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 retreat
For fear and melancholy meet.
And in truth (being fain to pursue the quotation further)
I blame them not
Whose fancy in this lonely spot
Was moved.