Wenderholme: A Story of Lancashire and Yorkshire

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

If the reader has ever been absent for many years from some neighborhood where he has once lived—where many faces were familiar to him, and the histories that belonged to the faces—where he once knew the complex relations of the inhabitants towards each other, and was at least in some measure cognizant of the causes which were silently modelling their existence in the future, as masons build houses in which some of us will have to live—if, after knowing the life of a neighborhood so intimately as this, he has left that place for long years, and come back to it again to visit it, that he may renew the old sensations, and revive his half-forgotten ancient self, he has learned a lesson about human life which no other experience can teach. The inhabitants who have never gone away for long, the parson who preaches every Sunday in the church, the attorney who goes to his office every day after breakfast, the shop-keepers who daily see the faces of their customers across the counter, perceive changes, but not change. To them every vicissitude has the air of a particular accident, and it always seems that it might have been avoided. But the great universal change has that in its aspect which tells you that it cannot be avoided; and he who has once seen it face to face knows that all things are moving and flowing, and that the world travels fast in a sense other than the astronomical.

I have endeavored to enlist the reader's interest in a set of persons who lived at Shayton and Sootythorn at the time of the establishment of the militia. The first training of Colonel Stanburne's regiment took place in the month of May, 1853—to be precise, it met for the first time on the 23d of that month; and the 15th of the month following will long be remembered in the neighborhood on account of the great fire at Wenderholme Hall, which, as the reader is already aware, took place under circumstances of the most exceptional publicity. It is probable that on no occasion, from the times of the Tudors to our own, were so many people collected in the park and garden of Wenderholme as on that memorable night.

It is the misfortune of certain positions that the virtues which are necessary to those who occupy them have to be translated into a money outlay before they can be adequately appreciated. Colonel Stanburne was not an extravagant man by nature; he was simple in all his habits and tastes, liked to live quietly at his own house, hated London, and indulged himself only in an innocent taste for tandem-driving, which certainly did not cost him two hundred a-year. But this was John Stanburne's character in his private capacity; as a leader of men—as the head of a regiment—his nature was very different. Whether his surroundings excited him, and so caused him to lose the mental balance which is necessary to perfect prudence, or whether he acted at first in ignorance of the wonderful accumulativeness of tradesmen's bills, and afterwards went on from the force of established habit, it is certain that from the 23d of May, 1853, when his regiment assembled for the first time, Colonel Stanburne entered upon a new phase of his existence. Hitherto he had lived strictly within his income, whilst from the year 1853 he lived within it no longer.

His whole style of living had been heightened and increased by his position in the militia. The way he drove out was typical of every thing else. Before his colonelcy he had been contented with a tandem, and his tandem was horsed from the four ordinary carriage-horses which were regularly kept at Wenderholme. But since it had seemed convenient—nay, almost indispensably necessary—to have a commodious vehicle of some kind, that he might convey his officers from Sootythorn to Wenderholme every time he asked them to dinner—and since he had naturally selected a drag as the proper thing to have, and the pleasantest thing for himself to drive—there had been an increase in his stable expenses, and a change in his habits, which lasted all the year round. Besides, his natural kindliness and generosity of disposition, which had formerly found a sufficing expression in a general heartiness and good-nature, now began to express themselves in a much more expensive way—namely, by more frequent and more profuse hospitality.

In the year 1865 Colonel Stanburne was still at the head of his regiment of militia, and during the annual trainings the Wenderholme coach has never ceased to run. Wenderholme had become quite a famous place, and tourists knowing in architecture came to see it from distant counties. It is a perfect type now of a great Elizabethan mansion: the exterior, especially the central mass over the porch, is enriched with elaborate sculpture; there are great mullioned windows everywhere, and plenty of those rich mouldings and copings which diversify the fronts of great houses of that age, and crown their lofty walls. There are globes and pinnacles on the completed gables, and at the intersections of the roofing rise fantastic vanes of iron-work, gilded, and glittering in the sunshine against the blue of the summer sky.

The interior has but one defect—it seems to require, in its inhabitants, the costume of Sir Walter Raleigh and the great ladies of his time. It has become like a poem or a dream, and one would hardly be surprised to find Edmund Spenser there reading the "Faëry Queene" to the noble Surrey, or imagining, in the solitude of one of its magnificent rooms, some canto still to be written.

Let us pause here, and look at the place simply as in a picture, or series of pictures, before the current of events hurries us on till we have no time left to enjoy beautiful things, nor mental tranquillity enough to feel in tune with this perfect peace.

It is noon in summer. Under every oak in the great avenues lies a dark patch of shadow, and on the rich expanse of the open park the sunshine glows and darkens as the thin white clouds sail slowly in the blue aerial ocean. How rich and stately is the rounded foliage—how perfect the fulness of the protected trees! In the midst of them stands the house of Wenderholme, surrounded by soft margins of green lawn and wide borders of gleaming flowers.

It is pleasant this hot day to enter the great cool hall, to walk on its pavement of marble (white marble and black, in lozenges), and rest the eye in the subdued light which reigns there, even at noon.