The grand old house stands, as I have said, on a plateau, protected from the north and east by the hills, down which the road winds in and out like a white ribbon. On the west it faces the Atlantic, and the lawn, merging in the park, falls rapidly seawards till it meets the natural barrier of the beach. As a rule the barrier stands well; yet times there are when the sea will no longer “harrow the valleys, or be bound with a band in the furrow,” but, laughing at the puny obstruction, lays its tribute of drift and wreckage and human life almost on the very door-step of the house.
Whether you love the scene or not, will depend on your age and temperament, and something, too, on the circumstances under which you view it. Steeped in the quiet twilight of an autumn evening, its perfect stillness and repose appeal irresistibly to a heart that yearns for rest, and many such have coveted it. But let a Londoner come upon it when a furious south-wester is raging, and the double windows are veiled with an impermeable film of brine, and you can feel the chimneys rocking overhead—and the chances are he will hurry from it as from the abomination of desolation.
After our uncle’s death, Ronald, it was well known, was to reign in his stead—supplanting myself, albeit the son of an elder brother and the natural heir. But my father had been unlucky enough to marry the woman of old Heyward’s choice, and the sin of the father was to be visited upon the son. Our uncle (to do him justice) never made a pretence of equity in the matter. “I should turn in my grave,” he said, “if I thought that son of his was to follow in my room.” And there the matter ended. Short of this, he was fond of me in his own undemonstrative way. Only lately he had settled me at Bayview with a handsome allowance, where I was to make acquaintance with the rudiments of the law till it was time for me to enter at Cambridge.
Honestly I can say that I never grudged Ronald his inheritance. He and I were brothers rather than cousins, and I cannot remember the time when the sturdy little Viking was not dear to my heart. Perhaps it was I who gave the most, and he who took it. But that is only as it should be, provided he who gives and he who takes are equally nothing loth.
The house was an ideal home for us, so long as we shared it in common. When we were separated, it became unutterably dull for the one who was left companionless. Ghosts it must have had in plenty. There certainly was an “impluvium,” which in these days is rarer than a ghost. I mean that the whole centre of the house was open to the winds of heaven, for the purpose of collecting the rain water which fell into a huge reservoir at the basement.
The ghosts, if any, never showed themselves—frightened in all probability by the antagonism of Ronald’s temperament. But we discovered what was next best to the real article—the equipments and paraphernalia of one. In a disused coach-house we came one day on an old travelling carriage of the fashion in use sixty years ago, when paterfamilias took himself and his family for a progress round the country. Rumble it had, and imperial, and a chest of most unearthly pattern, accommodated to the space under the back seat.
But the glass was broken in the frames, and the hangings were mouldy. The very woodwork was so worm-eaten that at a touch you would expect it to crumble into dust, like one of the Pharaohs when he is disencumbered of his trappings. It was painted—or rather had been painted—a sable black, but the colour had deteriorated with time to the hue of rusty crêpe.
Our first impression suggested that it was some time-honoured memorial of the past—the carriage, it might be, in which a bride and bridegroom had made their home-coming under auspices of exceptional promise. But a second glance through the broken semicircular skylight told rather of intentional neglect or indifference. The plaster of the coach-house, where it still clung to the lath, had broken out into patches of mouldiness, defiant of the first principles of cleanliness, while an army of spiders, who must have worked unmolested for years, had tied the carriage to the walls and floor with a net-work of dirt-begrimed strands.
“What on earth is it? and why is it kept here?” asked Ronald of the groom. “I shall get the uncle to have it broken up and burned: it’s only filling the place with moths and insects.”
“Don’t you do nought of the kind, Master Ronald,” said the coachman, lowering his voice to a whisper. “That carriage has been driven up to these very doors by old Nick himself, or one or other of his coachmen. Aye, you may laugh. But it’s true enough, and not so long ago neither. They’d forgotten—had your aunt and uncle—that it was here in the stable at all: it must have been here years before they bought the place—till he came and drove it round to the front door one night, all mouldy and ramshackled just as you see it now.”