The Dowerless Damsel. An autobiography

Front matter

3n lutobiograpfin. BY A. DORSET. What in the midst of the mighty drama are girls and their blind visions ? They are the yea or nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onwards through the ages the treasure of human affections. — George Eliot. Observe, that of men's whole terrestrial possessions and attainments, unspeak ably the noblest are his symbols, divine, or divine-seeming ; under which he marches and fights with victorious assurance in this life-battle ; what we call his realized ideals. — Carlyle. |£<m!)oii : REMINGTON AND CO., g, STKI-.ET, STBAKtJ, W.C. tS 77 (All Rig/tfi Ttetcraeii.) TO .MY IRISH FRIENDS AND FELLOW TRAVELLERS ON THE NILE, l&hesz page© arc |pcbicateb totth SINCEREST AFFECTION. CONTENTS. what's in a name? the inevitable.

CONCERNING A WIG AND OTHER PRODIGIES, HOBGOBLINS. DULL CARE. AWAY INTO SPACE. THE UNKNOWN. THE GATES OF THE EAST. THE SOLE BOON OF MAN. THE THRESHOLD. THE ONE-EYED. THE GARDEN OF STATUES. THE PASHA. CAIRO. OPEN SESAME. THE BRIDGED PEARL. PREPARATIONS. THE VOYAGE OF THE "SPINSTER." THE UNFAILING. THE CATARACT. IMMORTAL ROCKS. FLOATING FROM THE TROPICS. DESCENT OF THE CATARACT. THE CITY OF A HUNDRED GATES. THE ROAD TO FUTURITY. VIGILS. THE GREAT WORLD. THE NEW ERA. WINGED GUESTS. WHERE IGNORANCE IS BLISS. HOBSON'S CHOICE. THE WINGS OF THE MORNING. THE DIMMER GREAT UNKNOWN. THE WHITE VISION. SEE NAPLES AND DIE. WHOLLY A VORTEX. COUNTERFEIT PRISONERS. THE MAESTRO. BIG NOBS. PHANTOMS OR FACTS. VISTAS. DAME NATURE. JAFFA GENTRY. THE IRREFRAGABLE. LONG ART. THE PROFESSOR. CINDERELLA. WHITHER ?

Chapter I. What's In

A NAME ? " By your gracious patience, I will a round unvarnished tale deliver." Shakespeare. The great living master of truth says, " Wonders lie in every day — -every meanest day — had we sight, as happily we have not, to decipher them ;" so it may be said, wonders lie in every life, even the most obscure, had we power to see them. But to proceed to facts. I was born in the year — stay, I will not tell you in what year I was born, or you will begin to think you know more than I do myself, and that will not do. No matter then when ; but where, was in that part of London which fashion calls Belgravia. My mother, who came "of old stock and honourable degree," had some fortune. She was married, a mere girl, fresh from school, from her guardian's house — her bright eyes, and sweet, gentle manners, having won all hearts, and among them that of Robert Noaille.

This, of course, was not his name, but no matter. My father, who was twenty years and more my mother's senior, had, many years before, married an heiress ; who, however, died before she had inherited her fortune. Being an only child, no one doubted, and, least of all my father, that he would come into the estate. Which flattering prospect, although never realised, served agreeably to fill up de ficiencies in the perspective. Not indeed, that this was the only fortune to which my father had a good title — if people would but have been reasonable enough to see things in their right light, and as he said they ought, that is. But, que voulez-vous ? people are not always reasonable ; and it's no use expecting too much of them. Reasonable or foolish, however, there " is clearly no good in tormenting one's self un necessarily ; so pray let us be happy and com fortable at present ; and as for the future, good times are coming. ? 3 " So, my dear sir, let us turn our attention to business," or to pleasure.

Which are clearly one and the same thing ; at least the last is. Whether business is pleasure, that's a matter of taste. It was not my father's taste ; that I can vow, but then all people have their idiosyncrasies. My father boasted a long pedigree, of which he was exceedingly proud ; and with some reason. For in truth there are not many, even ducal families in the country, who can show so ancient and noble a descent. In fact I was accustomed as a child to hear him say, that he should consider it an insult to ask him to change his name, even for an earldom. This speech, and reading old stories of the feudal doings of our ancestors, tinged my childish mind with a vast impression of our quality and dignity. And in a misty way I firmly believed that however incognito we might be for the present, some day we should certainly bloom out, Cinderella-like, into our former state and prosperity.

I had often read of our great ancestor who came across the sea with William the Conqueror, and I knew his history quite by heart. How the king had given him so many baronies, that near all Oxfordshire belonged to him ; and how he lived in the Castle, and became such a despot i — — the old rogue ! — that for some supposed short comings of the monks of Abingdon, he pounced upon their lands and appropriated them for himself. Until one fine day falling ill — most opportunely for the monks — he beheld a vision of the Holy Virgin, who exhorted him to re store his depredations ; the which, being a good Catholic, he immediately did ; and became for ever after the patron of the Abbey instead of its tyrant. So, don't imagine his ill deeds pro ceeded from avarice ; far from that, more likely from a naughty pride.

This gallant old knight (peace to his memory) could be on the con trary so romantically generous, that as the old chronicler Thierry has it, " he did share with his bosom friend, Roger d'lvry, his lands and even his clothes." Nor, I am proud to relate, was this old ancestor of mine without learning either ; for the which is good proof : for the king did con fide to his care his son, Henry I., who was afterwards, as is known, called Beauclere. And to him belongs also a yet greater distinction, the honour of having munificently founded Osney Abbey, out of whose revenues rose Christ Church, Oxford ; the king having, as I say, bestowed upon this favoured knight the City of Oxford, with twenty-eight other lordships. ? 5 Upon him also as a reward, and, as it was said, to propitiate the Saxons, the king gave in marriage Aldgitha, only child and heiress of Count Vigo de Wallingford, of Castle Walling ford,' which title and estate continued to descend through the female line.

Their child married Brian Fitzcount, Lord of Abergavenny ; and became famous, and unfortunate too, from ad herence to the cause of Queen Matilda, who fled one snowy morning, disguised in white, down the frozen river from Oxford, to take refuge within the hospitable walls of Wallingford Castle. Meanwhile the old Baron, with his loving spouse Aldgitha, worn out with their erudition and long labours, as I suppose, sleep their long sleep side by side, on the north side of the high altar of Abingdon Abbey. Willing, lordly exiles - — types of the future Anglo-Saxon race — from their hereditary castles in Normandy, where they had held sway for some hundreds of years ; tracing a clear descent, as Burke relates, through royal blood from the time of Charlemagne. And where, up to 1787, was still to be traced, the moat of one of their castles at Ouilly la Ribaud, near Caen, with even the painted window placed there in 843, by the great Baron, in memory of his signing the treaty of the separation of Gent and Germany at Verdun.

But in the Abbey of Abingdon I say, now sleeps calm and still, the old hero of Christ Church ; " in life so potent that none durst oppose him," placidly unconscious that King Richard is away, fighting the Infidels, and that his own nephew Sir Foulke, who, as Sir Walter Scott has done us the honour to record, slew Sir Oread the Saracen, was now sighing out his life's blood in the dungeon of Austria, the inseparable friend and companion of Richard III. The next heir of the Oxon House wedded Rose Dunstan, co-heir of Noel, Lord of Ranton, Stafford, ancestor of the Earls of Gainsborough (from which we quarter the Ranton arms) ; and later, another made an alliance with royal blood. The Noailles evidently had a knack of marrying heiresses ; let us hope they were above being mercenary. Whether or not, it has not availed to keep up their fortunes ; for under the pretence of turbulence or what not, different sovereigns have confiscated the family estates.

But that which they formerly were, with all the faded honours of the family is recorded at length in a parchment roll, originally kept in the muniment chest at Shottisham Hall ; but having been abstracted by some old thief of an antiquary, is now lodged, by the celebrated ? 7 Robert Ryce, in the library of the College-at- Arms — a much prized relic. After a long jump — not to be wearisome — ■ come my two great uncles, who fought under Wellington through the Peninsular War, and again at Waterloo. One of whom, Sir Francis Noaille, K.C.B., was Adjutant-General to Lord Dalhousie's Division, being killed, was buried in the Waterloo Chapel, with an inscription to his memory. Thus have they been, a warlike race. With some heroes among them, down to the gallant young Captain, who mortally wounded, leaned on a gun-carriage and gave his orders so coolly at Agra ; and, though it may seem but a riddle, it is none the less true, that to this day, no civilised Englishman, at leasi:, sits down to his evening meal, without paying homage to our once feudal glory.

No wonder if nothing would please my only brother but to go too into the army; and pity only, that my father, on the score of his then lack of fortune, opposed it. My brother, poor fellow, in his disappointment, ran away to sea, and has only been heard of once since. He was the eldest of us, except one sister who died as a child ; and it is so long ago I scarcely remember him. After him come my two sisters, and then myself; whom, much to the injury of my dignity, and desire to be grown up big, they would insist on calling Baby till I dare not say how old. My grandfather who was D. L. and J. P. for the North Riding, Yorkshire, inherited considerable estates, but his feudal hospitality and large family, prevented him from becoming wealthy. He kept, too, a large stud of hunters ; and it was having become accustomed to this as a necessity of life, which more than anything else ruined my father's affairs.

Besides, as I have said, unhappily, there were fortunes to come, looming in the distance. As he said, "to retrench occasionally might be reasonable enough ; but could any one be so preposterous as to expect a gentleman to do without the necessaries of life ? And certainly some paltry half dozen hunters, and perhaps a house in town, could but be reckoned as among the indispensable. Had any of the Noailles descended before to such niggardly economies, unbecoming a gentleman, and why should he ?" To such unanswerable arguments, even the calm good sense, and " clear glances " of his gentle young wife could make no answer. Nor would it have been of much use if they had. Pray did you ever know the best of ? 9 reasonings keep a man from ruining himself, if he has a mind for it, if his own good sense (and something besides) does not avail for the purpose ?

" Truly a man of incredible facility " — par ticularly in the way of hunting and shooting — "facile action, facile elocution, facile thought." The years at any rate pass pleasantly; shooting and hunting, and hunting and shooting are pleasant ; and as for to-morrow something is sure to turn up. Or at worst, could he not hope, as Carlyle expresses it, to go careering through the inevitable, as handsomely as another ? Alas ! " No lie you can speak or act, but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment — with the answer no effects. Pity only that it often has so long a circulation, and that the burden of the ill should be passed on from back to back, and from rank to rank."

Chapter II. The Inevitable

" Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head." Shakespeare. " There is an alchemy of grace which transmutes sorrow into blessing." It was soon after I was born, that my father's affairs became irretrievably involved. He could no doubt have obtained a government appoint ment of some kind had he wished it ; but to make a fortune at the Antipodes looked a pleasanter prospect through the distance ; and he determined to go to New Zealand to reconnoitre it, and bring back his report ; leaving meanwhile my mother and her children to live in her brother's house. So, like the younger sons of many noble families before, he sailed away across the broad, hopeful seas ; to prove, however, the truth of Bacon's adage, that what people find on their travels, depends chiefly on what they take with them.

He cannot certainly be said to have found, or formed the ghost of a fortune ; but he made to his own satisfaction an important discovery ; namely, that life might yet, under The Inevitable. 11 some circumstances, be still very tolerable. If one could have no longer preserves of one's own, there was game at all events in New Zealand, enough and to spare ; and as to hunting, it was well enough to stay occasionally with friends, and find house and mount provided without further trouble. As to blaming him! Fiddlesticks! He was a martyr to circumstances ; and everybody must admire the fortitude with which such an unprecedented descent to penury was borne. His letters were, it is true, naturally filled with lamentations at his irremediable bad fortune ; yet, when occasion offered he would go shooting, or even fishing — a meditative employment, one would think — with a serenity and even mindedness, incomprehensible under the cir cumstances.

My uncle, at whose house we now lived, and who was my mother's only brother and some years older than herself, had opposed her mar riage ; and afterwards desired to have her for tune settled on her, which, however, was not done. My uncle and father, therefore, were not on the best of terms in consequence ; and, naturally, things were not improved now. My uncle could not be said to be wealthy, yet such was his unselfish generosity that he seemed to desire nothing better than to keep my mother and us always with him. He was an only son, with several sisters, who might well therefore have succeeded in spoiling him ; the more as his charming manners and handsome face made him welcome wherever he went. I remember well as a child how he used, in his witty sprightly way, to tease me by jokingly relating how handsome he was thought ; and how when a small boy his nurse could never take him out, but what some old lady would stop to inquire in raptures, "Whose was that lovely boy ?"

In vain I would remonstrate that he must not tell such tales of himself. He would only laugh gaily, and begin over again. In this way it happens, that my earliest recol lections are of my uncle's house ; and I must attempt to describe it. It was a queer old house, pleasant in my estimation ; still and quiet, and far enough from neighbours, to have done for a hermitage. And, indeed, it might have been called the Nunnery ; for my mother now lived by choice in such seclusion, that one might almost have supposed she had taken the veil. As to be induced to go even to a dinner party, I think a coach and six in those days could hardly have got her there. And even my The Inevitable. 13 uncle, except on occasional visits to town, seemed to have lost his taste for society. So, except when one of my uncles or aunts, or an intimate friend or two, came down in state on a visit, nothing disturbed the even tenour of our lives.

As I have said, it was a strange old house, of no particular style of architecture ; with an entrance which was more modest than a portico, and more important than a porch. This, which ever it might be, led into a wide old hall, furnished with oak, and with a ceiling and staircase of the same, the staircase being in the corner. On the right-hand side of this was the dining-room, with two pleasant large windows looking different ways into the old fashioned garden. On the opposite side of the hall was the drawing-room, built evidently as an after-thought, by some one anxious to cut a figure in the world ; for it was higher and larger. The windows looked out on the lawn, except one, which led into a greenhouse ; it was a cheerful room, warm and comfortable, with its old-fashioned roomy sofas in their deli cate chintz covers.

In the farther corner a door led into the billiard-room, and beyond this again to the library, while upstairs were many bedrooms, rambling hither and thither.

Chapter III. Concerning

A WIG AND OTHER PRODIGIES. " Oh blessed vision ! Happy child ! Thou art so exquisitely wild ; I think of thee with many fears Of what may be thy lot in future years — # * # * What hast thou to do with sorrow, Or the injuries of to-morrow ?" " Pray ! who can that small wild child be, with curly hair, scampering all over the garden ?" Ah ! that's just the question. Mark Twain says the nomadic instinct was born in Adam, and transmitted to us through the patriarchs ; and I should think this little person must have, in some way, decided Bedouin blood in her ; for she shows at all events the most inveterate aversion to shoes and socks ; tugging them off, and flinging them away, if left alone, and no one observing. Little pickle ! She can only be bribed to wear the horrid things, with a gift of a pair of brilliant red morocco ones, with bright buckles!

Bless me ! how she does plague the dancing master, Mr. Smart, who comes from the town to teach her sisters their steps. She must have Concerning a Wig and other Prodigies. 15 a blue ribbon on one arm, to be able at least to remember which is her right hand. Cross little man; how disagreeable he gets, because " Miss Dodo," as the nurse expresses it, " won't be minded which is her right hand." Never mind. Miss Dodo shall be promoted to a pocket in her small frock ; and that will be a greater charm than blue ribbon brace lets. " A spoiled Dodo then is this ?" No, no. People say so ; but it is quite a delusion. Her uncle perhaps spoils her, just a little; now and then; being unable well to refuse anything to his little friend ; but that is all. Yet one cannot deny her to be an unreason able little person, scampering about ; while her two elder sisters (more of an age together) are growing wise and clever.

But Dodo did, how ever, manage somehow or other, no one could tell how, to learn to read at a very early stage. And this feat remained for a long while a solitary exploit of the kind ; she not being by nature, apparently, more given to books than to shoes or stockings. But proud of her one accomplish ment, when she was not more than three, or perhaps four, she would sit on her nurse's lap occasionally, and read out "Peep of Day" aloud to her. Oh ! the precocious little prophetess ! What a lying promise of that which did not follow. Never mind. The rapt attention of the nurse, a mulatto, who could not read, was a balm, long to console her ignorant youth. So in this way, she rode the shaggy pony with the old coachman, or played with her friend the cat, and no one said her " nay." How people maligned the black cat, saying she was savage !

Why she never once scratched her well-meaning tormentor ; not even though the attentions bestowed on her were so ex asperatingly unremittant ; nor even flew at her when the little damsel pulled a mouse out of her mouth to save its life, and let it run away. Ah ! but if possessions bring cares, so do cats. Who can paint how this Dodo's heart became blankly miserable, when the perverse animal, perhaps on a bleak, wet night, would insist on having the garden door opened, and trotting out into the darkness ? How could any cat be so tormentingly infatuated, with such a friend to cuddle her, and a fire to sit by ? The poor little heart went out into the darkness with the cat — a first sad glimpse of the possible perversity of men and things. This child's hair was yellow — flaxen, I suppose, I ought to call it; altogether an unnatural Concerning a Wig and other Prodigies. \, colour.

But you can see a lock of it to prove what I say — if you wish, wrapped up in silver paper, in her mother's drawer. Well, this hair, yellow or flaxen, or what you please, had never been cut, like a little Jewess's ; and hung in disorderly, uncertain curls down her shoulders. It would cause no remark now a-days, but then it was a source of uneasiness to the minds of the village children, who would now and then inform the nurse that " Miss's hair had come down." One day — a fatal day — for some childish illness it was cut short; and then never was such a wig known before ; for nothing would induce it to curl again. Certain it is that, however it may be about crowns, uneasy lies the head that wears curl-papers ; the horrid things! But, jubilate! this wig suddenly took to curling again, one fine day, like its wilful owner, without rhyme or reason ; and, well to say, never left it off again.

Chapter IV. Hobgoblins

" Child of the pure unclouded brow, And dreaming eyes of wonder ! * * * time is fleet, I and thou Are half a life asunder." " The women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands." While my father was abroad he was in the habit of writing to my mother by every mail. Reams and folios of letters they appeared in my eyes ; at least I know my mother would be the greater part of the morning reading them the day they would arrive. They were written close, in a small hand ; and I believe if they did not contain the "Whole Duty of Man," they certainly did that of woman. They took time enough to read ; goodness knows how long they must have taken to write. Ponderous epistles they certainly were ! As for me the outside of them, with their great red seals of sixteen quarterings (it was the day of seals at that time), sufficed to fill me with awe.

I dimly regarded this mysterious far-off authority, much the same as, I suppose, Chinamen regard their celestial emperor, hidden away as he is from Hobgoblins. 19 the vulgar gaze, far in the depths of his im perial palace. Sometimes, on my birthday for instance, one of these letters would come to me. This en tailed altogether a weighty business, namely, writing the answer. Weighty in more ways than one ; for no flimsy foreign-post paper would resist the substantial text-hand in which, with much ado it was written, copied from a slate. Many sheets of paper, much ink, and, what I am more likely to remember, a vast stock of patience, were expended on these wonderful letters ; before I arrived safely, steered success fully at last between rocks of orthography and caligraphy, at " I am my dear papa your affec tionate daughter."

Probably that which makes children more than anything else afraid of hobgoblins, and such like offspring of their imaginations, is that they have no notion what the monsters would be like, if one did happen to make his appear ance ; nor, it is clear, can any one enlighten them. So, in an unreasonable and unreasoning way, when I grew old enough, I never during my father's life, heard a certain loud rap or peal at the door, or saw a carriage drive quickly up, without a great thump at my heart. For, whether suggested to me by some servant or 2 — what, I don't know, but a vague dread con stantly pursued me, the worse from being un ventilated, that my father would certainly come some unexpected moment, and carry my mother away to some unknown, horrible region, leaving us three desolate, in the big house, alone with my uncle.

What nonsense it is to say that children are perforce happier than grown-up people. Their griefs, doubtless, have less foundation in fact, but they are none the less tormenting and heartbreaking for that. When I was about eleven years old, my sisters went to stay at an aunt's in London, that they might have masters ; and our governess falling ill about the same time, a great interreg num, like the end of a paragraph, or a full stop, happened as regards me. Succeeding I must say — however, to something uncommonly like vacuity, or the Irishman's definition of nothing, "a footless stocking without a leg," as far as my learning went. In spite of this, perhaps on account of it indeed, latent enterprise began to stir in me occasionally. One day — a wet day — being in the library all by myself, my eye fell on a row of books, bound alike, and perched inconveniently near the ceiling, which I had not noticed Hobgoblins. 21 before.

To tug the steps and mount did not take long ; so seizing a volume, somewhat at the risk of my neck, I perceived it to be Hume and Smollett's " History of England." I had heard of this book, and seeing it now for the first time close, I surveyed it with respect; and, surprising phenomenon, was sired with a sudden ambition to read it. Twenty mortal volumes — it's true they were small, but that was no matter, it sounded all the same grand and formidable. Would not such an achievement atone for many deficiencies ? For, I confess, of these last, I began spasmodi cally to feel sensible. Had my anxious friends seen me at this critical moment — critical in two ways — -their attention would doubtless have been concen trated on the probability of my breaking my neck. How short-sighted is mankind ! Rather on the contrary should they have been absorbed in the reflection, that I had placed my foot morally, and of my own free will — the only kind of will that is worth any thing — on the first rung of the ladder of know ledge.

Had . my brains but developed them selves in proportion to the deceitful promise of this " representative " action, what a genius I ought to have been by this time ! Well, after the first volume, like the Italian, who when offered his choice between reading Guicciardini or going to the galleys, chose the history, but afterwards changed his mind and went to the oar ; so I believe should I have decided for the galleys, in preference to Hume and Smollett ; had the choice only been offered me ; which unhappily it was not. There was no War of Pisa to prove too much for me, it is true ; but, were there not worse, namely, whole volumes full of nothing else but Parliamentary Debates ? Mercy on us, the old rogues ! What did it matter to me — or to any body I should have thought— what they took it into their tedious old heads to say ?

As for me, I only wished talking, or at all events talking in Parliament, had never been in vented. And had I been king, wouldn't I have sent my faithful lords and commons in a body to meditate in jail, if they dared to weary me with speeches more than five minutes long by the clock ! Why ! dear me ! now I think of it, it would be a most beneficent revolution. Who can venture to say what wonders might not be done, if there were such a law ? Whether that is so or not, certain it is, I never yet see the re ports of the debates in the Times, without an Hobgoblins. 23 inward shudder ; — such an overdose did I swallow, like the little martyr that I was, and all in search of knowledge too. The sun was never shut out of our house " because of the carpets," and in the morning it would flood the pleasant drawing-room with its cheerful warmth.