The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864. Various
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guide, with the air of one who felt she had really nothing worth showing, but was bound to fulfil her task; and, entering one of the stone-walled apartments, she pointed out a few enormous pewter platters, much dimmed by time and neglect, leaning against the wall.
What visions of Christmas feasts and wassails these relics might have awakened in me, had I been left to gaze on them undisturbed, it is impossible to say; but my mind was not permitted to follow its own bent.
"There's nicer ones down at the house, all brightened up," said the child, with simplicity, and looking disdain at the heirlooms she was displaying.
The estimate put by the little girl upon the comparative value of old pewter dishes was suggestive. Whether the farm-house had robbed the castle, or the castle the farm-house, became at once an open question, and romance died in doubt.
There could be no doubt, however, as to the genuineness of the rude old dining-hall to which we were conducted next. The clumsy oaken table still occupied the raised end of the apartment, where the baron feasted his principal guests. The carved and panelled gallery whence his minstrels cheered the banquet still stood firm on its massive pillars, and the great stags'-antlers which surmounted it told of his skill as a sportsman. What giant logs might once have burned in the wide fireplaces, what sounds of revelry have gone up to the bare rafters! Our guide's tongue went glibly as she pointed out these familiar objects, and in the kitchen, buttery, and wine-vault, which were situated conveniently near to the dining-hall, she seemed equally at home. It was easy to recognize in the great stone chimneys, with their heavy hooks and cross-bars, symptoms of banquets for which bullocks were roasted whole and sheep and calves slain by the dozen; but we needed her practised lips to suggest the uses of the huge stone chopping-blocks, the deeply sunk troughs, the narrow gutters that crossed the stone pavement, all illustrative of the primitive days when butcher and cook wrought simultaneously, and this contracted cellar served at once for slaughter-house and kitchen. Her little airy figure was in strange contrast with these gloomy passages, these stones that had reeked with blood and smoke. She glided before us into the mysterious depths of the storehouse and ale-vault, as the new moon glides among damp, black clouds; as she directed our attention to the oaken cupboards for bread and cheese, the stone benches that once supported long rows of casks, the little wicket in the doorway, through which the butler doled out provisions to a waiting crowd of poor, she might well have been likened to a freshly trimmed lamp, lighting up the dark, mysterious past.
Freshly trimmed she unquestionably was, and by careful hands, but not a voluntary light; for, the moment her explanations were finished, or our curiosity satisfied, she sank into an indifference of speech and attitude which proved her distaste to a place and a task utterly foreign to her nature. Evidently, the hall which we had come so far to see, and were so eager to explore, was at once the most familiar object of her life and her most utter aversion. She had been drilled into a mechanical knowledge of its history, but the place itself was to her what an old grammar or spelling-book is to the unwilling pupil,—a thing to be learned by rote, to be abused, contemned, escaped from. As we finished our exploration of the lower floor, she probably breathed a sigh of relief, feeling that the first chapter of her task was concluded.
But a second and more difficult was yet to follow,—for we now ascended a staircase of uncemented blocks of stone, crossed a passage, and found ourselves in a long gallery or hall, the finest and best-preserved room in the castle, the state-apartment and ball-room of the lords of the manor. Our admiration at once broke forth in words of surprise and delight. The architecture of this room was of much more recent date than that portion of the building which we had already visited. It was Elizabethan in its style, and one of the finest specimens of the period. It was floored and wainscoted with oak; its frieze richly carved and adorned with boars' heads, thistles, and roses; its ceiling, also of oak, beautifully panelled and ornamented. There was a great square recess in the middle of the gallery, and along one side of it a row of bow-windows, through whose diamond panes a fine view was afforded of the quaint old garden and balconies below. Here, doubtless, knights and dames of the olden time had danced, coquetted, quarrelled, and been reconciled. Within those deep embrasures courtiers in ruffs and plumes had sued for ladies' favors, and plotted deep intrigues of state. What stories these walls could tell, had they but tongues to speak! What dreams did their very silence conjure up!
Led by a more erratic spirit than that even of our child-guide, I am afraid I lent an inattentive ear to her accurate statement of the length, breadth, and height of the gallery in which we stood, the precise date of its erection, the noble owners of the various coats-of-arms carved above the doorway; for I remember only that she seemed confident and well-informed, and recited her lesson faithfully so long as she was suffered to follow the beaten track. How impossible it was to extract anything beyond that from her we soon had proof.
She ushered us next into my lord's parlor, which nearly adjoined the gallery. This room was hung with arras, retained a few articles of ancient furniture, had one or two pictures hanging on its walls, and presented, altogether, a more habitable look than any other portion of the castle. Our little maid had got on well with her description of this room, had pointed out the portrait of Prince Arthur, once a resident at the hall, had introduced that of Will Somers, my lord's jester, as glibly as if Will were a playmate of her own, had deciphered for us the excellent moral precept carved in old English beneath the royal arms, "Drede God and honour the King," and was proceeding rapidly with an array of measurements and dates, when I unluckily interrupted her,—I think it was to ask some question about the tapestry. She looked at me reproachfully, indignantly,—just as a child reciting the multiplication-table before the School-Committee would look, if tripped up between the numbers, or as a boy, taken advantage of in play, might cry, "No fair!" She did not condescend to answer me, perhaps she could not, but paused a moment, reflected, went deliberately back in her recital, repeated the last few dates and phrases by way of gaining an impetus, and then went on without faltering to the end of her prescribed narration.
Poor child! She had my sympathy, and has still. What a grudge she must owe us tourists, even the tamest and most submissive of us, for whom she is thus compelled to tax her unwilling memory!
But if her spirits were damped, her good-humor threatened, it was for a minute only. Upon completing our rapid survey of my lord's parlor, and looking round for the guide who should conduct us farther, she had become invisible. So we moved on without her, and commenced exploring a narrow passage with a certain sense of bewilderment at its loneliness, and the doubt whither it might lead, when, suddenly, we were startled by a merry laugh, which seemed to ring through the air directly above our heads. Was it a mocking spirit that haunted the place? or one of the old figures on the tapestry, started into life? We looked up, and there, on a rough platform of pine boards, projecting from the wall, stood our Fenella. She was leaning over the shoulder of an artist-boy, who, seated at his easel, was copying one of the Gorgon-heads that stood out on the faded tapestry. She had dismissed us wholly from her thoughts, and, giving play to her native fun and coquetry, was taunting the youth with the slowness of his labors and the little progress he had made since she last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall, and condemned, like herself, to reproduce the past and bring out in fresh colors the staring eyes and mummied cheeks which would otherwise soon be lost to memory. She certainly made the most of her opportunity to taunt and tease him, for there was time for a laugh and a word of raillery only, to which he seemed too shamefaced to respond, before she was at our side again, gravely announcing, "My lady's chamber!"—and as we looked around the apartment, whose furniture and decorations imparted to it a superior air of neatness and refinement to that observable elsewhere, she pointed out to us a private doorway, conducting to a flight of steps, and affording an exit by which "my lady" had easy access to the court-yard, and thence to the chapel where she performed her devotions.
"And what are the rooms opposite?" we asked, pointing to a long row of windows on the second floor, on the opposite side of the quadrangle to that of which we had now completed the inspection.
"Those rooms are never shown," was the mysterious answer.
"But