Spring in a Shropshire Abbey

Then there was, I saw, a plant of wormwood, the plant from which absinthe is distilled. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century the leaves of this plant were chopped up for flavouring, and it was thought an excellent seasoning to venison. By the wormwood there was a line of camomile. A little later in the summer the plants will be covered with little white star-like blossoms. Burbidge will cut stalks and flowers and his wife will dry them in the sun, and give them away to the parents of sick children. “My missus,” the old man once said to me, “mostly does her kindnesses by nastiness. Her will,” he added, “fair poison a body to keep her alive.”

But though Burbidge allows himself the privilege of a free tongue as regards his wife’s remedies, he permits no criticism elsewhere. On one occasion one of “his boys” objected to a gigantic draught of ales-hoof and mallow, flavoured with camomile. “What dost thee stand there for, loselling?” was the vigorous rebuke I heard addressed by my old friend, as the victim hesitated to drink down at a gulp, a bumper of a frothy brown fluid. “I tell thee, Roderick, if it fair blows off thy stomach, it will make a new man of thee.” “I canna,” feebly protested Burbidge’s man. But he had to; for as my old gardener said, with a purple face of wrath, “I and my missus don’t make physic for folks to chuck abroad, and a man that works under, needs must drink under.” Whatever the immediate effect of the awful beverage was, I cannot say, but this I do know, Roderick did not die; he even looked as usual a week later.

Few gardeners now have their herb plots, but through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ladies and their waiting-women made household medicines, and administered these themselves to the villagers, and to the members of their households.

Suddenly, whilst I was looking at my herbs and thinking of how they were used in earlier days, the garden door was thrown abruptly open and Bess danced in before me.

“What a time you have been away!” she cried. “I can’t run about, and only look at flowers or watch idle birds. Hals is coming, that is what I have to think of.”

I went into the house after luncheon, my chair and table were carried out, and I sat and embroidered. This time I worked a cherubim’s face, who possessed long locks and had dark-blue eyes.

“I am going to give him chestnut hair,” I said; and I looked out six different shades of reddish-brown to produce the desired effect.

BESS TALKS OF HEAVEN

“He ought to be pretty,” said Bess, who had seated herself by me. “Good children should be beautiful.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why?” repeated Bess. “Why, because God could never do with ugly little squinting things up there. He wouldn’t want boys that had crooked noses and red warty hands, and ugly eyes that didn’t look straight.”

“But suppose, Bess, the good children,” I urged, to see what Bess would say, “had crooked noses, red warty hands, and squinting eyes, what must be done then?”

“Oh, mamsie, you don’t understand heaven,” said Bess, loftily, “but I and Prince Charming do,” and she hugged her puppy. “We do. We know that God can’t have ugly boys in His garden, or what would the poor girl angels do? I know what heaven is like – beautiful, beautiful,” and my little maid stood panting with excitement before me. “All the flowers all out, and all the fruit quite ripe, and you may pick what you like, and no cross Nanas ever make you wash, or go to bed until you’re quite, quite tired.”

“Have you ever been there?” I asked, smiling at my little girl’s enthusiasm.

“Once,” said Bess. “Nana said I was asleep, but I know better. The snow was on the ground, deep, deep, but I wasn’t frightened, for when I looked out – and I got out of bed all myself, when Nana was at supper – I saw the stars, and I knew the angels were close to me; and when I crept back to bed I said, ‘God make me good,’ and I didn’t sleep, but I went to heaven, and that’s better than a picnic on the Edge, or making toffee with Mrs. Langdale. So you see I know there are no ugly people in heaven, because, mamsie, I’ve been there.”

“But in your philosophy, Bess,” I answered, “what happens to poor people, sick people, old people, all the people who have worked for God and done the work of His kingdom here?”

“Oh, God,” said Bess, softly, “God gives them all prizes. When you give children prizes at the school, they don’t get nothing more, but when God gives one prize they get everything.”

“Everything?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Bess, “dolls, cakes, pups. And then they play, and are always young, and they never have rheumatics, not even colds or coughs.”

I kissed my little girl and told her to dream of heaven again.

A minute or two later, and Bess was off chasing a butterfly.

“Mama,” she said after a long chase, when she returned to me with a scarlet face and dripping temples, “do you know that Mrs. Burbidge’s nephew, Frank Crossley, has brought her back a beautiful glass case, and it’s full of butterflies – real butterflies. There’s a beautiful blue one – all blue, and a red one, and a yellow one, like the gorse you told me not to pick because it was so prickly, and one green, like the Edge Wood when you look below and can’t see a cornfield, and can only hear flies buzzing. And do you know Frank caught them all himself, and he stuck a pin into each to keep them tight, and spread their wings as if they were flying; but they can’t really fly for they’ve always got to stay in his box.” Then, after a gasp, my little maid put her hand in mine, “Mama, may I have a net and a box, and some pins, for I should like to have what Burbidge calls a ‘collection’?”

“But you won’t like to hurt butterflies, Bess?” I said. “Just think how horrid it would be to run pins through them and to pin down their beautiful wings in boxes.”

“STUPID LITTLE INSECTS CANNOT FEEL”

“Well,” said Bess, “I suppose I shouldn’t like that at first, but Frank doesn’t mind. I’m not an ignorant little insect,” said Bess, loftily, “and you won’t make me believe, mamsie, that stupid little insects can feel like girls or boys.”

I did not argue, for I am aware that the best wisdom of the child comes sometimes from the silence of the parent, rather than from the speech; but I felt sure my words would come back later to Bess, and that when she had had time for reflection, her better nature would make her give up the wish to have a collection of butterflies. Whilst we thus sat on, Nana swooped down and captured Bess.

“I must wash your face and hands, miss, before going to the station,” she said tartly, and at the same time informed me that a poor woman was waiting outside in the monk’s passage, who wished to speak to me. “I can’t make head nor tail of what she wants,” said Nana, sourly.

“A pack of rubbish and not a grain of sense, that’s what we often feel about our neighbours’ sayings and doings,” I answered. “But ask her to come and see me.”

Mrs. Milner disappeared, and in a few moments reappeared, followed by a little brown, undersized woman, with a mahogany skin, and wrinkled like a walnut. Mrs. Eccles was a little hunchback, and had come from the Dingle to see me. She walked a bit lamely, and carried a stick. Mouse gave a growl, and Prince Charming, who had rolled himself up on the edge of my skirt, tumbled up with a snort, and a gruffle. I begged the poor woman not to be afraid, told her to sit on a bench close by, and asked her mission.

“’Tisn’t no flannel, no, nor no dinners neither, not even a packet of tea,” she answered. For a moment Nana returned to fetch a ribbon or a tie – some lost possession of Bess’s. On seeing her Mrs. Eccles remained silent, for, as she whispered, “’twas a private matter.” Then when Nana had disappeared, her courage returned, and she blurted out, “I knows as yer have one, for all Mr. Burbidge says. There always was one – one out alongside of the walled garden.”

I felt puzzled, but nodded and begged my old friend to tell me what it was she had come for. But a direct answer is not often to be got from the poor, you must wait for an answer, as a dear old clergyman once said to me, “as you must wait for flowers in an English spring.” So I threaded my needle with a brilliant brown, and Mrs. Eccles’s speech bubbled on, like a brook in February.

MRS. ECCLES’S MISSION

“It be in this way, for I know this place, same as the inside of my own kitchen,” she said. “Didn’t I work here fifty years agone, in the old days? I knowed this place,” she said, looking round, “afore it war a haunt of the gentry, when it was farmer folk as lived here, and when I war a servin’ wench, when I scrubbed, and cleaned, plucked geese at Yule-tide, and helped the missus in making mince-meat, and in making butter for the market. I know’d it then, and I knows it now.”

I tried to stem the old dame’s eloquence, for the time I had at her disposal was limited; but my little old guest was voluble, and I had to sit quiet to learn her mission. At last light pierced through her discourse, and I discovered that she had come down for a leaf, or a sprig, of some plant.

“You must come round and show me what it is you want,” I said at last; and I covered up my embroidery and prepared to take her to the herb plots in the kitchen garden, as the most likely spot to find out what she was in need of.

But halfway, Mrs. Eccles stopped dead, shook her head, and called out, “It never grow’d there, I be sure it never did. I know it does there,” and she pointed back to the Abbey, “for I have a-know it afore yer was born, and, my dear, it war along top-side of the mound, at back of the red wall, where the missus used to grow her fever drinks, and where they put in cabbages for Christians and cows alike.” As she spoke my funny old friend turned her back on the kitchen garden, and made for the quadrangle as hard as her old legs would take her. Mouse and I followed hot-foot behind. Suddenly Mrs. Eccles came to a dead stop at the foot of a green slope, on which the red wall was built, and pointed with her black stick, at a green shrub above her.

“There her be,” she cried triumphantly, “sure enough, same as a galenny’s nest, snug and safe.”

I scrambled up the bank, and Mouse followed with a bound. The old body was almost breathless for a minute, but went on pointing like a pointer at the shrub.

“What is it for?” I asked. The shrub in question was a bay tree, and in a severe winter in the nineties, had almost died, but last spring it revived somewhat, and sent out a few weakly branches this summer.

“What does I want it for?” repeated Mrs. Eccles. “Why I wants it for salvation; to save my boy from the Lightning.” Then she went on to tell me, with a burst of eloquence, about the Shropshire belief, to the effect that a spray of bay-leaf, or a feather of an eagle, if worn in a cap or hat, can preserve the wearer from lightning.

“The big hawk’s feather, there’s none as can get now,” she said. “The railways and the holiday-makers have killed they, but they have left the bay trees.”

Then I remembered having heard that Mrs. Eccles’s husband, some forty odd years ago, had been killed whilst haymaking, struck by lightning. “’Twas the death of Job, his fork,” an old man had once told me. “The lightning came clean down, and struck him by the command of the Lord.”

“If my gude man had had but a sprig, he might have been hearty now,” broke from Mrs. Eccles; and she went on to tell me that her grandson, Joseph Holroyd, “war goin’ to work for Farmer Church, and that she had come here, for I know’d as you’d provide.”

I opened the little knife on my chain, and cut off a sprig and gave it to my old friend.

AN OLD PAGAN BELIEF

She bobbed low, and scuttled away. “Won’t you have a cup of tea?” I called after her. But she shook her head, and cried out, “Nay, nay, I have my widdies (ducks) to feed;” and as I stood and looked, the little brown figure disappeared up the drive. When I went back to the east garden, I thought over my conversation with Mrs. Eccles, and I recollected having read somewhere, that the Romans believed that a phœnix’s feather, if it could be obtained and worn in the bosom, would avert disaster; and a learned friend once told me that the Emperor Tiberius was much alarmed by thunder, and always wore a wreath of laurel round his neck if the weather was stormy, because he believed that laurels were never blasted by lightning. So I reflected that my old friend, bred amidst the wilds of Shropshire, held, after all, unconsciously an old pagan belief, of which the plume from the big hawk was only another version of the phœnix’s feather, whilst the laurel and the bays sprang, likely enough, from the same legend. Whilst revolving the old beliefs of past empires in my mind, I was called back to the present by Bess rushing up to me, and calling out —

“Where have you been Mum, Mum? We shall be late, I know we shall be late. And if Hals didn’t find some one to meet him, what would he say?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” I said penitently.

“Nor me,” retorted Bess, indignantly.

So without more ado, my daughter, Prince Charming and I walked up a golden field of glittering buttercups to the station. We waited on the platform. The train was late – when isn’t the train late in the country? – and Bess and I sat down on the long bench that faced the line.