It happened once in a northern county that I found myself at a farmer’s
fireside, and in company which the four winds of heaven seemed to have
blown together. The farmer was a joyous old man; and the evening, a
wintry one, and wild with wind and snow, flew away with jest and mirth
and tale and song. Our entertainer had no wish that our joy should
subside; for he heaped the fire till the house shone to its remotest
rafter, loaded his table with rustic delicacies, and once when a pause
ensued after the chanting of one of Robin Hood’s ballads, he called out,
“Why stays the story, and what stops the rhyme? Have I heated my hearth,
have I spread my tables and poured forth my strong drink, for the poor in
fancy and the lame in speech? Up, up; and give me a grave tale or a gay,
to gladden or sadden the present moment, and lend wings to the leaden
feet of evening time. Rise, I say: else may the fire that flames so high;
the table which groans with food, for which water and air and earth have
been sought; and the board that perfumes you with the odor of ale and
mead,——may the first cease to warm, and the rest to nourish ye.”
“Master,” said a hale and joyous personage, whose shining and gladsome
looks showed sympathy and alliance with the good cheer and fervent blood
of merry old England, “since thy table smokes, and thy brown ale flows
more frankly for the telling of a true old tale, then a true old tale
thou shalt have; shame fall me if I balk thee, as the peasant folks say,
in the dales of bonny Derby.
“Those who have never seen Haddon Hall, the ancient residence of the
Vernons of Derbyshire, can have but an imperfect notion of the golden
days of old England. Though now deserted and dilapidated, its halls
silent, the sacred bell of its chapel mute; though its tables no longer
send up the cheering smell of roasted boars and spitted oxen; though the
music and the voice of the minstrel are silenced, and the light foot
of the dancer no longer sounds on the floor; though no gentle knights
and gentler dames go trooping hand in hand, and whispering among the
twilight groves, and the portal no longer sends out its shining helms
and its barbed steeds,——where is the place that can recall the stately
hospitality and glory of former times, like the Hall of old Haddon?
“It happened on a summer evening, when I was a boy, that several curious
old people had seated themselves on a little round knoll near the gate
of Haddon Hall; and their talk was of the Vernons, the Cavendishes, the
Manners, and many old names once renowned in Derbyshire. I had fastened
myself to the apron-string of a venerable dame, at whose girdle hung a
mighty iron key, which commanded the entrance of the hall; her name was
Dolly Foljambe; and she boasted her descent from an ancient red cross
knight of that name, whose alabaster figure, in mail, may be found in
Bakewell church. This high origin, which, on consulting family history,
I find had not the concurrence of clergy, seemed not an idle vanity of
the humble portress; she had the straight frame, and rigid, demure, and
even warlike cast of face, which alabaster still retains of her ancestor;
and had she laid herself by his side, she might have passed muster, with
an ordinary antiquarian, for a coeval figure. At our feet the river Wye
ran winding and deep; at our side rose the hall huge and gray; and the
rough heathy hills, renowned in Druidic and Roman and Saxon and Norman
story, bounded our wish for distant prospects, and gave us the mansion of
the Vernons for our contemplation, clear of all meaner encumbrances of
landscape.
“‘Ah! dame Foljambe,’ said an old husbandman, whose hair was whitened
by acquaintance with seventy winters, ‘it’s a sore and a sad sight to
look at that fair tower and see no smoke ascending. I remember it in a
brighter day, when many a fair face gazed out at the windows, and many a
gallant form appeared at the gate. Then were the days when the husbandman
could live,——could whistle as he sowed, dance and sing as he reaped, and
could pay his rent in fatted oxen to my lord and in fatted fowls to my
lady. Ah! dame Foljambe, we remember when men could cast their lines in
the Wye; could feast on the red deer and the fallow deer, on the plover
and the ptarmigan; had right of the common for their flocks, of the
flood for their nets, and of the air for their harquebuss. Ah! dame,
old England is no more the old England it was, than that hall, dark and
silent and desolate, is the proud hall that held Sir George Vernon, the
King of the Peak, and his two lovely daughters, Margaret and Dora. Those
were days, dame; those were days!’ And as he ceased, he looked up to the
tower, with an eye of sorrow, and shook and smoothed down his white hairs.
“‘I tell thee,’ replied the ancient portress, sorely moved in mind
between present duty and service to the noble owner of Haddon and her
lingering affection for the good old times, of which memory shapes so
many paradises,——‘I tell thee the tower looks as high and as lordly as
ever; and there is something about its silent porch and its crumbling
turrets which gives it a deeper hold of our affections than if an hundred
knights even now came prancing forth at its porch, with trumpets blowing
and banners displayed.’
“‘Ah! dame Foljambe,’ said the husbandman, ‘yon deer now bounding so
blithely down the old chase, with his horny head held high, and an eye
that seems to make naught of mountain and vale, it is a fair creature.
Look at him! see how he cools his feet in the Wye, surveys his shadow
in the stream, and now he contemplates his native hills again. So! away
he goes, and we gaze after him, and admire his speed and his beauty.
But were the hounds at his flanks, and the bullets in his side, and the
swords of the hunters bared for the brittling, ah! dame, we should change
our cheer; we should think that such shapely limbs and such stately
antlers might have reigned in wood and on hill for many summers. Even so
we think of that stately old hall, and lament its destruction.’
“‘Dame Foljambe thinks not so deeply on the matter,’ said a rustic; ‘she
thinks, the less the hall fire, the less is the chance of the hall being
consumed; the less the company, the longer will the old hall floor last,
which she sweeps so clean, telling so many stories of the tree that made
it, that the seven Virtues in tapestry would do well in avoiding wild
company; and that the lass with the long shanks, Diana, and her nymphs,
will hunt more to her fancy on her dusty acre of old arras, than in
the dubious society of the lords and the heroes of the court gazette.
Moreover, the key at her girdle is the commission by which she is keeper
of this cast-off and moth-eaten garment of the noble name of Manners; and
think ye that she holds that power lightly, which makes her governess of
ten thousand bats and owls, and gives her the awful responsibility of an
armory containing almost an entire harquebuss, the remains of a pair of
boots, and the relique of a buff jerkin?’
“What answer to this unceremonious attack on ancient things committed
to her keeping the portress might have made, I had not an opportunity
to learn; her darkening brow indicated little meekness of reply; a
voice, however, much sweeter than the dame’s intruded on the debate. In
the vicinity of the hall, at the foot of a limestone rock, the summer
visitors of Haddon may and do refresh themselves at a small fount of pure
water, which love of the clear element induced one of the old ladies to
confine within the limits of a large stone basin. Virtues were imputed
to the spring, and the superstition of another proprietor erected beside
it a cross of stone, lately mutilated and now removed, but once covered
with sculptures and rude emblems, which conveyed religious instruction
to an ignorant people. Towards this fountain a maiden from a neighboring
cottage was observed to proceed, warbling, as she went, a fragment of
one of those legendary ballads which the old minstrels, illiterate or
learned, scattered so abundantly over the country.