THE OLD RYE HOUSE.
When the Rye House was built, or at least its gate-tower wing of
which we are now speaking, and which was as old as the time of King
Henry the Sixth, probably no dwelling of any importance, with the
exception of Nether Hall, a still more ancient baronial structure,
stood within miles of it.
Strong as rocks were its fortified outer walls; and in many parts its
interior walls were three feet thick. This was the case with the old
"Debtors' Prison," lying at the older wing's extreme end, and forming
the angle connecting it with the new wing, which dated only from the
time of Queen Elizabeth. In this debtors' prison Master Rumbold, as
we have seen, now stored his malt. The wall separating Maudlin
Sweetapple's little sleeping chamber from the more spacious one
occupied by Ruth, was of at least equal strength and solidity with
the walls of this storing room; but while in the one case the surface
showed the bare hewn stone, polished only by the hand of time,
panellings carved in many a quaint device, and reaching half-way to
the flat oak-timbered ceiling, lined the "Lady's Bower," as time
beyond all count, Ruth's room had been called.
[Sidenote: Ruth's bower.]
Here she held sway undisputed; spending in it hours of her lonely
days when her father was absent from home, as of late she noted he so
frequently had been. So she sat strumming on the broken and
half-stringless virginal, or spelling out the crabbed type of several
worm-eaten books, chiefly poems--long winded, wordy things enough.
Still she cared for them in a fashion; and one volume, whose
title-page set forth that its contents were from the pen of one
William Shakespeare, a play-actor, took her mightily. Line after
line she would tell you of many of the long speeches and odd sayings
it contained; though she kept her studies to herself, for Maudlin had
not very much of a turn for book-learning, and Master Rumbold always
said, if it had not been for the Bible, and that godly person Mr.
Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_, child of his should not have been taught to
read at all. Then as to writing, he was near never speaking one word
more to Madam Lee after one fine day when he made the frightful
discovery that she had been teaching the little girl so successfully
to make pot-hooks and hangers, that long before Lawrence was out of
the alphabet Ruth had been writing on her own responsibility, and in
unmistakeable fair round hand: "Fear God. Honour the King." Wroth
indeed was Master Rumbold over the "fine surprise" thus prepared for
him by instructress and pupil. The knowledge, however, could not be
unlearned; and such a penwoman as Ruth remained till the day of her
death you might go a hundred miles and not find.
And so with her wheel and her tapestry-frame for her father's
company, and her graver accomplishments for the solitude of the
Lady's Bower, Ruth contrived to live as happily as any princess.
Solitude is, however, no term to connect with the spot where the
birds sang their sweet music the livelong day amid the beechen
branches which swept the panes of the old painted oriel window, and
the wind sighed gently in the long summer evenings through the ivy
trails and creepers which Ruth trained about its carved
stone-cornices, or in his rougher moods snarled and blustered, like
the tyrant he can be, round the ancient house. But in Ruth's eyes
the broad look-out from that window always wore a beauty, and with
all her fifteen years' experience she had not been able to determine
whether that expanse of lowly undulating meadow-land and winding
waters looked loveliest in its spring and summer garb of green,
tented over with cloudless blue, or in autumn's grays and russets, or
clad in its pure white winter snow robe; nor even whether golden
sunlight, or the moon's silvery sheen, as to-night she stood gazing
on it, pleased her best.
[Sidenote: Rumbold's chamber.]
Master Rumbold himself slept on the ground-storey, in a room
immediately beneath his stored malt-sacks. This chamber, tradition
said, contained in its stone flooring a trap-door opening upon a
ladder which conducted into the fearsome dungeons underground, where
prisoners used to be thrust, bidding hope and the blessed air and
daylight farewell for ever. The subject was, however, one rarely
touched upon in the maltster's presence by those who best knew his
humours; for he would either smile in bitter contempt, or--and indeed
that more generally happened--frown angrily; and, let his mood be the
one or the other, always turned the conversation at last with some
half-uttered remark that so might it, or might it not be, and that he
had simply occupied the room ever since he had been master of the
place, because it commanded a watch on both wings of the house. The
quaintly timbered walls of the new wing contained the malting-house;
while its gabled roof stretching up stiff as cat's ears, afforded
sleeping accommodation for the domestic servants and the few
workpeople living on the premises.
[Sidenote: The malting house.]
The handsome guest-chamber, or keeping-room as it was called, was not
reserved merely for high days and holidays, for Richard Rumbold had
no liking for such vain settings apart of time; but was used as the
general sitting-room, and extended from end to end of the
ground-storey. Its three windows fronted the great square
smooth-shaven grass-plot, which by tradition and courtesy was called
"the pleasaunce." In the middle stood one solemn big yew-tree,
clipped, beehive-shape, and surmounted by a leafy monstrosity which
Maudlin said was meant for a peacock. Never a flower, however, save
the poor little buttercups and daisies, whose heads were chopped off
in a twinkling, if they did venture to peer forth, ever starred that
dreary pleasaunce, for the maltster said he had other uses for his
money than to be wasting it on gaudy nonsenses like flowers.
But returning now to the old wing, let us peep in for a moment on old
Adam Lockit, the gatehouse keeper, in his sanctum deep hidden in the
recesses of the vaulted archway piercing the tower, and giving on its
outer side upon the drawbridge, which was still let down at dawn, and
drawn up at sunset, by the massive old iron chains working through
the wall.
[Sidenote: Barnaby Diggles.]
Not a snugger corner in the whole establishment than this of Master
Lockit's. Within the last year or so, since he has not been so young
as he used to be, and the dragging at those heavy chains has come to
be a bit of a pull upon him, though he is a hale enough man for his
threescore and ten, he has condescended to accept the assistance of a
lad, employed originally as a Jack-of-all trades in the malting-yard,
but promoted to the dignity of domestic factotum by reason of sundry
excellent qualities. Foremost among these stand unimpeachable
honesty and placid temper. A characteristic less distinguishing
Barnaby Diggles, for so the lad was named, was animal courage. He
was, in other words, an arrant coward; in the matter at all events of
hobgoblins and things of the sort. He was, however, but just turned
of sixteen; and time as yet had never tried his mettle with any real
and substantial danger. Meanwhile, nothing so much charmed him as
having his imagination tortured with ghost stories by the village
gossips; unless, indeed, it was to sit and incline his ears to the
hundred and one yarns of all countries and ages that Adam Lockit
loved at least as much to spin.
[Sidenote: The gatehouse room.]
When Barnaby is not to be found after his day's work for love nor
money, you are safe to run him to earth in the gatehouse room. A
Sindbad's valley it is to him, a Hassan's cave, with all its
treasures of crossbows and battle-axes, and catapult relics; its bits
of chain-armour, its battered helmets, stags' antlers, and
hunting-horns, for all and each of which Adam had his story to tell,
as vividly as if he had been honoured by the personal acquaintance of
Joan of Arc and William Rufus, or gone a buck-hunting in Hainault
Forest with the merry monks of Waltham or bluff King Hal.
What gruesome tales too, Master Lockit, sitting of bitter winter
nights in his warm ingle neuk. could tell you between the whiffs of
his pipe, about yonder spiral staircase, "There, just behind you,"
which goes winding up past the nail-studded iron clamped door,
shutting in the old wing's upper storey. Ever so high, aloft to the
tower roof, with the spiked vane atop of its tall twisted chimney.
"But he was speakin' mainly," he was, Adam would say, "of where it
went round an' round, an' down an' down to what was just wine and
wood cellars now, but 'twas no such honest end as that they were
scooped out for hunnerds and hunnerds, if so be 'twarn't thousands o'
years agone. And Master Rumbold might say what he pleased, an' deny
it you as he liked, 'twere just for all the world a honeycomb o'
cells an' passages, openin' right an' left into dungeons, till you
come out by the weir, over against the ruins o' Nether Hall."
"Go on! go on!" Barnaby would gasp, writhing in ecstasy at the
recital. "Slidikins! I'm all goose-flesh from top to toe! Master
Lockit, go on!"
[Sidenote: Master Lockit's word pictures.]
"More idiot you," Adam would rejoin, puffing away with immeasurable
but secret content in the effect produced by his word picture of
their hidden surroundings. "What is it to the likes of us? An't
such things all done with now? I'm speakin', I am, of the good old
times when royal kings an' queens theirselves wasn't safe on their
gold thrones, for blows in the dark."
"Happen it might come again," Barnaby would murmur, staring with
hopeful rounded eyes into the blazing logs; but when the old belfry
clock overhead boomed its warning to bed, Master Diggles stumbling
half blind with terror to his sleeping-room in the gabled roof, was a
sight not easily to be forgotten.
That same iron-clamped door atop of the tower staircase opened--if
indeed one may so speak of a door which so rarely was put to its
use--into a chamber called the Warder's Room. Not having been
inhabited for a generation or two, it was of course reputed to be
haunted by a "White Woman," and that was no more than truth and fact;
for many an hour Ruth spent in it, weaving romances out of her own
brain, for the mail-clad knights and wimpled ladies whose pictured
forms gleamed dimly from the rich oak wainscoted walls, and the
designs and quaint devices of their panellings which accorded with
those on the walls of Ruth's room, lying immediately beyond.
[Sidenote: Ruth romancing.]
Ruth had a theory that this suite of rooms on the upper storey of the
gatehouse wing had in olden times been occupied by the lord and lady
of the ancient mansion; and the notion was probably a correct one,
since in no part of the place were traces of such magnificence to be
seen as here. Fragments of painted glass glowed in the mullioned
windows, showing scraps of monstrous griffin-like heads and scaly
tails, and enscrolled letters, of which only one word in one of the
upper lights of Ruth's window remained entire--"Loyaulté."
Time and wear had so polished the wood of this chamber's
richly-parqueted floor that its smooth surface reflected, like some
quiet pool, the tall-backed chairs of tawny and gilt Cordovan
leather, ranged stiffly against the walls, and about the long narrow
oaken table covered with its faded velvet drapery; and the massive
proportions of the huge carved oaken chest, capacious enough to shut
in one of the mailed knights, or even portly brown-frocked Abbot
Benedict Ogard of Waltham Abbey himself, who smiled, come fair
weather come foul, come day come night, so unctuously down on you
from his recess beside the loftily-coped fireplace.
Ruth could very well recall the time when the lower portion of the
walls of this room had been hung with Flemish tapestry, embroidered
with subjects from the Old Testament and early Grecian lore. One
winter, however, when King Frost intruded so tyrannically in-doors
that people shivered in their beds, Maudlin Sweetapple had stripped
down the greater part of this tapestry to make curtains for Ruth's
room. If in cutting away the tattered and hopelessly unmendable
parts of it, she had patched the stuff together again in such fashion
as to leave Solomon in all his glory turning a summersault on the
extreme tip of Jonah's whale's nose, and Goliath's gory head frowned
grimly from the neck of the Trojan horse, did it not all serve every
whit as well for keeping the wind away?
[Sidenote: The warder's room.]
No doubt the situation of the Warder's Room, cut off as it was so
completely from the rest of the house, had first obtained it its
ghostly renown; one not likely to dwindle, by the knowledge that its
outer door giving on the staircase was always kept locked. This,
however, was no more than an ordinary precaution; since the room
stood literally in the very portal of the whole house, though time
had brought its changes, and various small doors in the new wing now
admitted by the wicket the maltster's few visitors and his workpeople
to the malt-yard.
[Sidenote: A grim greeting.]
The master of the house himself did not set foot inside the Warder's
Room twice in a year; and when on that May morning, before starting
for Nether Hall, Ruth entered it, according to her daily custom, to
let a little fresh air and sunshine into its grim silence, she had
been startled at perceiving her father standing with folded arms and
sombre brows near the hearth, gazing into its cold blackness as if
lost in moody thought. On becoming conscious of her presence,
however, he had roused up from his abstraction, and with a hurried
and absent "Good morrow, child," he turned and went out, locking the
door behind him.