Part 2, Chapter IX.
Contrasts.
“There’s none so sure to pay his debt.
As wet to dry, and dry to wet.”
Part 2, Chapter X.
The Time of Roses.
“When all the world was young, lad,
And all the trees were green.”
While the bright southern sunshine was filling the old palace with its rays; and while, beneath the blue Italian sky, Hugh Crichton was arranging Violante’s flowers; the same fair summer weather was making life enchanting in the English county where Oxley lay. Instead of deep, unbroken azure, see a paler tint, with fleecy, snowy clouds; and, for the fretwork and the imagery, the marble, and the alabaster of Civita Bella, broad, green, low-lying meadows, where dog-roses tossed in the hedges, and dog-daisies and buttercups were falling beneath the scythe; a slow, sleepy canal, with here and there a bright-painted boat; and, on the low hill side, the clustering white villas and modern streets, surmounted, not by innumerable pinnacles and domes, but by one tall, grey spire.
Oxley was a large, flourishing town, some forty miles from London—next to the county town in dignity, and before it in size and enterprise. It could boast no architecture and no antiquities, save a handsome church—neither very old nor very new—and some tumble-down, red-tiled, dirty streets, sloping down from the back of the town to the canal—unless, indeed, like some of its townsmen, you counted the Corinthian façade of the railway station, the Gothic gables of the new Town-Hall, or the sober eighteenth-century squareness of the Oxley Bank. These two latter public buildings opened on to a broad, sunny market-place; from which started a clean, white, sunny road, which led past villas, nursery gardens, meadows, and bits of furzy, heathery waste, all the way to Redhurst, and was the old coach-road from the county town to London.