Lettice Lisle. By the author of 'Stone Edge' [Lady Verney] . With three illustrations

Preface

. Dialects are fast dying out in England under the influence of books, newspapers, and schoolmasters ; yet they often contain pithy words, which it is a loss to the language to part with — inflexions which show the history of our tongue — racy expressions ill-exchanged for the Latinisms of would-be fine writing — many forms of speech, indeed, which are to be found in our older classics, in Chaucer, Shakspeare, the trans lation of the Bible, and even as late as in Milton. Ralph Higden, a monk of Chester who lived under Edward III., aud died about 1362, after men tioning the decline of French and the advance of English among the upper class in his time, says that "there were three speeches in England, the northern, midland, and south country." The first and third continue still very distinctly marked, the second has

PREFACE.

. VI much ado to keep apart from its encroaching neigh hours. Lettice Lisle is the last of three stories which attempt to save some of the relics of speech and thought still remaining from the old days, but which are disappearing so rapidly before advancing " civilization." If it is thought that so small a work (in every sense) has no business with such weighty matters, it may be pleaded that Mr. Max Miiller, in his Science of Language, observes that if the dialectic varieties, the proverbs and traditions of a district, were collected, much that is interesting and even useful to the history of our English tongue might he preserved. CONTENTS. CHAP. ,.AOK I. A Yeoman's Estate 1 II. Amyas Wysvate and ms Home :i IU. Fishing in the Heron's Pool 22 IV. Lethe's Schoolmasters 39 V. Father and Son 4!i VI.

Pleasant Waters ii.5 VII. A Summer's Night ! 78 Vlls. A "Frost in June" 85 IX. There's no Smoke but there's Fire 95 X. Notre Dame de Box Secours 112 XI. TruUBLES AND SYMPATHY 130 XII. Teasing and Quibbling 138 XIII. The Witch-Clover 145 XIV. Tangling in One's Heart 157 XV. Man is a Hunting Animal 164 XVI. An Appeal 172 XVIf A Fight with the "Fair-Traders" 180 XVIII. Half a Gale in the Channel 204 XIX. Waifs after a Storm 210 XX. A Moonlight Drive CONTENTS. chap. page XXI. " Single Misfortunes never come Alone " 230 XXII. In the Aisle of Mapleford Minster 237 XXIII. Night-Watching at the Pilot's 252 XXIV. An Opening for a Middle-aged Man 261 XXV. Mapleford Gaol 272 XXVI. Everhard and his Mother 281 XXVII. Suspense 290 XXVIII. What came of it 301 XXIX. Springtide 307 XXX. Aftermath 321 ILLUSTRATIONS.

" He's wonderful took up wi' y-e, child " (Frontispiece). Lettice drew back feom him, fok she saw Caleb's face 199 " There ain't a lighter hand at a ptjdden, though I say it that shouldn't" CHAPTEK I. A YEOMAN'S ESTATE. " These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild, this pastoral farm, Green to the very door, with wreaths of smoke Sent up in silence from among the trees." — Wordsworth. " So they just go on locking the gates as usual ! I can't think what they want to be so very private for," said a disagreeable-looking man, mounted on an exceedingly good horse, as he tried at a gate which led out of the deep hollow lane where he was riding into a neglected grass-grown road. He got down and tried to take it off its hinges, but it was secured at that end also. He uttered an oath, and then, seeming to know the place well, rode on to a field-gate which opened on the lane further down, and came back across the pasture to his point.

It was a beautiful bit of ground, lying just where the land fell away in a gentle slope to the valley below ; tossed about in every possible direction, with a clear pool at the bottom of the little dell in the heart of it, and with peeps at blue distance from all the higher points. But all was neglected and dilapidated : the fences, like overgrown thickets, were badly mended, the magnificent trees stood so thickly as to spoil each other, the gates, with the exception of the one into the lane, were all half broken, and there was a sad povertystricken look about everything. The horseman rode along the grassy unused road, across which lay the evening shadows, up to a sort of wide irregular avenue, the large branches of the tall elms arching in a great green space, which ended in a farmyard, woodyard, rick yard, all in one.

Beyond these stood a curious old tim bered house, its gables and many mullioned windows showing that it had once been a place of much greater pretension than as belonging to the poor yeoman its present possessor. All was very still : the echo of an unseen flail in a barn close at hand, the cawing of the rooks in the trees above, and an occasional low from a distant cow coming home to be milked, were the only sounds to be heard, and there was no one to be seen about the house. He called several times without receiving any answor. At last he caught sight of a little girl standing quietly in a sort of island of light, where the sunshine came through an opening in the high trees down upon her golden hair. A YEOMAN'S ESTATE. 3 "Is nobody at home ? " said the horseman impa tiently. " Granny's in the house," replied the child in a very low, shy voice.

He fastened his horse to a broken paling, and walked up to the beautiful old wooden porch, with a curious pinnacle in the carved gable, hung with a neglected tangle of vine and jessamine, and with a stone seat on each side. As he came near, a tall, dark, stern-looking woman of about fifty, dressed in black, appeared at the open door. Her features had the remains of having once been very handsome, but now the sad dreary determination in her face was its striking part. She motioned her visitor, without speaking, into the house : he was evidently no welcome guest. In a few minutes he came out again. " You'll tell Wynyate what I say," he called out, as he mounted his horse and rode away in an opposite direction to that in which he had come. The child had continued almost motionless in the place where she had first seen him, but when he dis appeared she gave a sigh of relief; she did not know him, but her instinct was as strongly against him as that of a bird which cowers away before a hawk.

She went on with her solitary play. A tall chestnut, a magnificent tower of bloom, stood at the end of the aisle of arching branches, leaving the blackness of the shadows under them still more striking. A shower of the blossoms had fallen after a little rain, and the child was stringing them upon a blade of bent. She had hung herself over with long daisy chains, and the old shepherd smiled kindly at her as she passed. " Thou'st made thyself rare and fine, my little maid," said he, affectionately. Suddenly her grandmother's harsh voice was heard. "Lettice, come in directly, child; it's time for you to be abed." The little girl rose slowly, though obediently — bed has a gruesome sound on a May evening, flowers bloom ing, birds singing, cows lowing — it seems a terrible hardship to be shut up with eyes closed to all this beauty, while the sleep, which makes it endurable, if not pleasant, is not counted in a child's imagination.

As she reluctantly walked towards the house with her finger in her eye, a tall boy, about fifteen, with a merry look on his rosy brown face, came up behind her. " Why, Lettice, what's the matter now, little one?" And he took her up in his arms as he spoke. " Oh, uncle Edward," said she, flinging her arms round his neck in an ecstasy of hope, " mayn't I stay up for your supper; please mayn't I? It isn't seven o'clock yet. Oh, please," and she hugged him tightly. " We'll see about it, little 'un ; don't ye put your self in such a way," answered he, carrying her straight into the sort of houseplace, half kitchen, half sitting room, shut off from the entrance by a curious sort of black oak screen. A grave, sad-looking man was standing by the A YEOMAN'S ESTATE. 5 latticed window at the further end, but he did not seem to see them come in.

He was the true son of his mother — the same high forehead and deep-set eyes — but there had been a cross in the blood : the stern mouth and chin had not descended to him ; there was a great deal of tenderness about the lines in his face, and what might be contemplation, orjthe indecision pro duced, as sometimes happens, by the fear of giving pain. " Mayn't Lettie stay up for supper to-night, Amyas?" said the boy, going up to his brother with the child still in his arms. Amyas seemed to bring his thoughts up out of some far-off deep well, and even then required to have the question repeated before he took it in. " She's much better abed," observed her grandmother, in a short tone. " Nay, let the child stay with us this once, mother," replied Amyas, gently. Mrs. Wynyate did not answer, and began in silence to make preparations for the meal.

"I should like some bread - and - milk to-night, mother," said the boy. And, without any observation or assistance from her, he went from the dairy to the pantry and hack again to the kitchen fire, Lettice, in the full glory of " sitting up," following him like a little dog, carrying the plate, taking back the jug, and watch ing the boiling of the saucepan. Two other brothers, strong sturdy fellows, strolled in. " Les quatre fils d'Aymon " were very unlike. These two seemed hardly above the level of labourers, and the few words which they uttered about their work, the way in which they cut their great slices of bread and-cheese and cold fat bacon, and drank their deep draughts of thin cider, were of the same character — while Amyas had had a good deal of schooling as the eldest of the family, and so had Edward as the youngest.

" Could ye give me a dish o' tea, mother ? " said Amyas, looking round rather drearily at the comfortless meal as he sat down to the long deal table. " Tea's six shillings a pound," said Mrs. Wynyate, with a sort of short sigh, as she filled the teapot. He drank his tea eagerly, but touched nothing else. It was a serious meal — it could hardly be otherwise with that stern woman seated at one end of the table, and that silent sad man at the other. But Lettice, sitting upon Edward's knee, was like the bit of sunshine in the avenue : she fed him with the bread-and-milk, and a low ripple of laughter went on between them at the landing of each " fish " out of the pool of milk into his mouth. Mrs. Wynyate looked on with increasing disfavour. " Sit up to the table, Ned, and don't] crumb about," said she at last.

" They're not making a mess," said her uncle Amyas, gently, looking at Lettie with the ghost of a smile. " She's a tidy little lass, — neat, like her grandmother." It was the second time that evening that he had interfered in her behalf, and she laid her soft little A yeoman's estate. 7 cheek against his arm as she sat next him in a passion of gratitude. But execution came after the reprieve — the supper things were soon carried away and the child led off in earnest. She escaped from her stern grandmother's hands, however, once again and ran back. " Good-night, uncle Amyas," said she, climbing up on his knee and putting her arms tenderly round his neck. He kissed her very fondly, and set her silently down, and then justice had its course. " Good-night, uncle Job, good-night, uncle John, good-night, Ted," she cried, as she was led off.

"You mustn't call your uncle, Ted," said Mrs. Wynyate, gravely. Job and John kept hours with the cows and poultry ; they were up with the sun, and thought no shame to go to bed with it. Edward had some boyish operation on a forked sort of root, which he was shaping with a knife, which took him a little longer, but even he soon disappeared, and Amyas and his mother were left alone. " And he threatened they'd foreclose the mortgage ? " said he, with a sort of dreary sigh. " Did he say how much time they'd allow to pay ? " Mrs. Wynyate was refooting a stocking by the miserable light of a " tallow dip." " He said the interest hadn't been paid regular this dozen years ; hardly ever in full, nor by yer father nor by you, and that yer couldn't expect any one to be kep' out of his money like that."

" And I'm sure I don't know where the money's to come from ; with wheat down where 'tis, the farm didn't much more than pay the interest last year, and six mouths to feed off it." " He said why didn't ye cut the trees : they was spiling one another and the land too, they were so thick." " I meant to have clone it this spring, but I couldn't find a good sale. We must cut 'em, but I hate touching the old timber," said Amyas, with a sort of groan. " I'll see and mark 'em now, however; but it's too late to fell the oak this spring," he added, with a kind of relief. And after sitting in silence for some time he, too, rose and went off to bed in the dark. Mrs. Wynyate's glimmering light, however, shone on hour after hour, as she sat and sewed, and mended, and darned, and patched, till far on into the night.

Chapter II. Amyas Wynyate And His Home

"For evil is wrought By want of thought As much as by wicked will." The Woodhouse was a yeoman's estate. It had been in the family of the Wynyates for many generations, gradually becoming more and more impoverished, mortgaged as it was almost up to the value of the last acre ; which is the case, indeed, with most of these properties. In the old days the yeoman class seems to have been prosperous and useful, but, under the present state of things, they cannot apparently keep pace with the farmers of other men's land, who bring in fresh capital and fresh ideas and energy, and are everywhere in England gradually dying out, — a curious contrast (whether for good or evil) to the " morcellement " going on in France. Although when Mrs. Wynyate married she was supposed to have made rather a grand match, her husband, if it had not been for the honour of it, might as well have been without a foot of land.

He was a good natured, weak, self-indulgent man, " nobody's enemy but his own : " virtue was not amiable under his wife's stern aspect, and he took refuge in something a little more jovial at the " Marquis of Granby " or the " Barley Mow." Disagreeable virtue has a good deal of harm to answer for of this kind, in the world. Feckless and wasteful, the little chance there was of setting the property straight vanished under his hands, and one winter's night, after a drunken bout, he did not return. He was not discovered till morning, when he was found in a sort of quagmire : he had ridden round and round a field half through the night, for " there weren't ne'er a gate in it," he said. He never recovered the cold and exposure, rheumatic fever came on, and, at not quite fifty, he died, leaving a wife and five children, the youngest not six years old, to be provided for out of the land, weighed down as it was with debt.

Amyas had lived almost entirely with his mother's brother, an old man with some money and a tanyard at the cathedral town near : a staunch Dissenter, in the days when Dissent entailed an amount of petty persecution and annoyance which we have nearly forgotten. It was very real suffering for righteousness' sake, but sometimes, as in Amos King, it induced a certain manner of conscious virtue, of superior sanctity, which was trying to the nerves of weaker vessels. He had set his heart upon Amyas becoming a " minister : " he was a readin' lad, " a pious youth," and would be " a shining light " in the communion. As time went on, however, his nephew's tender heart and rather fastidious taste revolted against certain parts of the creed and discipline ; he was sticking at the doctrine of " reprobation," to his uncle's infinite distress, who was indeed as much horrified at the young man's daring to dissent from him, as the stoutest old canon in the close at his own nonconformity, and he complained in much the same sense, if not terms, at the " carnal self-sufficiency," the " wicked wilful blindness " which alone could produce such results.

The right of private judgment was by no means an article of the Protestant faith (fifty years ago). Poor Amyas was in a most painful state of perplexity and distress, when the knot was cut for him, by being suddenly summoned home on his father's death. There was no will or provision for the widow or her younger children ; the property all came to him, and he found himself at three-and-twenty the head of the house, with the maintenance of a large family on his hands and little but debt to support them on. He knew more of theology than of farming, but he did his best, poor fellow : he never married, for how could a second family be main tained ? He had toiled day and night to keep things together and to pay the interest, and now, after nine years, it seemed to him as if he had been " pouring water into baskets."

His mother was one of those stern, strong-willed women who go through life constantly worsted. She had never had the smallest influence with her husband or her only daughter, a beautiful self-willed girl, on whom she doated, perhaps the more for their not having a single quality in common. There is a slow power in fools, a strength in the weak, with which it is hopeless to contend. What impression can be made on water, which returns to its level again after the most convincing pressure ? A year after her father's death, when she was about eighteen, Letitia Wynyate had fallen in love with a man whom she had met at the neighbouring miller's, of whom her mother, with reason, thought very ill. After some furious scenes between the two, Letitia, who had never been crossed by either parent, went off to her friend's house, and was married from thence against her mother's most positive commands.

Mrs. Wynyate never forgave it. Letitia made a sort of " offer " at friendship about two years after, but her mother's resentment was too deep : they once met, but it was coldly and stiffly. At the end of five years, however, peace was made in another way : Letitia died, leaving one child, whom she entreated her mother to take charge of, " or the poor thing would have nobody to look after her ! " The implied slur on her husband mollified Mrs. Wynyate almost as much as the death itself, while the dreary feeling that she should never see her child again, and the thought of those long years of enforced silence, aged her ten years and more. But it did not soften her towards her granddaughter : she bore her a grudge, as if it had been the child's fault. She was very unlike her mother, and therefore Mrs. Wynyate determined that she reminded her of her father, and she " did her duty" to Lettie, which is of all things the most aggravating.

As the only representative of woman, however, in the house (no one could insult Mrs. Wynyate by con sidering her as belonging to the gentler sex), her four uncles, each in his own way, loved her and spoiled her, as is fit and proper for a little girl. Hers was a solitary little life in one sense ; there were no children near to he had, but her playmates included the whole animal and vegetable creation within the domain of the Wood house. As she sat on the ground next morning, with her great hunch of bread in one hand, and the tin por ringer, which uncle Job had filled with new milk as he passed with his pail into the dairy, the chickens flocked round her on the tenderest and most equal terms ; the wheeling pigeons swooped within a foot of her head ; the calves, the dogs, the horses, all seemed to treat her as a pet thing belonging to themselves.

There was nothing about the place which disputed her supremacy but her grandmother and the old peacock, the most tyrannical and shrewish of his race, who led his hens a perfect life of it, and insulted Lettie whenever he met her. She had finished her breakfast and was now standing, trying to hold out an olive-branch to this, after all, the least formidable of her enemies. " Piccocks, piccocks, come and eat ! " said she, when her uncle Job, on his road once more between the dairy and the cows, came up as the fierce bird made a snatch at her, and drove him away. " Thee must na' ha' nought to do with that surly beast, do'st thou hearken me, Lettie ? " " I want for to make friends wi' him," said the child, trembling all over. " There's some folk, the more you calls 'um the more they won't come," said Job, sententiously ; " and now ye go to Gabriel Grove, as is tumbling the butter in the milk-house," added he, as he went about his work.

The child went on willingly to the dairy. The Archangel's namesake was a little wizened, tottering old blind man who did the churning under Amyas' benevolent rule, and was her best playfellow when Edward was at school. He was standing in deep thought with the handle in his hand. " Well, 'tis [queer," said the old man, " how the butter won't come nohow some days ! I b'lieve 'tis bewitched. Lettie, you get me two twigs; of the rowan bush : wo'll make a cross and stop that, anyways." " How is it the witches does it ? " inquired the child when she had brought the desired charm. " Well, I can't say. My old woman she had a sovereign cuddled away in a drawer, and it's gone and no one's been nigh the house ; but she did see a hare a runnin' off that evenin', close to the skillen, and p'r'aps that were she — the witches turn themselves into hares, they do, by-times, like Mall Do,* yer know, and my missis she flung a pobble-stone at her, and p'r'ps that's the reason I'm so bad.

I bets and burns and smerts * This remarkable zoological fact is chronicled on Mall Do's tombstone at Beaulieu. all night, and my head he noises so that I be quite froghtened." " P'r'ps you've a got the ague saver," said Mrs. Wynyate, looking in from the top of the stone steps to see how the butter was getting on. " No, I've got no saver," answered the old man, doggedly. " I've got that as won't let it be saver," he whispered to Lettie as her grandmother retired. " What is it, Gabriel ? " replied the child, in a low voice. " Nay, thou beesn't old enow to understand," said the old man, importantly. "I got he from the wise woman." He had miscalculated Mrs. Wynyate's distance, however ; she had only retired as far as the passage closet. " Show me what it is, Gabriel," said she impe riously, from her vantage-ground.

" It ain't lucky for to look at he," replied the old man, peevishly ; but she insisted, and at last, with a deep sigh, he pulled out a dirty little bag, which she cruelly ripped open ; it contained the charm on a bit of parchment. " When Jesus Christ went to be crucified He said I have both ague and saver, If ye shall kip my commandments Yer neivcr shall have nayther " — ran the rude rhyme. " That'U. do ye no good," said Mrs. Wynyate, dicta torially; she had no faith in any nostrums but her own. "I'll giv ye some boiled snails or some Good-Friday bread." " Madam allays has her own way, she's so stomachy* and high-minded," he said sadly to the child, who was doing her best to sew up the amulet again for him as before. " It'll have spoiled the vertue on it ; but I shan't take the snails. She rubs one the wrong way o' the stuff like a cat, and it sets a body's back up, it do."

Mrs. Wynyate, busy as she was, took great pains in making the horrid decoction, but it was with the utmost satisfaction that he declared to Lettie, " 'Twere an ugly hansel, and I just hulled it a' into the pig-wash." That evening Ned came up to Lettie with the knobbed root, at the end of which, with his ever active knife, he had been shaping a kind of rude head. " Here's a nice baby for you, Lettie," said he. A child's imagination is so rich, so active, that it rather prefers a formless foundation on which it can build at its pleasure. It is not the grand pink and white lady in gorgeous clothing and a string to open and shut its eyes, but the battered, wretched thing without arms or legs, who is pressed passionately to its tender mother's breast, and only taken away at bed-time with tears.

It seems to be the same with all uncul tivated minds. " The wonder-working images are not the chefd'œuvrcs of Raphael, but the blackened pictures, the formless stones," says a great man. Diana of * " Whoso hath a proud look and high stomach."— Psalm 101. Ephesus, " the image fallen from heaven," was probably nothing but a lump of ironstone. Therefore when Ned wrapped the root in a red pocket-handkerchief of his own, and tied it with a string round what was by cour tesy called its " waist," Lettie, in a rapture of delight, took it at once to her heart, and it became to her a " baby," and the most valuable confidant of all her griefs and joys. Most things were wrong in Mrs. Wynyate's code. She was a very conscientious woman, but her creed and her disposition reacted on each other ; her sorrows and her Methodism combined to throw a dark veil over the world, in which all amusements were tabooed, and even " of laughter she said in her heart, it is mad."

Lettie was too young to understand all this, but a sort of instinct made her keep her precious baby out of her grandmother's sight, and it was some time before the criminal was discovered. At last, however, one day off her guard, she came into the kitchen hugging and nursing her prize, and singing lovingly to it. " What's that horrid bundle ? " said her grandmother, angrily. "I don't choose to have dolls in the house, don't you know that, Lettice ? I shall burn the nasty thing." And she turned towards the fire, only stopping to save the handkerchief, and delayed by untying the curious knots in which it was twisted before she carried out the sacrifice. It is strange how entirely grow-n people forget the intense misery which children are capable of enduring ; because of its short duration, that something else soon takes its place, men, and women too, laugh and talk of childish sorrows as " being nothing."

They are as real as they are poignant, and a great deal more absolute than the pain which their elders endure : a child's horizon is so limited that it sees no issue to its woes, no hope, no remedy, no future — its sorrow as its joy absorbs its whole little being. When Lettie saw her beloved "baby" about to be cast into the flames, her horror was as great as that of the mother depicted in the "Judgment of Solomon," which hung upon the wall above in very gorgeous pink and yellow colouring. She stood in a sort of tearless agony, with her hands clasped. " Nay, mother," said Ted, with a smile, taking hold of her arm, " what harm can it do ? Let the little mayd have her dollie ! " " I tell ye, I won't have her spoilt i' that fashion ; it's dress and fine clothes anc! all them things that ruins the girls," said Mrs. Wynyate, vehemently, which was not quite in point, considering the attire and appearance of the monster.