Part 1

Transcribed from the 1844 edition by David Price, email [email protected]. Many thanks to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries, Local Studies, for allowing their copy to be used for this transcription.

[Picture: Decorative title page]

THE FORLORN HOPE: A STORY OF OLD CHELSEA.

BY Mrs. S. C. HALL.

[Picture: Chelsea from the Thames]

CHELSEA Hospital, or, as the old soldiers prefer to call it, “Chelsea College,” appears much the same at all seasons of the year; its simple, dignified, and, if the phrase may be permitted, healthful and useful, style of architecture, suggests the same ideas, under the hot sun of June and amid the snows of bleak December; bringing conviction that the venerable structure is a safe, suitable, comfortable, and happy, as well as honourable, retreat for the brave men who have so effectually “kept the foreigner from fooling us.” The simple story I have to tell, commences with a morning in April, 1838. It was a warm, soft morning, of the first spring month; the sun shone along the colonnade of “the Royal College.” Some of the veterans—who, fearing rheumatism more than they ever feared cold steel or leaden bullet, had kept close quarters all the winter, in their comfortable nooks up stairs—were now slowly pacing beside the stately pillars of their own palace, inhaling the refreshing breeze that crossed the water-garden from the Thames, and talking cheerfully of the coming summer. Truly the “pensioners” seem, to the full, aware of their privileges, and of their claims—far less upon our sympathies than upon our gratitude and respect. The college is THEIRS; they look, walk, and talk, in perfect and indisputable consciousness that it is their house, and that those who cross its courts, loiter in its gardens, or view its halls, chapel, and dormitories, are but visitors—graciously admitted, and generously instructed by them. And who will dare to question their right?

[Picture: The Summer House]

The veterans are, as they may well be, proud of their country and their hospital; they are too natural to disguise the feeling that they love a good listener; to such they will tell how Madam Gwyn asked the king—the second Charles—to endow a last earthly home for his brave soldiers; and how rejoiced she was to have it built at Chelsea, because she was born there, for that all human souls love the places where they were born! They point to the tattered flags in the noble hall and sacred chapel, as if the trophies were actually won by their own hands; they will digress from them to Sir Christopher Wren, not seeming to know very clearly whether the great architect or Charles the Second planned the structure—they are apt to confound Henry the Eighth with the second James, who presented to their church such splendid communion plate; but make no mistake at all about Queen Victoria, who came herself to see them—“God bless her Majesty!” I never met one who was not proud of his quarters; they praise the freshness and sweetness of the air, the liberality of the treatment, and point out, with gratitude, their little gardens which occupy the site of the famous Ranelagh of fashionable memory, where they can follow their own fancies, cultivating, in their plots of ground, the flowers, or herbs, or shrubs that please them best; THE SUMMER-HOUSE, which they say Lord John Russell built for them, occupies a prominent position there; it was worthy a descendant of the noble house of Bedford to care for brave soldiers in the evening of their days. If you have patience, and feel interested in the cheerful garrulities of age, they will hint that they fear the new embankment of “The Thames” will still more dry up the land-springs, and injure their fine old trees. Some can describe the ancient conduit which supplied Winchester Palace and Beaufort House with water, and point out (if you will extend your walk so far) the various sites of houses in the immediate vicinity, where dwelt the great men of old times,—chiefest among them all, the wise Sir Thomas More, Lord High Chancellor of England, who lived “hard by,” and had for his near neighbours the Earl of Essex, the Princess Elizabeth; and, farther down, at Old Brompton, Oliver Cromwell and Lord Burleigh. But those who would know more than the pensioners can tell them concerning Chelsea, and its neighbourhood—that suburb of London most rich in honourable and interesting associations with the past—may consult good Mr. Faulkner, the accurate and pains-taking Historian of the district, who lives in a small book-shop near at hand, flourishing, as he ought to, in the very centre of places he has so effectually aided to commemorate.

[Picture: Nell Gwyn and Charles]

The story of “Mistress Nelly’s” prayer that an asylum might be provided for aged veterans, “whose work was done,” rests mainly on tradition; but there is nothing of improbability about it. Her influence over the voluptuous monarch,

“Who never said a foolish thing And never did a wise one,”

was, at one period, unbounded. It was in this instance, at least, exerted in the cause of mercy and virtue, as well as gratitude; the College remains a lasting contradiction to the memorable epigram I have quoted; inasmuch as a “wiser thing” than its foundation, to say nothing of its justice, is not recorded in the chronicles of the reign of any British sovereign. Many a victory has been won for these kingdoms by the knowledge that the maimed soldier will not be a deserted beggar—by the certainty that honourable “scars” will be healed by other ointment than that of mere pity! Chelsea and Greenwich are enduring monuments to prove that a Nation knows how to be grateful. The brave men who pace along these corridors may “talk o’er their wounds,” and while shouldering their crutches, to “show how fields were won,” point to the recompense as a stimulus to younger candidates for glory. Who can sufficiently estimate the value of this reward? Let us ask what it has done for our country; but let us ask it on the battle fields, where French eagles were taken: eagles, a score of which are now the trophies of our triumphs, in the very halls which the veterans, who won them, tread up and down.

The pensioners—though, as human beings, each may have a distinctive character—are, to a certain degree, alike; clean and orderly, erect in their carriage for a much longer period than civilians of equal ages, and disputing all the encroachments of time, inch by inch—fighting with as much determination for life as formerly they did for glory. When they die, they die of old age.

[Picture: Pensioner]

The month I have said was April—the April of 1838: old James Hardy and John Coyne were walking beneath the colonnade that faces the water-garden. They were both old, yet John considered James a mere boy. John’s face had been “broken up” by a gun-shot wound at Seringapatam, which anticipated time; and James “stumped” very vigorously along on a brace of wooden legs, his eyes bright and twinkling, his laugh ringing out, at the conclusion of each of his brief, pithy stories, which he told as earnestly as if John could hear them; John, however, _had_ heard them all before he became deaf, and as James only re-drew upon his ancient store, John had no great loss. He looked up in his comrade’s face, caught the cheerful infection of his comrade’s laugh, by sight though not by sound, and laughed also—not as James laughed, but in a little quiet way, something like the rattle of a baby’s drum—and then James would wind it up by saying—“There! did you ever hear the like of that before!” and bestow a sounding slap on his friend’s shoulder. They were comrades in every sense of the word, for they inhabited the same dormitory, nest by nest; John cherishing a canary, whose song he had never heard, though he used to declare it sang like a nightingale, with a woodlark’s note—while James had ranged all manner of curious crockery on the shelf over his bed, filling up the intermediate spaces with caricatures of the French, the iron head of a halbert, the buckle of a French cuirass, a fragment of an ensign’s gorget, and a few other reliques of a “foughten field,”—

“The treasures of a soldier, bought with blood, And kept at life’s expense.”

As they strutted lovingly together, delighting, as children do, in sunshine, while James talked and laughed incessantly, a tall, thin, military-looking man, as hard and erect as a ramrod, marched up to them, with as measured a tread as if he were in the ranks; then, wheeling about, presented James with a leaf of laurel, one of many he held in his hand; there was a wild sparkle in his eyes, and a bright flush upon his cheek.

“What for, serjeant-major?” inquired James, taking the leaf, and giving a military salute.

“Toulouse!” answered the veteran, in a voice of triumph; yet the tone was full of music, and rendered ample justice to the musical word. “Toulouse! my old fellow,” he repeated.

“So it is!” answered James Hardy; “it is the anniversary, sure enough. And yet, master, if we are to mount a fresh laurel for every day we gained a victory, we shall have to get as many as there are days in the year.”

“Right, Hardy, right,” replied the sergeant-major. “Right; three hundred and sixty-five laurel-leaves per annum. Right, that was well said. Lucy walked out this morning and gathered me a basketful; she knew I’d want them for my old comrades, as soon as I could get down to the college. She’s worthy to be a soldier’s daughter.”

“Ah, ah! and a soldier’s wife,” responded James; “isn’t she, John?” And John, thinking James had been telling a story, laughed his little laugh as usual.

“Worthy to be anything, thank God,” said the sergeant-major; but the expression of his face changed; it lost its flush and its proud glance of triumph; anxiety for his only child obliterated even the memory of “Toulouse:”—the soldier was absorbed in the father,—and he continued, “No: I should not like her to be a soldier’s wife, Jem, I should not; she hasn’t strength for campaigning. It killed her poor mother; they said it was consumption; but it was no such thing. It was the wet and dry, heat and cold, ups and downs of campaigning; she would not leave me—not she: it is a wonderful thing, the abiding love that links a frail, delicate woman to the rough soldier and his life of hardships; and such a loving mother as she had, and such a home; she never heard anything louder than the ripple of the mountain rill, and the coo of the ringdove, until, a girl of seventeen, she plunged with me into the hot war. You remember her, Jem?” The sergeant-major’s seventeen years of widowhood had not dried up the sources of his grief; he drew his hand across his eyes, and then began, hastily and with a tremulous hand, to fit the laurel leaves, which he still held, one within the other.

“That I do—remember her—and well;” answered James Hardy.

“What is it?” inquired old John. James made him understand they were speaking of poor Mrs. Joyce.

“Ah!” said John, “she was an angel,—Miss Lucy is very like her mother—very like her—even to the way she has in church of laying her hand on her heart—so,—as if it beat too fast.”

“She does not do _that_, does she, James?” inquired the sergeant-major, eagerly; “I never saw her do _that_.”

“Likely not,” replied James; “John sees a deal more than those who hear; he is obliged to amuse himself with something; and, as he cannot hear, he sees.”

The sergeant-major paused, and his companions with him; he became abstracted—the leaves dropped from his fingers—and, at last, turning abruptly away, he retraced his steps homewards.

[Picture: Chelsea physic garden with statue of Sir Hans Sloane]

Old John touched his brow with his forefinger significantly, and James muttered to himself—“The wound in his head may have damaged the sergeant-major, to be sure,—but, it is his daughter, poor thing, for all the roses on her cheek, and her sweet voice—!” John did not hear a word his comrade spoke, but his thoughts were in the same channel. “He loves to see us all the same,” he said, “as when he was with the old ‘half-hundred,’ and takes a march through the college every morning, keeping wonderful count of our victories; and then mounts guard over his daughter, as regularly as beat of drum;—he’s constant with her; if the sun’s too hot, under the shade of the avenue trees; or, if it is too cold, in the warmth of Cheyne-walk, or with old Mr. Anderson in the botanic garden, gathering the virtues of the herbs, and telling each other tales of the cedars and plane trees of foreign parts; may be, looking through the old water gate, or at the statue of Sir Hans Sloane. {6} I hear tell that Miss Lucy has great knowledge of such things; but she’ll not live—not she—no more than her mother; I’m sure of that.”

“Who knows?” said James Hardy, “if she had a milder climate, or proper care.”

“Ah! the poor sergeant-major! He’s always leading some forlorn hope!”

The sergeant-major was one of EIGHTY-THREE THOUSAND MEN who are pensioned by a grateful country; an honourable boon—honourable alike to “those who give, and those who take.” A wound in the head had rendered him, at an early period of life, unfit for future service, and he had taken up his quarters in his native village, only to watch by the dying bed of a beloved wife, who, after a few years of gradual decline, left him the fatal legacy of a child as delicate as herself.

Of all the evils that wait on poor humanity, the most sad and the most hopeless, in its progress and its result, is that disease which may be described as peculiar to our climate; acting as a dreadful counterpoise to numerous blessed privileges; the one terrible “set-off” against the plague, the pestilence, the famine, the storm, the earthquake, the wars, which so continually devastate other countries, but from which a merciful Providence has, in a great degree, exempted ours. The raging fever of the blood or the brain, brings the suspense of but a week or two, and busies the mournful watcher; all the ills that “flesh is heir to” have inseparably linked with them some sources of consolation, some motives for hope; they may be borne by the sufferer, and by those who often suffer more intensely than the patient, because of the knowledge that skill and care are mighty to save. But CONSUMPTION—lingering, wasting, “slow but sure”—when the victim has been marked out, the work is, as it were, done! The hectic cheek is as a registered death-doom from which there is no appeal!

Should I not, rather, say that, HITHERTO, it has been so considered:—the Despair engendered by a belief that “all hope” was to be “abandoned,” having—no one can doubt it—largely aided in preventing cure.

The poor sergeant-major! strong and brave as a lion though he was,—a single word had made him feeble as a child. He had defied death, when death assumed appalling shapes; but the memory of his wife’s sufferings was ever a sudden chill upon his heart; he shrank, as at an adders’s touch, from the thought that his child might be the inheritor of the mother’s fatal dowry. Thus, the sound of a hollow cough would shake his rugged nature like an ague fit; his very life was bound up in that of his dear daughter; and, for a moment, the thought that there might be truth in what his aged comrade said, seemed as awful in its consequences as an actual death-knell.

Sergeant-major Joyce was a veteran soldier, who had gained the respect and esteem of his whole regiment officers and men. There was a bond between him and them which his withdrawal from active service could not cancel. So, after his wife’s death, finding that a few of his old companions in arms were inmates of Chelsea College, he removed to its vicinity; passing his time between the lofty corridors of the palace-hospital and the small sitting-room of his child; ever walking with and talking to “the pensioners,” or that dear and delicate “copy” of the wife he had so truly loved. And Lucy was a girl of whom any parent might have been proud. Delicacy of constitution had given refinement to her mind as well as to her appearance: she read, perhaps, more than was good for her, if she had been destined to live the usual term of life, in her proper sphere. She thought, also, but she thought well; and this, happily for herself, made her humble. Faith is the foundation of that righteous affection, without which nought is pure; her faith was clear and firm—in nothing wavering; SHE BELIEVED, and belief had given her, without an effort, tenfold the strength which those who rely for strength upon the broken and bending reed of HUMAN REASON, seek for in vain. You inquire, who taught her this? Was it her kindly but half-crazed father? No: he was full of a rough soldier’s honour, mingled, at times, with the more than woman’s softness, which often tempers dispositions fierce as his; but in all this faith, in the trust and purity, the meek, cheerful, warm spirit of love and tenderness, Lucy—I say it with deep reverence—Lucy, in all these things—the fruits of a regenerate nature—was taught of GOD. She made no show of piety; but her father knew that every night her Bible was placed beneath her pillow; for he had often seen it there, when stealing into her little room to be assured she slept. She read much besides, and had that youthful leaning towards poetry which is often the sure evidence of a good and highly tempered mind; but many a time she shut her “poesy book” with something like distaste, to fill out her heart with the inspired numbers of Isaiah, or the glories of the holy Psalms. Well might she be her father’s darling; she was more than that, though he did not know it; she was his ministering angel. At times her heart would throb wildly at tales of the wars in which he had borne a part. And even on the sabbath day she seldom knelt beneath the shadow of the trophies of our country’s prowess—trophies which glorify the old Hospital-Chapel of Chelsea—without feeling proudly thankful they were there; but her care was ever to soothe and tranquillize, to watch for and avert her father’s stormy moods, and be ready with a word in season, to recall him to himself.

Mr. Joyce soon reached his home after he left his comrades. “Mary,” he inquired of an Irishwoman, the widow of a soldier, who had nursed his daughter from her birth, and never left them—one of those devotees—half-friend, half-servant—which are found only among the Irish: “Mary, did you ever perceive that Lucy pressed her hand upon her heart—as—as—her mother used to do?”

“Is it her heart? Ah, then, did ye ever know any girl, let alone such a purty one as Miss Lucy, count all out twenty years without feeling she had a heart, sometimes?”

The sergeant-major turned upon the faithful woman with a scrutinizing look; but the half-smile, the total absence of anxiety from her features, re-assured him; long as Mary had lived in his service, he was unaccustomed to her national evasions.

“Who was it tould you about her heart bating, masther?” she inquired.

“It was old John Coyne, who said she pressed her hand thus—”

“Is it ould John?” repeated the woman; “ould John that would sware the crosses off a donkey’s back? Ah, sure! you’re not going to b’lieve what ould John says.”

“You think she is quite well, then?”

“She was singing like the first lark in spring after you went out, sir, and I never see her trip more lightly than she did down to the botany garden, not two minutes agone; unless you quick march, you’ll not overtake her.” Mr. Joyce wheeled round in his usually abrupt manner, and Mary stood at the door, shading the sun from her eyes with her hand, until he was out of sight. “I hate to have him look at me that way,” she said, “seeing right through and through a body, more than what’s in them! The bird of his bosom, poor man, may wear it out awhile, but not for long—and it’s himself that will be lost then! But where’s the good of looking out for sorrow; its heavy and hard enough when it comes: may the Lord keep it off as long as it’s good for us; and it _is_ hard to fancy so bright a crathure marked for death.”

Mary returned to her work—and the old sergeant-major overtook his daughter, just as she had lifted her hand to pull the great bell of the botanic garden. He said it would be pleasanter to stroll along Cheyne-walk, over THE OLD BRIDGE OF BATTERSEA.

[Picture: The old bridge of Battersea]

So over the old bridge they went; resting now and then upon the worn ballustrades of the rough structure, to gaze over the bosom of the richest and most glorious—to my thinking, I may add, the most calmly beautiful—of all the rivers of the world. Standing upon this bridge, a forest of masts is seen in the distance;—indications of the traffic which brings the wealth of a thousand seaports to our city quays. “The mighty heart” of a great Nation is sending thence its life-streams over earth. Glorious and mighty, and—spite of its few drawbacks—good and happy England! Turning westward, the tranquil and gentle waters of

“The most loved of all the ocean’s sons,”

are washing the banks of many a lordly villa and cottage, where the hands of industry are busied every day. And within sight, too, are places memorable in the annals of “holiday folk.” How closely linked with remembrances of hosts of “honest citizens,” is “the Red House, at Battersea,”—relic of those ancient “tea-gardens,” which even now are beginning to belong to the history of the past. “Pleasant village of Chelsea,” how abundant is its treasure of associations with the olden time! Not a house is there, or within view of it, to which some worthy memory may not be traced. Alas! they grow less and less in number every day!

[Picture: Chelsea windmill?]

But I have made a long digression from my story. During their walk the old soldier narrowly watched his child, to ascertain if she placed her hand on her heart, or her side; but she did not. She spoke kindly to the little children who crossed their path; and the dogs wagged their tails when they looked into her face. She walked, he thought, stoutly for a woman; and seemed so well, that he began talking to her about sieges, and marches, and of his early adventures; and then they sat down and rested; Lucy getting in a word, now and then, about the freshness and beauty of the country, and the goodness of God, and looking so happy and so animated that her father forgot all his fears on her account. Many persons, attracted by the fineness of the day, were strolling up and down Cheyne-walk as the father and daughter returned; and a group at the entrance to the famous Don Saltero Coffee-house, regarded her, as she passed, with such evident respect and admiration, that the sergeant-major felt more proud and happy than he had done for a very long time. In the evening, he smoked his long inlaid foreign pipe (which the little children, as well as the “big people” of Chelsea, regarded with peculiar admiration,) out of the parlour window.

[Picture: Lucy and her father]