I must catch the post with this. Love to Emmie.
Yours ever,
F. H.
THE LUFTON PAPERS: 1818
THE LUFTON PAPERS: 1818
To The Rt. Honble. The Earl of Thame Copley, Northamptonshire
The Parsonage, Great Bramfield, Gloucestershire May 20th, 1818
MY DEAR LORD,
I have the honour to inform you that I mean to be your guest at Copley towards the middle of July, – for how long I cannot tell. I will engage to quit Northamptonshire as soon as I have secured a more agreeable invitation elsewhere. Had I been able, this year, to arrange my usual succession of summer visits I should have done my best to avoid your lordship’s hospitality. But my affairs are somewhat confused; I am out of a place and mean to give my acquaintance no peace until they have done something for me.
I therefore find myself obliged to depend upon a sort of invitation issued by Lady Thame, in the autumn, which I choose to construe into a firm engagement. She may have forgotten it, or believe that she has not absolutely committed herself in the matter, in which case you will be so good as to inform her that she has, for I intend to come, little as you both may desire my company.
I believe, however, that I shall be tolerably welcome, since guests at Copley are shy birds. In autumn you shoot them, in winter you ride over them, and in spring you let loose your pedigree bulls upon them. July, so I have heard, is as safe a month as any.
I need no assurance of your lordship’s concern for my health and happiness. All my friends have been, these six months, so anxious to know how I do that they have ventured upon no enquiries, lest they might learn that my accident, last November, proved fatal. They believe me dead, I suppose, and are very sorry for it. Most of them were at Gracedieu when this misfortune befell me. Your lordship witnessed it and was so good as to inform me that I had broken my neck. ‘By God, Pronto!’ said you, ‘I believe that you have broken your neck.’ ‘By God,’ said I, lying in the ditch, ‘I believe that I have.’ But you were gone on by then, and killed, so they told me after, near Ulverscroft. Some cottagers came to my assistance and carried me on a hurdle to my inn. My neck, as it turned out, was safe, but I had broken a leg and three ribs.
You were all gone next day, but I lay perforce for three weeks in that inn, doing my best to die. In addition to my injuries I had got a fever from lying in the rain, untended, for so long. I must have an excellent constitution for I began to mend and crept off to my father’s parsonage, an earth to which I return when wounded in the chase, but about which I keep pretty mum at other times. The fever has at last departed and I can hobble about. But I doubt that I am perfectly recovered, for this letter won’t do at all. It is scarcely in Pronto’s style.
Pronto, however, is not dead. He sleepeth. Another week or so may see him out of the wood and he shall then write a prodigiously civil letter to your lordship, securing his invitation to Copley. In the meanwhile,
I have the honour to be,
With great insincerity,
Your most obliged and faithful servant
MILES LUFTON (Pronto to you, old boy!)
May 21st
I thought that I had torn up my effusion to Ld T: but here it is in my desk! I shall keep it as evidence of my reviving spirits. A week ago I should have found no amusement in composing it. I wish that I had the assurance to send it!
But I have torn up another letter which I began and never finished, – to Ludovic. His neglect I cannot overlook. For the rest I care nothing. I know that they value me only as I am useful to them. My vanity was wounded when I learnt how easily they could forget me. But I thought, I believed, that Ludovic had a real regard for me. Our friendship is now of many years’ duration; he knew me long before Pronto came upon the scene and I have ever been a loyal friend to him. If he were to be near dying, I should not treat him so. He should have written. He should have showed some concern.
I must remember that he never does write letters unless he is riding some hobby horse. His concern is all reserved for the muses; he will weep at a poem but not for a friend. I have always known him for a heartless little monster. But life here is such a dead bore that I wish somebody would write to me.
Sunday
I hobbled to church this morning. It is the first time that I have got so far. I was in pain for most of the Service and could not sleep as all the rest of the world did. George preached today as my father has a touch of his lumbago. Only Macbeth could have remained awake when my brother preaches and I doubt if even he could have listened. My eyes were open but I can recollect nothing save the text: The children of Israel brought a willing offering unto the Lord (Exodus 35, 29). He preached for an hour but it would have taken him less than a minute to make his point: Those who will not pay tithes in full must certainly expect eternal damnation.
Sukey and Anna slept with their heads sunk forwards so as not to crush the feathers in their Sunday bonnets. In my sister, slumber was excusable; I would have joined her if I could. But Anna should have stayed awake; a wife should listen when her husband preaches, however tedious he may be. In the Park pew, over against ours, I heard a rumbling like the Severn Bore. It was Cousin Ned snoring. I spied on him through the old knot hole in the wood; when we were boys we poked marbles through it. He had some half-dozen of his children there with him. They gaped and picked their noses. I wonder he don’t teach them noughts and crosses; that used to be the great game in the Park pew during sermon time, in the old days. But not in ours; any levity would have distressed my mother. We sat to attention, all seven of us, and I believe that we were not a little proud of my father’s sermons.
Mrs. Ned was not at church. She lay in last night, so they say, of another boy. I suppose we shall have the bells ring out this afternoon.
The monument that they have set up to my mother is the most frightful I ever saw. It is a bas-relief representing one of the pyramids of Egypt. At its base, beneath a willow tree, sits, or rather squats, a disconsolate female. But they have done better in the text that they chose:
Strength and dignity are her clothing
And the law of kindness is on her tongue.
The law of kindness!
Is it a blessing or a curse to have known no other, through the first years of infancy?
‘Nothing that you do, my dearest Miles, can make me in the least uneasy, so long as I am satisfied that you feel as you ought.’
I had been stealing green gooseberries and she found me ready to vomit in the kitchen garden.
‘Our feelings,’ said she, ‘must ever be our best guide. How do you feel, my love?’
‘Very bad, Ma’am.’
‘That is conscience, Miles. Conscience will always torment us when we have done wrong.’
I have never doubted it, and got rid of conscience as soon as I could, behind the potting shed.
There go the bells! What a busy fellow is Ned, to be sure! I forget how many he has got, but Mrs. Ned lies in every year about this time.
In the old days my mother would have been off to the Park this afternoon with a little crock of our rum butter. It was incomparable, and it went to any house in the parish when a child was born. But we don’t make it now. Sukey has forgotten the receipt, – she is the least housewifely of my sisters. As for Anna, she never knew it; my mother was dead before Anna married into the family. We don’t take presents to our great cousins at the Park nowadays, nor do game and peaches come from them to us. All those pleasant customs are quite gone over. Though, in justice to Ned, I must remember that he did come to see me when I was ill. His appearance put the household into quite a fluster, for no Chadwick had crossed our threshold for close upon two years. He sat for half an hour beside my bed, breathing heavily, and looking as if he wished to say something cordial but getting no further than a gruff enquiry after my bowels. He was not quite sober, but nowadays he seldom is.
I continually look out of my window as if I expected to see my mother set off with the rum butter. I could ha
ve followed her course for quite a while, across Parsonage Lane, through the little gate, and among the trees in the park. She had her own way of walking; she neither sauntered nor hurried, but sailed onwards with a smooth easy motion, like some handsome ship gliding over the sea. Wherever she went, she always seemed to be expecting a pleasant end to her walk.
Wednesday
Spirits at zero this morning, although I feel a great deal better. If I have to remain at Bramfield much longer I shall run mad. That is the worst of recovery, – one grows more observant. It is all so dreary, so unutterably dreary here now! When I reflect upon the past I can scarcely bear it. Not only is the loss of my mother daily, hourly, felt, but my father is but the shadow of what he was. His mental powers are failing and his temper is very uncertain. Of the seven children who grew up here, one is dead and three have found other homes. Sukey, George and I are melancholy survivors, nor is the addition of Anna likely to raise our spirits.
Have made a resolution to be kinder to poor Sukey. Her peevish, spiteful ways are very provoking, but her lot is hard, – penned up here. She has no amusement, no distractions. George is an affectionate brother, but he was always a dull dog and his marriage extinguished the last vital spark of sociability. Six months of George and Anna are too much for me; no wonder Sukey grows sour! I wish she could get a husband. She used to be a pretty girl, but her bloom was short. It might revive if she could but get away. If Harriet would invite her to Cullenstown, for a month or so, she might recover her spirits, even if she did not get a husband. Have I not cause to know what havoc such a life may work upon a woman’s heart? If another, far more amiable than Sukey, had not grown hard and bitter I might now be able to call myself a happy man. To live unloved, disregarded by others, is to become, in the course of years, unloving and censorious. We deride old maids, but they cannot help their narrow hearts and spiteful tongues; life has made them what they are.
What could have induced George to marry Anna Cotman? That thought was uppermost in all our minds when we assembled for the wedding. I remember Kitty’s explanation:
‘’Tis all the consequence of Mamma’s death. Poor George was very lonely and wretched and Anna was by. Sukey is to blame. She should have tried to be a more cheerful companion to him.’
He had just taken Orders and was doing the duties for my father at Stokehampton. He was wretched and Anna was by. That must have been the way of it. But Anna had always been by; we were united in wishing that she were not. Mrs. Cotman lived, with her five daughters, in The Red House, just beyond the village, upon the Tewkesbury road. She was the kind of woman whom one cannot imagine as a wife, – only as a widow, as born wearing weeds. Most of the Cotman girls were oppressively lively, but Anna had the spirits of a slug. I think that a determination to be dismal is the most positive trait in her character. My mother always exhorted us to dance with her at children’s balls; each boy must stand up with her at least once, because ‘poor little Anna’ never could get partners. George, in those days, objected as loudly to this kind of charity as did Eustace and I. We felt that Anna preferred to be slighted.
Little did we think that we should all be trooping to church one fine summer’s day, triumphant Cotmans, disconsolate Luftons, George with hay fever, and Anna, awkward and aggrieved as ever, in a prodigious white bonnet and a Brussels veil which (so like her) she contrived to catch and tear upon the latchet of the church door.
All through that ceremony we thought of death, for it was but six months since we had gathered at my mother’s grave-side. And I perceived then that home was home no longer. It was she who had made it so. She had bound us all together, obliging us to love one another because she did, so tenderly. She wrote continually to each, giving news of the rest. When we returned nothing was changed, and the old days were there to welcome us. But gone now for ever, – the children finally scattered, bound only by ties of memory. We buried our childhood in that grave. Bramfield Parsonage was thereafter merely the house where our father lived and where, when we paid him a visit, we might scan ‘the marks of that which once had been.’
I cannot recall the day, the hour, when this stealthy door closed for ever behind me. I was at Bramfield in October. I suppose that I said goodbye to her and rode away, unaware that this was the final farewell, – that I had weighed anchor and set out upon a voyage from which there could be no return. But whether it was a Monday or a Tuesday I know not, or if it rained or shone, or if I turned at the corner of the lane to wave to her. The leaves must have been falling. When we buried her the snow was on the ground.
Thoughts of that inclement day, when we stood in the snow about an open grave, were so strong upon me during the wedding that I was amazed, coming out of church, to see the lilacs in bloom. Thrushes were singing and the glebe meadow was full of buttercups. Clocks had ticked. The earth had rolled round to summer. But we had been left in the snow.
KAI CHRONOU PROUBAINE POUS!
I forget who said that. I must ask my father. He will like to be asked; I shall do so at dinner. It may give us a little rational conversation and protect us from the eternal bickering of Sukey and Anna.
Thursday
I did ask, and might as well have held my tongue, for any hope of enlivening the dinner-table. My father was in a very ill humour, which is not to be wondered at, for the dinner was abominable. I wish it could be determined whether Sukey or Anna is mistress here. A dinner ordered by either would scarcely charm the gourmet, but we might at least have some consistency in our discomforts. As it is, each insists that it is the other’s province. Nanny, our cook, does her best, but I sometimes suspect that she procures our meat from a knacker.
‘Kai chronou,’ says my father, ‘… never heard of it! Pray Sukey, what d’ye call this?’
‘Mutton, sir.’
‘Mutton? I’m glad to know it. I had thought it might be old shoe leather.’
We champ in silence until an indistinct mutter is heard from Anna about a hare-lip. One can never be quite certain of what she says, but I gather that the midwife told Goody Wellbright, who told Nanny, who told Anna, that Ned’s new infant has a hare-lip.
‘Not very likely!’ snaps Sukey.
I foresee a controversy which will outlast a night in Russia. We shall inspect the child at the christening, but that will settle nothing. An idea, once lodged in Anna’s mind, is a tenacious guest. George supported her, in conjugal loyalty I suppose, for he can know nothing of the matter. Copley, and Thame growing maudlin over his wine, would be Paradise to this.
After the women had gone my father became more genial and asked what my Greek line had been.
‘And the foot of time advanced …’ said he. ‘Let me consider … I fancy it is to be found in Aristophanes. But I believe that it may be a quotation from some other poet.’
After some cogitation he went off to look up the passage and finally pronounced it to be, in his opinion, a quotation from one of the lost plays of Euripides. Being once got on to Euripides he grew quite cheerful, and discoursed for some time upon the merits of this neglected poet. Later he showed me some translations that he has made. I am glad that he should still have the spirit for that sort of thing. His verses are scholarly and elegant, as is all his work; I used to admire it immensely but I have lately come to think that he translates the sense only. Of the sentiment there is little indication. Does a woman describe her probable rape thus?
Perforce the hostile alcove to ascend!
When bewailing her murdered infant does she say:
Alas! Still starts th’ involuntary tear!
I do not believe these lines sounded so to the Greeks, when pronounced in their theatres. It is the sound, the heavy tramp in the syllables, which has taken so strong a hold upon my fancy in this line about Time’s foot. My father can see nothing remarkable in it. I sometimes wonder if he really believes that there were such people as the Greeks, although he has spent a lifetime in deciphering their literature. He refuses to believe that there can be merit in Ludovic�
��s great dote, the marbles which poor Ld Elgin brought back from Athens. He has not seen them and Humphs! and Pshaws! at any suggestion that they can bear comparison with some acknowledged masterpiece, such as the Apollo Belvedere.
‘Are they not great clumsy, barbarous things?’ said he.
I said my piece, learned from Ludovic, that they are intended to represent gods rather than men.
‘And how,’ asks my father, ‘may gods differ from men?’
‘Were they not immortal, sir?’
‘Why, what nonsense is this? You don’t suppose that there ever were any such individuals, do you?’
‘No, sir. But the Greeks supposed so.’
‘The more fools they!’
Saturday
George gone to Stokehampton. When he goes over for the duties he sleeps at a farm.
We have suffered all day from a superfluity of icebergs. My father can talk of nothing else. He has been reading an article upon the Arctic Regions in The Gentleman’s Magazine. It appears that an iceberg exposes but one-tenth of its bulk above the surface of the water, concealing nine-tenths below, for the inconvenience of shipping. Since I never intend to visit the Arctic, this peril does not appal me.
I had letters yesterday. Ludovic wrote, sending a song for Sukey. There is no direction on his letter but I imagine that he writes from Brailsford. He says of the song that:
All the women are singing it. The words are striking and you may guess to whom they are attributed when I tell you that T. Moore sang them at Ly Dysart’s one day, and would not name the author, – since when there has been a scramble for copies, and no album is complete without one.
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