I
For the purposes of this bit of history, Bangletop Hall stands upon a
grassy knoll on the left bank of the River Dee, about eighteen miles
from the quaint old city of Chester. It does not in reality stand there,
nor has it ever done so, but consideration for the interests of the
living compels me to conceal its exact location, and so to befog the
public as to its whereabouts that its identity may never be revealed to
its disadvantage. It is a rentable property, and were it known that it
has had a mystery connected with it of so deep, dark, and eerie a nature
as that about to be related, I fear that its usefulness, save as an
accessory to romance, would be seriously impaired, and that as an
investment it would become practically worthless.
The hall is a fair specimen of the architecture which prevailed at the
time of Edward the Confessor; that is to say, the main portion of the
structure, erected in Edward's time by the first Baron Bangletop, has
that square, substantial, stony aspect which to the eye versed in
architecture identifies it at once as a product of that enlightened era.
Later owners, the successive Barons Bangletop, have added to its original
dimensions, putting Queen Anne wings here, Elizabethan ells there, and an
Italian-Renaissance facade on the river front. A Wisconsin water tower,
connected with the main building by a low Gothic alleyway, stands to the
south; while toward the east is a Greek chapel, used by the present
occupant as a store-room for his wife's trunks, she having lately
returned from Paris with a wardrobe calculated to last through the first
half of the coming London season. Altogether Bangletop Hall is an
impressive structure, and at first sight gives rise to various emotions
in the aesthetic breast; some cavil, others admire. One leading architect
of Berlin travelled all the way from his German home to Bangletop Hall to
show that famous structure to his son, a student in the profession which
his father adorned; to whom he is said to have observed that,
architecturally, Bangletop Hall was "cosmopolitan and omniperiodic, and
therefore a liberal education to all who should come to study and master
its details." In short, Bangletop Hall was an object-lesson to young
architects, and showed them at a glance that which they should ever
strive to avoid.
Strange to say, for quite two centuries had Bangletop Hall remained
without a tenant, and for nearly seventy-five years it had been in the
market for rent, the barons, father and son, for many generations having
found it impossible to dwell within its walls, and for a very good reason:
no cook could ever be induced to live at Bangletop for a longer period
than two weeks. Why the queens of the kitchen invariably took what is
commonly known as French leave no occupant could ever learn, because, male
or female, the departed domestics never returned to tell, and even had
they done so, the pride of the Bangletops would not have permitted them to
listen to the explanation. The Bangletop escutcheon was clear of blots, no
suspicion even of a conversational blemish appearing thereon, and it was
always a matter of extreme satisfaction to the family that no one of its
scions since the title was created had ever been known to speak directly
to any one of lesser rank than himself, communication with inferiors being
always had through the medium of a private secretary, himself a baron, or
better, in reduced circumstances.
The first cook to leave Bangletop under circumstances of a Gallic
nature--that is, without known cause, wages, or luggage--had been employed
by Fitzherbert Alexander, seventeenth Baron of Bangletop, through Charles
Mortimor de Herbert, Baron Peddlington, formerly of Peddlington Manor at
Dunwoodie-on-the-Hike, his private secretary, a handsome old gentleman of
sixty-five, who had been deprived of his estates by the crown in 1629
because he was suspected of having inspired a comic broadside published in
those troublous days, and directed against Charles the First, which had
set all London in a roar.
This broadside, one of very few which are not preserved in the British
Museum--and a greater tribute to its rarity could not be devised--was
called, "A Good Suggestion as to ye Proper Use of ye Chinne Whisker," and
consisted of a few lines of doggerel printed beneath a caricature of the
king, with the crown hanging from his goatee, reading as follows:
"_Ye King doth sporte a gallous grey goatee
Uponne ye chinne, where every one may see.
And since ye Monarch's head's too small to holde
With comfort to himselfe ye crowne of gold,
Why not enwax and hooke ye goatee rare,
And lette ye British crown hang down from there?_"
[Illustration]
Whether or no the Baron of Peddlington was guilty of this traitorous
effusion no one, not even the king, could ever really make up his mind.
The charge was never fully proven, nor was De Herbert ever able to refute
it successfully, although he made frantic efforts to do so. The king,
eminently just in such matters, gave the baron the benefit of the doubt,
and inflicted only half the penalty prescribed, confiscating his estates,
and letting him keep his head and liberty. De Herbert's family begged the
crown to reverse the sentence, permitting them to keep the estates, the
king taking their uncle's head in lieu thereof, he being unmarried and
having no children who would mourn his loss. But Charles was poor rather
than vindictive at this period, and preferring to adopt the other course,
turned a deaf ear to the petitioners. This was probably one of the
earliest factors in the decadence of literature as a pastime for men of
high station.
De Herbert would have starved had it not been for his old friend Baron
Bangletop, who offered him the post of private secretary, lately made
vacant by the death of the Duke of Algeria, who had been the incumbent of
that office for ten years, and in a short time the Baron of Peddlington
was in full charge of the domestic arrangements of his friend. It was far
from easy, the work that devolved upon him. He was a proud, haughty man,
used to luxury of every sort, to whom contact with those who serve was
truly distasteful; to whom the necessity of himself serving was most
galling; but he had the manliness to face the hardships Fate had put upon
him, particularly when he realized that Baron Bangletop's attitude towards
servants was such that he could with impunity impose on the latter seven
indignities for every one that was imposed on him. Misery loves company,
particularly when she is herself the hostess, and can give generously of
her stores to others.
Desiring to retrieve his fallen fortunes, the Baron of Peddlington offered
large salaries to those whom he employed to serve in the Bangletop menage,
and on payday, through an ingenious system of fines, managed to retain
almost seventy-five per cent of the funds for his own use. Of this Baron
Bangletop, of course, could know nothing. He was aware that under De
Herbert the running expenses of his household were nearly twice what they
had been under the dusky Duke of Algeria; but he also observed that
repairs to the property, for which the late duke had annually paid out
several thousands of pounds sterling, with very little to show for it, now
cost him as many hundreds with no fewer tangible results. So he winked his
eye--the only unaristocratic habit he had, by-the-way--and said nothing.
The revenue was large enough, he had been known to say, to support himself
and all his relatives in state, with enough left over to satisfy even Ali
Baba and the forty thieves.
Had he foreseen the results of his complacency in financial matters, I
doubt if he would have persisted therein.
For some ten years under De Herbert's management everything went smoothly
and expensively for the Bangletop Hall people, and then there came a
change. The Baron Bangletop rang for his breakfast one morning, and his
breakfast was not. The cook had disappeared. Whither or why she had gone,
the private secretary professed to be unable to say. That she could easily
be replaced, he was certain. Equally certain was it that Baron Bangletop
stormed and raved for two hours, ate a cold breakfast--a thing he never
had been known to do before--and then departed for London to dine at the
club until Peddlington had secured a successor to the departed cook, which
the private secretary succeeded in doing within three days. The baron was
informed of his manager's success, and at the end of a week returned to
Bangletop Hall, arriving there late on a Saturday night, hungry as a bear,
and not too amiable, the king having negotiated a forcible loan with him
during his sojourn in the metropolis.
"Welcome to Bangletop, Baron," said De Herbert, uneasily, as his employer
alighted from his coach.
"Blast your welcome, and serve the dinner," returned the baron, with a
somewhat ill grace.
At this the private secretary seemed much embarrassed. "Ahem!" he said.
"I'll be very glad to have the dinner served, my dear Baron; but the fact
is I--er--I have been unable to provide anything but canned lobster and
apples."
[Illustration]
"What, in the name of Chaucer, does this mean?" roared Bangletop, who was
a great admirer of the father of English poetry; chiefly because, as he
was wont to say, Chaucer showed that a bad speller could be a great man,
which was a condition of affairs exactly suited to his mind, since in the
science of orthography he was weak, like most of the aristocrats of his
day. "I thought you sent me word you had a cook?"
"Yes, Baron, I did; but the fact of the matter is, sir, she left us last
night, or, rather, early this morning."
"Another one of your beautiful Parisian exits, I presume?" sneered the
baron, tapping the floor angrily with his toe.
"Well, yes, somewhat so; only she got her money first."
"Money!" shrieked the baron. "Money! Why in Liverpool did she get her
money? What did we owe her money for? Rent?"
"No, Baron; for services. She cooked three dinners."
"Well, you'll pay the bill out of your perquisites, that's all. She's done
no cooking for me, and she gets no pay from me. Why do you think she
left?"
"She said--"
"Never mind what she said, sir," cried Bangletop, cutting De Herbert
short. "When I am interested in the table-talk of cooks, I'll let you
know. What I wish to hear is what do _you_ think was the cause of her
leaving?"
"I have no opinion on the subject," replied the private secretary, with
becoming dignity. "I only know that at four o'clock this morning she
knocked at my door, and demanded her wages for four days, and vowed she'd
stay no longer in the house."
"And why, pray, did you not inform me of the fact, instead of having me
travel away down here from London?" queried Bangletop.
"You forget, Baron," replied De Herbert, with a deprecatory gesture--"you
forget that there is no system of telegraphy by which you could be
reached. I may be poor, sir, but I'm just as much of a baron as you are,
and I will take the liberty of saying right here, in what would be the
shadow of your beard, if you had one, sir, that a man who insists on
receiving cable messages when no such things exist is rather rushing
business."
"Pardon my haste, Peddlington, old chap," returned the baron, softening.
"You are quite right. My desire was unreasonable; but I swear to you, by
all my ancestral Bangletops, that I am hungry as a pit full of bears, and
if there's one thing I can't eat, it is lobster and apples. Can't you
scare up a snack of bread and cheese and a little cold larded fillet? If
you'll supply the fillet, I'll provide the cold."
At this sally the Baron of Peddlington laughed and the quarrel was over.
But none the less the master of Bangletop went to bed hungry; nor could he
do any better in the morning at breakfast-time. The butler had not been
trained to cook, and the coachman's art had once been tried on a boiled
egg, which no one had been able to open, much less eat, and as it was the
parlor-maid's Sunday off, there was absolutely no one in the house who
could prepare a meal. The Baron of Bangletop had a sort of sneaking notion
that if there were nobody around he could have managed the spit or
gridiron himself; but, of course, in view of his position, he could not
make the attempt. And so he once more returned to London, and vowed never
to set his foot within the walls of Bangletop Hall again until his
ancestral home was provided with a cook "copper-fastened and riveted to
her position."
And Bangletop Hall from that time was as a place deserted. The baron never
returned, because he could not return without violating his oath; for De
Herbert was not able to obtain a cook for the Bangletop cuisine who would
stay, nor was any one able to discover why. Cook after cook came, stayed a
day, a week, and one or two held on for two weeks, but never longer. Their
course was invariably the same--they would leave without notice; nor could
any inducement be offered which would persuade them to remain. The Baron
of Peddlington became, first round-shouldered, then deaf, and then insane
in his search for a permanent cook, landing finally in an asylum, where he
died, four years after the demise of his employer in London, of softening
of the brain. His last words were, "Why did you leave your last place?"
[Illustration]
And so time went on. Barons of Bangletop were born, educated, and died.
Dynasties rose and fell, but Bangletop Hall remained uninhabited, although
it was not until 1799 that the family gave up all hopes of being able to
use their ancestral home. Tremendous alterations, as I have already
hinted, were made. The drainage was carefully inspected, and a special
apartment connected with the kitchen, finished in hardwood, handsomely
decorated, and hung with rich tapestries, was provided for the cook, in
the vain hope that she might be induced permanently to occupy her
position. The Queen Anne wing and Elizabethan ell were constructed, the
latter to provide bowling-alleys and smoking-rooms for the probable
cousins of possible culinary queens, and many there were who accepted the
office with alacrity, throwing it up with still greater alacrity before
the usual fortnight passed. Then the Bangletops saw clearly that it was
impossible for them to live there, and moving away, the house was
announced to be "for rent, with all modern improvements, conveniently
located, spacious grounds, especially adapted to the use of those who do
their own cooking." The last clause of the announcement puzzled a great
many people, who went to see the mansion for no other reason than to
ascertain just what the announcement meant, and the line, which was
inserted in a pure spirit of facetious bravado, was probably the cause of
the mansion's quickly renting, as hardly a month had passed before it was
leased for one year by a retired London brewer, whose wife's curiosity had
been so excited by the strange wording of the advertisement that she
travelled out to Bangletop to gratify it, fell in love with the place, and
insisted upon her husband's taking it for a season. The luck of the brewer
and his wife was no better than that of the Bangletops. Their cooks--and
they had fourteen during their stay there--fled after an average service
of four days apiece, and later the tenants themselves were forced to give
up and return to London, where they told their friends that the "'all was
'aunted," which might have filled the Bangletops with concern had they
heard of it. They did not hear of it, however, for they and their friends
did not know the brewer and the brewer's friends, and as for complaining
to the Bangletop agent in the matter, the worthy beer-maker thought he
would better not do that, because he had hopes of being knighted some day,
and he did not wish to antagonize so illustrious a family as the
Bangletops by running down their famous hall--an antagonism which might
materially affect the chances of himself and his good wife when they came
to knock at the doors of London society. The lease was allowed to run its
course, the rent was paid when due, and at the end of the stipulated term
Bangletop Hall was once more on the lists as for rent.