Further on, along the bay shores, and across the long bridge, and reaching over crests of hills that gave beautiful pictures of land and waterscape, the way was pleasanter and pleasanter. Other and different homesteads were set along the route, suggesting endless imaginations of the different character and living of the dwellers. More than once, either Ray or Frank was on the point of saying, as they passed some modest, pretty structure, with its field and garden-piece, its piazza, porch, or balcony, and its sunny windows,—"There! that is a nice place and way to live!"
But a young man and woman are shy of sharing such imaginations, before the sharing is quite understood and openly promised. So, many times a silence fell upon their casual talk, when the same thing was in the thought of each.
For miles before they came to it, the sightly Newrich edifice gave itself, in different aspects, to the view. Mr. Newrich, himself, never saw anything else in his drives out, of sky, or hill, or water, after the first glimpse of "my house," and the way it "showed up" in the approach.
Men were busy wheeling away rubbish, as they drove in between the great stone posts that marked the entrance, where the elegant, light-wrought, gilded iron gates were not yet hung.
Other laborers were rolling the lawn and terraces, newly sown with English grass seed that was to come up in the spring, and begin to weave its green velvet carpet. Piles of bricks and boards were gathered at the back of the house and about the stables.
The plate-glass windows glittered in the sun. The tiled-roofs, with their towers and slopes, looked like those in pictures of palace buildings. It was a group,—a pile; under these roofs a family of five—Americans, republicans, with no law of primogeniture to conserve the estate beyond a single lifetime—were to live like a little royal household. And the father had made all his money in fifteen years in Opal Street. This country of ours, and the ways of it, are certainly pretty nearly the queerest under the sun, when one looks it all through and thinks it all over.
Frank Sunderline pointed out the lovely work of the pillars in the porched veranda; every pillar a triple column, of the slenderest grace, capitaled with separate devices of leaf and flower.
Then they went into the wide, high hall, and through the lower rooms, floored and ceiled and walled most richly; and up over the stately staircase, copied from some grand old English architecture; along the galleries into the wings, where were the sleeping and dressing-rooms; up-stairs, again, into other sleeping-rooms,—places for the many servants that there must be,—pressrooms, closets, trunk-rooms,—space for stowing all the ample providings for use and change from season to season. Every frame and wainscot and panel a study of color and exact workmanship and perfect finish.
It was a "show house;" that was just what it was. "And I can't imagine the least bit of home-iness in the whole of it," said Ray, coming down from the high cupola whence they had looked far out to sea, and over inland, upon blue hills and distant woods.
They stopped half way,—on the wide second landing where they had seen, as they went up, that the great window space was open; the boards that had temporarily covered it having been removed, and the costly panes and sashes that were to fill it resting against the wall at one side.