Spring in a Shropshire Abbey

Down by the Abbey pond I saw the two swans swimming, but, every now and then, the male bird seemed almost to leap out of the water in the delight of spring, and beat the water with his great snowy wings as he drove across the glass-like expanse at a furious rate, making the little wavelets rise and fall and dance, in a crystal shimmer over reeds and grass.

Suddenly a little moor-hen dipped and bobbed out of the reeds. With an angry cry, one of the swans went for her, and I thought, for a moment, the poor little bird must have fallen a victim to his murderous beak; but the little black bird, as Burbidge would have said, “was nimble as ninepence,” and doubled, and dived, before her enemy could reach her. It was very good to be out. Life seemed enough. The island in the centre of the Abbot’s pond had become a sheet of primroses, and looked as if it had been sown with stars; and as I stood in the garden, the scent of the crimson ribes reached me. What a rich perfume it was! and what a distance it carried. In the full sunshine it was almost like incense, swung before the high altar of some old-world cathedral. I wandered away into the red-walled garden. How busy Burbidge was! The fir branches and matting were to be taken down off the tea-roses, and away from the beautiful purple and lavender clematises, my autumn splendours.

WINTER COVERINGS REMOVED

Beautiful Mrs. George Jackman, that shone like a great full moon in the dusk on clear summer nights, was now to be allowed “to open out,” as gardeners say, and the sun and soft winds were once more to play with her tender leaves, and delicate tendrils.

Then the exquisite tea hybrid roses, such as Augustine Guinoiseau la France, and that richest of all the noisettes, William Allen Richardson, were to dispense with their protecting fir branches. The time had come for them to feel the joy of full sunlight again, and the tree peonies were no longer to be enveloped in tawny fern branches, or to lie smothered in litter.

As I stood in the pathway, I heard Burbidge walking up and down the paths, giving orders in the Shropshire tongue that I love so well.

A mantle of spring splendour had fallen upon all. Lines of yellow crocuses shone like threads of gold. Crown Imperials were opening their rich brown, metallic-looking blossoms. Pink and white daphne bushes perfumed the air, and I noted that a host of hungry bees were humming greedily round them. Chionodoxas of all shades, were looking enchantingly fair. The blue Sardensis was opening its petals, of the same wonderful sapphire-blue shade as the Alpine gentian. Then in blossom also I noted Chionodoxa Luciliæ, that had the delicacy and daintiness of a piece of china, and lovely Alleni, that recalled the beauty of a sunset sky when the gold is dying, and when celestial amber is dissolving and melting into exquisite tones of mauve and lavender.

A little later, I found Burbidge hard at work pruning my great bed of hybrid teas, and hybrid perpetual roses, that I have planted with alternate rows of old Dutch and Darwin tulips, with English and Spanish irises, and with lines of grape and Botryoides hyacinths. “Us must get a bit of the bush off,” said my old gardener, as he plied his pruning scissors. I begged him, however, not to cut my hybrid teas too hard, as now so many gardeners are inclined to do, for roses in Shropshire, it seemed to me, did not like too much of the knife, or of the French drastic treatment. “Let it be a rose bush in England,” I pleaded.

“Right you are, ma’am,” replied Burbidge, “for there’s many as uses the knife as a child the whip. Most of the roses here be on their own roots, and so, healthy and abiding. Manetti stuff have blooms big as saucers the first year, but go out the next year like candles as the wind’s overmastered. They be like most fandangles – no stay in them.”

THE VERMILLION ROSE

So saying, my old friend plied his scissors vigorously, and the click, click, resounded all through the garden. Before I left the red-walled garden, I had a word with my old gardener about my hedge of Austrian briars. What a wonderful single rose it is, and the variety is very ancient. Parkinson mentions it in his “Theatre of Plants,” and calls it “the vermilion rose of Austria.” If we prune it this year, we shall get no flowers, I lamented, and I am always very loth to let the pruning shears work their will with my pet rose. Then I turned to my moss roses: pink, white, purple, and the most beautiful variety of all, the old crested. They were all big bushes and must be kept in shape, but should not be pruned in the ordinary sense.

Besides these sorts already named, I grow in my garden the beautiful roses of Japan – the purple and white, and the semi-duplex kinds, all of which bear such superb hips in the autumn. I told Burbidge that we must net some of the bushes in autumn, and that I would try later and get some German recipes for making them into preserves. In Elizabethan days, I have read, “Cooks and their ladies did know how to prepare from hips many fine dishes for their tables.” Burbidge scoffed at this notion. “Let the wild things be, marm,” he said to me; and added, “I never heard of much that was good wild, but nuts.” At this I laughed and replied, “Wait and see – and taste.”

Burbidge told me, that he proposed to carry out the bees in their little wooden houses next week. “Come next Thursday, bee operations should begin,” my old friend assured me. Nine was the hour chosen, and, if fine, “us will have the masks, so that come a breakage the little brown folk can’t come to us – and the vermin make sore flesh of us.” To-day, as I went into the tool-house I heard the bees buzzing angrily, as if they could not keep quiet for anger.

“To-morrow,” Burbidge then informed me, he and the boys would paint all the “bees’ homes over, save the lips, in different colours.” These must, in his language, remain “simple;” but “come Thursday, us will take off the zinc stopper on each, and then the little brown uns can roam as they list.”

All last winter, since November, the bees had lived in the tool-house, and had been artificially fed for the last fortnight, so that, to use my old friend’s words, “they be fair nasty with temper, and buzzin’ like an organ on fire.” And now nothing remained but for Auguste, as he always did, to make them one last meal of burnt sugar, and solemnly to “inviter ces messieurs à faire leur miel.” Their appointed time of liberty was at hand, and in a few days the little brown folk would fly into the sunshine with pæans of joy.

I went into the tool-house with Burbidge. Burbidge is a man of order. Every night he makes “his boys” hang up the tools, after cleaning them with care. Those not in use shine brightly against the wall. Every night they are rubbed clean with a rag steeped in oil. Great strings of onions hung from the massive oak beams. During bad days in winter, when the snow lay on the ground, Burbidge and his men mended the fruit nets, painted the water-cans a brilliant red, or green, made wooden labels, and got ready, as they called it, “for the comin’ of summer.”

There, along one side, were the beehives, some eight in all – all to be painted in different colours. Burbidge holds the view that no two should be painted the same colour, so that each hive, as he calls it, “should drop on their own colour sharp.” What truth there may be in this idea I cannot say, but I was delighted to oblige my old friend in this respect, for I, too, like bright colours in a garden.

Burbidge took out of an oak locker his colour board for the year. “I know, marm, as yer be tasty with a needle,” he said, “and I’ll leave it to you to say what pleases you and the brown folk most.” I suggested shades of blue, and told him of the Scotch belief that bees of all colours love blue best. But Burbidge would not admit this. “I never heard that in Shropshire,” he said stoutly. “Don’t believe it, nor a letter of it. Orange or purple, I believe, be every bit as good as blue.” Then I asked Burbidge about the old Shropshire bees that learned folks in bee-lore have told me were descended from the old wild bees that the British had, and of which there are still swarms in straw skeps in far-away farmhouses nestling against the Clee. But about these wild bees Burbidge knew nothing, but only felt certain that anything “as be Shropshire born be bound to be good.”

Then I chose the colours – red, flame, crimson, salmon, mauve, pink, the delicate shade of the autumn crocus, jonquil yellow, and one or two shades of blue – and particularly the dear old-fashioned bleu de Marie that one meets in an Italian sky, as beautiful in its way as the breast of “old Adam” (the peacock) against a yew hedge on a fine March morning in full sunlight.

It was a lovely spring morning on that Thursday, the appointed day for the removal of the bees to summer quarters.

MOONLIGHTERS AT WORK

Bess and I had a cup of milk and a slice of bread and butter, the best of all morning breakfasts, and ran out to see the sport. Burbidge was there with his boys, looking all of them like marauders, or moonlighters, for their faces were clothed with masks and their hands were covered with thick gloves.

Bess grasped tight hold of my hand. “Mamsie, how wicked they look, as if they meant to kill some one,” she whispered.

As to Mouse, she could not contain her displeasure. She gave a series of low growls, and, for all she knew them, did not like their coming too near us.

Burbidge propped back the garden gate with a stout staff. Then they carried the little wooden houses out. What an angry sound of buzzing went on inside, as the men bore them along. “Steady, steady!” cried Burbidge, in a tone of command, “or the little brown people will burst themselves with rage, and then, boys, it will be run for it who can.”

After this note of warning, “the two boys” advanced very gently and placed the beehives in turn along the side of a path under the shade of an apple grove, and stood them facing south and east. “That be your home,” said Burbidge, and then gravely proceeded to whisper “a charm.” What that was I have never been able to discover, for Burbidge declared it to be a secret between him and the little brown ’uns, and if it was known the good would go with “gossamer wings.” There is something about spring and blossom, and sun, and gentle rain, an old woman once told me, but the exact words old Nelly Fetch wouldn’t tell me, and declared, like Burbidge, “that charms and rhymes were best kept between bees and bee-keepers, same as words to the bees when death had visited a family.” It is believed in Shropshire that bees are canny, touchy folk, and that those who wish to keep them must be civil and knowledgeable, and, “plaize ’em as little sweethearts,” as an old cottager once said to me, “or the bees wud mak’ yer rue it.”

“Whispering a death” is still a common custom. I remember once asking a farmer’s wife, who used to be noted for her bees, if she had any honey to sell, and being gravely told that she was out of bees, for that they had forgotten when the master died to whisper his death to them, and in consequence the bees had taken to the woods in displeasure.

“PAINTS NEXT BEST TO WATER”

Bess and I watched the proceedings, and when all the hives were fixed in their places, we put on old aprons and helped to daub on the paint. Burbidge had mixed little cans of each colour, pink, yellow scarlet, and flame, crimson, jonquil, and blue. Bess was delighted with the little pots and the brushes. “Mamsie, I am certain of one thing,” she said, “paints are next best to water.” And in a few moments the little face, hands, and pinafore, reflected all the colours of the rainbow.

In ten minutes or so, we had given each hive one coat of colour, and we never give more. Then we all went and stood at the other end of the garden to see the effect of our handiwork.

“Fine, very fine,” exclaimed Burbidge, admiringly. “A horse in bells couldn’t look smarter.” And Bess added, “Mamsie, it’s like a bunch of flowers, only there are no leaves.” As we remained there, Auguste came on the scene. He appeared with a pail of syrup to feed the bees, for bees will always feed with avidity when put out first into the air, however dainty or reluctant they have been to eat when kept in confinement. A large bottle with a broad opening, full of thick syrup, was filled, and fixed upside down on the top of each hive. We heard behind the perforated zinc a mighty din. “Messieurs les abeilles crient pour leur dîner,” said Auguste.

Overhead was the sunshine, and the bees scented the breeze. Burbidge filled each bottle, and then replaced the wooden lid of each hive. “Stand back, marm!” he cried, “and you, too, Monsieur.” Then Burbidge called his “boys,” and they removed the little pieces of zinc that had kept the bees so long prisoners. Out they flew with exultant hums and buzzes.

“They wud have liked to cut their way through,” cried Absalom, “but zinc, for all their cunning, be the masters of they.”

“They’ll be contented now,” laughed Burbidge. “Sugar and sunshine, what more can a bee desire?”

There is a great art in making bee syrup, like there is in doing most country things. Syrup should be clear and of the right thickness, and not too liquid; above all, it should not be too thin, so as to pass too quickly through the muslin, or, in Burbidge’s words, “it would drown the bees like flies in a jar of cream.”

After watching the bees come out and fly round in exultant joy, Bess and I returned to the house, for, as Bess said, the “bee play” was over for to-day. How busy the little brown people will be gathering fresh honey, flying amongst the arabis and searching for celandines and primroses.

We went in, and Bess ran up to her lessons. Alas! study to my little maid is always a period of sadness. “Real children never like lessons,” is my little girl’s dictum. They don’t like useless things; and to Bess, French, geography, history, and music are all useless and worthless acquisitions. As I sat and embroidered in the Chapel Hall, I was suddenly told that a boy outside wished to speak to me. I left a carnation spray, a copy of a design of one of Mary Queen of Scots’, and looked up to welcome Thady Malone, a little Irish lad, who, with his father and mother, had lately come into the parish.

Thady is the terror of the locality, and the hero of all the naughty-boy stories of the neighbourhood.

“MORE DEVIL THAN BOY”

According to my old gardener, who looks at him with an evil eye, “Thady be more devil than boy.” Burbidge declares that Thady is a plague, and a sore to the town, and “wull be the death of some ’un, unless he kills hisself first.” The fact is, Thady has done every naughty thing conceivable. He has fired woods, put strings across roads, I have been told, to try and trip up his natural enemy, James Grogan, the reigning policeman, and even put logs across the little local line, I have been assured; but this he stoutly denies himself. He has been thrashed by indignant farmers for running their sheep, and yet, as Bess says, always turns up “naughty and nice,” with the politest of manners, which he gets from “auld Oireland,” and the sweetest and most innocent of baby faces out of which natural wickedness ever peeped.

A minute later and Thady stood before me, bare-legged and bonny, with an expectant smile in his eyes. I opened the conversation by asking him from where he came? “Right from Mrs. Harley.” And he added, with a catch in his throat, “The poor lady is like to die entirely, judging by what Mrs. Betty said, and so I have come to you to see what your leddyship can do to stop the disease.”

Thady spoke in the most engaging brogue, and he had the sunniest, pleasantest smile in the world. He stood before me, with his little bare feet shyly touching the fringe of the carpet.

No other child in the old town goes barefoot. He is known at Wenlock by the nickname of “Naughty Bare-legs,” and has a shock of curly hair and dancing grey-blue eyes.

“I’ll come at once,” I said. “But why, Thady, have they sent you?”

Thady scratched his head and looked puzzled, declared he didn’t know, but protested there was nothing he wouldn’t do to oblige Mrs. Harley, for all, he averred, “she’s a hathan, and never says a prayer to the blessed Virgin.”

It appeared that once some naughty boys at Homer nearly succeeded in drowning Mrs. Harley’s tortoiseshell kitten, but that Thady, hearing the poor little beast mew, fearlessly came to its rescue, fought his way through the thick of the band of miscreants, and told them they were nothing but base robbers, that they should be the death of something bigger; and before they had recovered from their surprise, had dashed through the ring, plunged out of the brook, and carried off poor pussie victoriously. After this, Mrs. Harley had always been a friend of his, filled his pockets with damsons in autumn, and apples, and when the world turned a cold shoulder on him, never failed to hold out to him the hand of friendship.

“For all I’m bad,” Thady would say, with a twinkle in his eye, “Mrs. Harley never believes the worst of me, and says (God bless her!) the day will come when the country will be proud of me.”

There was no time to be lost, so I followed the little bare-legged messenger out of the room, ran upstairs, put on my hat and cape, and whistled my great dog to heel. I said before starting, “Is there nothing I ought to take to her?”

Whereupon Thady answered impetuously, with the romance of his people, “There’s just nothing at all. It’s just your face, my leddy, which the poor body wants to get a sight of, considerin’ it’s never the shadow of the blessed Virgin that she can bless her eyes with.”

So without another word, Thady and I passed out of the Abbey, hurried across the emerald velvet of the Cloister lawn, and let ourselves out by the little side wicket, and so up the meadow past the station and away to the top of the hill. “I cannot run any more,” at last I cried to Thady, who had set the pace. “We must walk. See, even Mouse is panting.” Thady stopped, and then we settled down into a walk, and began after a few minutes to chat.

Thady looked at Mouse. “Proud I’d be, my leddy,” he said, “if I owned such a dog. The constable, I’m thinking, would look a small man beside me then.”

At this sally I had the ill-nature to suggest the constable could shoot Mouse. Whereupon Thady, with Hibernian readiness, replied, “Now I’m thinking the dog would bite first.”

“A KITTY WREN, BEGORRA!”

A little later a bird flew across the path, upon which Thady cried out, “A Kitty wren, begorra!” and before I could stop him, had picked up a pebble to throw at a little golden-crested wren that I saw running up a spray of yew.

“Stop, stop,” I cried; “don’t throw it.”

“Why not?” said Thady. “There’s no law in England or Oireland against killin’ a wren, beside” – and he what the Shropshire folks call “rippled over” with laughter – “’twould be a pretty shot.”

But I begged him to desist, and Thady, who is civility itself, or, as he quaintly expresses it, “born dutiful entirely to a leddy,” dropped his stone and we walked on. After a few minutes’ conversation, I discovered that Thady Malone was a naturalist of no mean repute, that he could imitate the call and various notes of most of the wild birds, and that he knew where to find their nests. “And if it’s after such,” he added gallantly, “that yer fancy takes yer, I’ll lead yer and show yer the rarest birds that fly. Only wait another fortnight, pheasants, hawks, magpies, jays, blackcaps, blue-bonnets, Nanny washtails, heather lenties, red-poles, cutty wrens, corbie crows, Harry redcaps, and scores of others.” Many of Thady’s names I did not know, but Thady was graciously inclined, and assured me that he would “learn my leddyship the true names.” “I don’t call them after the books whatever,” he asserted, “but same as the gipsy folks, and by the names known by the people that lived in London, and elsewhere, before us settled in Wenlock.”

So it was agreed that Thady and I were to spend a day in the woods.

“Let it be Saturday,” said Thady, authoritatively, “for then there’s no school to plague the life out of a fellow. I can climb and you can cap,” by which Thady meant that I was to carry the eggs.

“Thady,” I said, as we parted at Mrs. Harley’s wicket, “you must come for me some Saturday. We will go into the woods, and I will bring out luncheon, and you shall climb the trees, whilst I and Bess will search the ground; but we will take no nests, only look at them and see the eggs.”

“Leave the eggs, and what for will her leddyship do that?” asked Thady, surprised. “That wud be like catching a hare and not finding it in the pot the night after.”

“Well,” I remonstrated, “when you come with me, you must play my game of bird-nesting. Anyway, I can promise there will be nothing sick, or sorry, where we have gone.”

Thady at this laughed a little contemptuously, and a second later vanished behind a hedgerow, and I entered Mrs. Harley’s cottage.

It was a lovely morning, bright and joyous. The air was full of spring odours, and in the song of the birds I only heard the echo of universal joy. Yet I knew, the moment I entered the cottage, that the hand of Death was about to beckon my old friend away from the good and useful life, that she had led so well and bravely, to the other side of the bourn from which no man returns.

Old Bessie met me. “Her’s goin’ fast,” she whispered, and stood a moment in the sunlight, hot tears almost blinding her poor old eyes. Then, as I hesitated, she touched me gently on the arm and murmured, “Come up, come up. Glad her’ll be to see you, for all her’s done with Homer, and this world too.” So I mounted the stairs and again found myself in Mrs. Harley’s presence.

Outside beyond the Severn and the Wrekin, the sun was shining gaily. Inside the little chamber, all was spotlessly clean, I noted, as I entered the bed-chamber. I saw the dying woman wanted something, from the way in which her face moved.

“A FAIR DAY TO GO HOME”

“Light, light,” she murmured as I touched her hand; and then, very low, “A fair day to go Home.”

“Her’s been talking of nothing but goin’ home,” said Betsy, reverently; “and her’s goin’ sure, same as gospel truth.”

“All’s at peace,” whispered my old friend, and took a long, far look of the great hill of which all Shropshire men are so proud. So, smiling tenderly and loving the distant scene, her head sank back, and she seemed gently to fall asleep.

“How peaceful!” I said, awestruck.

“The Lord have a-called her, and her work be done,” said Betty solemnly, a little later. “’Tis a good thing,” she added, “to have done good work, and I think the Lord loved her for all she was lowly and never trod in high places.”

Then I left Betty, and the triumphant serene face, in the little whitewashed chamber. As I departed, I was conscious of having touched the fringe of a very holy garment.

I passed out. And as I met the gladness of the outside world, I knew that some of my old friend’s radiance was still lighting my path. After all, I know no better or more blessed things than simple faith, and a noble life, ended by His supreme grace.

Mouse followed at my heels, dutifully walking close behind me. It is curious, the way in which a dog that is often our companion, reflects our mood. The great hound knew that I was absorbed, and gave way to no frolic, chased no rabbit, but kept near, watching me out of her topaz eyes solemnly and with marked concern.

A great stillness seemed to belong to the afternoon. The sun was hidden beneath tender lavender clouds. I crossed a stile and walked amongst the budding grass. Suddenly out of a wood, for the first time in the year, I heard the mystic voice of the cuckoo, calling, calling as if out of a dream.

What a delightful eërie sound it is! Not like a real bird, but like some voice from another world, with its strange power of reiteration, a voice which we cannot do otherwise than listen to; for, as Sir Philip Sidney said, “The cuckoo cometh to you with a tale to hold children from their play, and old men from the chimney corner.” From all time men have loved his cry. In the “Exeter Book” occurs the passage —

“Sweet was the song of birds,The earth was covered with flowers,Cuckoos announced the year.”THE CRY OF THE CUCKOO

I did not see the bird, which lent enchantment to his song. I listened, with budding daisies at my feet, and over Wenlock spire a magic purple light. He seemed to me no bird, but a spirit calling to the world with a gladness that we cannot know. Death and winter must come, but for all that, spring is here, he seemed to say.