Spring in a Shropshire Abbey

Hearing my favourites, the bullfinches, attacked, I could not help saying something in their defence. “The cock ‘nope,’ as you call him, is so beautiful,” I urged, “that surely he may have a few buds in spring, and later on get a little fruit? Besides,” I added warmly, “many people now say that he does no damage, and that the buds, that he attacks, are already diseased, and, anyway, would bear no fruit.”

But at this Burbidge waxed wroth. “The nope,” he retorted angrily, “be pure varmint for gardens, same as stoats be for poultry, and squirrels for trees; and as to his colour, ’tis like looks in lasses, it hath nought to do with character. I don’t see things, marm, as you does. When yer sweats for a thing, there be no halves in the matter. What’s a friend to my garden, I be a lover to; but what’s foreign, I be a foreigner to,” and the old man walked away in a huff.

After “our bullfinch war,” as Bess called it when I recounted to her later the little episode, I walked up the path that is edged by rows of double primroses. How lovely they were in the neatest of little clumps, white, yellow, and mauve, with here and there tufts of hen and chicken daisies, roots of the single blue primroses, brilliant polyanthuses, and the curious hose-in-hose variety, which an old South Country nurse of ours used to call “Jack-a-Greeners.” A little further on, I saw some plants of the soft Primula Cashmeriana, which bore leaves which looked as if they had been powdered with milk of sulphur, and carried umbrella-like mauve heads of blossom.

A little higher up the path I saw some fine plants of Primula Japonica with its red whorls of blossom; and at the top of the garden I came across a line of beautiful auriculas. The most beautiful of all the primulas, I think, is “Les Oreilles d’Ours,” as the French call these flowers, with their sweet distant smell, like downs covered with cowslips on dewy mornings, or golden apricots ripening on southern walls. As I passed back to the Abbey, I plucked a shoot off a black-currant bush. How fragrant the budding shoots were. They recalled the perfume of the bog myrtle on Scottish moors, only that the scent had something homely and useful, but none the less delicious.

Ten minutes later, and I was seated before my embroidery. To-day I had a blue dragon to work. I tried to see and to reproduce in my mind’s eye Burne Jones’ wonderful tints of blue with brown shades and silver lights, and so the hours passed.

“A PATIENT HAS VIRTUES”

In the afternoon Bess visited Thady. “Mama,” she cried, “I think Thady will soon be well, for all he was so lame on Sunday. You see he wants to get well so badly, and what people want badly they generally get. I took him some pudding and some cake, and Nana gave him some ointment. Nana,” said Bess, presently, “seems quite kind now. Do you know, mamsie, since Thady has taken her medicine, and rubbed on her lily stuff, she seems quite to like Thady.”

“Ah, my little girl,” I laughed, “you are discovering a very old truth. Nana has found a patient, and a patient always has virtues.”

Bess did not quite understand, but declared it was a good job that Nana had given up disliking Thady, for in Thady, Bess found a most delightful and useful friend. He had already made my little maid a whistle, and was then engaged in making her a crossbow, and he is a wonderful hand in whittling an ash or hazel stick in elaborate designs, all of which are delightful and rare accomplishments in Bess’s eyes.

All the week Bess ran up and down to the Red House. Bess repeated her verses for the fête to Miss Weldon, and gained what her governess called “word accuracy,” but all gestures and action Constance taught her, I heard. Besides this, I was told about the dance which was being practised for the great day by eight little town maidens in the disused room over the stables of the Red House, and of the music which Constance’s nice parlourmaid played. Constance endeavoured to get eight little boys to dance also; but the little lads were too shy, what an old woman, speaking of her grandson, calls “too daffish and keck-handed to learn such aunty-praunty antics,” and all that Constance could get in the way of male support was to induce eight little lads to look on, bend their knees, and bow at intervals, whilst the maidens sang and danced.

Bess was full of her verses and of her white costume, and old Nana, for all that she grumbled much at first, got stage-fever at last in her veins, and told me “that none would look as well as her blessed lamb, and seeing what the play was, and who made the dresses, and where the flowers grew, she held it to be all foolish, overgrown, mealy-mouthed righteousness on old Hester’s part to stick out so obstinate and audacious again’ a harmless bit of childer’s play.”

When I asked Burbidge if he and his men would get me some primroses and bunches of marsh marigolds, he was at first very wroth.

“Do yer take me for a loseller, marm?” he said, using the old country word for an idler. “Do yer think that I have nought to do, but to stump through wood and field, pulling blows for a May folly?”

But since the first outbreak he softened, and now he has begun to speak in a more kindly spirit, about fine primroses as grow above Homer steps, marsh marigolds as can be got near the Marsh Farm pool, and about cuckoo pint and bits of green fern, and I have little doubt that on May morning it will be found that my request has been granted.

Burbidge and Nana will always do what we want them, only give them time, as Bess says, for my little minx, young as she is, has long discovered that with old friends, and particularly old servants, there is often a great deal of bark, but happily not much bite.

One day it had been raining all the morning. Everything seemed growing. I could almost, as I looked out of the window, see the chestnut buds swelling, and the points of the yews were turning a reddish gold. Through a window I could hear the canaries singing, singing and filling the garden with melodious sounds. The sun had gently pierced the clouds at last, and here and there faint shades of delicate blue were to be seen.

Suddenly, as I sat by the window plying my needle and admiring the rain drops glistening like crystals in the grass, I saw my little friend, Thady, below on the gravel walk. “What, Thady, you here!” I cried; for Thady, to use his mother’s expression, was all himself again, bare-legged and as merry as a grig.

“BEGORRA, IT’S ME”

“Begorra, it’s me,” replied Thady, “me myself, and I’ve come to ask if yer will come a bird-nesting with me, some day?” And he added, with the courtesy that only can be found in an Irish imp, “’Twill be an honour and a pleasure to guide yer leddyship to the rarest nests in the country, and yer remember our talk some weeks ago?”

So, after a little parley, it was agreed that the following day, a Saturday, if fine, we would take our luncheon into the woods, and that Thady should climb the trees, as we had previously proposed.

We settled thus, the main point, for Thady, in his own language, “was the best man whatever at that sport.” “Whilst you are climbing,” I said, “we can look for rare flowers and ferns, and find what nests we can upon the ground.”

I asked Thady a minute later what nests he knew of.

“Galore,” he answered, grinning. And then proceeded to enumerate them: “A lintie (a linnet), a green grosbeak (greenfinch), a Harry redcap (goldfinch), a yellow yeorling by the roadside, a scobby (chaffinch), a lavrock (skylark), a cushie-doo (a wood pigeon), a cutty wren (common wren), a nanny washtail (pied wagtail) in the rocks, and two tom-titers of sorts. Then there be hawks,” he called through the window, “and one by Ippekin’s Cave as I don’t rightly know, bluish and bigger than the wind-hover (kestrel) or the pigeon-hawk, not to make mention of throstles and black ouzels (blackbirds), which just jostle same as hips and haws in October, but they’re hardly worth the point of raising of a foot to see.”

So our plans were made, and I looked forward to spending the morrow in the budding woods. Thady was to be our guide, but no eggs were to be taken. This was a matter of mortification to Thady. “Sure,” he said, on another occasion, “I thought I would have made the little lady, this year, the prettiest necklace that ever was strung, fine and rare, for the May dance; and,” he added, “yer leddyship must not forget that I have eaten of Miss Bess’s blue egg, and so glad I would be to show her a bit of favour.”

However, I succeeded in making Thady give up the project of robbing the nests, by begging him to make me a whistle, which, as my little daughter declares, is a thing that might be useful to everybody – “to a lady, to a bishop, or even to a Member of Parliament.”

The next day was a day of glorious sunshine – gay and pure – one of those rare sweet days in spring, when it does not seem possible for “rain, or hail, or any evil thing to fall.” Little Hals, to our joy, came over without governess or maid, only what Bess calls “under his own care,” which she declared was best, because there was then no need to be naughty; and Miss Weldon, to the joy of all, vanished for the day to Shrewsbury; so, to quote my little girl, “all seemed happy, and everything just pure fun.”

As the old church clock struck eleven we started.

The groom boy, Fred, led Jill, the Stretton pony, bearing a basket strapped on a saddle, which contained a simple luncheon, and off we went into the woods.

AWAY TO THE EDGE WOOD

We started gaily; there were no trains to catch – always a subject of congratulation – and we only left word that we should be back for tea.

It was true that old Nana had black prognostications about what “that villain Thady would do” (for since Thady was cured, her kindly interest in him had ceased). But I laughed at her fears. “Nan,” I cried out as we left, “we will all take care of ourselves, and even Jill shall come back safe and sound.”

We walked along the town, Bess and Hals running in front, hand-in-hand, and Thady and I following leisurely behind. In a few minutes we had left the town behind us and were wandering up a lane, cut in the lime rock, bordered with yews in places, and between high hedgerows.

Hals begged that we might begin to bird-nest at once; but Thady, who was master of the ceremonies, shook his head. “Best wait, begorra, for the Edge Wood, sir,” he exclaimed; “that’s the mightiest place in the county for all that wears feathers.”

So we marched on steadily to the great strip of wood which is known in Shropshire as the Edge Wood. This strip runs for many miles, is very precipitous in places, and consists of groves of oaks, patches of yews here and there, hollies – the haunts of woodcocks – and in many parts a rough tangle of hazel is to be found. It is a sweet wild place, little visited save by bird and beast. In one place the woodcutters had cut for some hundred yards, and in the cleared spaces the ground was covered with primroses, ground ivy, and the uncurled fronds of the lady fern – still brown and crinkly. Groups of lords and ladies reared themselves up amongst their sombre leaves, and patches of dog’s mercury nodded and whispered with their cords of green grain. Overhead, the larch in a few branches was breaking into emerald splendour, whilst pink tassels at the extremities trembled here and there. Squirrels leapt into the trees and vanished at our approach, and once or twice we heard, like a distant curse, the rancorous guttural cry of the jay, and saw one disappear into the undergrowth, a jewelled flash of turquoise splendour.

In a ride below, I saw a magpie hopping about, its long green-black tail bobbing up and down on the grass. At this sight Thady gravely took off his cap and saluted him, saying aloud —

“One for sorrow,
Two for mirth,
Three for a wedding,
Four for a birth.”

And then cried out in a tone of excitement, “Look out, yer leddyship, begorra, look out for another; for it is mirth to-day and no sorrow whatever that we must have.”

Then we plunged into the heart of the wood. Fred and Jill alone kept to the path. How lush it was, that soft moist turf in April, all teeming with moisture and freshness – not even the driest summer sun can parch or dry the soil of the Edge Wood. Here and there I saw little plantations of self-sown ash amidst beds of downy moss, and everywhere hundreds and thousands of little infinitesimal plants, struggling for existence. As I walked along I noted open glades, which later would be rosy with pink campion, or purple with the stately splendour of the foxglove. Now and then a bird flew away, and I saw at intervals the white scut of a frightened rabbit.

BIRD-NESTING WE GO

Suddenly Thady stopped before a yew tree. Hals and Bess followed, panting and crying out eagerly, “Where, where?” for Thady had discarded his jacket, and in a twinkling had thrown his arms round the tree. In a second he was aloft. “A lintie’s nest,” he whispered, and then peered in. A minute later he called out, “Two eggs.”

“Will you bring one down?” we said in chorus. For all answer, Thady nodded, slipped an egg into his mouth, and then proceeded to descend. We looked at the little egg that Thady held out on the palm of his hand. It was of a pale bluish white, speckled and streaked with lines of purplish brown.

After we had all peered over it, the egg was put back solemnly by Thady.

A little further on, and Thady again halted. “Here it be, yer leddyship,” he cried, in a high treble; and there, sure enough, looking upward, we discerned a nest of twigs and roots. It was quite low down, and I was able easily to lift up the children to get a peep themselves. The little nest was lined with hair and wool stolen from the neighbouring fields, but as yet there were no eggs. “A nope’s (bullfinch’s) sure enough,” said Thady, dogmatically. Then on we wandered until we paused below a fir tree. Below the bole of the tree there was no herbage, for the fir leaves had fallen like needles and had pierced and stabbed the grass to death – so it was quite bare now, not a leaf, or even a patch of moss; as bare, in fact, as a village playground.

Suddenly we heard overhead a loud, ringing clap of wings, and as we looked up, we saw an ill-made nest of sticks, and two eggs, which last we could see glistening inside, like two button mushrooms. For a minute I had a vision of a big departing bird of a soft lavender grey, and as I looked, Thady called out, “Quice,” which is the Shropshire name for the wood-pigeon. Thady was anxious to mount the tree and bring me down an egg for closer inspection; but I begged him not to do so, for the Cushat-Doos, as he tells me he has heard them called in the North Country, are very shy birds in a wild state, and I have been told will never return to a nest where the hand of man has trifled with eggs or nest.

I lingered, looking up at the shining round pink eggs with the light glimmering through the twigs; and then I mounted up the hill, which was very hard work, for both children were a little weary and hot, and I went up the incline, pulling both up as best I could. Mouse kept close to my heels. She had had dark suspicions ever since we entered the wood, and was convinced of the existence, I felt sure, of robbers, footpads, wolves, and also of innumerable vague dangers, and alarms.

We passed a blackbird’s nest, but Thady waved his hand in lofty disdain, and refused to pull back the bough so that we might look at the eggs. “’Tisn’t for dirt like that that I’ll trouble yer leddyship and the young squire to spier round,” he exclaimed. “The black ouzel is just a conny among feathered folk, or what blackberries be ’mongst the fruit.”

Thady seemed to know every inch of the ground. “It isn’t in woods or field that I forget myself,” he remarked to me, when I commended him for his knowledge of the Edge. “Devil a bit,” he said, “if I have ever lost my way along, or missed a mark or forgotten the bend of a stick; but,” he added, in a tone of contrition, “’tis in the book larning and figures that Thady Malone cannot always discern rightly.”

At last, after much puffing and panting, we reached the top of the hill.

THE SCOBBY’S NEST