A LITTLE HOUSE
"Each in the crypt would cry,
'But one freezes here! and why?
'When a heart, as chill,
'At my own would thrill
Back to life, and its fires out-fly?
'Heart, shall we live or die?
The rest ... settle by-and-by!'"
Robert Browning.
I
Rachel at Seddon Court watched, from her window, that first fallen snow.
Seddon Court is about three miles from the town of Lewes and lies, tucked and cornered, under the very brow of the Downs. It is a grey little house, old and stalwart, with a courtyard and two towers. The towers are Norman; the rest of the house is Tudor.
Beyond the actual building there are gardens that run to the very foot of the Downs, with only a patch and an old stone wall intervening. Above the house, day and night, year after year, the Downs are bending; everything, beneath their steady solemn gaze, is small and restless; as the colours are flung by the sun across their green sprawling limbs the house, at their feet, catches their reflected smile and, when the sun is gone and the winds blow, cowers beneath their frown; everything in that house is conscious of their presence.
Rachel had been at Seddon Court for a month and now, at the window of her writing-room, looking across the garden, up into their dark shadows, she wondered at their indifference and monotony. Anyone who had known her before her marriage would be struck instantly, on seeing her now, by a change in her.
Her whole attitude to the world, during her first season in London, had been an attitude of wonder, of expectation, of the uncertainty that comes from expectation.