Life's Tapestry; or, Homes and Hearths. Fitzthorpe

Front matter

LIFE'S TAPESTRY OR HOMES AND HEARTHS GLENDULPH BY CARADOC GRANHIM IN THREE VOLUMES VOLUME III. LONDON WAED & DOWNEY 12 YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 1893 [All rights reserved] CONTENTS CHAP. ' PACE I. — Caerllwddyn Castle, .... 3 IL— Percy, ...... 27 III.— St. Chad 42 IA7.— Cousin Madge, ..... 46 V. — Ecclesia, ...... 58 VI.— Christmas Day, ..... 67 VII.— Harrys Visit, ..... 81 VIII.— The Highest Hope, . .... 90 IX.— Palestrina, ...... 93 X.— Homewards— The boys, . . ... 116 XL— Homewards— The Young Men, . .123 XII.— The Nocturne, ..... 132 XIIL— Easter, ...... 143 XIV.— Bauldy, ..... 164 XV.— The Accusation, . . . .190 XVI.— The Day drags on, . . . ■ • 195 XVII.— Spring-Traps, 202 XVIII. —The Encounter, ..... 210 XIX.— The Decision, ..... VOL. ' Ever charming, ever new ! When will the landscape tire the view ?

The fountain's fall, the river's flow, The woody valleys, warm and low, The windy summit wild and high Roughly rushing on the sky ; The pleasant seat and ruined tower, The naked rock, the shady bower, The town and village, dome and farm, Each gives each a double charm, As pearls upon an Ethiop's arm.' in. A ' Go the weird as it will, Each man of us shall abide the end Of his life work ; let him that may AVork, work his doomed deeds Ere death come.' Beowulf.

Chapter I Caerllwddyn Castle

' On yon bold brow a lordly tower, In that soft vale a lady's bower, In yonder meadow far away The turrets of a cloister grey.' On the borders of Shropshire, far in the south and stretching into what is now Hereford county, was an old manor known as Caerllwddyn Castle. Centuries before the militant advent of William of Normandy the lands belonging thereto, then baronial, were possessed by Humphrey Flugh or Fulcke Adelberht. For centuries before, as well as for centuries after the Conquest, like many of the barons on the western marches, throughout those long unsettled times, vicis situdes, sometimes of the most scathing and over whelming kind, were endured by the chief of the time, and consequently, more or less, by the different branches of the clan. But the stock of Adelberht was hardy ; and it was endued with a persistency of life and purpose that showed it was worthy to live, as well too in its prin cipal branches as in its veteran head.

Their broad lands had at different times been seized and alienated in part or in whole, and bestowed, as the case might be, now on the soldier of fortune for daring deeds, now on the courtier for success in diplomacy or intrigue. It looked, however, as if the Flugh Adelberhts possessed some such power, native or acquired, as was in those days imputed to the magician, by which they could lure back their ancient lands to their ancient owners. It is known that in the early times of their inde pendence the British were diligent and daring students in the occult sciences. The arcane secrets of nature were the supreme study of the adepts among the powerful hierarchy of the Druids. That numerous commun ity comprised within its different sections priests, philosophers, lawgivers, musicians, poets, historians.

They were the hereditary depositaries, as well as teachers, of those obscure sciences which made them masters of many delicate experiments and startling phenomena. After the Roman Conquest of the British Islands, and consequent domination by the Romans, it became perilous for the Britons to pursue such studies, and consequently the practical part of demonstration was abandoned, as drawing the attention of their foreign rulers too much upon themselves. But the fame of those wonder-workers, as the Druids were designated by the Romans, had spread as far as had the Roman legions themselves. In Rome, the centre of the political world then, Pliny gave force to the opinions circulating there and vastly stimulated the general curiosity about the singular inhabitants of those distant islands of the West by publishing in his writ ings ' that the very Persians might seem to have learned their magic from the British.' Whether it was some inscrutable aptitude latent in the race of the Adelberhts, or some special knowledge communicated in early times by the adepts and preserved among the clansmen, which, skilfully and per sistently exerted, could in the long run subjugate the accumulated antagonisms of conditions and enable them to master fate, are intricacies not easy to unravel at this distance of time.

But among the rhymers and chroniclers and border folk the events in the family history of the Adelberhts were weighted with great significance as being so many fulfilments of prophecy and testimonies and proofs of occult powers. The burden of testimony was found in the salient facts that, after a term of enforced alienation, whoever came to hold those rich demesnes by any grant of arbitrary royal favour, such occupant either fell at last under royal displeasure, or was cut off by some un looked for death, it might be in border raid, or it could be by some unlucky accident, for which no explanation could be found ; a not unusual occurrence then, and never closely looked into. So frequent had been those untoward events, ending in favour of the Adelberhts, that in the country around the traditions had heaped and grown, that it was not merely uncanny, but leading ultimately to certain death, for any stranger to be enfeoffed in the Barony of Caerllwddyn.

Like the needle that is nugatory and ineit, and will give no ' directions,' therefore no surety, while it is isolated by any obstruction, by the removal of that obstruction seems to become endowed with life and motion, and flies back to the magnet, so surely at different recurring periods did those lands of Caer llwddyn revert to the existing descendants of the Adelberhts — their earliest known possessors — possessors before dates were settled with any particularity ; and when families were called by their lands, were they county, barony, or manor. In Doomsday Book, which came into existence later, the house of Flugh Adelberht, lords of Caerllwddyn, was registered. In Battle Abbey Roll the name of a scion of the house had its place. The chief of the house was present when the Magna Charta was signed at Runnymede.

The sense of a place in the country of their birth as a part of the national life was fully as strong in the Adelberhts as was the sense of the weight of family name, family history, family dues and duties ; the one rose upon the other. Because the family life was robust the sense of national life was vivid. All that makes up that strong sense of family and of nation came from growth and continuance ; that which produces substance and brings solidarity, a thing at once inscrutable and intangible, yet persistent, potent, irrepressible and ensphering. No matter how impoverished at any period in those unsettled times the representatives or scions of that house had become by confiscation of their lands, when the moment osgood fortune returned, the representative of the clan for that time was at once ready to step out from his obscurity and take possession of his ancestral halls, as if to the manner born, though he might have first seen light in a peasant's hut and passed his youth in the hardships of breadwinning.

Poverty had seem ingly no power permanently to degrade them. What strength for the soul can lie in such family history ! To know yourself, your kith and kin, to be rooted in the past of the national life of your native land, by centuries of ancestors who have helped to make the history of that land and give colour and fibre to its national life, is to possess a consciousness of being yoked with a measure of that same energy, which, did opportunity but concur, could add still some chaptersmore to the already' existing volumes of that life. Such knowledge, an amalgam of many mixtures, gives quality to one's feelings, one's thinking, one's decisions. It brings with it, and is there imbedded, that primary substance that determines the pitch and proclivities of the individual nature. With all who possess it, it exists as a hereditary conscience, an autocrat ruling the life ; and in its daily processes, it is that undercurrent that flows from the fountain-head of the individual life.

If the case so be, despite of poverty, it awakens revulsion of what is base, and constrains to lofty purpose and generous doing ; or, if allied to pro sperity, gives balance and moderation and mastery in possession. The multitude of such individual lives is the reserve force of a nation ; it insures cohesion and dominion, for in it lies majesty. Many were the objects that stood as records of the pristine long gone-by, as also of the mediæval history of that wide-stretching and fertile range of country, some salient, arresting the attention of the traveller at once, others obscure, that had to be sought for and well con sidered before they rendered up their story. In the early centuries earnest-minded and devout men had visited that quarter. They were the great pioneers of modern civilisation.

They instructed the people how to drain their swampy lands, how the better to plough and sow and reap. They were in dustrious, intelligent, educated, yet hard-working men, — men who worked as labourers and husbandmen. They travelled on foot from point to point, that they might carry the message of ' glad tidings,' their chief object, to the toiling, ignorant, and boorish folk who lived on the soil. At that remote period there were at first no churches where the people could be gathered together and the message of grace proclaimed to them. Those early missionaries went to the people, therefore, taught them by the roadside, in the field, or in the hamlet ; instructed them by twos and threes ; in groups of ten or a score as they could be mustered. In those early twilight days, royal and noble women, in devout enthusiasm left the attractions of their royal or lordly homes and betook themselves to dwell in some kell, sheltered, it might be, by some of the great forests then existing, or they would construct a simple hut near the bend of a winding stream, and there secluded, they would live, spending their days in unostentatious devotion and works of benevolence.

The lives of those saintly women were really not the attenuated and colourless thing it appears to us at this great distance of more than a millennium and a half of years. Life, then, was not the ruthless feverish agita tion it is in our present day. Silence and quiet were not felt as oppressive. Fewer elements sufficed to round out the daily life ; yet the soul was strong ; the disease of ennui was unknown. When the occupation of those women was that of benevolence, such activi ties were filled out to their completest rhythm by the directness of individual procedure, and the much personality infused by the necessary intercourse with their humbler fellow-beings moving and working in the kingdom of the affections and borne ou by the enthusiasms of the soul, so that the heart felt satisfied by the reciprocal goodwill and sympathy evoked in others.

Their work of lovingkindness was not done by proxy, nor through the machinery of organisations, and the difference of moral results in such work so done is incalculable. We gaze on the ameliorations effected by these early workers, in the care of the sick, and the effectiveness of their moderate almsgiving, which did not break down self-reliance in the recipients, and it provokes a contrast with the vast and varied machinery of benevolentari anisms that exist in our day ; and the wonder arises that after so many centuries a Christian land should so imperiously require such huge organisations of charity, and charity in such crude forms. And yet it is dis cerned that all the existing appliances but barely touch the surface of the leprous ulcer of poverty, vice and wretchedness, that as a gangrene is preying on the masses in our cities and our rural populations as well, eating its cancerous way to the vitals of the nation.

Looking back, we are better able to gauge the worth and fibre of the work and living of those early workers in our land. There are some features that stand out more clearly defined. The religious life of those highborn and devout women does not seem ever to have taken on that negative virtue so often engendered by asceticism. Their lives seem wholesome. Then, as the religious life nationally expanded, they are historically seen to be distinguished for great powers of administration. The pristine churches that superseded the kells of the saints were no more than wattled structures. To these succeeded the wooden edifices built of the great oak-trees felled in the forests as the land was cleared. It was those wooden structures that < were designated the ' black churches,' as the process of weathering under the changeful climate of those humid skied islands gradually darkened the oak to a deep black brown.

But those black edifices were no flimsy buildings. As time went on many structures of the same materials were of the large dimensions of abbeys and priories. All these successive stages of national expansion had left their traces in this country district. The Kell of the Lady Elswith, a daughter of the house of Adelberht, was still shown partly scooped out of the rock ; and adjacent was a group of oak-trees showing great age, and which were doubtless the successors of those hoary ancestors whose vast branches and um brageous leafage had shaded and sheltered from blast and storm the rugged dwelling-place in the rock when occupied by the Lady Elswith and ber companions. A piece of level sward, still soft, green and grassy, was designated The Lady's Garden. A little way beyond was what seemed a natural basin, an almost circular trough of several feet in diameter, always brimming full of a delicious and limpid water supplied by a spring but a few yards distant.

That was known as the Holy Well, and for long centuries was a place of pilgrimage, being visited yearly by hundreds of people from far and near, drawn there by the fame of the salubrious and abundant waters, the popular voice affirming they were a prophylactic in cases of epilepsy. In the early part of the eighth century the modest kell of the Lady Elswith, empty and deserted for several hundred years, was overshadowed by an extensive edifice. The Black Church that had been built adjacent to the kell was also superseded by a vast structure of wood, a Noble of the kingdom of Mercia founding there an abbey. He was drawn to that locality by the lingering traditions of the saintly life and deeds of mercy of the lady recluse, and by the un broken history of the intellectual and religious life that had been maintained there during successive centuries.

During the two hundred years that that stately edifice, the abbey, existed, three lady abbesses had ruled over the large establishment. But this was no exceptional case. In the British Isles, in the different religious communities consolidated in the country, in Kent, in the kingdom of Northumbria, in the south, as well as in the west, women held prominent places, were conspicuous by their piety, their industry and skill in the executive, as also by their ability in the wide range of administration. In these early days women ruled in many of the abbeys where the monastic foundation included, as in some cases, an adjunct of monks as well as of nuns. Those noble women of Caerllwddyn Abbey, with other ladies from other religious houses, were always present at the councils convened at different places from time to time for the regulation and government of those great foundations and at which the chief abbots and priors were assembled.

The wooden Abbey of Caerllwddyn was devastated by fire in the middle of the tenth century, during the ruthless marauding and tumultuous upheavals con sequent on the invasion by the Danes in the western counties ; and in after years the scorched and charred ribs of the ruined structure were carried away bit by bit, by the boors and peasantry living on the land, to serve as rafters as well as walls of the huts they rudely constructed as shelter for themselves and families. It was only by the lines of the foundations, broad and low and broken, where they could be seen, covered with moss and lichens and many a fragile flower, or by some vast beam lying gaunt and prostrate half hidden among the tall rank grass, that one could have detected that a great and substantial building had ever existed there.

When in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries guilds of architects with their workmen passed from country to country, building cathedrals, abbeys, and monasteries ; when kings and nobles devoted their wealth and bequeathed lands for the consolidation and support of those institutions which represented the piety and learning of tbeir day and generation, a Benedictine monastery was founded at Caerllwddyn, but not exactly on the site of the former wooden abbey. What was regarded as a more advantageous situation was selected, not so close to the river, and having broader level lands as an appanage. Also, what was considered an attraction in those days, the new site would include a spot associated with the name of one of the early British saints. Thereby would be resuscitated the almost forgotten story and fame of the once renowned Mawddach, or Madoc, signalised in his native island of Erin at a time when that land was the focus of learning, of art, and of religion ; invoked in Scotland as he continued to be for many centuries ; and revered for his saintliness in Albion, whither he had come, and at last made his home and final resting place in this rural western country.

This last edifice was not of wood, but of materials more solid, drawn from the quarries of old red sand stone in the neighbourhood. It was of extensive plan, a vast and substantial structure, as compared with the previous wooden building. But it never ranked as an abbey, but was committed to a prior and twenty monks. Yet it was so richly endowed and held of so much importance that its priors were sum moned to take part in the election of the abbots of the great Benedictine Abbey of the ecclesiastical city of Gloucester on one side, and of the Benedictine Abbey of Shrewsbury on the other, a function they exercised through successive generations, and maintained when in the fourteenth century those great dignitaries of those abbeys in the west along with those of certain other abbeys in England were advanced to the rank and distinction of mitred abbots, conferring on them the right to sit in the legislature of the land.

But the finger of doom touched this great edifice as well. In the sixteenth century when what has been historically termed ' The Dissolution ' rushed over the land, the Priory of Caerllwddyn, as so many abbeys, priories, and cathedrals throughout England, was sup pressed, its revenues and lands seized and appropri ated, the building dismantled and left to fall into decay and irretrievable ruin and forgottenness. On a high ground sloping gradually up on the opposite side from the vale of the river, rising clear against the sky, which as an aerial background threw forward the objects and made them appear less distant, was a vast extent of masonry, once a castle of great dimensions, but now a ruin, most picturesque in colour and varied in outline. About the same time, or soon after the completion of the priory, the lord of the soil, like many another baron of that day, built himself a castle of great strength and proportions, taking as nucleus the earlier foundation of the pristine feudal tower.

Such castles were raised ostensibly to illustrate the greatness and wealth of the baron-builder, but primarily as a place of defence and self-protection against other strong and valiant barons who might assail and ruthlessly plunder him on crafty pretext or slight provocation. In the internecine Wars of the Roses, close to the end of that fierce struggle, when the crown and sceptre were wrenched from the feeble hands of Henry of Lancaster by the youthful prowess of the daring Edward of York, in the surging of that prolonged and lamentable conflict, the stronghold of Caerllwddyn had been besieged, the castle desolated by fire, aud much property destroyed. Throughout the Tudor Period Caerllwddyn Castle, rebuilt, continued the feudal residence and chief seat of the Adelberhts. But with the demolition of the priory and the consequent scattering of the educated men who had dwelt there, the social life was robbed of some of its best elements and its tone proportionately lowered.

But vicissitudes which historically might well seem vol. in. B an integral and inseparable part in the fate and fortunes of the house of Caerllwddyn again showed their persistence and ruthlessness. About the end of the seventeenth or beginning of the eighteenth century these broad lands with their mediæval castle were held by the only son and heir of the house of the Adelberhts. He and a sister a few -year younger than himself were all that remained of that ancient and powerful family. There was a legend that might from time to time be heard from the lips of the very elderly folk in the hamlets, as they sat round their hearths in the winter, or in tbe warmth of the summer passed the evening hour on the green. It was, as usual with weird sayings, in two parts. The first part ran somewhat thus: — ' When to the seventieth Lord of the House These fair lands shall descend, There shall be sorrow ; there shall be joy, Bnt the Line in the male shall end.' No one as yet had dared to reckon or settle how far the heirs and possessors of Caerllwddyn might have advanced oh this numerically ominous category.

In the monastic days the legend had been pro nounced mystical by some one of the monks who had heard it in his visits to the village. The monk had said that seventy was a mystical number, and other monks who had been appealed to as time went on had said the same thing — that seventy was mystical. What mystical meant, the village folk did not know. But the schoolmaster and the blacksmith and a few of the clever ones of the different generations had repeated the word, so that in the unfluctuating community of the village, it had obtained currency and stability, and had become by association a part of the legend. Thus it was that when the prophetic utterance would be rehearsed on occasions when the affairs of the lords of Caerllwddyn engrossed the interest and talk of the country folk more than usual, the addition connected with 'seventy' as being mystical was sure to follow as a Talmudic annotation uttered with much gravity.

The origin of the legend was assigned to the remote period of the Druids. About that there was no con troversy. But a prolific point of speculation always existed, as never having been settled, as to how many lords of Caerllwddyn had flourished before the Arch- Druid had pronounced his prophecy. That was data no one could furnish ; and the wish was latent, by no means to determine the point. But the prophecy was held all the more tenaciously because shrouded by so much uncertainty. While the people would halt and speculate over the first part of this vaticination, they experienced no hesi tation about the fulfilment of the second part of the augury ; as they obviously deemed that as but con sistent with the grandiose history of the house of Adelberht that there could be no difficulty in its accomplishment.

Then :— ' That the Lord of those lands. With fierce rush and roar, And wrapt in a princely winding sheet Glittering like silver, Clear as glass, Would vanish from sight for evermore. This strange and portentous legend, though not directly or openly acknowledged by the chiefs of the house of any given period, was not the less never lost sight of. It was tacitly recognised as an abiding factor in the fortunes, if not even of the destinies, of the great house of Adelberht. More than once in the later cen turies, when there was but one son in the family, his sister, a daughter of the house, had been associated with him as co-heiress, so that the lands should remain with the representative direct, of the primeval head and chief. Cydric Hugh Simon Fulck Adelberht, Lord of Caerllwddyn, had the firmly-knit stature and robust health that nature gives to those whom she would seem to have destined to uphold and transmit a vigorous race.

But being an only son, following the traditions of his bouse when no more children were born to him, the father of Cydric associated his daughter, the youthful Lady Geraldine, as co-heiress with his son. When this son came to the estates he was little more than major. His sister was in France, and con tinued there for purposes of education. Cydric was almost quite alone, so far as home associations existed. But he liked country life, and the occupations it furnishes. He was fond of field sports ; riding and boating were favourite recreations. Being so much alone, the j'oung lord spent a good deal of time with other young men of equal rank and of similar tastes. His chief friend was Odo Talbot, still a minor, and one of a large family. The residence of the Talbots was much farther to the west than Caerllwddyn.

Cydric was always a welcome visitor there. During one of those visits Odo and Cydric, as they often did, went out boating on the Severn. It was about the middle of March. They rowed for some time on that part of the river where its course is sluggish ; but agile and strong, and reliant on their skill as boatmen, they struck out and eagerly shot down far into the tidal currents of that treacherous river. They had forgotten the spring or palm tides were on : nor did they give much thought to the startling speed with which the tide was sweeping up from the estuary. The pull was stiff, but that was what they wanted. They called to the boatman at the tiller to steer to the middle of the stream. The tide mounts fully a hundred and twenty miles, and will rise ten or twelve feet in a few minutes. But when the March tide combines with the bore — indeed, produces it — the rush of the waters is tremendous in force and speed, and thousands of tons of water are carried up the tortuous channel with a sweep and a noise that can be heard miles distant, the waters rising sometimes forty to sixty feet.

The young men had reached a bend in the river's course. The sweep of the swollen waters caught the boat, plucked the oars from the hands of the stalwart rowers, swung the boat suddenly round, engulfed it voraciously, and fiercely and remorselessly rolled on. The brave young men struck boldly out, breasting up against the turgid waters, and striving to swim upwards with the rush of the bore. The fellow at the tiller had been flung out at the other side, and being swept to the slack water of the inner course of the stream, had had strength to swim and clamber up the low shores of the river. Resolute and undaunted, he ran through the marshy wastes skirting the fields, in the eager hope to help and save his youthful masters. But they were immersed in the waters that swept the opposite shore with the impetuous tide.

Yet he saw them rise. It seemed for a time they would succeed in reaching the bank ; but again the swelling tide went over them and sucked them down. Again they rose, but the distance between them was this time greater. A grazier in his field collecting his cattle saw them struggling to swim on. Fain would he have helped them, willingly would he have put out his boat, but he knew well no boat could live in such swollen waters. He called to them, but his voice was lost in the noise of the rushing Eagre. Stupefied perhaps by the weight of the waters, ex hausted by the fierceness of the tide, one and then another of these courageous young men sank and rose no more. The heads of an ancient house mourned the loss of their first-born — the heir to a coronet. And a fair young girl wept in secret over a great sorrow of the heart, her maiden thoughts shrouded in silence.

Caerllwddyn was without a lord. A month, a week, and a day had passed since the mournful event. The corse, recovered from its watery bed, had been laid with much pomp in the resting place of illustrious forefathers. The moon was in its first quarter. A singularly weird-looking man of ancient mien, wearing the garb, it might be, of a Benedictine monk, but having a white glistening beard that reached down to his girdle, appeared on the village green, before the folk who had gathered there, as was their wont. Whence he came, or whither he went, no one knew. In strange, unearthly voice he proclaimed that Cydric was the seventieth Lord of Caerllwddyn ! That ' they ' had kept faith with the great Adelberhts ; that they had prolonged their illustrious line until now. The winding sheet was no other than ' the princely river,' the foremost river in this land of the west, that, glittering in the lustre of the ascend ing sun, and clear as the glassy sea, had wrapped and swathed in a liquid silvery sheet the heir of an ancient race — the lord of an ancient heritage.