Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland
scanty retinue that attended her to Carisbrooke was one “Judith Briott, her gentlewoman.” We liked to think she must have loved her gentle little mistress. It is possible her tending was as affectionate as the care she might have had, had the mother, to whom the father had sent his love by the daughter’s hand, been with her instead of in France, toying (some say) with a new lover. Yet the child-heart must have yearned for parents, brothers and sisters. On that Sunday morning, an attendant entering with a bowl of bread-and-milk, discovered that the princess had died alone, her cheek pillowed upon the Bible—her father’s legacy.
That small chamber was a sacred spot where we could not but speak low and step softly. It is utterly dismantled. When draped and furnished it may not have been comfortless. It could never have been luxurious. A branch of ivy had thrust itself in at the window through which her dying eyes looked their last upon the sky. Caput reached up silently and broke off a spray. As I write, it climbs up my window-frame, a thrifty vine, that has taken kindly to voyaging and transplanting. To me it is a more valuable memento than the beautiful photograph of the monument erected to Princess Elizabeth’s memory in the Church of St. Thomas, whither “her body was brought (in a borrowed coach) attended with her few late servants.”
Yet the monument is a noble tribute from royalty to the daughter of a royal line. The young girl lies asleep, one hand fallen to her side, the other laid lightly upon her breast, her check turned to rest upon the open Bible. The face is sweet and womanly; the expression peacefully happy. “A token of respect for her virtues, and sympathy for her misfortunes. By Victoria R., 1856.” So reads the inscription.
Imagination leaped a wide chasm of time and station in passing from the state prison-chamber of Carisbrooke to the thatched cottage of The Dairyman’s Daughter; from the marble sculptured by a queen’s command, to the head-stone reared by one charitable admirer of the humble piety of Elizabeth Walbridge. To reach the grave we had to pass through the parish church of Arreton. It is like a hundred other parish churches scattered among the byways of England. The draught from the interior met us when the door grated upon the hinges, cold, damp, and ill-smelling, a smell that left an earthy taste in the mouth. Beneath the stone flooring the noble dead are packed economically as to room. The sexton, who may have been a trifle younger than the building, spoke a dialect we could hardly translate. The church was his pride, and he was sorely grieved when we would have pushed right onward to the burying-ground.
“Ye mun look at ’e brawsses!” he pleaded so tremulously that we halted to note one, on which was the figure of a man in armor, his feet upon a lion couchant.
“Here is ye buried under this Grave
Harry Haweis. His soul God save.
Long tyme steward of the Yle of Wyght.
Have m’cy on hym, God ful of myght.”
The date is 1430.
Another “brass” upon a stone pillar bears six verses setting forth the worthy deeds of one William Serle:
“Thus did this man, a Batchelor,
Of years full fifty-nyne.
And doing good to many a one,
Soe did he spend his tyme.”
“An’ ye woant see ’e rest?” quavered the old sexton at our next movement. “ ’E be foine brawsses! Quawlity all of um—‘e be!”
Seeing our obduracy, he hobbled to the side-door and unlocked it, amid many groans from himself and the rusty wards. The July light and air were welcome after the damp twilight within. In death at least, it would seem to be better with the poor than the “quality,” if sun and breeze are boons. The churchyard is small and ridged closely with graves. The old man led the way between and over these to the last home of the Dairyman’s Daughter. We gathered about it, looked reverently upon the low swell of turf. There is a metrical epitaph, sixteen lines in length, presumably the composition of the lady at whose expense the stone was raised. It begins:
“Stranger! if e’er by chance or feeling led,
Upon this hallowed turf thy footsteps tread,
Turn from the contemplation of the sod,
And think on her whose spirit rests with God.”
The rest is after the same order, a mechanical jingle in pious measure. It offends one who has not been educated to appreciate the value of post-mortem patronage bestowed by the lofty upon the lowly. It was enough for us to know that the worn body of Legh Richmond’s “Elizabeth” lay there peacefully sleeping away the ages.
We had picked up in a Ventnor bookshop a shabby little copy of Richmond’s “Annals of the Poor,” printed in 1828. It contained a sketch of Mr. Richmond’s life by his son-in-law, The Dairyman’s Daughter, The Negro Servant, and The Young Cottager, the scene of all these narratives being in the Isle of Wight. We reread them with the pensive pleasure one feels in unbinding a pacquet of letters, spotted and yellowed by time, but which hands beloved once pressed, and yielding still the faint fragrance of the rose-leaves we laid away with them when the pages were white and fresh. We, who drew delight with instruction from Sunday-School libraries more than thirty years back, knew Elizabeth, the “Betsey” of father and mother, better than we did our next-door neighbors. Prima and Secunda, allured by my enthusiasm to read the book, declared that her letters to her spiritual adviser “were prosy and priggish,” but that the hold of the story upon my heart was not all the effect of early association was abundantly proved by their respectful mention of her humble piety and triumphant death.
By her side lies the sister at whose funeral Legh Richmond first met his modest heroine. In the same family group sleep the Dairyman and his wife. “The mother died not long after the daughter,” says Mr. Richmond, “and I have good reason to believe that God was merciful to her and took her to Himself. The good old Dairyman died in 1816, aged 84. His end was eminently Christian.”
Elizabeth died May 30, 1801, at the age of thirty-one.
“Pardon!” said a foreign gentleman, one of the party, who, seeing Caput uncover his head at the grave, had done the same. “But will you have the goodness to tell me what it is we have come here to see?”
“The grave of a very good woman,” was the reply.
Legh Richmond tells us little more. Her love for her Saviour, like the broken alabaster-box of ointment in the hand of another woman of far different life, is the sweet savor that has floated down to us through all these years.
I stooped to picked some bearded grasses from the mound. The sexton bent creakingly to aid me, chattering and grinning. He wore a blue frock over his corduroy trousers: his hands and clothes were stained with clay; his sunken cheeks looked like old parchment.
“ ’A wisht ’a ’ad flowers to gi’ ’e, leddy!” he said. “ ’A dit troy for one wheele to keep um ’ere. But ’a moight plant um ivery day, and ’ee ud be all goane ’afore tummorrer. He! he! he! ’A—manny leddies cooms ’ere for summat fro’ e’ grave. ’A burried ’er brother over yander!” chucking a pebble to show where—“ ’a dit! ’E larst of ’e fomily. ’Ees all goane! And ’a’m still aloive and loike to burry a manny more! He! he!”
Our homeward route lay by the Dairyman’s cottage, a long mile from the church. When the coffin of Elizabeth, borne by neighbors’ hands, was followed by the mourners, also on foot, funeral hymns were sung, “at occasional intervals of about five minutes.” As we bowled along the smooth road, Prima, sitting behind me, read aloud from the shabby little volume a description of the surrounding scene, that might, for accuracy of detail, have been written that day:
“A rich and fruitful valley lay immediately beneath. It was adorned with corn-fields and pastures, through which a small river winded in a variety of directions, and many herds grazed upon its banks. A fine range of opposite hills, covered with grazing flocks, terminated with a bold sweep into the ocean, whose blue waves appeared at a distance beyond. Several villages, churches and hamlets were scattered in the valley. The noble mansions of the rich and the lowly cottages of the