The tomb of Frank Sydall and of the Lord
Viscount Saul, only child and heir to William Earl of Kildonan, is
one: a stone altar tomb in Whitminster churchyard. Dr. Ashton lived on for over thirty years in his prebendal house, I do
not know how quietly, but without visible disturbance. His successor
preferred a house he already owned in the town, and left that of the
senior prebendary vacant. Between them these two men saw the
eighteenth century out and the nineteenth in; for Mr. Hindes, the
successor of Ashton, became prebendary at nine-and-twenty and died at
nine-and-eighty. So that it was not till 1823 or 1824 that any one
succeeded to the post who intended to make the house his home. The man
who did was Dr. Henry Oldys, whose name may be known to some of my
readers as that of the author of a row of volumes labelled _Oldys's
Works_, which occupy a place that must be honoured, since it is so
rarely touched, upon the shelves of many a substantial library. Dr. Oldys, his niece, and his servants took some months to transfer
furniture and books from his Dorsetshire parsonage to the quadrangle
of Whitminster, and to get everything into place. But eventually the
work was done, and the house (which, though untenanted, had always
been kept sound and weather-tight) woke up, and like Monte Cristo's
mansion at Auteuil, lived, sang, and bloomed once more. On a certain
morning in June it looked especially fair, as Dr. Oldys strolled in
his garden before breakfast and gazed over the red roof at the minster
tower with its four gold vanes, backed by a very blue sky, and very
white little clouds. "Mary," he said, as he seated himself at the breakfast table and laid
down something hard and shiny on the cloth, "here's a find which the
boy made just now. You'll be sharper than I if you can guess what it's
meant for." It was a round and perfectly smooth tablet--as much as an
inch thick--of what seemed clear glass. "It is rather attractive at
all events," said Mary: she was a fair woman, with light hair and
large eyes, rather a devotee of literature. "Yes," said her uncle, "I
thought you'd be pleased with it. I presume it came from the house: it
turned up in the rubbish-heap in the corner." "I'm not sure that I do
like it, after all," said Mary, some minutes later. "Why in the world
not, my dear?" "I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps it's only fancy." "Yes, only fancy and romance, of course. What's that book, now--the
name of that book, I mean, that you had your head in all yesterday?" "_The Talisman_, Uncle. Oh, if this should turn out to be a talisman,
how enchanting it would be!" "Yes, _The Talisman_: ah, well, you're
welcome to it, whatever it is: I must be off about my business. Is all
well in the house? Does it suit you? Any complaints from the servants'
hall?" "No, indeed, nothing could be more charming. The only _soupçon_
of a complaint besides the lock of the linen closet, which I told you
of, is that Mrs. Maple says she cannot get rid of the sawflies out of
that room you pass through at the other end of the hall. By the way,
are you sure you like your bedroom? It is a long way off from any one
else, you know." "Like it? To be sure I do; the further off from you,
my dear, the better. There, don't think it necessary to beat me:
accept my apologies. But what are sawflies? will they eat my coats? If
not, they may have the room to themselves for what I care. We are not
likely to be using it." "No, of course not. Well, what she calls
sawflies are those reddish things like a daddy-longlegs, but
smaller,[1] and there are a great many of them perching about that
room, certainly. I don't like them, but I don't fancy they are
mischievous." "There seem to be several things you don't like this
fine morning," said her uncle, as he closed the door. Miss Oldys
remained in her chair looking at the tablet, which she was holding in
the palm of her hand. The smile that had been on her face faded slowly
from it and gave place to an expression of curiosity and almost
strained attention. Her reverie was broken by the entrance of Mrs. Maple, and her invariable opening, "Oh, Miss, could I speak to you a
minute?" A letter from Miss Oldys to a friend in Lichfield, begun a day or two
before, is the next source for this story. It is not devoid of traces
of the influence of that leader of female thought in her day, Miss
Anna Seward, known to some as the Swan of Lichfield. "My sweetest Emily will be rejoiced to hear that we are at length--my
beloved uncle and myself--settled in the house that now calls us
master--nay, master and mistress--as in past ages it has called so
many others. Here we taste a mingling of modern elegance and hoary
antiquity, such as has never ere now graced life for either of us. The
town, small as it is, affords us some reflection, pale indeed, but
veritable, of the sweets of polite intercourse: the adjacent country
numbers amid the occupants of its scattered mansions some whose polish
is annually refreshed by contact with metropolitan splendour, and
others whose robust and homely geniality is, at times, and by way of
contrast, not less cheering and acceptable. Tired of the parlours and
drawing-rooms of our friends, we have ready to hand a refuge from the
clash of wits or the small talk of the day amid the solemn beauties of
our venerable minster, whose silvern chimes daily 'knoll us to
prayer,' and in the shady walks of whose tranquil graveyard we muse
with softened heart, and ever and anon with moistened eye, upon the
memorials of the young, the beautiful, the aged, the wise, and the
good." Here there is an abrupt break both in the writing and the style. "But my dearest Emily, I can no longer write with the care which you
deserve, and in which we both take pleasure. What I have to tell you
is wholly foreign to what has gone before. This morning my uncle
brought in to breakfast an object which had been found in the garden;
it was a glass or crystal tablet of this shape (a little sketch is
given), which he handed to me, and which, after he left the room,
remained on the table by me. I gazed at it, I know not why, for some
minutes, till called away by the day's duties; and you will smile
incredulously when I say that I seemed to myself to begin to descry
reflected in it objects and scenes which were not in the room where I
was. You will not, however, be surprised that after such an experience
I took the first opportunity to seclude myself in my room with what I
now half believed to be a talisman of mickle might. I was not
disappointed. I assure you, Emily, by that memory which is dearest to
both of us, that what I went through this afternoon transcends the
limits of what I had before deemed credible. In brief, what I saw,
seated in my bedroom, in the broad daylight of summer, and looking
into the crystal depth of that small round tablet, was this.