The heiress of Greenhurst

The first bright picture upon my memory was of Greenhurst, Lord Clare’s ancestral home. It rests in my mind a background of gorgeous and hazy confusion, indistinct and mellow as a sunset cloud. Then comes a misty outline of distant mountains melting into the more clearly defined middle distance, and in the foreground a beautiful stream sleeping beneath old trees, sparkling through the hollows, and spreading out like a lake in the green meadows. A lawn rose softly upward from the banks of this river, broad and green as emerald. If you parted the soft grass, an undergrowth of the finest moss met your view like velvet beneath a wealth of embroidery. Clumps of trees shaded the lawn here and there, and on either hand, so far as the eye could reach, a park of magnificent old chestnuts, with a fine variety of oaks, filled the eye with the vast wealth of their foliage.

A dozen avenues led through this park, some of them miles in length, and almost all commanded some view of the old mansion. One revealed a gable cutting picturesquely against the sky; another commanded the back entrance, with its massive stonework, burdened with heavy armorial bearings, and heaped with quarterings till the herald office itself would have been puzzled to unravel them. A third opened upon the east wing, with its broad bay windows curving into old stone balconies covered with ponderous sculpture, its antique casements filled with single sheets of plate glass which shone through the ivy like flashes of a river between the trees that fringe it—thus was blended all that is gay and cheerful in our times with the sombre magnificence of the long ago, beautifully as we find the sunshine pouring its glory into the dark bosom of a forest.

This view I remember best, for it was the first object that ever fastened itself upon my memory. A waste of flower-beds, clumps of rich trees, and the wilderness, as we called a tract of land in which all the wildness of nature was carefully preserved, lay between the little antique cottage that I was born in and Greenhurst.

Lord Clare had his own rooms in that wing of the building, and a footpath bordered with wild blossoms, rich ferns, and creeping ivy, wound from a flight of stone steps that descended from his apartments, around the circular flower-beds, and through the wilderness to the jessamine porch of our dwelling. It was a well-trodden path when I first remember it; and no foot ever passed down its entire length but that of Lord Clare. Even the gardeners felt that to be in that portion of the grounds, after the master left his apartments, was an intrusion. Turner, dear, good old Turner, visited us every day, but he always came down the chestnut avenue. No other servant from the mansion ever came near us.

A Spanish woman who had learned but little English, was all the domestic we had. Lord Clare had brought her from Malaga, and had she spoken his language well, the most prying curiosity could have gained no information regarding my parents from her.

Our cottage was the loveliest little dwelling on earth. White roses, rich golden multifloras, and the most fragrant of honeysuckles covered it to the roof. You were forced to put back a sheet of blossoms with each hand like drapery every time you opened a casement. The stone porch was sheeted over and fringed down with white jessamine: and the garden that surrounded it was a perfect labyrinth of blossoms. Crimson fuchias, purple and white petunias, verbenas of every tint, roses of every clime, heliotrope and carnations made the earth gorgeous, and the air soft with fragrance.

The peaked roof shot up among the branches of a noble elm tree, and when there was a high wind I loved to watch the old rook’s nest sway to and fro above the chimney tops, while the birds wheeled and cowered among the branches like widowers at a funeral.

The interior of the house was like a cabinet. Pictures collected from abroad, each a gem that might have been piled an inch deep with gold and its value not yet obtained, hung upon the walls. Antique cabinets of tortoise-shell and gold, lighted up with precious stones, stood in the principal room; soft, easy chairs glowing with crimson velvet; tables of Sèvres china, in which beds of flowers and masses of fruit glowed, as if just heaped together by some child that had overburdened its little arms in the garden; others of that fine mosaic only to be found in Italy; carpets from Persia, from Turkey, and one Gobelin, rendered that cottage one nest of elegance. Everything was in proportion, and selected with the most discriminating taste. Small as the building was compared to Greenhurst, it did not seem crowded, yet there was garnered up everything that Lord Clare held most precious.

It was well for us, for he could not have lived away from the beautiful. His taste, his sensuous enjoyment of material things might gain new zest by brief contrasts of the hard and the coarse, but he would not have endured them altogether. Thus it was often said that no man sustained himself under privation or the toil of travel better than he did. He not only endured but enjoyed it. The effort sharpened his appetite for the luxurious and the beautiful. In his whole life, heart and soul, he was an epicure.

Perhaps he had some motive beyond his own convenience in thus surrounding my mother with objects a queen might have envied. He might have wished to overwhelm her remembrance of the miserable gipsy cave in the ravine at Granada by this superb contrast, or possibly it was only a caprice, a natural desire to surround her and himself with things that enrich the intellect and charm the sense. My mother thought it a proof of affection, but she was a child. We often heap material benefits on the being who has a right to our devotion as an atonement for the deeper feeling which the heart cannot render. The man who truly loves requires no stimulant from without. He is always surrounded by the beautiful.

Another might have feared that this sudden change of condition would have set awkwardly on a creature so untutored as my mother—for remember she was a mere child, not more than sixteen when I was born—but genius adapts itself to everything; and if ever a woman of genius lived, that woman was the gipsy wife of Lord Clare. His wife, I say—his wife!—his wife! I will repeat it while I have breath; she was his wife. What had the laws of England to do with a contract made in Spain? What—but I will not go on. My blood burns—the wild Rommany blood of my mother—it has turned his blood into fire that smoulders, but will not consume. There are times when I hate myself for the English half of life that he gave me. Yet I cannot think of him, so kind, so gentle, so full of intellectual refinement, without a glow of admiration. It is his people—his nation—his laws that I hate, not him—not his memory. Indeed, at times, I feel the tears crowd into my eyes when I think of him. My hate is a bitter abstraction after all. When I reflect, it glides from him like rain from the plumage of an eagle.

You should have seen my mother in that beautiful home back of the wilderness at Greenhurst. The moist climate of England refreshed her beauty like dew; her lithe figure had become rounded into that graceful fullness which we find in the antique statues of Greece, still the elasticity, the wild freedom remained. She was more gentle, more quiet, almost sleepily tranquil, because the fullness of her content arose from perfect love and perfect trust. She had left nothing in Spain to regret; and every hope that she held in existence was centred at Greenhurst. Never did there exist a creature so isolated. She had no being, no thought, save in her husband. In the wide, wide world he was her only friend, her sole acquaintance even.

I do not think that she left the park once during her whole stay in England. The noble little Arabian that she rode knew every avenue and footpath in the enclosure, but never went beyond it. She did not seem to feel that there was a world outside the shadow of those old trees. She felt not the thralls of society, nor cared for its mandates more than she had done in the barranco at Granada; but a delicious and broad sense of freedom—an outgushing of her better nature made this, her new existence, perfect heaven compared to that.

With time her intellect had started into vigorous life. A teacher so beloved, with perceptions quick as lightning, had kindled up the rich ore of her nature, and you could see the flash of awakened genius in every change of her countenance. Still the world remained a dream to her; she never thought of human beings except as they were presented to her in books—and Lord Clare selected every volume that she read. He was not likely to present knowledge of conventional life to a person situated as she was, with a mind so acute and imaginative. No, it was the lore of past ages that she studied. Those noble old authors of Greece and Rome whom Clare understood so well, became familiar to her as his own voice. Without having the least idea of it, she was deeply imbued not only with classical knowledge, but with the lofty feelings that inspired those ancient authors, who seldom find themselves echoed with full tone in the mind of woman.

Think what a character hers must have been, with all this grand poetry grafted into the wild gipsy nature.

Still my mother was not perfectly happy; a vague want haunted even her tranquil and luxurious existence. It was a feeling, not a thought, the shadowy longing of a heart loving to the centre, which finds half the soul that should have answered it clothed in mystery. She could not account for this hungry feeling. It was not suspicion—it was not a doubt, but something deeper and intangible. The love which fills a bosom like hers always flings its own shadow, for love is the sunshine of genius, and shadows ever follow the pathway of the sun.

Still, her life was very happy, not the less so, perhaps, for these wandering heart-mists. My birth had its effect also, for it seems to me that no woman thoroughly sounds the depths of her soul till she becomes a mother. I have read her journal at this period, and every sentence is a rich, wild gush of poetry; you can almost feel a torrent of blissful sighs warming the paper on which she wrote, such as a mother feels when the first-born sleeps upon her bosom for the first time.