INTRODUCTORY

Concerning Bindon-Cheveral.

An ancient gateway, looking as though it were closed for ever; with its carved stone pillar bramble-grown, its scrolled ironwork yielded to silence and immobility, to crumbling rust—and through the bars the wild imprisoned garden....

The haunting of the locked door, of the condemned apartment in a house of life and prosperity, how unfailingly it appeals to the romantic fibre! Yet, more suggestive still, in the heart of a rich and trim estate, is the forbidden garden jealously walled, sternly abandoned, weed-invaded, falling (and seemingly conscious of its own doom) into a rank desolation. The hidden room is enigmatic enough, but how stirring to the fancy this peep of condemned ground, descried through bars of such graceful design as could only have been once conceived for the portals of a garden of delight!—Thus stands, in the midst of the nurtured pleasaunces of Bindon-Cheveral, the curvetting iron gate leading to the close known on the estate as the Garden of Herbs—a place of mystery always, as reported by tradition; and, by the legend touching certain events in the life of one of its owners, a place of somewhat sinister repute. Even in the eyes of the casual visitor it has all the air of

Some complaining dim retreatFor fear and melancholy meet.

Some complaining dim retreat

For fear and melancholy meet.

And in truth(being fain to pursue the quotation further)

I blame them notWhose fancy in this lonely spotWas moved.

I blame them not

Whose fancy in this lonely spot

Was moved.

Ancient haunts of men have numberless tongues for those who know how to hear them speak; therein lies the whole secret of the fascination that they cast, even upon the uninitiated. Those, on the other hand, whose minds are attuned to the sweetness of “unheard melodies” turn to such places of long descent with the joy of the lover towards his bridal chamber, for the wedding of fantasy with truth. Divers, indeed, and many, might be the tales which the walls of Bindon-Cheveral could tell, from what remains of its old battlements to the present mansion.

Its front, which the passer-by upon the turnpike-road may in leafless winter-time descry at the end of the long avenue of elms, has the peaceful and rich stateliness of the Jacobean country seat—but there is scarce a stone of its grey masonry, with its wide mullioned windows, its terrace balustrades and garden stairways, that has not once been piled to the arrogant height from which the Bindon Castle of stark Edward’s times looked down upon the country-side. The towers and walls are gone; but the keep still stands, sleeping now and shrouded under centuries of ivy—a kindly massive prop to the younger house, its descendant. The ornamental waters were once defensive moats: red they have turned with other than the sunset glow, and secretly they have rippled to different causes than the casting of a careless stone or the leap of the great fat carp after a bait. Where the pleasure-grounds are now stretched in formal Italian pride spread, centuries back, the outer bailey of the once famous, now forgotten, stronghold.

Stirring would be the Romance of old Bindon I could recount, as old Bindon revealed it to me—many the talesof love, of deeds, of hatred, of ambition. I could tell brave things of the builder of the Castle, and how he held the keep in defiance of Longshanks’ royal displeasure; or of the Walter, Lord of Bindon, Knight of the Garter, High Treasurer to the last Lancaster, and of his fortunes between the Two Roses; or yet of his grandson, beheaded after Hexham; and, under Richard Crookback, of the transfer of the good lands of Bindon to the “Jockey of Norfolk” who perished on Bosworth Field.—And these would be tales of clash of steel and waving banner as well as of wily diplomacy. Great figures would stalk across my page; it would be shot with scarlet and gold, royal colours; and high fortunes, those of England herself, would be mingled with the lesser doings of knight and baron.

I could set forth the truth touching some of those inner tragedies, now legendary, that the warlike walls once witnessed after the first Tudor had restored the estate of Bindon to the last descendant of its rightful owner, a Cheveral, whereby the line of Bindon-Cheveral joined on the older branch.—There was the Agnes Cheveral of the ballad singers—“so false and fair”—who left the tradition of poison in the wine cup as a fate to be dreaded by the Lords of Bindon.—And there was the Sir Richard who kept his childless wife a life-long prisoner in the topmost chamber of that keep now so placidly dreaming under its creepers!

Or I could reel you a bustling Restoration narrative of the doing of the Edmund Cheveral known in the family as Edmund the Spendthrift, who had roamed England, hunted and fasting, with Charles; had stagnated with him, had junketed and roystered in Holland. He it was who brought over the shrewish little French wife and her great fortune, and also foreign notions of display, to old English Bindon. He it was who pulled down the gloomy loopholed walls, built the present House, laid out the park and the renowned gardens; who introduced the carp into the pacific moat after the fashion of Frenchchâteaux; and who, bitten with fanciful scientific aspiration—a friend of Rupert and a member of the Royal Society—laid out in a sunken and wall-sheltered part of the old fortified ground an inner pleasaunce of exotic plants and shrubs, after the manner of Dutch Physick-Gardens.

Or would you have the story of the new heir—a silent, dark man—and of his mystic Welsh wife and of the new wealth and strain of blood that came with her into the race? Or again, no doubt for those who care to hear the call of horn and hounds, to see the port pass over the mahogany; who find your three-bottle man the best company and the jokes of the stable and of the gun-room the only ones worth cracking with the walnut, there were a pleasant rollicking chapter or two to be chronicled anent the generation of fox-hunting, hard-living Squires who kept Bindon prosperous, made its cellars celebrated and its hospitality a byword.

And yet, my fancy lingers upon the spot where it was first awakened; dwells on the story of the deserted Physick-Garden, with its closed exquisitely-wrought gate, its mystery and its melancholy; with its wildness wherein lies no hint of sordidness, but rather a fascinating, elusive beauty. It is of this that I fain would write.

Standing barred out, in this still autumn twilight, as the first stars flash out faintly on the deepening vault; gazing upon its overgrown paths, where the leaves of so many summers make rich mould; inhaling its strange fragrances, the scent of the wholesome decay of nature mixed with odd spices that come from far lands; hearing the wild birds cry as they fly free in its imprisoned space—it seems to me as if the spirit of my romance dwelt in these, and I could evoke it.

A tale of well-nigh a century ago; when George III. lay dying.—It was a strangely silent Bindon then; and the whole house seemed to lie under much such a spellas now holds its Herb-Garden. Yet those same garden paths, if wild, were not deserted; and the gate, though locked to the world at large, still rolled upon its hinges for one or two who had the key.

In those days of slow journeys and quick adventure, had you been a traveller on the turnpike-road between Devizes and Bath, you could not, looking over the park wall from your high seat, but have been struck by the brooding, solitary look that lay all upon this great House, with its shuttered windows and upon these wide lands, so rich, yet so lonely.

The driver of the coach would, no doubt, have pointed with his whip; his tongue would have been ready to wag—was not Bindon one of the wonders of his road?

“Aye, you might well say it looked strange! There were odd stories about the place, and odd folk living there, if all folk said were true. The owner, Sir David Cheveral (as good blood as any in the county, and once as likely a young man as one could wish to see), had turned crazy with staring at the stars and took no bit nor sup but plain bread and water. That was what some said; and others that he was bewitched by an old kinsman of his that lived with him—an old, old man, bearded like a Jew, who could not die, and who practised spell-work on the village folk. That was what others said. Anyhow, they two lived in there quite alone; one on his tower, the other underground. And that was true. And the flowers bloomed in the garden, and the fruit ripened on the walls; there were horses in the stables and cattle in the byres (the like of which could not be bettered in Wiltshire); the whole place was flowing with milk and honey, as they say, and the only ones to use it all were the servants! Oh, there the servants grew fat and did well, while the master looked up to the skies and grew lean.”

And presently, to the sound of your driver’s jovial laugh the coach would bowl clear of the long grey walls, emerge from under the overhanging branches; and then the well-known stretch of superb scenery suddenly revealed at thebend of the road would perhaps so engross your attention that your transient traveller’s interest in the eccentric, world-forsaking master of Bindon-Cheveral would no doubt have evaporated.

But pray you who travel with me to-day give me longer patience. I have to tell the story of Bindon’s awakening.

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