But that glum palfrey did not stop, and his fantastic master made no sign. Then it would be a way-side cottage, all criscross-faced with beam of wood, after the new fashion, and overgrown with rose and eglantine. “Then this is it,” I sighed—“a comely, peaceful harborage. One could surely lie safer from the winds of blustering fortune in this tiny shell than a small white maggot in a winter-hidden nut.” And I put my hand upon the dim trestle-gate. But stamp—stamp! the steed went on; and the master never took his chin from off his bosom!
Well, we had passed in this way some few small homesteads, and seen the glow-worm lights of a fair, sleeping Tudor village or two shine remote in the starlight valleys, and then we came all at the same solemn pace, the same gloomy silence, into that deep-shadowed dell I spoke of. We dipped down, out of the honest white radiance, between high banks on either hand, so high that bush and scrub were locked in tangles overhead and not a blink of light came through. Down that strange black zigzag we slipped and scrambled, the loose stones rattling beneath our feet, in pitchy darkness, with never a sound to break the stillness but the heavy breathing of the horse, and now and then the gurgle of an unseen streamlet running somewhere in the void. We staggered down this hell-dark pathway for a lonely mile, and then there loomed up from the blackness on my right hand a moldy, broken terrace wall, all loose and cracked, with fallen coping slabs and pedestals displaced, and hideous, stony, graven monsters here and there glowering in the blackness at us who passed below. Two hundred paces down this wall we went, and then came to an opening. At the same moment the pale moon shone out full overhead and showed me a gate, a garden, and beyond an empty mansion, so white, so ruinous and ghastly, so marvelously like a dead, expressionless face suddenly gleaming over the black pall of the night, that I tightened my hand upon the snaffle strap I held, and bit my lip, and thanked my fate it was not there I had to sleep.
Yet could I not help staring at that place. The wall turned in on either side to meet those gates. They had once been noble and well wrought and gilded, for here and there the better metal shone in spots amid the wide expanse of rusty iron that formed them, but now they were like the broken fangs, methought, of some old hag more than aught else. The left of these two rotten portals never opened, the nettle and wild creepers were twined thick about its shattered lower bars, while its fellow stood ajar, with one hinge gone, and sagging over, desperately envious, it seemed, of the small footway that wound amid the rank wild herbage past it. And then that garden! Jove! Was ever such a ghostly wilderness, such a tangled labyrinth of decay and neglect born out of the kind, fertile bosom of gentle Mother Earth? Never before had I seen black cypresses throw such funereal shadows; never had I known the winter-worn things of summer look so ghoul-like and horrible! But worst of all was the mansion beyond—a straggling pile, with mighty chimney stacks, from whence no pleasant smoke curled up, and silent, grassy courtyards, and lonely flights of broken steps leading to lonely terraces, and a hundred empty windows staring empty-socketed back upon the dead white light that shone so straight and cruel on them. Oh! it was all most forlorn and melancholy, surely an unholy place, steeped deep with the indelible stain of some black story—and I turned me gladly from it!
I turned, and as I did so the horse came to a sudden stop!—stopped calm and resolute before that ill-omened portal! This woke his master, who stared and looked up. He saw the house and gates in the full stream of the moonlight, and then turned to me.
“Welcome!” he cried, “right welcome to my home! Ho! ho! you shall sleep snug enough to-night. Look at the shine on it. They have lit up to welcome us!” and he pointed with a long, fleshless finger to those ghostly windows! “Ho! ho! ho!” came, like a dead voice, the echo of his laughter out of the blank courtyard depth, and the old man, so strange and wild, struck his rusty spurs upon the bare sounding ribs of his beast and turned and rode through the portal.
For one minute I held back—’twas all so grim and tragic-looking, and I was weak, shaken with grief and fasting, unweaponed and alone—for one minute I held back, and then the red flush of anger burned hot upon my forehead to think I had been so near to fearing. I tossed back my black Phrygian locks, and with an angry stride—my spirit roused by that moment’s weakness—strode sternly across the threshold.
Down the white gravel way we twined, the loose, neglected path gleaming wet with night-dew; we brushed by thickets of dead garden things, such as had once been tall and fair, but now tainted the night air with their rottenness. We stepped over giant brambles and great fallen hemlocks—little hedge-pigs, so forsaken was it all, trotting down the path before us—and bats flitting about our heads. In one place had been a fountain, and Pan himself standing by it. The fountain was choked with giant dock and cress, wherefrom some frogs croaked with dismal glee, while Pan had fallen and lay in pieces on his face across the way. So we came in a moment or two to the house, and there my guide dismounted and pulled bit and bridle, saddle and saddle-cloth from his pony. That beast turned and stepped back into the shadows of the desolate garden, vanishing with strange suddenness, but whither I could not guess. Then the old man produced a green-rusty key from under his belt, and putting it to the lock of the door at top of that flight of broken steps, which looked as though no foot had trodden them for fifty years, he turned the rusty wards. The grind and wail of those stiff bolts had almost human sadness in it, and then we entered a long, lonely chilly hall. Here my guide felt for flint and steel, and I own I heard the click of the stone and metal, and saw the first sparks spring and die upon the pavement, with reasonable satisfaction.
’Twould have made a good picture, had some one been by to limn it—that ghastly pale face that might have topped a skeleton, so bloodless was it, with sharp, keen eyes, a glint in the red glow that came presently upon the tinder, that strange slouch hat, that ragged, sorrel, graveyard cloak, and all about the gleam, glancing off the crumbling finery, the worm-eaten furniture, the broken tile-stones, the empty, voiceless corridors, the doors set half ajar, the great carved banisters of the stairway that mounted into the black upper emptiness of that deserted hall. And then I myself, there by the porch, watchful and grim, in my sorry rags, the greatest wonder of it all, eyeing with haughty speculation that old fellow, so ancient and yet so young, tottering and venerable under the weight of a poor eighty years, perhaps, while it was three times as much since strong-limbed, supple I had even sat to a meal! It was truly strange, and I waited for anything that might come next with calm resignation—a listless faith in the integrity of chance which put me beyond all those gusty emotions of hope and fear which play through the fledgling hearts of lesser men.
The red train of sparks lit upon the tinder while I glanced around, the old man’s breath blew them into a flame, and this he set to a rushlight, then turned that pale flame in my direction as he surveyed his guest from top to toe. I bore the inspection with folded arms, and when he had done he said:
“Such thews and sinews, son, as show beneath that hempen shirt of yours, such breadth of shoulder and stalwartness can scarcely be nourished on evening dew and sad reflections. Have you eaten lately?”