Such was the steward of that curious household. Over against him sat the excellent old country dame, whose mind wandered no further than to speculate upon the price of eggs next market-day, or how her bleaching linen fared; above was the wise-mad scholar, bent and visionary; and by him, ruddy in her country beauty, that wild hedge-rose of his. And as I looked from one to other, and thought of what I was and had been, all seemed strange, unreal, fantastic, and I could only wait with dull patience for what fortune might have next in store.
It was a pleasant, peaceful place, that manor hall! When we had finished our midday meal, and the servitors had gone to their duties, Master Faulkener said a walk in the green fields might do him good—he would go out and take the country air. It was a wise resolve, and he made a show of carrying it through, but he had not crossed the courtyard toward the sunny meadows when he got a sniff of his own smoldering furnace fires. That was too much for him. The scholar’s rustic resolution melted, and, glancing fugitively behind, we saw him presently steal away toward his cellar, and then drop down the stairs, and bar the door, and soon the curling smoke and dancing sparks told that wondrous thing of his was growing once again.
Thus I and the maid were left alone, and for a little space we stood silent by the diamond-latticed window, scarce knowing what to say—I looking down upon that virgin bosom, so smoothly heaving under its veil of country lawn, she thinking I know not what, but pulling a leaf or two to pieces from her window vine. And so we stood for a time, until the lady broke the silence by asking if I would wish to see the house and gardens with her? It was a good suggestion and a comely guide, so we set out at once.
She led me first back through her garden again, naming every flower and bush by country names as we went along, and this brought us to the empty house-front, which we entered. She took me from room to room, and dusty corridor to corridor, chatting and laughing all the way, talking of great kinsmen, and noble, fickle guests who once had called her father friend—all with such a light, contented heart it sounded more like fairy story than stern material fact. Then that tripping guide showed me the one door I had not found, which led through into the rearward house. Here, again, I told her of how I had hunted in vain for such a passage, and she laughed until those ancient corridors resounded to her glee. This door admitted to another region, which we entered, and soon Elizabeth led on down a dusty flight of twilight wooden stairs, until a portal studded with iron barred our way. At this, putting a finger to her mouth in mysterious manner, the damsel asked if I dared enter, to which my answer was that, with sword in hand, and her to watch, I would not hesitate to prise the gates of hell; so we pulled the heavy sullen bolts, and the door turned slowly on its hinges. There before us was displayed a long, dusty corridor, lit by high narrow cobwebbed lattice windows down one side, and dim with moss and stain of wind and weather. From end to end of that soundless vestibule were stacked and piled and hung such mighty stores of various lumber, rare, curious, dreadful, as never surely were brought together before.
It was Andrew Faulkener’s museum-room—the place where he put by all the strange shreds of life and death he collected when the scholar’s fervor was upon him, and now, as his sweet daughter laid one finger on my arm and softly bid me listen, directly down below and under us we heard him hammering at his forge.
“Oh, Sir,” began that maid, whispering in my ear and sweeping her expressive arm round in the direction of those mounds and shelves, “did ever child have such a father? This is the one room that is forbidden me, and it is the one room of our hundreds that I take the most fearful pleasure in. I do wrong to show it, and, indeed, I had not brought you here but that something tells me you are good comrade, true and silent both in great and little. Therefore step lightly and speak small: there is nothing in all the world that stirs my father’s choler but this—to hear a vagrant foot overhead among his treasures.”
Softly, therefore, as any midnight thieves we trod the dust-carpeted floor, and now here, now there, the damsel led me. Now it was at one oriel recess where stood a black oak table and open chests piled with vellum books, all clasped and bound with gold and iron, that we paused. And I opened some of those great tomes, and read, in Norman-Latin, or old Frankish-French, the misty record of those things of long-ago that once had been so new to me. I spelled out how the monkish scribe was stumbling through a passage of that diary that I had seen Cæsar write—saw him repeat, as visionary and incredible, in quaint and crabbed cloister scrawl, the story of the Saxon coming, and how King Harold died. I turned to another book, a little newer, and read, ’mid gorgeous uncials, the story of that remote fight above Crecy, “when good King Edward, with a scanty band of liegemen, was matched against two hundred thousand French abou ye ville of Crecy, and by the Grace of God withstood them upon an August day”—and I could have read on and on without stop or pause down those musty memory-rousing pages but for the gentle interrupter at my side, who laughed to see me so engrossed, and shut the covers to, little knowing of the thoughts that I was thinking, and took me on again.
Then she would halt at a pile of splendid stuffs, half heaped upon the floor, half nailed against the wall, the hangings of courtly rooms and thrones; and, as her sympathetic female fingers spread out the folds of all those ruined webs, I read again upon them, in tarnished gold and filigree, in silken stitching and patient, cunning embroidery, more stories of old Kings and Queens I once was comrade to. On again, to piles and racks of weapons of every age and time: all these I knew, and poised the javelin some Saxon hand had borne in war, and shook, like a dry reed, the long Norman spear, and whirled a rusty pirate scimitar above my head until it hummed again an old forgotten tune of blood and lust and pillage, and, with a stifled shriek, the frightened girl cowered from me.
Oh! a very curious treasure-house indeed! And here the scholar had laid up skins and furs of animals, and there horns and hoofs and talons. Here, grim, melancholy, great birds were standing as though in life, and crumbling, as they waited, with neglect and age. There, in a twilight corner, glimmered the green glassy eyes of an old Thebeian crocodile, and there the shining ivory jaws of monstrous fishes, with warty hides of toads, and shriveled forms of small beasts dried in the kiln of long-silent ages, and now black, shrunken, and ghastly. On the walls were pendent enough simples and electrices to stock twenty witches’ dens, enough mandrake, hellebore, blue monkshood, purple-tinted nightshade to unpeople half a shire; and along by them were withered twigs and leaves would banish every kind of rheum; samples of wondrous shrubs and roots, all neatly docketed, would cure a wife of scolding or a war-horse of a sprain, would cure an adder’s bite, or by the same physic mend a broken limb; ah, and bring you certain luck in peace and war, or light, all out of the same virtue, the fires of love in icy, virgin bosoms.
In that quaint ante-room, dimly illumined by its cobwebbed windows, were astrolabes and hemispheres from the cabin poops of sunken merchantmen; charts whereon great beasts shared with pictured savages whole continents of land, and dolphins and whales did sport where seas ran out into unknown vagueness. There were models of harmless things of foreign art and commerce, and cruel iron jaws and wheels with bloody spikes or beaks for breaking bones or tearing flesh, and teaching the ways of fair civility to heretics. That old man had got together twenty images of Baal from as many lands, and half a hundred bits of divers saints. Here, tied with the strand of the rope that hanged him, was the skin of a dead felon, and near was the true shirt of a martyr whom the Church had canonized a thousand years before. In some way, too, the scholar had possessed him of a Pharaoh still swaddled with his Memphian robes, and there he was propped up against the wall, that kingly ash with mouth locked tight, whose lightest whisper once had made or marred in every court or camp from dusty Ababdah to green Euphrates, and brows set rigid, whose frown had once cost twenty thousand lives, made twenty thousand wives to widows, and eyes shut fast that seemed still to dream of shadowy empery—of golden afternoons in golden ages—a most ancient, a most curious fellow, and I stared hard at him, feeling wondrous neighborly.