Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland
of civil war, to find an asylum for three weeks under the roof that had covered a greater than the lordliest Stuart who ever paltered with a nation’s trust. At Lady Barnard’s decease, New Place was sold, first to one, then another proprietor, until Sir Hugh Clopton remodelled and almost rebuilt the house. After him came the Rev. Francis Gastrell who, in a fit of passion at what he conceived to be the exorbitant tax levied upon the mansion, pulled it down to the foundation-stones. In the same Christian frame of mind, he hewed down the mulberry-tree, then in a vigorous old age, a giant of its tribe, “because so many people stopped in the street to stare at it, thereby inconveniencing himself and family.” Peevish fatuousness that has a parallel in the discontent of the present incumbent of Haworth that, “because he chances to inhabit the parsonage in which the Brontë sisters lived and died, he must be persecuted by throngs of visitors to it and the church.” It is not his fault, he pathetically reminds the public, that people of genius once dwelt there, and he proposes to demonstrate the dissimilarity of those who now occupy it by renovating Haworth Rectory and erecting a new church upon the site of that in which the Brontës are buried.
Of New Place nothing remains but the foundations, swathed in the kindly coverlet of turf, that in England, so soon cloaks deformity with graceful sweeps and swells of verdure. The grounds are tended with pious care, and nobody carps that visitors always loiter here on their way from Shakspeare’s birth-place to his tomb.
We passed to the fane of Holy Trinity between two rows of limes in fullest leaf. The avenue is broad, but the noon beams were severed into finest particles in filtering through the thick green arch; the door closing up the farther end was an arch of grayer glooms. The church-yard is paved with blackened tombstones. The short, rich grass over-spreads mounds and hollows, defines the outlines of the oblong, flat slabs, sprouts in crack and cranny. The peace of the summer heavens rested upon the dear old town—the river slipping silently beneath the bridge in the background—the venerable church, in the vestibule of which we stayed our steps to hearken to music from within. The organist was practising a dreamy voluntary, rising, now, into full chords that left echoes vibrating among the groined arches after he resumed his pensive strain. Walking softly and slowly, lest our tread upon the paved floor might awake dissonant echoes, we gained the chancel. An iron rail hinders the nearer approach to the Grave. This barrier is a recent erection and a work of supererogation, since that sight-seer has not been found so rude as to trample over the sacred dust.
Upon the stone—even with the rest of the flags—concealing the vault, lay a strip of white cloth, stamped with a fac-simile of the epitaph composed by Shakspeare for his tomb. Volumes have been written to explain its meaning, and treatises to prove that there is nothing recondite in its menace. Since the rail prevented us from getting to that side of the slab next the inner wall of the chancel, we must have read the inscription upside-down but for the convenient copy:
“Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.”
Our eyes returned again and again to the weird lines and the plain stone, as thoughts of what lay beneath it were chased away by the wretched pomp of the monument raised by the nearest relatives of the dead. It is set in the chancel wall about the height of a tall man’s head above the floor and almost directly over the burial-vault. The light from a gorgeous painted window streams upon it. Just beyond, nearer the floor, the effigy of a knight in armor lies upon a recessed sarcophagus. The half-length figure intended for Shakspeare is in an arched niche, the family escutcheon above it. On each side is a naked boy of forbidding countenance. One holds an inverted torch, the other a skull and spade. A second and larger skull surmounts the monument. The marble man—we could not call it Shakspeare—writes, without looking at pen or paper, within an open book, laid upon a cushion. The whole affair, niche, desk, cushion and attitude, reminds one ludicrously of the old-time pulpits likened by Mr. Beecher to a “toddy tumbler with a spoon in it.” The “spoon” in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, wears the dress of a gentleman of his day, a full, loose surcoat, with falling collar and cuffs. The forehead is high and bald, the face smooth as a pippin, the eyes have a bold, hard stare; upon the mouth, and, indeed, upon all the visage, dwells a smirk, aggressive and ineffable. It is the face of a conceited, pompous, heavy fool, which the fine phrenological development of the cranium cannot redeem. We cannot make it to be to us the man whom, according to the stilted lines below—
“Envious death has plast
Within this monument.”
“Yet it must have been a likeness,” ventured Caput. “It was seen and approved by his daughters.”
We persisted in our infidelity, and refused to look again at the smirking horror. When it was set up in the mortuary pillory overhead, it was colored from nature. The hair, Vandyke beard, and moustache were auburn, the tight, protuberant eyes hazel, the dress red and black. Seventy years afterward, it was painted white and was probably a shade less odious for the whitewashing. Lately the colors have been restored to their pristine brightness and varnish.
Another flat slab bears the inscription:—
“Heere lyeth interred the body of Anne, Wife
of William Shakespeare who dep’ted this life the
6th day of Avgt · 1623 · being of the age of · 67 · yeares.”
She was a woman of twenty-five, he a lad of eighteen when they were married—a circumstance that dampens the romantic imaginings we would fain foster to their full growth, in visiting the vine-draped cottage of Anne Hathaway. We put from us, while standing by the graves of husband and wife, the truth that when he, a hale, handsome gentleman of fifty-three, sat at eventide in the shadow of the mulberry-tree, or, as tradition paints him, leaned upon the half-door of a mercer’s shop and made impromptu epigrams upon passing neighbors—Anne was a woman of sixty, who had best abide in-doors after the dew began to fall.
We went to the Red Horse Inn by merest accident. We must lunch somewhere, having grown ravenously hungry even in Stratford-on-Avon, and left the choice of a place to the driver of our waggonette. Five minutes’ rattling drive over the primitive pavements between the rows of quaint old houses, and we were in a covered passage laid with round stones. A waiter had his hand upon the door by the time we stopped; whisked us out before we knew where we were, and into a low-ceiled parlor on the ground-floor, looking upon the street. A lumbering mahogany table was in the middle of the floor. Clumsy chairs were marshalled against the wainscot. Old prints hung around the walls. The carpet was very substantial and very ugly. A subtle intuition, a something in the air of the room—maybe, an unseen Presence, arrested me just within the door. I had certainly never been here before, yet I stood still, a bewilderment of reminiscence and association enveloping my senses, like fragrant mist.
“Can this be”—I said slowly, feeling for words—“Geoffrey Crayon’s Parlor?”
I tell the incident just as it occurred. Not one of us knew the name of the inn. Our guide-books did not give it, nor had one of the party bethought him or herself that Washington Irving had ever visited Stratford or left a record of his visit. None of the many tourists who had described the town to us had mentioned the antique hostelry. What followed our entrance came to me—a “happening” I do not attempt to explain.
The waiter did not smile. English servants consider the play of facial muscles impertinent when addressing superiors. But he answered briskly, as he had opened the carriage-door.
“Yes, mem! Washington Irving’s parlor! Yes, mem!”
“And this is the Red Horse Inn?”
“The Red Horse Inn! Yes, mem!”
“Where, then, is Geoffrey Crayon’s Sceptre?” looking at the grate.
He vanished, and was back in a moment, holding something wrapped in red plush. A steel poker, clean, bright and slender, and, engraved upon one flat side in neat characters—“Geoffrey Crayon’s Sceptre.”
I took it in speechless reverence.