Passing over the frequent visits of such characters as Mr., Mrs. and Dolly Varden, Miss Haredale and others, we reach the stage in the story when the rioters arrived at the inn on their way to burn and raid the Warren in the neighbourhood. They encounter John Willet at the Porch, and immediately demand drink.
Their ringleader was no other than Maypole Hugh, who confronted his late master with “These lads are thirsty and must drink. Bustle, Jack, bustle! Show us the best—the very best—the over-proof that you keep for your own drinking, Jack!” Then ensued a mad scene. The rabble entered the bar—“the sanctuary, the mystery, the hallowed ground: here it was, crammed with men, clubs, sticks, torches, pistols; filled with a deafening noise, oaths, shouts, screams, hootings; changed all at once into a bear-garden, a madhouse, an infernal temple; men darting in and out, by door and window, smashing the glass, turning the taps, drinking liquor out of china punch-bowls, sitting astride of casks, smoking private and personal pipes, cutting down the sacred grove of lemons, hacking and hewing of the celebrated cheese ... noise, smoke, light, darkness, frolic, anger, laughter, groans, plunder, fear, and ruin.” Finally binding John to a chair they left him alone in his dismantled bar and made for the Warren, which they burned to the ground.
In despair, Mr. Haredale seeks his niece and servants at the Maypole, only to find the spectacle of John Willet in the ignominious position the rioters left him, with his favourite house stripped and pulled about his ears. Damaged as the “Maypole” was in many ways, it never actually drops out of the story’s interest; but during the trend of events in London we naturally hear little of it.
John Willet had flown in despair from it, and took up his abode in the Black Lion in London for safety’s sake, where eventually he again met his son Joe, now a one-armed hero back from the wars.
Here in his solitude we find him sitting over the fire, “afar off in the remotest depths of his intellect,” with a lurking hint or faint suggestion “that out of the public purse there might issue funds for the restoration of the Maypole to its former high place among the taverns of the earth.” What actually did happen, however, was the marriage of his son Joe to Dolly, whose father gave her a handsome dowry, enabling the happy couple to return to the Maypole, reopen it, and there install themselves as host and hostess. And so they brought back to the inn all its famous glory, earning for it the epithet that there was no such country inn as the Maypole in all England.
Barnaby returned to live with his mother on the farm established there, and Grip was his cherished companion throughout the rest of his life. John Willet retired into a small cottage in the village, where the fire-place was widened and enlarged for him, and where a boiler was hung up for his edification, and, furthermore, in the little garden outside the front door a fictitious Maypole was planted; so that he was quite at home directly. To this new abode came his old friends and cronies of the old chimney-corner of the Maypole to chum over the things that once were.
No doubt they talked of the old days in the old inn, and occasionally turned in to its enticing haven and challenged anyone to find its equal by asking, as was asked before, “What carpet like its crunching sand, what merry music as its crackling logs, what perfume like its kitchen’s dainty breath, what weather genial as its hearty warmth?” And we are sure that they all endorsed its historian’s benediction—“Blessings on the old house, how sturdily it stood.”
We have attempted to bring to mind the atmosphere of the Maypole as it was in the days of the story of Barnaby Rudge, and to recall the characters and incidents associated with it. The pilgrim to this notable Dickens shrine to-day, remembering these things, will find that time has dealt kindly with the old inn. It is changed, of course, in many ways, but it is still the old Maypole, with its bar, its Chester room, its stables, its cellars running under the adjoining cottages, and its ivy still clinging to the old worn bricks at the back. Its windows are still diamond-paned, and its floors are still uneven and sunken in places; its heavy beams run across the ceiling. One can even hear the sparrows chirp and see the other birds disport themselves in their revels. The building has many gables, and its stories overhang and bulge over the pathway as if the old house was nodding in its sleep just as the novelist described it.
And, in the churchyard opposite, the scene of Barnaby and his mother sitting upon a tombstone and eating their frugal meal can easily be visualized.
Still set in a rural and beautiful district of England’s verdant lanes, long may the Maypole survive!