Thus, amid laughter, merriment, and mock-seriousness, the fun is continued until about half the borough is visited, by which time the tutti-men have taken care that all the duty kisses that should gratify the ancient inhabitants have been administered, as well as certain others that are more a pleasure than a duty. Certainly they deserve well of the town, for the tutti-men go through a good day’s work by the time dinner is served. Then, in accordance with the time-honoured precedent, the Chief Constable is elected into the chair; the great bowl of punch is placed on the table after dinner, and the various offices toasted and replied for. One is drunk in solemn silence—that of John of Gaunt, the town’s benefactor. All the townspeople seem satisfied with their day’s carnival, save, perhaps, a crooning old burgher, who may occasionally be heard to extol the good old days when the punch was strong and the newly-elected officers went home in wheelbarrows.
XXIX
LITTLECOTE
From the everyday respectable dulness of Hungerford itself we will pass to the exciting scandals which make up much of the story of Littlecote, that gloomy and romantic Tudor mansion, which has become famous (or infamous, if you will have it so) through the crimes and debaucheries of Will Darell. There are two ways of reaching Littlecote from the Bath Road. The most obvious way is by turning to the right when in the midst of Hungerford town; the other, which is the more rural, is by a lane a mile further down the road. Either will bring the traveller to that secluded spot in the course of three and a half miles.
It stands, that hoary pile, in a wide and well-wooded park, sheltered beneath the swelling Wiltshire downs and close beside the gentle Kennet, whose stream has been fruitful of trout ever since “trouts” (as our ancestors quaintly called them, in the plural) were angled for. Littlecote, as we now see it, was built by the Darells in the closing years of the fifteenth century, in whose early years it had passed from the Colston family by the marriage of the heiress of the Colstons to William Darell, son of Sir William Darell, of Sesay, in Yorkshire. A descendant of this emigrant from the North Riding, the “Wild Will Darell” of this blood-boltered history was born into an estate comprising an ancestral home and many thousands of acres in the counties of Wilts, Berks, and Hants, and might have been accounted fortunate had it not been for the rather more than trifling circumstances of an unhappy up-bringing which included a shameful treatment of himself and his mother by an unnatural father; the paternal extravagances which had alienated much of the property; the heavy charge made on the estate for the benefit of the mistress of his brother, who preceded him in the estate; and, finally, the crop of lawsuits into which he was plunged immediately upon succeeding to this singularly-encumbered patrimony. At this interval of time it has become quite impossible for serious historians to discriminate between the facts and the—fancies, shall we call them?—of the Wild Darell story. This difficulty does not arise from lack of patient research on the part of Darell commentators, who have ransacked the Record Office to prove that he was not a villain of the most lurid kind, or the industry of others who have searched among musty muniment chests to determine that he was. It would, considering the fact of the records in the Littlecote muniment room not having yet been explored for the benefit of these historic doubts, be rash indeed for any one to pronounce definitely for either of the very diverse views held of Darell as Villain, or Darell as Good Young Man.
The story, which first became widely known through a footnote appended to Sir Walter Scott’s “Rokeby,” is of a midwife summoned from the village of Shefford, seven miles away, on a false pretence of attending Lady Knyvett, of Charlton, near by, and of her being blindfolded and led on horseback in the darkness of the night to quite another house, in one of whose stately rooms lay a mysterious masked lady for whom her services were required. The horrid legend then goes on to say that a tall, slender gentleman, a lowering and ferocious-looking man, “havinge uppon hym a goune of blacke velvett,” entered the room with some others, and, without a word, took the child from her arms and threw it upon a blazing fire in an ante-room, crushing it into the flaming logs with his boot-heel, so that it was presently consumed.
A prime horror, this, and rich in ferocity, mystery, and all the incertitude that comes of age and conflicting testimony. Masked lady, blindfolded nurse, burnt baby, taciturn and horrible stranger, what lurid figures are these! and how royally abused for the possession of an over-imaginative mind would be that novelist who should dare conceive incidents so romantic!
WILD DARELL
Scott gleaned his traditions from the weird legends current in the country-side. They had, when he first printed them, been the fireside gossip of that district for over two hundred years, and of course in that length of time had lost nothing in the repetition. For that reason we are asked nowadays to discredit them altogether. We cannot, however, do that, because there came to light some years ago the actual deposition to the facts made by the midwife, Mrs. Barnes of Shefford, taken down on her deathbed by a Mr. Bridges of Great Shefford, a magistrate, who was also a cousin of Darell, and would not, it may well be supposed, be inclined to spread any baseless gossip to the hurt of a family with which he was connected. This deposition tells the story as already narrated. It does not identify Darell or Littlecote, nor does it even hint the identity of any person or place. But the sinister discovery, some twenty years ago, at Longleat, of an original letter from Sir H. Knyvett, of Charlton, to Sir John Thynne, of Longleat, dated January 2, 1578/9 (about the time of the midwife’s confession), brings us to the original rumours pointing to Darell’s being the man and Littlecote the place.