Wyndham Towers

Those Wyndhams?  Were they never, never found?
Look you, ‘t will be three years come Michaelmas:
‘T were well to have at least the bones of them.
‘Fore God, sir! this is something should be seen!
When the Armada, which God smote and sunk,
Threatened our Realm, our buckler and our shield
Were such stout hearts as that young Wyndham was.
The elder brother—well, Heaven fashioned him.
Our subjects are our subjects, mark you that.
Not found, forsooth!  Why, then, they should be found!”
Fain had my good Lord Burleigh solved the thing,
And smoothed that ominous wrinkle on the brow
Of her Most Sweet Imperious Majesty.
Full many a problem his statecraft had solved—
How strangle treason, how soothe turbulent peers,
How foil the Pope and Spain, how pay the Fleet—
Mere temporal matters; but this business smelt
Strongly of brimstone.  Bring back vanished folk!
That could not Master Cecil an he would.

The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.
Dark were the days that came to Wyndham Towers
With that grim secret rusting in its heart.
On the sea’s side along the fissured wall
The lichen spread in patches of dull gold
Up to the battlements, at times assailed
By sheeted ghosts of mist blown from the sea,
Now by the whistling arrows of the sleet
Pelted, and thrice of lightning scorched and seamed,
But stoutly held from dreary year to year
By legions of most venerable rooks,
Shrill black-robed prelates of the fighting sort.
In the wide moat, run dry with summer droughts
Great scarlet poppies lay in drifts and heaps,
Like bodies fall’n there in some vain assault.
Within, decay and dolor had their court—
Dolor, decay, and silence, lords of all.
From room to room the wind went shuddering
On some vague endless quest; now pausing here
To lift an arras, and then hurrying on,
To some fresh clue, belike!  The sharp-nosed mouse
Through joist and floor discreetly gnawed her way,
And for her glossy young a lodging made
In a cracked corselet that once held a heart.
The meditative spider undisturbed
Wove his gray tapestry from sill to sill.
Over the transom the stone eagle drooped,
With one wing gone, in most dejected state
Moulting his feathers.  A blue poisonous vine,
Whose lucent berry, hard as Indian jade,
No squirrel tried his tooth on, June by June
On the south hill-slope festered in the sun.
Man’s foot came not there.  It was haunted ground.

The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.
An oak stood where an acorn tumbled once,
Ages ago, and all the world was strange.
Now, in that year King Charles the Second left
Forever the soft arms of Mistress Gwynn
And wrapt him in that marble where he lies,
The moulder’d pile with its entombed Crime
Passed to the keep of a brave new-fledged lord,
Who, liking much the sane and wholesome air
That bent the boughs and fanned the turret’s top,
Cried, “Here dwell I!”  So fell it on a day
The stroke of mallets and the screech of saws
In those bleak chambers made such din as stopped
The careful spider half-way up his thread,
And panic sent to myriad furtive things
That dwelt in wainscots and loved not the sun.
Vainly in broken phalanx clamorous
Did the scared rooks protest, and all in vain
The moths on indolent white damask wings
At door and casement rallied.   Wyndham Towers
Should have a bride, and ghosts had word to quit.

And now, behold what strange thing came to pass.
A certain workman, in the eastern wing
Plying his craft alone as the day waned—
One Gregory Nokes, a very honest soul,
By trade wood-carver—stumbled on a door
Leading to nowhere at an alcove’s end,
A double door that of itself swung back
In such strange way as no man ever saw;
And there, within a closet, on the flags
Were two grim shapes which, vaguely seen at first
In the half light, grew presently distinct—
Two gnomes or vampires seemed they, or dire imps
Straight from the Pit, in guise fantastical
Of hose and doublet: one stretched out full length
Supine, and one in terror-stricken sort
Half toppled forward on the bended knee,
Grasping with vise-like grip the other’s wrist,
As who should say, Arouse thee, sleep no more!
But said it not.  If they were quick or dead,
No sign they gave beyond this sad dumb show.
Blurred one face was, yet luminous, like the moon
Caught in the fleecy network of a cloud,
Or seen glassed on the surface of a tarn
When the wind crinkles it and makes all dim;