An Old English House
I
IN the year 1931, Montacute House, one of the most perfect examples of an Elizabethan country house in England, was formally taken over by the National Trust and so became a state monument safe from mutilation or destruction. It had been the home of the Phelips family for three hundred and fifty years. A Phelips had built it and a Phelips had sold it. Montacute House is entirely constructed of Ham Hill stone, a golden habitation speaking elegantly enough of the prosperity of the Tudor times when, under the rule of a headstrong dynasty, a moiety of peace was ensured throughout the land of England, and noblemen and gentry came no longer to consider entrenched and moated castles necessary for their safety.
It was in the year 1885 that my father was offered the living of Montacute by Mr. W. R. Phelips, and when I was two years old we moved from Dorchester to our new home, a large Victorian vicarage.
It was my privilege therefore to witness at close quarters the last years of this Reformation family in their celebrated dwelling. When I recall my childhood I often now feel as if I had lived two lives, one in the eighteenth century and one in the twentieth. Overlooking the moss-grown wall of the rook-haunted, garlic-floored spinney down by the old Montacute Mill I well remember in our nursery walks seeing a notice board with the words ‘Beware of Man Traps’ still clearly legible upon its weather-worn wood.
It has been for three generations the business of my family as country clergymen to stand between the landed gentry and the people of the village. This was an office my father was called upon to perform at Montacute. The Squire was a highly cultured gentleman with a kindly disposition, but the traditions of his class were firmly fixed in him. He never questioned his right to be an autocratic ruler over the lives of all those who lived upon his hereditary acres, and the democratic assertiveness that became common among the working classes toward the latter end of the nineteenth century was constantly resented by him.
II
In those days there were beggar women to be found in almost every parish. Nancy Cooper, an old witch woman, would come from her hovel in ‘the hungry air of Odcombe’ to gather sticks in the Montacute Park. She was dressed in rags, looped together fold upon fold, and in these dramatic robes of her trade she would always be ready, for a copper or two, to sing her song of ‘Three Jolly Farmers,’ and to dance a jig for the brutal diversion of those in the village whose rude tastes harked back to a Hogarthian appreciation of the monstrous. The Squire never interfered with the activities of this aged drab. Perhaps he regarded her as part of his feudal estate, like some twisted tree that he would by no means have his woodsman tamper with, having grown used to seeing it.
Nancy Cooper, so our cook Ellen would tell us children as we hung about her skirts in the kitchen, had once upon a time been a beautiful girl living in Montacute and ‘dressed all in lace.’ Ellen was the daughter of the aged clerk whose duty it was to say ‘Amen’ to my father’s prayers in church, and she shared not a few of his obdurate prejudices. ‘Too gay, too gay,’ was the significant utterance we always heard in explanation of Nancy’s downfall. Her bastard daughter, Betsy, whose birth had been the cause of her disgrace, was the old beggar woman’s constant companion, and, now grown to middle life, was little less tattered than was her mother. Her white bloodless lips our governess, Miss Beale, used to attribute to the drinking of vinegar.
This Betsy I came to know well. She called continually at our back door for meat and cocoa and I used to talk with her as she sat on the box in the yard. ‘We mid put our trust in Jesus,’ she once said to me; ‘we mid trust he when the cuckoo hollos, we mid trust he when corn be cut, we mid trust he when sleet and rain do fall and frosties do crispy the turnpikes come Christmas . . . but oh, deary I — see how terrible they did serve ’en!’
After such a speech I would stand wondering at the shrewd scraps of understanding in so ignorant a pate, and would watch her trudge out of the back gate with her sticks and her orts firmly held under her arm and her mud-stained garments flapping in the wind. Once when my brother John and I met her in the Odcombe Street we tried to get her to show us where her mother was buried. She went pathetically stumbling to and fro over the graves with tears rolling down her dirt-ingrained cheeks, repeating again and again, ‘I be so mazed, I be, I did n’t mind now where she do lie — she were a blessed mother and no mistake. ’T is the nights when I do miss she terrible bad — the rats out on boards.’
During the years of the Great War the authorities took her out of her dilapidated cottage with its broken thatch and put her into the Yeovil workhouse. Here she pined like a caged rook and in a few months suffered the final indignity of a pauper’s burial in the town cemetery.
III
The Squire’s mother must have been about the same age as Nancy Cooper, and yet how different had been the life of this other human female of high rank!
I do not think I have ever seen an old lady with so delicate a complexion. Even in her great age the poise of her head was light and graceful as a rose upon its stalk. The moulding of her skull was as fragile as that of the most precious porcelain and there was a flush upon her cheeks that reminded me of the inside of some of the sea shells in my father’s cabinet. Her head was as ethereal in appearance as was Shelley’s head, and she was, as a matter of fact, the daughter of Shelley’s cousin Harriet, the poet’s first love, the same who forsook him to bestow the favors of her beauty upon the wealthy Squire of Coker Court in Somerset.
When old Nancy and her daughter would, with crooked spines, be ‘sticking’ under the great Montacute sycamores, crooning to each other on the eternal subjects of back and belly, this little great lady could be seen walking along the drive that ran under the avenue to Galpin’s Lodge; unless she had chosen, as she sometimes did, the damp woodland path of Park Cover, a woodland path bordered by a shelving bank thick with mosses out of which in the autumn slippery toadstools of brightest scarlet would grow. Who ever knew the long, long thoughts that were revolving in that solitary old woman’s head, so aristocratic and so ancient, as she trod the ancestral woods of her husband’s family, which, during those mild wet months before Christmas, never ceased from their melancholy dripping?
Her husband, the Squire’s father, inherited eighteenth-century tastes, and through his love of gaming had so compromised the Phelips estate that it never afterward recovered. In the hall there is an oil painting of him standing life-size in his park, tall hat in hand, the great house he ruined reduced by perspective to the size of a doll’s house.
Near Ilchester there are two farms called Sock and Beerly. These farms at one time rounded off the Phelips property to the north. I used to be told by the country people this story about them. The gambling Squire was staying at Weymouth, and on a wet afternoon, having nothing to do, staked a bet on one of two flies that were crawling up the windowpane. When his friend’s fly reached the wooden plinth which marked the winning post of this fantastic circus race, the idle sparks who were watching heard the Master of Montacute mysteriously exclaim, ‘There go Sock and Beerly.’
One of my earliest recollections of Mrs. Phelips, Senior, is of her driving me and her grandson Gerard, who was my own age, to Yeovil. Arrived in the town, she told the coachman to draw up at the toyshop which stood opposite ‘The Choughs.’ On the proprietor’s obsequiously hurrying out to the carriage door, he was instructed to give us our choice of all his wares. I was so bewildered as I was ushered round the crowded passages of the small shop that I selected a painted tricycle that went by clockwork, afterward envying the cooler judgment of my companion, who brought back for our inspection in the gallery a very expensive, and apparently inexhaustible, conjuring box.
Often we would be invited to a nursery tea with the four Phelips children. We would walk down the long drive on those winter afternoons with our black shining house shoes in a basket, and Miss Beale sedately leading the way. I remember choking at one of those teas and being carried behind the heavy winter curtains so that I might recover from my embarrassment in private, and how before making my appearance once more at the candlelighted tea table I climbed up on the sill to look out of the high window and was amazed to find that in the courtyard below all was as bright as day. In that one glimpse through the small glass panes I received an impression of the enchantment of moonshine that has remained with me all my life — the fountain, the dovecot, the stone flags, the very weeds in their crevices edged with an exact hoarfrost whiteness.
It was Marjorie, the elder of the two Phelips girls, who had put me behind the curtain. She had always protected me since, under my brother John’s direction, we had acted Macbeth and I had played the part of her little son, the son of Lady Macduff, piping out to her the words ‘As birds do, mother.’ The Squire, I remember, invented a method of imitating the sound of thunder by beating a large sheet of tin with a broom handle, and was amused because, for reasons of temperance, my mother would not agree to having wine served to us at the banquet, but in its stead gave us raspberry vinegar.
IV
The interior of Montacute House stirred my imagination — the armory, for example, with helmets and cuirasses used at the time of the Great Rebellion.
Whenever I passed through this high square-shaped room I experienced a kind of Ivanhoe romance, and, although the Phelips family came into prominence after the Wars of the Roses, echoes from the days of mediæval chivalry would be clearly audible to me as I looked up at the weapon-hung walls of the civil antechamber. The main stairway was exciting also, the long stone slabs worn uneven by so much Phelips shoe leather; but most wonderful of all it was to step suddenly into the immense gallery that stretched one hundred and eighty feet from end to end of the house.
How the lonely memories of the old gallery would be scattered as, with the careless voices of living children, we burst in upon its emptiness, and how hollow, how resonant, its bare boards would sound as our quick feet went pattering, racing down them, unheedful of everything but the impinging actuality of our moment’s holiday! How swiftly, too, on a rainy afternoon the time would go by in so spacious a playing room! The great rocking-horse was kept there, the highest-stepping dapple gray ever built by a carpenter, left alone through so many long hours to contemplate with painted eye the procrastinating twilights of the morning and evening shading their way through sixteen windows, along the coved ceiling of this vast Elizabethan corridor.
The rain would beat against one or other of the high oriel windows at each end of the gallery, where to the south the village was overlooked, and at the other end the stately ornamental North Gardens with their dark gusty yew trees standing like royal sentinels against the meadows that rose into view beyond the privileged enclosure.
V
How soon death — impersonal, implacable — removes the fairy-tale characters from the dream of our lives! Where now is the old Squire, and where now the young Squire, and where the second daughter of the house, whose hair was of the finest golden texture — the hair of a princess in a storybook, as indeed she always seemed, whether leaning from the top of one of the garden walls to pick an apricot sweetened by the summer sun, or, in a wide summer hat, seated at the back of one of the Pitt Pond pleasure boats.
I do not think any occurrence I have observed in my life has given me sharper understanding of the insubstantiality of all temporal values than the separation of this house from the Phelipses. How completely for centuries they had dominated the countryside of South Somerset! They sold their hereditary farms and disposed of their hereditary Manor with apparent indifference. It had not ever been in their style to wear their hearts upon their sleeves, and the outer world was never permitted to gauge at what emotional cost they were finally divided from the wood and stones and pasture lands that had for so long been theirs in perpetual freehold.
As a boy I used to visit a bedridden Montacute laborer. He was so old that to move himself at all he had to lay hands on a rope end tied to the bottom rail of his rusty bedstead. This old man initiated me into an odd tradition that must have been current for generations in the village. The Phelips crest represents a blazing fire held in an iron cresset, and in years gone by some inventive mind among the commonality must have suggested the following explanation of the sign. In a far period of antiquity, even before Thomas Phelips possessed himself of ‘half a burgage’ in the Montacute Parish, the rightful heir of the property had been burned to death. The King of England, hearing of the deed, had given orders that the Phelips family should for all times carry the flaming beacon as their crest — ‘to mind ’em of it for everlasting.’
The crest is familiar to everybody who lives in Montacute, and has been so for centuries. It is placed on each side of the great gates of the west drive and is painted clear for all eyes to see on the swinging tavern board that hangs outside the Phelips Arms at the top of the Borough. Without doubt the explanation of its meaning communicated to me by old John Hann on his deathbed was the one generally accepted by the apple-orchard laborers and Ham Hill quarrymen with heads besotted with cider. To this day I remember certain of the old man’s more dramatic expressions. ‘Thick sign on top of they girt posties along by Vicarage, do tell o’ sommat and no mistake,’ and again, ‘My granfer would say, God Almighty will shift ’em for it, may be in thy time, may be in thy childer’s time, but sure as day comes he’ll unroosty ’em.’
I still upon occasions meet a member of this family, the eldest daughter of Mrs. Ingilby, the Marjorie Phelips who so long ago placed me behind the curtains. This granddaughter of the Squire is a tall girl and remarkably handsome, her features carrying upon them the very stamp to be observed in many of the portraits of the old-world Phelipses still left hanging in the great hall of Montacute House. The least taint of worldiness is remote from her character. Indeed, I often feel that the unassuming goodness of her nature offers a reproof to all those who are tempted to stake their interest on the advantages of social preëminence in a world where the possession of every commodity is untrustworthy, where the footing of even kings is precarious, and where life itself is for every man and for every woman as fugitive as is an inconsequential dream.