Deep in the Surrey hills, and long secluded from the world, there runs a drowsy valley known to the rustics whom it nurtures as the Vale of Caterham.
Of late years our English passion for the countryside has discovered this enchanted spot; a railway has conveyed to it those who were wise enough to seize early upon its subtle beauties, and the happy homes of a population freed from urban care are still to be seen rising upon every sward. Here Purley, which stands at the mouth of the Vale, Kenley, Warlingham and Caterham Stations receive at morning and discharge at evening the humbler breadwinners whom economic circumstance compels to absent themselves from the haunting woods of Surrey during the labours of the day. Some few, more blest, in mansions more magnificent, can contemplate throughout untroubled hours the solemn prospect of the hills.
Here it was that Mr. Clutterbuck was building the new home.
The sense of proportion which had always marked his life and had contributed so largely to his financial success, was apparent upon every side. He was content with some seven acres of ground, chosen in the deepest recess of the dale, and, since water is rare upon that chalk, he was content with but a small lake of graceful outline, and of no more than eighteen inches in depth; in the midst an island, destined with time to bear a clump of exotic trees, stood for the moment a bare heap of whitish earth diversified rather than hidden by a few leafless saplings.
The house itself had been raised with businesslike rapidity under the directions of Mrs. Clutterbuck herself, who had the wisdom to employ in all but the smallest details, an architect recommended by the Rev. Isaac Fowle.
The whole was in the taste which the sound domestic sense of modern England has substituted for the gloomy stucco and false Italian loggias of our fathers. The first storey was of red brick which time would mellow to a glorious and harmonious colour; the second was covered with roughcast, while the third and fourth appeared as dormer windows in an ample roof containing no less than fifteen gables. The chimneys were astonishingly perfect examples of Somersetshire heading, and the woodwork, which was applied in thin strips outside the main walls of the building, was designed in the Cheshire fashion, with draw-pins, tholes and spring-heads tinctured to a sober brown. The oak was imported from the distant Baltic and strengthened with iron as a precaution against the gape and the warp.
The glass, which was separate from the house and stood in a great dome and tunnel higher up on the hillside where it sheltered the Victoria Regia, the tobacco plant, the curious and carnivorous Hepteryx Rawlinsonia, the palm and the common vine. A lodge guarded both the northern and the southern entrances and a considerable approach swept up past the two greyhounds which dignified the cast-iron gates; themselves a copy, upon a smaller scale, of the more famous Guardini's at Bensington, while the main door was of pure elm studded with one hundred and fifty-three large nails. The rooms within were heated not only by fireplaces of exquisite decoration, but also secretly by pipes which ran beneath the floors and had this inconvenience, that the captious, withdrawing from the fierceness of the blaze to some distant margin of the apartment, would marvel at the suffocating heat which struck them in the chance corner of their retirement.
Of the numerous bath-rooms fitted in copper and Dutch tiles, of the chapel, the vesting chamber and the great number of bedrooms—many with dressing-rooms attached—I need not speak.
The stables were connected with the mansion by a covered way, which the guests could use in all weathers when there was occasion to visit the stables and to admire Aster, West Wind, Cœur de Lion, Ex Calibur, Abde-el-Kader, and the little pink pony, Pompey, which was permanently lame, but had caught Mrs. Clutterbuck's eye at Lady Moreton's sale, and had cost no less than 250 guineas.