Part 17 (1/2)
”Humph,” said the old woman gruffly, as she tottered out, leaving her door wide open; ”they're nothin' to boast of.”
Her own lodging certainly was not. It was literally little more than a chamber in the wall: it had no window, except one small square pane above the door. You could hardly stand upright in it, and not much more than turn around. The walls were hung full: household utensils, clothes, even her two or three books, were hung up by strings; there being only room for one tiny table, besides the stove. In one corner stood a step-ladder, which led up through a hole in the ceiling to the cranny overhead in which she slept. This was all the old woman had.
She lived here alone, and she paid to the Duke of Westminster two s.h.i.+llings and sixpence a week for the rent of the place. ”It's dear at the rent,” she said; ”but it's a respectable place, an' I think a deal o' that.” And she sighed.
The name of the Duke of Westminster and the value of that two and sixpence to his grace meant more to me that morning than it would have done twenty-four hours earlier; for on the previous afternoon we had visited his palace, the famous Eaton Hall. We had walked there for weary hours over marble floors, under frescoed domes, through long lines of statues, of pictures, of stained-gla.s.s windows, hangings, carvings, and rare relics and trophies innumerable. We had seen the d.u.c.h.ess's window balcony, one waving ma.s.s of yellow musk. ”Her ladys.h.i.+p is very fond of musk. It is always to be kept flowering at her window,” we were told.
We had walked also through a gla.s.s corridor three hundred and seventy-five yards long, draped with white clematis and heliotrope on one side, and on the other banked high with geraniums, carnations, and all manner of flowers. Opening at intervals in these banks of flowers were doors into other conservatories: one was filled chiefly with rare orchids, like an enchanted aviary of hummingbirds, arrested on the wing; gold and white, purple and white, brown and gold, green, snowy white, orange; some of them as large as a fleur-de-lis. Another house was filled with ferns and palms, green, luxuriant, like a bit of tropical forest brought across seas for his grace's pleasure. The most superb sight of all was the lotus house. Cleopatra herself might have flushed with pleasure at beholding it. A deep tank, sixty feet long, and twenty wide, filled with white and blue and pink blossoms, floating, swaying, lolling on the dark water; while, seemingly to uphold the gla.s.s roof canopying this lotus-decked sea, rose slender columns, wreathed with thunbergia vines in full bloom, yellow, orange, and white; the gla.s.s walls of the building were set thick and high with maiden-hair and other rare ferns, interspersed at irregular intervals with solid ma.s.ses of purple or white flowers. The spell of the place, of its warm, languid air, was beyond words: it was bewildering.
All this being vivid in my mind, I started at hearing his grace's name from the old woman's lips.
”So these houses belong to the Duke of Westminster, do they?” I replied.
”Yes, 'ee's the 'ole o' 't,” she answered; ”an' a power o' money it brings 'im in, considerin' its size. 'Ee 's big rents in this town.
Mebbe ye've bin out t' 'is 'all? It's a gran' sight, I'm told. I've never seen it.”
I was minded then to tell about the duke's flowers. It would have been only a bit of a fairy story to the little maid, a bright spot in her still bright horizons; but I forebore, for the sake of the old woman's soul, already enough wrung and embittered by the long strain of her hard lot, and its contrast with that of her betters, without having that contrast enforced by a vivid picture of the duke's hothouses. My own memory of them was darkened forever,--unreasonably so, perhaps; but the ant.i.thesis came too suddenly and soon for me ever to separate the pictures.
The archaeologist in Chester will frequently be lured from its streets to its still more famous walls. This side Rome there is no such piece of Roman masonry work, to be seen. Here, indeed, is the air full of ballad measures, to which one must step, if he go his way thinking at all. The four great gates, north, south, east, and west,--three kept by earls, and only one owned by the citizens; the lesser posterns, with commoner names, born of their different sorts of traffic, or the fords to which they led; the towers and turrets, fought over, lost and won, and won and lost, trod by centuries of brave fighters whose names live forever; bridgeways and arches in their own successions, of as n.o.ble lineage as any lineages of men,--of such are the walls of Chester. They surround the old city; are nearly two miles in length, and were originally of the width prescribed in the ancient Roman manual of Vitruvius, ”that two armed men may pa.s.s each other without impediment.” There are many places, now, however, which would by no means come up to that standard; Nature having usurped much s.p.a.ce with her various growths, and time having been chipping away at them as well. In fact, on some portions of the wall, there is only a narrow gra.s.sy footpath, such as might wind around in a village churchyard. To come up by h.o.a.ry stone stairs, out of the bustling street, atop of the wall, and out on such a bit of footpath as this, with an outlook over the Rood Eye meadow and off toward the region of the old Welsh castles, is a fine early-morning treat in Chester. Some of the towers are now sunk to the ign.o.ble uses of heterogeneous museums. Old women have the keys, and for a fee admit curious people to the ancient chambers and keeps, where, after having the satisfaction of standing where kings have stood, and looking off over fields where kings'
battles were fought, they can gaze at gla.s.s cases full of curiosities and relics of one sort and another, sometimes of an incredible worthlessness. In the tower known as King Charles's Tower, from the fact of Charles I. having stood there, on the 27th of September, 1645, overlooking the to him luckless battle of Rowton Moor, is the most miscellaneous collection of odds and ends ever offered to public gaze.
A very old woman keeps the key of this tower, and is herself by no means the least of the curiosities in it. She was born in Chester, and recollects well when all the s.p.a.ce outside the old walls, which is now occupied by the modern city, was chiefly woods; she used to go, in her childhood, to play and to gather flowers in them. The fact that King Charles once looked through the window of this turret has grown, by a sort of geometrical ratio relative to the number of years she has been reiterating the statement, into a colossally disproportionate place in her mind.
”The king, mem, stood just where you're standin' now,” she says over and over and over, in a mechanical manner, as long as you remain in the tower. I wondered if she said it all night, in her sleep; and if, if one were to spend a whole day in the tower, she would never stop saying it. She was an enthusiastic show-woman of her little store; undismayed by any amount of indifference on the part of her listeners.
”'Ere 's a face you know, mem, I dare say,” producing from one corner of the gla.s.s case a cheap newspaper picture, much soiled, of General Grant. ”'Ee was in this tower last summer, and 'ee was much hinterested.”
Next to General Grant's portrait came ”a ring snake from Kentucky.”
”It's my brother, mem, brought that over: twenty years ago, 'ee was in Hamerica. You must undustand the puttin' of 'em hup better than we do, mem, for 'ere's these salamanders was only put hup two years ago, an'
they've quite gone a'ready, in that time.”
She had a statuette of King Charles, Cromwell's chaplain's broth bowl, a bit of a bedquilt of Queen Anne's, a black snake from Australia, a fine-tooth comb from Africa, a tattered fifty-cent piece of American paper currency, and a string of sh.e.l.l money from the South Sea Islands, all arranged in close proximity. Taking up the bit of American currency, she held it out toward us, saying inquiringly, ”Hextinct now, mem, I believe?” I think she can hardly have recovered even yet from the bewilderment into which she was thrown by our convulsive laughter and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed reply, ”Oh, no! Would that it were!”
In a clear day can be seen from this tower, a dozen or so miles to the south, the ruins of a castle built by Earl Randel Blundeville. He was the Earl Randel of whom Roger Lacy, constable of Ches.h.i.+re in 1204, made a famous rescue, once on a time. The earl, it seems, was in a desperate strait, besieged in one of his castles by the Welsh; perhaps in this very castle. Roger Lacy, hearing of the earl's situation, forthwith made a muster of all the tramps, beggars, and rapscallions he could find,--”a tumultuous rout,” says the chronicle, ”of loose, disorderly, and dissolute persons, players, minstrels, shoemakers and the like,--and marched speedily towards the enemy.” The Welsh, seeing so great a mult.i.tude coming, raised their siege and fled; and the earl, thus delivered, showed his grat.i.tude to Constable Roger by conferring upon him perpetual authority over the loose, idle persons in Ches.h.i.+re; making the office hereditary in the Lacy family. A thankless dignity, one would suppose, at best; by no means a sinecure, at any time, and during the season of the Midsummer Fairs a terrible responsibility: it being the law of the land that during those fairs the city of Chester was for the s.p.a.ce of one month a free city of refuge for all criminals, of whatsoever degree; in token of which a glove was hung out at St. Peter's Church, on the first day of the fairs.
There is another good tale of Roger Lacy's prowess. He seems to have been a roving fighter, for he once held a castle in Normandy, for King John, against the French, ”with such gallantry that after all his victuals were spent, having been besieged almost a year, and many a.s.saults of the enemy made, but still repulsed by him, he mounts his horse, and issues out of the castle with his troop into the middest of his enemies, chusing rather to die like a soldier, than to starve to death. He slew many of the enemy, but was at last with much difficulty taken prisoner; so he and his soldiers were brought prisoners to the King of France, where, by the command of the king, Roger Lacy was to be held no strict prisoner, for his great honesty and trust in keeping the Castle so gallantly.... King John's letter to Roger Lacy concerning the keeping of the said castle, you may see among the Norman writings put out by Andrew du Chesne, and printed at Paris in 1619.” Of all of which, if no ballad have ever been written, it is certain that songs must have been sung by minstrels at the time; and the name of the brave Roger's lady-love was well suited to minstrelsy, she being one Maud de Clare. Plain Roger Lacy and Maud de Clare! The dullest fancy takes a leap at the sound of the two names.
In the same old chronicle which gives these and many other narratives of Roger Lacy is the history of a singular, half-witted being, who was known in Vale-Royale, in the fifteenth century, as Nixon the Prophet. How much that the old records claim for him, in the way of minute and minutely fulfilled prophecies, is to be set down to the score of ignorant superst.i.tion, it is hard now to say; but there must have been some foundation in fact for the narrative. Robert Nixon was the son of a farmer in Ches.h.i.+re County, and was born in the year 1467.
His stupidity and ignorance were said to be ”invincible.” No efforts could make him understand anything save the care of cattle, and even in this he showed at times a brutish and idiotic cruelty. He had a very rough, coa.r.s.e voice, but said little, sometimes pa.s.sing whole months without opening his lips to speak. He began very early to foretell events, and with an apparently preternatural accuracy. When he was a lad, he was seen, one day, to abuse an ox belonging to his brother. To a person threatening to inform his brother of this act, Robert replied that three days later his brother would not own the ox.
Sure enough, on the next day a life inheritance came into the estate on which his brother was a tenant, and that very ox was taken for the ”heriot bond to the new owner.” One of the abbey monks having displeased him, he exclaimed,--
”When you the harrow come on high, Soon a raven's nest will be.”
The couplet was thought at the time to be simple nonsense; but as it turned out, the last abbot of that monastery was named Harrow, and when the king suppressed the monastery he gave the domain to Sir Thomas Holcroft, whose crest was a raven.
It was also one of Nixon's predictions that the two abbeys of Vale-Royale and Norton should meet on Orton bridge and the thorn growing in the abbey yard should be its door.
When the abbeys were pulled down, in the time of the Reformation, stones taken from each of them were used in rebuilding that bridge; and the thorn-tree was cut down, and placed as a barrier across the entrance to the abbey court, to keep the sheep from entering there.