Rosa leaned across Sybil to look in the direction indicated, and she saw scattered lights that seemed to be set in the side of the mountain. She saw no house, and she said so.
“That is because the house is built of the very same dark iron-gray rocks that form the mountain; and being immediately at the foot of the mountain, and closely surrounded with trees, can not at night be distinguished from the mountain itself.”
Here the carriage road curved around an expansion of the river that might have been taken either for a very small lake, or a very large pond. And about midway of this curve, or semi-circle, the carriage drew up.
On the left-hand was dimly seen the lake; on the right-hand the gate letting into the elm-tree avenue that led straight up to the house.
“That is the Black Pond, and there is Black Hall. More ‘blackness,’ Mrs. Blondelle,” smiled Sybil, who was so delighted to get home that she forgot her jealousy.
The carriage waited only until the gates could be opened by the slow old porter, whom Sybil laughingly greeted as “Cerberus,” although the name given him in baptism was that of the keeper of the keys of heaven, and not that of the guardian of the entrance to the other place.
“Cerberus,” or rather Peter, warmly welcomed his young mistress back, and widely stretched the gates for her carriage to pass.
As the carriage rolled easily along the avenue, now thickly carpeted with forest leaves, and as it approached the house, the fine old building, with its many gable ends and curiously twisted chimneys, its steep roofs and latticed windows—all monuments of the old colonial days—came more and more distinctly into view from its background of mountains. Lights were gleaming from upper and lower and all sorts of windows, and the whole aspect of the grand old hospitable mansion proclaimed, “welcome.”