CHAPTER IV.

THE OLD RYE HOUSE.

When the Rye House was built, or at least its gate-tower wing of which we are now speaking, and which was as old as the time of King Henry the Sixth, probably no dwelling of any importance, with the exception of Nether Hall, a still more ancient baronial structure, stood within miles of it.

Strong as rocks were its fortified outer walls; and in many parts its interior walls were three feet thick. This was the case with the old "Debtors' Prison," lying at the older wing's extreme end, and forming the angle connecting it with the new wing, which dated only from the time of Queen Elizabeth. In this debtors' prison Master Rumbold, as we have seen, now stored his malt. The wall separating Maudlin Sweetapple's little sleeping chamber from the more spacious one occupied by Ruth, was of at least equal strength and solidity with the walls of this storing room; but while in the one case the surface showed the bare hewn stone, polished only by the hand of time, panellings carved in many a quaint device, and reaching half-way to the flat oak-timbered ceiling, lined the "Lady's Bower," as time beyond all count, Ruth's room had been called.

[Sidenote: Ruth's bower.]

Here she held sway undisputed; spending in it hours of her lonely days when her father was absent from home, as of late she noted he so frequently had been. So she sat strumming on the broken and half-stringless virginal, or spelling out the crabbed type of several worm-eaten books, chiefly poems--long winded, wordy things enough. Still she cared for them in a fashion; and one volume, whose title-page set forth that its contents were from the pen of one William Shakespeare, a play-actor, took her mightily. Line after line she would tell you of many of the long speeches and odd sayings it contained; though she kept her studies to herself, for Maudlin had not very much of a turn for book-learning, and Master Rumbold always said, if it had not been for the Bible, and that godly person Mr. Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_, child of his should not have been taught to read at all. Then as to writing, he was near never speaking one word more to Madam Lee after one fine day when he made the frightful discovery that she had been teaching the little girl so successfully to make pot-hooks and hangers, that long before Lawrence was out of the alphabet Ruth had been writing on her own responsibility, and in unmistakeable fair round hand: "Fear God. Honour the King." Wroth indeed was Master Rumbold over the "fine surprise" thus prepared for him by instructress and pupil. The knowledge, however, could not be unlearned; and such a penwoman as Ruth remained till the day of her death you might go a hundred miles and not find.

And so with her wheel and her tapestry-frame for her father's company, and her graver accomplishments for the solitude of the Lady's Bower, Ruth contrived to live as happily as any princess. Solitude is, however, no term to connect with the spot where the birds sang their sweet music the livelong day amid the beechen branches which swept the panes of the old painted oriel window, and the wind sighed gently in the long summer evenings through the ivy trails and creepers which Ruth trained about its carved stone-cornices, or in his rougher moods snarled and blustered, like the tyrant he can be, round the ancient house. But in Ruth's eyes the broad look-out from that window always wore a beauty, and with all her fifteen years' experience she had not been able to determine whether that expanse of lowly undulating meadow-land and winding waters looked loveliest in its spring and summer garb of green, tented over with cloudless blue, or in autumn's grays and russets, or clad in its pure white winter snow robe; nor even whether golden sunlight, or the moon's silvery sheen, as to-night she stood gazing on it, pleased her best.

[Sidenote: Rumbold's chamber.]

Master Rumbold himself slept on the ground-storey, in a room immediately beneath his stored malt-sacks. This chamber, tradition said, contained in its stone flooring a trap-door opening upon a ladder which conducted into the fearsome dungeons underground, where prisoners used to be thrust, bidding hope and the blessed air and daylight farewell for ever. The subject was, however, one rarely touched upon in the maltster's presence by those who best knew his humours; for he would either smile in bitter contempt, or--and indeed that more generally happened--frown angrily; and, let his mood be the one or the other, always turned the conversation at last with some half-uttered remark that so might it, or might it not be, and that he had simply occupied the room ever since he had been master of the place, because it commanded a watch on both wings of the house. The quaintly timbered walls of the new wing contained the malting-house; while its gabled roof stretching up stiff as cat's ears, afforded sleeping accommodation for the domestic servants and the few workpeople living on the premises.

[Sidenote: The malting house.]

The handsome guest-chamber, or keeping-room as it was called, was not reserved merely for high days and holidays, for Richard Rumbold had no liking for such vain settings apart of time; but was used as the general sitting-room, and extended from end to end of the ground-storey. Its three windows fronted the great square smooth-shaven grass-plot, which by tradition and courtesy was called "the pleasaunce." In the middle stood one solemn big yew-tree, clipped, beehive-shape, and surmounted by a leafy monstrosity which Maudlin said was meant for a peacock. Never a flower, however, save the poor little buttercups and daisies, whose heads were chopped off in a twinkling, if they did venture to peer forth, ever starred that dreary pleasaunce, for the maltster said he had other uses for his money than to be wasting it on gaudy nonsenses like flowers.

But returning now to the old wing, let us peep in for a moment on old Adam Lockit, the gatehouse keeper, in his sanctum deep hidden in the recesses of the vaulted archway piercing the tower, and giving on its outer side upon the drawbridge, which was still let down at dawn, and drawn up at sunset, by the massive old iron chains working through the wall.

[Sidenote: Barnaby Diggles.]

Not a snugger corner in the whole establishment than this of Master Lockit's. Within the last year or so, since he has not been so young as he used to be, and the dragging at those heavy chains has come to be a bit of a pull upon him, though he is a hale enough man for his threescore and ten, he has condescended to accept the assistance of a lad, employed originally as a Jack-of-all trades in the malting-yard, but promoted to the dignity of domestic factotum by reason of sundry excellent qualities. Foremost among these stand unimpeachable honesty and placid temper. A characteristic less distinguishing Barnaby Diggles, for so the lad was named, was animal courage. He was, in other words, an arrant coward; in the matter at all events of hobgoblins and things of the sort. He was, however, but just turned of sixteen; and time as yet had never tried his mettle with any real and substantial danger. Meanwhile, nothing so much charmed him as having his imagination tortured with ghost stories by the village gossips; unless, indeed, it was to sit and incline his ears to the hundred and one yarns of all countries and ages that Adam Lockit loved at least as much to spin.

[Sidenote: The gatehouse room.]

When Barnaby is not to be found after his day's work for love nor money, you are safe to run him to earth in the gatehouse room. A Sindbad's valley it is to him, a Hassan's cave, with all its treasures of crossbows and battle-axes, and catapult relics; its bits of chain-armour, its battered helmets, stags' antlers, and hunting-horns, for all and each of which Adam had his story to tell, as vividly as if he had been honoured by the personal acquaintance of Joan of Arc and William Rufus, or gone a buck-hunting in Hainault Forest with the merry monks of Waltham or bluff King Hal.

What gruesome tales too, Master Lockit, sitting of bitter winter nights in his warm ingle neuk. could tell you between the whiffs of his pipe, about yonder spiral staircase, "There, just behind you," which goes winding up past the nail-studded iron clamped door, shutting in the old wing's upper storey. Ever so high, aloft to the tower roof, with the spiked vane atop of its tall twisted chimney. "But he was speakin' mainly," he was, Adam would say, "of where it went round an' round, an' down an' down to what was just wine and wood cellars now, but 'twas no such honest end as that they were scooped out for hunnerds and hunnerds, if so be 'twarn't thousands o' years agone. And Master Rumbold might say what he pleased, an' deny it you as he liked, 'twere just for all the world a honeycomb o' cells an' passages, openin' right an' left into dungeons, till you come out by the weir, over against the ruins o' Nether Hall."

"Go on! go on!" Barnaby would gasp, writhing in ecstasy at the recital. "Slidikins! I'm all goose-flesh from top to toe! Master Lockit, go on!"

[Sidenote: Master Lockit's word pictures.]

"More idiot you," Adam would rejoin, puffing away with immeasurable but secret content in the effect produced by his word picture of their hidden surroundings. "What is it to the likes of us? An't such things all done with now? I'm speakin', I am, of the good old times when royal kings an' queens theirselves wasn't safe on their gold thrones, for blows in the dark."

"Happen it might come again," Barnaby would murmur, staring with hopeful rounded eyes into the blazing logs; but when the old belfry clock overhead boomed its warning to bed, Master Diggles stumbling half blind with terror to his sleeping-room in the gabled roof, was a sight not easily to be forgotten.

That same iron-clamped door atop of the tower staircase opened--if indeed one may so speak of a door which so rarely was put to its use--into a chamber called the Warder's Room. Not having been inhabited for a generation or two, it was of course reputed to be haunted by a "White Woman," and that was no more than truth and fact; for many an hour Ruth spent in it, weaving romances out of her own brain, for the mail-clad knights and wimpled ladies whose pictured forms gleamed dimly from the rich oak wainscoted walls, and the designs and quaint devices of their panellings which accorded with those on the walls of Ruth's room, lying immediately beyond.

[Sidenote: Ruth romancing.]

Ruth had a theory that this suite of rooms on the upper storey of the gatehouse wing had in olden times been occupied by the lord and lady of the ancient mansion; and the notion was probably a correct one, since in no part of the place were traces of such magnificence to be seen as here. Fragments of painted glass glowed in the mullioned windows, showing scraps of monstrous griffin-like heads and scaly tails, and enscrolled letters, of which only one word in one of the upper lights of Ruth's window remained entire--"Loyaulté."

Time and wear had so polished the wood of this chamber's richly-parqueted floor that its smooth surface reflected, like some quiet pool, the tall-backed chairs of tawny and gilt Cordovan leather, ranged stiffly against the walls, and about the long narrow oaken table covered with its faded velvet drapery; and the massive proportions of the huge carved oaken chest, capacious enough to shut in one of the mailed knights, or even portly brown-frocked Abbot Benedict Ogard of Waltham Abbey himself, who smiled, come fair weather come foul, come day come night, so unctuously down on you from his recess beside the loftily-coped fireplace.

Ruth could very well recall the time when the lower portion of the walls of this room had been hung with Flemish tapestry, embroidered with subjects from the Old Testament and early Grecian lore. One winter, however, when King Frost intruded so tyrannically in-doors that people shivered in their beds, Maudlin Sweetapple had stripped down the greater part of this tapestry to make curtains for Ruth's room. If in cutting away the tattered and hopelessly unmendable parts of it, she had patched the stuff together again in such fashion as to leave Solomon in all his glory turning a summersault on the extreme tip of Jonah's whale's nose, and Goliath's gory head frowned grimly from the neck of the Trojan horse, did it not all serve every whit as well for keeping the wind away?

[Sidenote: The warder's room.]

No doubt the situation of the Warder's Room, cut off as it was so completely from the rest of the house, had first obtained it its ghostly renown; one not likely to dwindle, by the knowledge that its outer door giving on the staircase was always kept locked. This, however, was no more than an ordinary precaution; since the room stood literally in the very portal of the whole house, though time had brought its changes, and various small doors in the new wing now admitted by the wicket the maltster's few visitors and his workpeople to the malt-yard.

[Sidenote: A grim greeting.]

The master of the house himself did not set foot inside the Warder's Room twice in a year; and when on that May morning, before starting for Nether Hall, Ruth entered it, according to her daily custom, to let a little fresh air and sunshine into its grim silence, she had been startled at perceiving her father standing with folded arms and sombre brows near the hearth, gazing into its cold blackness as if lost in moody thought. On becoming conscious of her presence, however, he had roused up from his abstraction, and with a hurried and absent "Good morrow, child," he turned and went out, locking the door behind him.