The Retrospect. Ada Cambridge
I missed. The Tower, which I had never seen at all, that I can remember, I now saw only from the outside—except on the stage at Drury Lane, in the Marriages of Mayfair. The friend and hostess who took me to this play, as the wife of a Colonel of Grenadiers and intimately acquainted with the life of the place, answered for the accuracy of detail in the dramatic representation of it; furthermore, she arranged that I was to explore the great fortress in her company, and took my promise to accept no other guide. I was then within a fortnight of leaving England, and, to my keen regret, the press of last engagements crowded that one out.
Mention of the Tower reminds me of a circumstance that occurred the night before we made the futile compact, than which circumstance nothing happening to me in London impressed me more.
An afternoon at His Majesty's to see Beerbohm Tree in Faust—the new Faust, redeemed, not destroyed, through his human errors; the new Mephistopheles, with the dignity of a god—had provided excitement enough for one day, and we decided to spend the evening quietly at home. Tea, a rest with a book, three only at dinner, were the peaceful preliminaries; then we sank into deep sofa-corners by the drawing-room fire.
"This," said B., "is the opportunity I have been looking for to show you something. They have only just come back from the British Museum."
Two large, thick volumes were produced. And when I opened one of them—the other was a typed rendering of the precious text—I perceived that I was privileged for the moment above the rest of my countrymen. For I was the first of the general public to read some most interesting pages of English history, lost long before the story as we know it was put together for the use of schools.
For three hundred years or more they had probably been in hiding where they had recently been found—in the library of one of the seats of the family to which B. belonged. Consequent upon the death of the owner, her brother-in-law, there had been rummaging about the house, and a quantity of valuable documents had been discovered behind oaken wainscots and elsewhere. A cupboardful, found at a moment when it was not convenient to remove them, mysteriously disappeared, unread, before they could be retrieved; the bundle of letters on my knee had been spared to the family, of which a Lord C., of Charles the Second's reign, had been friend and kin to the writers. B. and the British Museum had been attending to their preservation. They had been carefully arranged and bound, and their condition was so perfect, and the penmanship was so exquisite, that I was able to read the original, in the old lettering of the time, as fast as B. could follow me with the modernised typed copy. We took turn and turn about with this reading and checking, and I suppose it took us hours—we were too absorbed to think of time—to get through the whole, if we did get through it.
They were the letters of that Lord William Russell who was beheaded, and of his wife, the famous Rachel, written during his trial and imprisonment, to and of each other, to Charles the Second, and the King's replies; portions of her journals; a long and minutely detailed account of the whole tragedy, from day to day, almost from hour to hour, by Bishop Burnet, who attended the prisoner—all in their own handwritings; and a more touching and elevating tale and a more distinguished piece of literature I do not remember to have come across. B. showed me a letter from the lady who had typewritten the copy. She said in effect that her sense of the privilege conferred on her with the work was beyond words. By this time, possibly, Lady C. has allowed the documents, family archives though they be, to be published for the benefit of the nation. Unless, indeed, the nation has had them this long time, and I have not known it.
Beheadings, again, remind me of Madame Tussaud's. As a child I had thought it hard lines never to see the famous waxworks, and I never did—until this belated return to where they were. I might not then have done so but for the accident of a Baker Street engagement, which being discharged with unexpected promptitude left us, G. and I, with an hour or two on our hands. The great building, new since he had visited it, stood almost over us, conspicuously proclaiming itself, and with one accord we turned into it. Another lifelong ambition gratified at last!
"You won't go into the Chamber of Horrors, I suppose?" said G., when I had viewed Mrs. Pankhurst and the rest of the notabilities.
"Oh yes," said I, for I was out to see things. And down I went. It was not particularly thrilling to one whose childhood was so far behind, but it was very nasty. A cup of tea in the fresh air of the restaurant was grateful after it. And I felt a particular craving for a bath.
One thing, however, has contrived to haunt me—the mask of Marie Antoinette as at the moment after execution, with the blood-oozing nostrils and the swooning, drowning eyes. For it seemed to me as if that might be very much how she would have looked.
But it strikes me I am not developing the proposition set at the beginning of this chapter to be the text of my discourse.
CHAPTER III
IN BEAUTIFUL ENGLAND
The second evening ashore saw us speeding out of London towards Cambridge and Ely, and beyond to the not-to-be-mentioned spot in the fens which represented the bosom of the family—G.'s family, that is to say, for England held no more trace of mine.
I saw prettier English landscapes afterwards, from the windows of railway carriages, but this first picture of the green country was overwhelmingly beautiful to my eyes. I had forgotten what the country grass was like, and the country trees. Our "English trees" of boulevard and garden had not struck me as inferior to their ancestors in any way, but here, in these glorious free-flung masses, how different they were. Throughout my stay and various ramblings in the land, the trees and the grass were my constant joy. The lawns of English gardens—not bits and scraps that must not be trodden on, but acres of velvet-soft emerald carpet always under one's feet, making the loveliest setting for flowers and tea-parties. It happened in this lucky year that the summer was the finest the land had known for years, and I think I must have had my tea on grass more times in that short English season than in all the years of my sojourn in the brighter country of the South; if I except Bush picnics—and I need not except them, because the aim of Bush campers is to keep as clear of grass as possible. I am not ashamed to say that I could have wept for joy of those English trees and meadows when I first saw them after the long, long exile. Nothing but the publicity of my position prevented it. I could only look and look at them till throat and eyes ached. I could not talk.
The unspeakable memories that thronged the platform at Cambridge! The last moment of one of the most tragical happenings of my life passed me, probably, on the very spot where our train halted. At a later day the ghosts of all the hours belonging to that last moment forgathered with me in the old quadrangles, and I could not believe they had been there for forty years. The first glimpse of the towers of Ely was still more thrilling. That ever I should have lived to see them again! Here, when soon afterwards we prowled about the place—the first I saw of an English provincial town after my return—I found my eye hopelessly out of focus. I ought to have known it better than any spot in the country. I had lived there and married there, and it had been my last English home; yet, but for the cathedral, I should not have recognised it. "This Ely!" I exclaimed. "These little, little, quaint, cramped streets and houses!" I seemed to have seen them in a picture; they were incredible as the whole substance of our city of old. Gradually I got the perspective, but it took two or three visits to do it. The familiar past enmeshed me with its thousand tentacles. "You don't know me, ma'am?" a weather-beaten matron emotionally accosted me on the steps of the post-office—her married daughter drove the cart she hastily descended from on seeing me. "You don't remember me? I was housemaid at W—— when you were there on your honeymoon." One of the young maids, with white satin ribbon in their caps, who stood with their smiling welcomes on the doorstep of the rectory at W—— when our bridal brougham drove up in 1870! The tears jumped to my own eyes as I wrung her toil-worn hands. I nearly kissed her in the open street—and market day too! Old servants, old friends, stretched arms to draw me into the groove they had never left—never been thrown out of, as I was—until the gulf of years sank out of sight, and we fraternised again as if partings had never been. Yet I could not get the "atmosphere," so to