Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

the information of whose members the | judge what interest there is in a minute account of her travels is written. Latin account, given by a traveller at the end

is her native tongue, though she knew enough of Greek to be able to give the sisters an explanation of a few Greek phrases that occur in her story. In describing the Euphrates she says that the current is like that of the Rhone, but that the river is broader, whence it has been inferred that she came from Gaul; and this conclusion is confirmed by the peculiarities of her Latin style. She appears to have been a person of some consideration; for she was everywhere courteously received by the bishops and leading clergy of the places she visited, and was furnished with a guard of soldiers in travelling from Sinai to Egypt.

of the fourth century, of a journey from Mount Sinai to Egypt, thence to Jerusalem, to Mesopotamia, and finally to Constantinople, and how much information may be derived from it both as to the topography of the countries visited and the liturgical usages of the Church of the time.

We had intended to conclude with a discussion of the newly discovered Gospel of St. Peter; but our article has already run to such a length, that we postpone the discussion to another opportunity. And we are not sorry to do so; for an edition of this Gospel has been promised by Dr. Swete, the Regius professor of divinity at Cambridge; and other commentaries on it are likely

NOTE.

completely independent of any previously known. It does not contain the twelve verses of St. Mark. The Athenæum informs us "that a copy has already been made and is under the examination of wellknown English editors."

Gamurrini selects as the person best fulfilling these conditions St. Silvia of Aquitaine, a sister of Rufinus, prefect to be published, of which we may hope of the East under Theodosius the Great, | to avail ourselves. of whose journey from Jerusalem to Egypt there is a notice in the "Historia Through an oversight which we much Lausiaca" of Palladius. And we acqui- regret we failed to notice an announcement esce in this conclusion, notwithstand-made in the Athenæum of August 6, 1892, ing a difficulty raised by Dr. Bernard, by Mr. Rendel Harris, of the discovery at who translated this pilgrimage for the Mount Sinai "of a new text of the old Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society. He Syriac version of the Gospels (Curetonian remarks that if this narrative be Sil- Syriac)." This will be a new second-cenvia's, Palladius must have greatly ex-tury authority for the text of the Gospels aggerated her asceticism; for Palladius tells how Silvia rebuked the luxuriousness of a deacon, Jubinus, her companion in travel, who, in consequence of the extreme heat, was guilty of the laxity of washing himself in cold water. "Here am I," she said, "now in my sixtieth year, and never has face or foot of any of my limbs touched water, save the tips of my fingers, and that for the sake of communion. Even when very ill, and the physicians ordered me to take a bath, I would not yield. Never have I slept on a bed or travelled in a litter." But this pilgrim complains of the steepness of Mount Sinai, which prevented her from being carried up in a chair and obliged her to walk; while on Mount Nebo she only walked in places where she could not ride on an ass. Whoever she was it was easy to

[blocks in formation]

From Temple Bar. RENT DAY.

BY RHODA BROUGHTON, AUTHOR OF "GOOD-BYE, SWEETHEART," ETC. Two men were riding slowly along a muddy country lane on a mild Febru ary afternoon. The younger was in pink, and a large stain on one shoulder, an irretrievably damaged hat, and a lame horse proved that he had not escaped some of the casualties incident to the chiefest among the plaisirs étranges of the Anglo-Saxon male. The question which he was putting as to the number of miles still left for him to traverse before reaching a railway

station, which he named to traverse | younger man had to dismount and come

at the foot-pace rendered necessary by the condition of his horse - proved him to be a stranger in the neighborhood. The other, a hardy old man, to whom one would not have given the nigh eighty years of which he had just been boasting to his chance-met companion, was jogging along on a fat cob nearly as old-with relation to the smaller dole of life allotted to horses than to men -as himself.

"I can show you a short cut that will save you a good three miles. Turn in at this gate to the left, and cross that pasture as far as the copse, then into the Denbury road, which you must follow for a few hundred yards; then take the second — no, the third, turn to the right. But stay, I had better come with you and show you the way myself -it will be safer. Oh, no apologies time is no great object to me!"

The person addressed, conscious of an ominous feeling that, left to his own unaided instincts, the short cut was destined to have but an ironical sound for him and his poor limping animal, which was not even his own, but a friendly mount, felt too heartily grateful for the old man's offer to make any but a very slender protest against the trouble it entailed upon him. They crossed the pasture to the copse; entered the highroad; left it; and after many devious turns and twists through by-lanes and bridle-paths, farm-yards, and spinneys, found themselves once again in a highroad, and faced by the gates and stone-dolphin topped pillars of what was evidently a place of some importance. The old squire rode up to the gates, through whose elegant wroughtiron work peeps of an Elizabethan house standing at a little distance were visible; and the other followed him, protesting somewhat and asking,

to his aid. The bolt yielded at last and they passed through, the stranger wondering a little at the evidence of long disuse in the rusty fastening, and still more so in the high, white, last year's grasses that had grown up, and now limply waved right across the entrance. Similar grasses nay, more, what amounted to grass-covered the approach, along which it was evident that no wheeled vehicle, nor apparently any human foot, had for many months passed.

"Is the place uninhabited ?" asked the stranger, in surprise, and looking with a startled admiration at the noble old dwelling-house, which, gabled and black framed, stood at the end of the approach, within two hundred yards of the king's highway, as so many houses of that date did; causing one to wonder whether in those happy days of elbowroom and leisure there were few passers-by to stare in upon their privacy, or that privacy itself was a gift less prized in that simpler period.

He had no sooner put the question than he felt it to have been a superfluous one.

Uninhabited? Well, it was hardly likely that any dweller, save the bat, the owl, and the hawk, would care to inhabit a house where scarce a whole pane of glass survived in the diamonded casements; when through the vacancies thus made could be seen fragments of the beautiful Tudor ceilings lying on the uneven boards of the bare oak floors; when the wind could be heard sighing dolorously through the lady's bower, and the flutter of owls' wings, disturbed by the sound of the horses' feet, from the banqueting hall. And yet it was evident that it was not because it had become unsafe for human habitation that the house had been abandoned. The walls still stood stout and firm, as when the Tudor roses in the great-nailed hall door had been copied — with a difference from blooming ones; the roof still showed a compact array of slim red tiles, though the vivid moss and the ingenious lichen had made them their own; the graceful 4282

"But is not this private property? Shall not we be trespassing?"

"I think you will find that we are not taken to task," answered the other dryly, stooping from his cob, and trying with fingers and whip handle to pull up the bolt that secured the two leaves of the portal. But it was so stiff that the

[blocks in formation]

cluster of slender chimneys was still | page boy, a poor little chap who was ready to transmit the fumes of baked so frightened of the bogies that he had

meats to the thin bluish air above them. But it was evidently long since they had been used, except as nestingplaces for jackdaws. The problem of the desertion of a house, at once so beautiful and, despite the neglect to which it had been subjected, so easily to be again fitted for human habitation, seemed insoluble; and the younger man, forgetting his lame horse and his train, looked with interested inquiry at his companion for le mot de l'énigme.

"I do not understand," he said. "What does it mean? Why is such a fine specimen of early Tudor architecture given over to the bats and owls?" His companion gave vent to a sound between a laugh and a sigh.

"A good many people beside you have asked that question," he said; "it has puzzled the country-side for some years, and it was only the other day that the cause of it transpired. But it is a long story," he added, without attempting to enter upon it; either really shirking a relation which he must have so often been called upon to make; or with that wish to be pressed for his reminiscences which is an old man's coquetry. "You will not have too much time if you wish to get to Holmhurst Station by daylight."

"Could not you give me a short abstract of it before our roads part ?" asked the younger man; but his companion for the moment did not seem to hear. He was sitting with the reins on his cob's neck, staring up at one particular window on the second floor, above which a row of swallows' nests showed under the eaves and between the grotesquely carved oak heads that ornamented the spouts.

[blocks in formation]

"It is a lonely sort of place, and in that particular winter there were a great number of burglaries committed in the neighborhood, and the police had entirely failed to get hold of the burglars. One morning, the maids and Alfred - Alfred was the page's name — I do not know why I remember it— were frightened out of their wits by finding the footmarks of a man in the snow, going all round the house. Probably he was only some one who had taken a drop too much to keep out the cold, and lost his way on his road home from Market Brigton; but nothing would have persuaded them of that, and they begged the old lady, with tears in their eyes, to get at least one of the bailiff's men—she had put down her stables too - to sleep in the house. Not a bit of it!

She took a revolver to bed with her, and told the frightened women and boy, if the thieves came, to direct them to her room, and if the sight of her in her nightcap did not scare away the boldest burglar that ever handled a 'jemmy,' her name was not Jane Winstanley! Oh, she was a fine old lady!"

"Then it was not in her lifetime that the place was deserted?" asked the other, endeavoring by this question to recall the old gentleman to a topic that interested him more than the valor of any previous owner of the Manor House.

"Oh, bless your heart, no, she lived and died here."

As he spoke he picked up the reins off his cob's neck, and saying, "We "That was the old lady's bedroom," really ought to be going," put his horse he said; "the old lady the late man's in motion again; then, shaking his mother, you know. She was a good-head several times as he took a final plucked one if ever there was. I have look at the solitary pile, standing alknown that old woman live for a whole most pathetical in its desolation against winter quite alone in this old barrack the evening heaven, - that winter of '-6, when, for some reason or other, she had to retrench, and had reduced her establishment to three or four maidservants and a little

"I was very fond of her, dear old lady, and though you would not think it to look at it now, I have spent some of the jolliest days of my life under

[ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

"Oddly enough I was in the house at knowledge of land than the majority of the time when it happened."

"When what happened? You forget," with a faint tinge of impatience, "that I am quite in the dark as to what you are alluding to.”

them. She never would have an agent, but managed her property — it was not very large and was very compactwith the help of a bailiff, a rough fellow enough she had a horror of what she

The narrator waved his hand slightly, called a fine gentleman - whom she with a deprecating gesture :·

"I am coming to it, I am coming to it! You must not hurry me, and you will have plenty of time between here and Holmhurst - for though I cannot promise to go quite as far as the town itself with you, I will set you well on your way to hear a longer story than mine."

[ocr errors]

ruled with a rod of iron. It was one of her favorite sayings that Mr. Briggs's axiom was hers, 'If you want a thing done, do it yourself. Among the things which she always insisted on applying her rule to was the collection of her own rents. Nothing would have induced her to depute it to her bailiff, though she had a faith, which some

He paused for a moment, then be- times appeared to her friends exaggergan:

"It must be nine-and-twenty years ago-no, thirty — no, I am wrong, twenty-nine it will be twenty-nine years ago, the end of September, since I was staying there for a shooting party. The old lady had some very pretty shooting-it is all let now, to a button-maker from Birmingham, who brings down a pack of commercial gents every year-and we assembled on the 28th of September, because Mrs. Winstanley liked to have a jolly gathering round her on her rent day. She had been left a widow very young, had complete control over the estate-she was an heiress — and the children of whom there were four, two of each sex -and I suppose what had begun in being a necessity, ended in choice — I mean her high-handed way of ordering and managing everything about the place, including the boys, even after they had left school. They had been so used to it that they did not seem to feel it, and I suppose to them she had always appeared father and mother in

ated, in his honesty. It was before these pleasant days, when almost every poor devil of a land-owner has to return twenty or thirty per cent. to his tenants every rent day, and look as if he liked it. She was a good landlord; you scarcely ever saw a farm-building out of repair, or a cottage that was not tight and weather-proof, on her property. She generally, in consequence, succeeded in getting a good class of tenants, and they mostly paid up to a penny; so that, unlike what she would have done had she been alive now, she herself enjoyed her rent day, and had always some stock job on hand with three or four of the principal tenants, to show the pleasant feeling that subsisted on both sides.

"For years she had made it a habit to have a houseful for Michaelmas; a houseful which was expected to stay on well into the week of the first. And the neighborhood had grown to regard the dance with which the party concluded in the light of as fixed an event as the recurrence of Michaelmas itself.

Thirty years ago we were less sophisti- quite without éclat, but also quite withcated and more stay-at-home than in out scandal. The younger son, Randal, the present day, and, at least in this though less colorless than his brother, neighborhood, people did not go to was of a rather neutral-tinted charScotland nearly so much, nor stay acter too, and I remember their mother there nearly so late as they do now, so saying to me once, à propos of both, that by the end of September most of 'I used always to be told that two the houses had refilled for the winter. negatives make an affirmative; but in On the occasion I speak of the old lady the case of the boys' father and me, was in great spirits-she was a most two affirmatives have succeeded in maksociable soul, and at that time not really ing two negatives.' Still, though she old because she had succeeded in col- had this little fling at them, she was a lecting an even larger number than most tender, doting mother, and quite usual of gay young people college wrapped up in her children. friends of the elder son, brother officers of the younger one - he had just joined the -th Hussars-young lady friends of the girls; the old house where the bats and the jackdaws have had it all their own way for ten years was crammed from attic to cellar. Sprinkled among the boys and girls were a few cronies of her own, that she 'might have a little age and ugliness to keep me in countenance among so much youth and beauty,' as she told me in her blunt way; and it was on that footing that I happened to be there.

་་

[ocr errors]

"It was the day before the rent day

glorious weather-the old lady always piqued herself upon her weather, real queen's weather. The young ones, that is to say the men, were all going off to a cricket match, and we were most of us in the hall, where you saw just now through the window the ceiling lying in patches on the floor, waiting for the brake, which was to take the cricketers, to come round. We were looking over the morning papers, when one of the men said from between the sheets of the Among the Oxford friends of Fred-journal he held, 'I see that Mademoieric, the elder boy, there was one of selle Vel Vel has come to grief at last.' the name of Armitage, whom Mrs. I had no particular interest in MadeWinstanley always said she never could moiselle Vel Vel, who was a trapeze make out, nor what was the attraction performer of great note in those days, that bound him to her boy. He was and had awoke notoriety still more not much of a sportsman, nor did he marked; but as the man spoke I just ever contribute any jokes or any ac- lifted my eyes from my own paper. complishments to the general fund of Armitage happened to be leaning agaiust entertainment; he had no personal the chimney-piece opposite to me, so beauty to make his silence forgivable, that my eyes could not help lighting on and nobody seemed to know anything him, and I was struck by seeing him of his origin or social status. But yet give a sort of involuntary start, and by he was treated by Frederic with a def- noticing a wave of—I could not tell erence, and obviously exercised over what sort of emotion, but it was a him an influence, quite out of propor- strong one-rush over his face, which tion to his apparent merits, and which was usually as expressionless as a mask. provoked surprised comments from his It was gone in a second, and I noticed other and less made-much-of, while that he looked hastily round the room, conscious of being more attractive, as I supposed, to discover whether any friends. What made it odder was that one had observed his change of counif Armitage was a man unlikely to tenance. The next moment the youth inspire enthusiasm, Frederic was the who had first given the piece of inforlast person one would have expected mation lifted up his voice again: 'Oh, to manifest it. He was a quiet, hum- I see that it was not much of an accidrum, rather negative fellow, who so dent after all; it was not one of her far had gone through his Oxford career high performances, in fact it was one

« ZurückWeiter »