In the Days of My Youth: A Novel

by Amelia B. Edwards

"Well, let us go--not forgetting to thank Monsieur le Perruquier for his polite information."

Monsieur le Perruquier fell into what dancing-masters call the first position, and bowed elaborately.

"Most welcome, Mademoiselle--and Monsieur," said he. "Straight up the road--past the orchard about a quarter of a mile--old iron gates--can't miss it. Good-afternoon, Mademoiselle--also Monsieur."

Following his directions, we came presently to the gates, which were rusty and broken-hinged, with traces of old gilding still showing faintly here and there upon their battered scrolls and bosses. One of them was standing open, and had evidently been standing so for years; while the other had as evidently been long closed, so that the deep grass had grown rankly all about it, and the very bolt was crusted over with a yellow lichen. Between the two, an ordinary wooden hurdle had been put up, and this hurdle was opened for us by a little blue-bloused urchin in a pair of huge sabots, who, thinking we belonged to the bridal party, pointed up the dusky avenue, and said, with a grin:--

"Tout droit, M'sieur--ils sont passés par là!"

Par là, "under the shade of melancholy boughs," we went accordingly. Far away on either side stretched dim vistas of neglected park-land, deep with coarse grass and weeds and, where the trees stood thickest, all choked with a brambly undergrowth. After about a quarter of a mile of this dreary avenue, we came to a broad area of several acres laid out in the Italian style with fountains and terraces, at the upper end of which stood the house--a feudal, moyen-âge French chateau, with irregular wings, steep slated roofings, innumerable windows, and fantastic steeple-topped turrets sheeted with lead and capped with grotesque gilded weathercocks. The principal front had been repaired in the style of the Renaissance and decorated with little foliated entablatures above the doors and windows; whilst a double flight of steps leading up to a grand entrance on the level of the first story, like the famous double staircase of Fontainebleau, had been patched on in the very centre, to the manifest disfigurement of the building. Most of the windows were shuttered up, and as we drew nearer, the general evidences of desolation became more apparent. The steps of the terraces were covered with patches of brown and golden moss. The stone urns were some of them fallen in the deep grass, and some broken. There were gaps in the rich balustrade here and there; and the two great fountains on either side of the lower terrace had long since ceased to fling up their feathery columns towards the sun. In the middle of one a broken Pan, noseless and armless, turned up a stony face of mute appeal, as if imploring us to free him from the parasitic jungle of aquatic plants which flourished rankly round him in the basin. In the other, a stalwart river-god with his finger on his lip, seemed listening for the music of those waters which now scarcely stirred amid the tangled weeds that clustered at his feet.

Passing all these, passing also the flower-beds choked with brambles and long waving grasses, and the once quaintly-clipped myrtle and box-trees, all flinging out fantastic arms of later growth, we came to the upper terrace, which was paved in curious patterns of stars and arabesques, with stones alternately round and flat. Here a good-humored, cleanly peasant woman came clattering out in her sabots from a side-door, key in hand, preceded us up the double flight of steps, unlocked the great door, and admitted us.

The interior, like the front, had been modernized about a hundred and fifty years before, and resembled a little formal Versailles or miniature Fontainebleau. Dismantled halls paved with white marble; panelled ante-chambers an inch deep in dust; dismal salons adorned with Renaissance arabesques and huge looking-glasses, cracked and mildewed, and mended with pasted seams of blue paper; boudoirs with faded Watteau panellings; corridors with painted ceilings where mythological divinities, marvellously foreshortened on a sky-blue ground, were seen surrounded by rose-colored Cupids and garlanded with ribbons and flowers; innumerable bed-rooms, some containing grim catafalques of beds with gilded cornices and funereal plumes, some empty, some full of stored-up furniture fast going to decay--all these in endless number we traversed, conducted by the good-tempered concierge, whose heavy sabots awakened ghostly echoes from floor to floor.

At length, through an ante-chamber lined with a double file of grim old family portraits--some so blackened with age and dust as to be totally indistinguishable, and others bulging hideously out of their frames--we came to the library, a really noble room, lofty, panelled with walnut wood, floored with polished oak, and looking over a wide expanse of level country. Long ranges of empty book-shelves fenced in with broken wire-work ran round the walls. The painted ceiling represented, as usual, the heavens and some pagan divinities. A dumb old time-piece, originally constructed to tell the months, the days of the year, and the hours, stood on a massive corner bracket near the door. Long antique mirrors in heavy black frames reached from floor to ceiling between each of the windows; and in the centre of the room, piled all together and festooned with a thick drapery of cobwebs, stood a dozen or so of old carved chairs, screens, and foot-stools, rich with velvet, brocade, and gilded leather, but now looking as if a touch would crumble them to dust. Over the great carved fireplace, however, hung a painting upon which my attention became riveted as soon as I entered the room--a painting yellow with age; covered with those minute cracks which are like wrinkles on the face of antique art, coated with dust, and yet so singularly attractive that, having once noticed it, I looked at nothing else.

It was the half-length portrait of a young lady in the costume of the reign of Louis XVI. One hand rested on a stone urn; the other was raised to her bosom, holding a thin blue scarf that seemed to flutter in the wind. Her dress was of white satin, cut low and square, with a stomacher of lace and pearls. She also wore pearls in her hair, on her white arms, and on her whiter neck. Thus much for the mere adjuncts; as for the face--ah, how can I ever describe that pale, perfect, tender face, with its waving brown hair and soft brown eyes, and that steadfast perpetual smile that seemed to light the eyes from within, and to dwell in the corners of the lips without parting or moving them? It was like a face seen in a dream, or the imperfect image which seems to come between us and the page when we read of Imogen asleep.