CHAPTER VIII.
GUENDOLEN'S BOWER.
"Four gray walls, and four square towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers, The Lady of Shalott."
TENNYSON.
High up in the gray square tower, which constituted the keep of thecastle of Waltheofstow, there was a suite of apartments, the remainsof which are discoverable to this day, known as the Lady's Bower;which had, it is probable, from the construction of the edifice, beenset apart, not only as the private chambers of the chatelaine andladies of the family, her casual guests and their attendants, but aswhat we should now call the drawing-rooms, wherein the more socialhours of those rude days were passed, when the sexes intermingled,whether for the enjoyment of domestic leisure, or for gayety andpleasure.
The keep of Waltheofstow consisted, as did indeed all the smallerfortalices of that date, when private dwellings, even of the great andpowerful, were constructed with a view to defense above all beside, ofone large massive building of an oblong square form, with a solidcircular buttress at each angle, which, above the basement floor, washollowed into a lozenge-shaped turret, extending above the esplanadeof the highest battlements, and terminating at a giddy height in acrenellated and machicolated lookout, affording a shelter to thesentries, and a flanking defense to the _corps de logis_.
For its whole height, from the guard-room, which occupied the wholeground-floor, to the battlements, one of these turrets contained thegreat winding stone staircase of the castle, lighted at the base bymere shot-holes and loops, but, as it rose higher and higher above thedanger of escalade, by mullioned windows of increasing magnitude,until, at the very summit, it was surmounted by a beautifully-wroughtlanthorn of Gothic stone-work. The other three, lighted in the samemanner, better and better as they ascended, formed each a series ofsmall pleasant rooms, opening upon the several stories, and for themost part were fitted as the sleeping-rooms of the various officers.
The whole floor, first above the guard-room, was divided into thekitchen, butteries, and household offices; while the next in order,being the third in elevation above the court-yard, was reserved in onesuperb parallelogram of ninety feet by sixty, well lighted by narrowlanceolated windows, and adorned with armors of plate and mail,scutcheons rich with heraldic bearings, antlers of deer and elk, hornsof the bull, yet surviving, of the great Caledonian forests, skulls ofthe grizzly boars grinning with their ivory tusks, and bannersdependent from the lofty groinings of the arched roof, trophies ofmany a glorious day. This was the knight's hall, the grandbanqueting-saloon of the keep; while of its three turrets, one was thecastle chapel, a second a smaller dining-hall, and the last theprivate cabinet and armory of the castellan. Above this, again, on thefourth plat, were bed-chambers of state, the larger armory, and thedormitories of the warders, esquires, pages, and seneschal, who alonedwelt within the keep, the rest of the garrison occupying the variousout-buildings and towers upon the flanking walls and ramparts.
The fifth story, at least a hundred feet in air above the inner court,and nearly thrice that elevation above the base of the scarped mounton which the castle stood, contained the Lady's bower; and its wholearea of ninety feet by sixty was divided, in the first instance,laterally by three partitions, into three apartments, each sixty feetin length by thirty wide. Of these, however, the first and last weresubdivided equally in two squares of thirty feet. The whole of thebower, thus, contained a handsome ante-chamber, opening from the greatstaircase, with a large room for the waiting-women to the right,communicating with the turret chamber corresponding to the stairway.Beyond the vestibule, by which access was had to it, lay the grandladies' hall, furnished with all the superabundance of splendor andmagnificence, and all the lack of real convenience, which was thecharacteristic of the time; divans, and deep settles, and ponderousarm-chairs covered with gold and velvet; embroideries and emblazonedfoot-cloths on the floor; mirrors of polished steel, emulatingVenetian crystals, on the walls; mighty candelabra of silver gilt;tables of many kinds, some made for the convenience of long-forgottengames, some covered with cups and vessels of gold, silver, andrichly-colored glass, and one or two, smaller, and set away in quietnooks, with easy seats beside them, showing the feminine character ofthe occupants, by a lute, a gittern, and two or three other musicalimplements long since fallen into disuse; pages of music written inthe old musical notation of the age; some splendidly-bound andilluminated missals and romances, in priceless manuscript, eachactually worth its weight in gold; silks and embroideries; aworking-stand, with a gorgeous surcoat of arms half finished, theneedle sticking in the superb material where the fairy fingers hadleft it, when last called from their gentle task; and great vases fullof the finest flowers of the season.
Such was the aspect of the room, beheld by the declining rays of thesun, which had already sunk so low that his stray beams, instead offalling downward through the gorgeous hues of the tinted-windows,streamed upward into that lofty place, playing on the richly-carvedand gilded ceilings, catching here on a mirror, there on a vase ofgold or silver, and sending hundreds of burning specks of lightdancing through the motley haze of gold and purple, which formed theatmosphere of that almost royal bower.
From this rich withdrawing-room, strangely out of place in appearance,though not so in reality, in the old gray Norman fortress, among thedin of arms and flash of harness, opened two bed-rooms, equal incostliness of decoration to the saloon without, each having itsmassive four-post bedstead in a recess, accessible by three or fourbroad steps, as if it were a throne of honor, each with its mirror andtoilet, its appurtenances for the bath, its easy couches, and itschair of state; its _prie dieu_ and kneeling-hassock, in a niche,with a perfumed lamp burning before a rudely-painted picture of theMadonna, each having communication with a pretty turret-chamber,fitted with couch and reading-desk, and opening on a bartizan orbalcony, which, though they were intended in times of war or dangerfor posts of vantage to the defense, whence to shower missiles or pourseething pitch or oil on the heads of assailants, were filled in thepleasant days of peace with shrubs and flowers, planted in large tubsand troughs, waving green and joyous, and filling the air with sweetsmells two hundred feet above their dewy birth-place.
It may be added, that so thick and massive were the walls at thisalmost inaccessible height, that galleries had been, as it were,scooped out of them, offering easy communication from one room toanother, and even private staircases from story to story, with secretclosets large enough for the accommodation of a favorite page orwaiting-damsel, where nothing of the sort would be expected, or couldindeed exist, within a modern dwelling.
Thus, the inconveniences of such an abode, all except the height towhich it was necessary for the female inmates to climb, were moreimaginary than real; and it was perfectly easy, and indeed usual, forthe ladies of such a castle to pass to and fro from the rooms of theirhusbands, fathers, or brothers, and even from the knights' hall totheir own bower, without meeting any of the retainers of the place,except what may be called the peaceful and familiar servants of thehousehold.
Through the thick-vaulted roofs of stone, which rendered every storyof the keep a separate fortress, no sound of arms, of revelry or riot,could ascend to the region of the ladies; and if their comforts wereinferior to those of our modern beauties, their magnificence, theirsplendor of costume, of equipage, of followings, their power at home,and their influence abroad, where they shone as "Queens of Love andBeauty," were held the arbiters of fame and dispensers of honor, wheretheir smiles were held sufficient guerdon for all wildest feats ofbravery, their tears expiable by blood only, their importance in theouter world of arms, of romance, of empire, were at the least as farsuperior; and it may be doubted, whether some, even the most spoiledof our modern fair ones, would not sigh to exchange, with the damesand demoiselles of the twelfth century, their own soft empire of theball-room for the right to hold Courts of Love, as absoluteunquestioned sovereigns, to preside at tilt and tournament, and sendthe noblest and the
most superb of champions into mortal combat, oryet more desperate adventure, by the mere promise of a sleeve, akerchief, or a glove.
She, however, who now occupied alone the Lady's Bower of Waltheofstowwas none of your proud and court-hardened ladies, who could look withno emotion beyond a blush of gratified vanity on the blood of anadmirer or a lover. Though for her, young as she was, steeds had beenspurred to the shock, and her name shouted among the splintering oflances and the crash of mortal conflict, she was still but a simple,amiable, and joyous child, who knew more of the pleasant fields andwaving woodlands of her fair lake-country, than of the tilt-yard, thecourt pageant, or the carousal, and who better loved to see theheather-blossom and the blue-bell dance in the free air of the breezyfells, than plumes and banners flaunt and flutter to the blare oftrumpets.
The only child of Sir Yvo de Taillebois, a knight and noble of theunmixed Norman blood, a lineal descendant of one of those hardy baronswho, landing with Duke William on his almost desperate emprise, hadwon "the bloody hand" at Hastings, and gained rich lands in thenorthern counties during the protracted struggle which ensued, theLady Guendolen had early lost her mother, a daughter of the noblehouse of Morville, and not a very distant relative of the good knight,Sir Philip, whose hospitality she was now partaking with her father.
To a girl, for the most part, the loss of a mother, before she hasreached the years of discretion, is one never to be repaired, moreespecially where the surviving parent is so much occupied with duties,martial or civil, as to render his supervision of her bringing-upimpossible. It is true that, in the age of which I write, theaccomplishments possessed by the most delicate and refined of ladieswere few and slight, as compared to those now so sedulously inculcatedto our maidens, so regularly abandoned by our matrons; and that, at aperiod later by several centuries, he who has been styled, by anelegant writer,[3] the last of the Norman barons, great Warwick theKingmaker, held it a boast that his daughters possessed no arts, noknowledge, more than to spin and to be chaste.
[3] Sir E. Lytton Bulwer.
Yet even this small list of feminine attainments was far beyond theteaching of the illiterate and warlike barons, who knew nought of thepen, save when it winged the gray-goose shaft from the trusty yew, andwhose appropriate and ordinary signatures were the impress of theirsword-hilts on the parchments, which they did not so much as pretendto read; and, in truth, the Kingmaker's statement must either beregarded as an exaggeration, or the standard of female accomplishmenthad degenerated, as is not unlikely to have been actually the case,during the cruel and devastating wars of the Roses, which, how littlesoever they may have affected the moral, political, or agriculturalcondition of the English people at large, had unquestionably dealt ablow to the refinement, the courtesy, the mental culture, and personalpolish of the English aristocracy, from which they began only torecover in the reigns of the later Tudors.
But in the case of the fair Guendolen, neither did the loss of hermother deprive her of the advantages of her birth, nor would theincapacity of her father, had the occasion been allowed him ofsuperintending the culture of his child, have done so; for he was--atthat day rarer in England than was a wolf, though literary culture hadreceived some impulse from the present monarch, and his yet moreaccomplished father, Beauclerc--a man of intellectual ability, and nota little cultivation.
He had been largely employed by both princes on the continent, indiplomatic as well as military capacities; had visited Provence, thecourt of poetry and minstrelsy, and the _gai science_; had dweltin the Norman courts of Italy, and even in Rome herself, then the seatof all the rising schools of literature, art, and science; and whileacquiring, almost of necessity, the tongues of southern Europe, hadboth softened and enlarged his mind by not a few of their acquirements.Of this advantage, however, it was only of late years, when she wasbursting into the fairest dawn of adolescence, that she had beenpermitted to profit; for, between her fifth and her fifteenth years,she had seen but little of her father, who, constantly employed, eitheras a statesman at home, an embassador abroad, or a conquering invaderof the wild Welsh marches, or the wilder and more barbarous shores ofIreland, had rarely been permitted to call a day his own, much less todevote himself to those home duties and pleasures for which he was,beyond doubt, more than ordinarily qualified.
Yet, however unfortunate she might have been in this particular, shehad been as happy in other respects, and had been brought up undercircumstances which had produced no better consequences on her headthan on her heart, on the graces of her mind and body, than on theformation of her feminine and gentle character.