CHAPTER XXI

THE NEW HOME

Miss Mitford’s cottage in Three Mile Cross is practically the same as it was in her day, the chief alterations being that the windows to the front of the house, which were formerly leaded casement windows, have been enlarged and are now sashed. Also that the window of a parlour looking unto the back garden has been enlarged. In former times, too, the red bricks of which the house is built were exposed, but they are now covered with plaster.

Curiously enough some early prints of the cottage are very misleading. A limner at a distance has evidently tried to make a pleasing drawing from some very imperfect sketch done on the spot, which did not reveal the fact that the right-hand portion of the house recedes, and that the front door is not in the middle but on one side. Thus a report arose that the cottage had been rebuilt in later years. But happily we possess conclusive evidence to the contrary given by a gentleman still living who passed his childhood in the cottage almost as an adopted son of the household. When visiting the place a few years ago he declared that the cottage was unchanged, and recalled, as he passed from room to room, his happy associations with each spot.

The house is now used as a working man’s club, and the caretaker is ready to show the place to any visitors desirous to see the home of Miss Mitford.

Behind the house on part of the site of Miss Mitford’s garden there is a large edifice built called the “Mitford Hall,” which is used as an Institute for the working classes, and is a source of much good to the neighbourhood. But happily it stands well back and cannot be seen by the visitor who gazes at the cottage from the village street, and who is glad to dwell only on what is connected with Miss Mitford’s residence in the place.

In the sketch of the cottage given the reader will observe that the windows have been drawn as they were formerly and a few other small alterations made.

[Illustration: THE WRITING PARLOUR]

The cottage consists of a ground floor with one storey only above it. The casement window in the receding portion of the cottage, just below the shelving roof, belongs to Miss Mitford’s study, a quaint little room where at a small table she used to write her stories of village life. The window looks down upon the “shoemaker’s” little shop, with its pointed roof and tiny window panes. It must be quite unchanged in appearance since Miss Mitford described it, the sole alteration being in the business carried on there, as it and the collar-maker’s quaint shop at the top of the village have exchanged trades.

As she sat at that window Miss Mitford would jot down all the incidents that occurred in the village street below. “It is a pleasant, lively scene this May morning,” she writes, “with the sun shining so gaily on the irregular rustic dwellings, intermixed with their pretty gardens; a cart and a waggon watering (it would be more correct perhaps to say _beering_) at the ‘Rose’; Dame Wheeler with her basket and her brown loaf just coming from the bakehouse; the nymph of the shoe shop feeding a large family of goslings at the open door; two or three women in high gossip dawdling up the street; Charles North the gardener, with his blue apron and a ladder on his shoulder, walking rapidly by; a cow and a donkey browsing the grass by the wayside; my white greyhound, Mayflower, sitting majestically in front of her own stable; and ducks, chickens, pigs and children scattered over all.... Ah! here is the post cart coming up the road at its most respectable rumble, that cart, or rather caravan, which so much resembles a house upon wheels, or a show of the smaller kind at a country fair. It is now crammed full of passengers, the driver just protruding his head and hands out of the vehicle, and the sharp, clever boy, who, in the occasional absence of his father, officiates as deputy, perched like a monkey on the roof.”

“I have got exceedingly fond of this little place,” writes Mary to Sir William Elford; “could be content to live and die here. To be sure the rooms are of the smallest; I, in our little parlour, look something like a blackbird in a goldfinch’s cage—but it is so snug and comfortable.”

The projecting piece of building seen in the sketch in the front of the cottage was appropriated by the doctor as his dispensary. It has a door that opens into the little front court. The bedrooms are on the first floor.

Mary’s study window commands a pretty view beyond the low peaked roofs of the shoemaker’s shop and of its neighbouring cottages. At the foot of a grassy slope can be seen a dark line of tree tops. They form part of a magnificent avenue of elms that border a long stretch of grass—one of the old drover’s roads—extending for nearly two miles. “The effect of these tall solemn trees,” remarks Mary, “so equal in height, so unbroken and so continuous, is quite grand and imposing as twilight comes on, especially when some slight bend in the lane gives to the outline almost the look of an amphitheatre.” This spot—Woodcock Lane as it is called—was a favourite resort of Mary’s, and thither she often repaired when composing her country sketches.

“In that very lane,” she writes one day, “am I writing on this sultry June day, luxuriating in the shade, the verdure, the fragrance of hayfield and beanfield, and the absence of all noise except the song of birds and that strange mingling of many sounds, the whir of a thousand forms of insect life, so often heard among the general hush of a summer noon.

“... Here comes a procession of cows going to milking, with an old attendant, still called the cow-boy, who, although they have seen me often enough, one should think, sitting beneath a tree writing ... with my dog Fanchon nestled at my feet—still _will_ start as if they had never seen a woman before in their lives. Back they start, and then they rush forward, and then the old drover emits certain sounds so horribly discordant that little Fanchon starts up in a fright on her feet, deranging all the economy of my extemporary desk and wellnigh upsetting the inkstand. Very much frightened is my pretty pet, the arrantest coward that ever walked upon four legs! And so she avenges herself, as cowards are wont to do, by following the cows at a safe distance as soon as they are fairly passed, and beginning to bark amain when they are nearly out of sight.”

[Illustration: THE WHEELWRIGHT’S SHOP]

Mary delighted in the beauty of the country that surrounds Three Mile Cross even from the first moment of her arrival, but her delight increased as she became more intimately acquainted with its charms.

“This country is eminently flowery,” she writes. “Besides the variously tinted primroses and violets in singular profusion we have all sorts of orchises and arums; the delicate wood anemones; the still more delicate wood sorrel, with its lovely purple veins meandering over the white drooping flower; the field tulips [or fritillary] with its rich checker-work of lilac and crimson, and the sun shining through the leaves as through old painted glass; the ghostly field star of Bethlehem [and] the wild lilies-of-the-valley.... Yes, this is really a country of flowers!”

She revelled, too, in the wilder beauty of the great commons in the neighbourhood “always picturesque and romantic,” she writes one day in early summer, “and now peculiarly brilliant, and glowing with the luxuriant orange flowers of the furze ... stretching around us like a sea of gold, and loading the very air with its rich almond odour.”

She loved the winding rivers that water her part of the country; the “pleasant and pastoral Kennet for silver eels renowned,” upon whose bordering meadows the fritillary, both purple and white, grow in profusion; and the changeful, beautiful Loddon “rising sometimes level with its banks, so clear and smooth and peaceful ... and sometimes like a frisky, tricksy watersprite much addicted to wandering out of bounds.”

There is a fine old stone bridge that crosses the Loddon about a mile beyond Shinfield, with a small inn, “The George,” close by, a favourite resort of fishermen. Standing on that bridge one summer evening Miss Mitford watched the setting sun descend over the water.

“What a sunset! How golden! how beautiful!” she exclaims. “The sun just disappearing, and the narrow liny clouds, which a few minutes ago lay like soft vapoury streaks along the horizon, lighted up with a golden splendour that the eye can scarcely endure.... Another minute and the brilliant orb totally disappears, and the sky above grows every moment more varied and more beautiful as the dazzling golden lines are mixed with glowing red and gorgeous purple, dappled with small dark specks and mingled with such a blue as the egg of the hedge-sparrow. To look up at that glorious sky, and then to see that magnificent picture reflected in the clear and lovely Loddon water is a pleasure never to be described and never forgotten. My heart swells and my eyes fill as I write of it and think of the immeasurable majesty of nature and the unspeakable goodness of God who has spread an enjoyment so pure, so peaceful and so intense before the meanest and the lowest of His creatures.”

[Illustration]