ruffian say to the butler, ‘I say, it’s no use mincing this kind of thing: no use doing this kind of thing by halves: better put him out of the way at once, and go on to the plate afterwards.’—‘Oh no,’ said the butler, ‘he has been a good master to me; I’ll never consent to that. Take all he has; he’ll never wake, not he; but you can’t do him any harm ”

“ At three we came on to Roddam, where an uncle and aunt of Charlie Bosanquet’s live—a beautiful place, with a terraced garden almost overhanging the moor-lands, and a dene stretching up into the Cheviots. I had ordered a gig to meet me and take me to Ford, where I arrived about half-past six, seeming to be driving into a sort of gothic castle of Otranto, as we passed under the portcullis in the bright moonlight. I found Lady Waterford sitting with her charming old mother, Lady Stuart de Rothesay. ... Her drawings are indescribably lovely, and her singing most beautiful and pathetic. ”

“ The High Force is a truly grand waterfall, where the whole river tosses over a huge precipice in the black basaltic cliff. We left the gig at a little inn at Langdon Beck, whence we set out on a weary foot—pilgrimage—a most fatiguing walk of ten miles, over broken edges of scars, along the torrent-bed, through rushes and bogs and heather, and across loose slippery shale—all this too in ceaseless rain and wind, and with the burden of a thick Scotch cloak. ”

“ Chesters, Hexham, Sept. 10.—I came here yesterday. My aged hostess, the eldest sister of the Newcastle Clayton family, is of a most tall, weird figure, and speaks in an abrupt, energetic, startling manner, but she is the most perfect lady imaginable, both in feeling and manners, and her kindness and thoughtfulness and consideration for others make her beloved far and wide. Chesters is famous for its liberal unostentatious hospitality, and Miss Clayton always lives here, though it is her brother’s place, and he resides at Newcastle. ”

“ While he was eating his breakfast, the old gentleman found he had forgotten his pocket-handkerchief; and went up to his room to get it. And such was the promptitude of that old-fashioned household, that the village being close to the house, and the bell-hanger living in the village, the master’s orders had already been obeyed, and the bell-hanger was already in the room, standing on a ladder, arranging the new wire of the bell. In old-fashioned houses, you know, the bell wires come through the wall and go round the top of the room, so that you can see them, and so it was in this house in Kent. ”

“ Her little black eyes twinkle with mirth all day long, though she says she is ill and has ‘the most extraordinary feels;’ she is ‘sure no one ever had such extraordinary feels as she has.’ She never appears to attend to her house a bit, which is like the great desert with one or two little oases in it, where by good management you may possibly make yourself comfortable. ”

“ It was very hot summer weather; the old gardener was mowing the lawn, the old housekeeper cooked the dinner, the old butler brought it in: no, there was nothing whatever especial going on.
“That night, when the old gentleman went to bed, he took particular care to examine his room, and to see that his heavy swing-door was well fastened, so that no one could come in to disturb him. And when he had done this, he went to bed and fell asleep, and slept very well till the next morning, for nothing happened, nothing whatever. ”

“ Ripley Castle, August 30.—The old Ladies Ruthven and Belhaven came to-day. They appear to have spent their lives in an atmosphere of dukes, but are very simple great ladies, chiefly interested by art and artists, and draw well themselves. Lady Belhaven is allowed by her husband to be with her sister now because of the odd illness of the latter, an invincible sleeplessness, which makes her very peculiar, and gives her a habit of talking to herself in a low murmur, however many people are around her. ”

“ Streatlam Castle, Sept. 25.—I came with Cousin Susan to this curious place, to which our cousin Mr. Bowes [3] has welcomed us very cordially. The house is in a hollow—an enormous building of the last century, enclosing a mediæval castle. I sleep in the ghost-room, looking most grim and weird from its black oak with red hangings, and containing a tall bed with a red canopy. ”

“ Opening from the enclosed courtyard, which now forms a great frescoed hall in the centre of this house of Wallington, are endless suites of huge rooms, only partly carpeted and thinly furnished with ugly last-century furniture, partly covered with faded tapestry. ”

“ Yesterday morning I set off directly after breakfast with Charles Bosanquet, in the sociable, on a long expedition. It was a really lovely day, and the drive over the wild moorlands, with the pink and blue Cheviot distances, was quite beautiful. At one we reached Hedgeley, where we had been asked to luncheon at the fine old house of the Carrs, looking up a mountain ravine, but a soldier-son first took us up to Crawley Tower, a neighbouring ruined Peel. ”

“ University students from Durham are constantly here, and the house is a second home to all the poor clergy of the neighbourhood, who come whenever they want a good dinner, or ready interest and kindly sympathy. A new curate was appointed to the neighbouring church of Bishop Middleham, and was asked to stay here while he looked out for lodgings: he stayed on and on, till he never went away again: he stayed here three years! The students of Durham University have just put up two stained glass windows in the church here, in token of gratitude for the kindness they have received at Mainsforth. ”

“ Oct. 21.—The Mount-Edgecumbes and I went to-day with Lady Ruthven to Gosford—her nephew Lord Wemyss’s place, near the sea. I walked for some time in the shrubberies with Lady Mount-Edgecumbe, till we were sent for into the house. There we found old Lady Wemyss with her daughter, Lady Louisa Wells, and her daughter-in-law, Lady Elcho. The last is a celebrated beauty, and has been celebrated also for fulfilling the part of ‘Justice’ in a famous tableau. In ordinary life she is perfectly statuesque, with a frigid manner. ”

“ April 26.—Miss Robinson has been telling me, ‘When we were in London, we went to a chapel in Bedford Place where Sydney Smith often used to preach, and we were shown into a pew; for, you know, in London you do not sit where you like, but they show you into pews—the women people that keep the church do. There was a strange lady in the seat, and I have never seen her before or since. It was not I that sat next to her—my Sister Surtees was the person. The service was got through very well, and when the preacher got up, it was Sydney Smith. I remember the sermon as if it were to-day. ”