It was a wilderness of a garden, with a large, irregularly shaped lawn, of a velvety softness and greenness, which neglect had not yet ruined. In the very centre of this lawn rose a high, thin old pear-tree. Scattered about were other kinds of fruit-trees. Broad borders of all sweet and old-fashioned flowers were filled with a rank luxuriance of plants, some blooming, some not yet in bloom; others almost choked to death by their more flourishing neighbours. On the left of the broad walk was a high wall, and behind the wall fine beech-trees which cast the shade of their ample boughs far into the garden of Monk’s Gate. The house itself stood back; it looked a small house for such a large, luxuriant garden. It was very low, Jerome saw, with odd-looking windows half-hidden by roses and clematis, while all over the left side of the house, a flourishing ivy revelled healthily. He approached nearer. Just before the house was a great bush of the Gloire de Dijon rose—the fragrance of its second crop that year filled the air for yards around.
Drawing forth the key which Mr. Netley had given him, he applied it to the door, and its rattle in the lock was the first sound to break the almost oppressive hush and stillness, and deadly calm of everything around and about. The lock turned somewhat rustily and unwillingly. It required him to exert the strength of both his hands to induce it entirely to yield. Then he pushed the door open, stepped in, and stood beneath all that he could now call his own roof-tree. A narrow passage—a door to the left, which he passed; the passage was only a few feet long; one stepped out of it, without door or other intervening ceremony, into a large, low, raftered room, with a high old wooden chimney-piece, deep oaken cupboards sunk in the walls, a long, very low window, with a deep, roomy seat in it—a heavy oaken table in the centre of the room, and, at one side, an ancient, shabby, comfortable-looking settee. In a remote corner there was a pile of old furniture, which in its dirt and shabbiness looked remarkably like lumber.
Jerome gazed round the room. Despite the age and decrepitude of all in it, it had a certain attraction for him, from its quaint, unconventional shape and arrangements. The stairs, with old oaken rails and balustrade, led straight out of it. A door which he opened, showed him a roomy kitchen, with a back-kitchen beyond. Turning back, he opened the door to the left of the passage, which he had not yet explored, and found a second sitting-room, smaller than the first, but just as quaint, low and irregular. This room, too, had the agreeable peculiarity of a corner fireplace, and it contained more furniture than the other; very old drawing-room furniture—thin-legged chairs and tables, and a strange-looking thing which was at once cupboard, cabinet, and press, to match the rest of the furniture, which was mahogany. The aforesaid thin-legged chairs were upholstered in a sickly, faded drab damask—relic of a bygone day. The whole place looked like some grave, and yet a grave about which lingered gentle memories, like a soft perfume; recollections of old-fashioned ladies who must have spent countless hours at their tambour-frames, embroidering those elaborate and now pale and faded semblances of pink-cheeked shepherds and blue-eyed shepherdesses which adorned some spindly-looking stools and spider-legged ‘occasional’ chairs. Whose slender fingers had accomplished that triumph of worsted-work which covered a large settee beneath one of the two little deep square windows—a piece of worsted-work with a whole picture upon it, of an elaborate landscape; figures, fountains, sheep, and marble vases?
Jerome passed his hand across his eyes, feeling as if he had lost his identity. Was it—could it be he, Jerome Wellfield, who was standing in this chill, pale, silent place, inhaling the faint, musty, dusty smell, which carries one back full a hundred years; and was this dim old place his home—all the home he now had? He tried to picture Avice there, and succeeded. It would be no inappropriate place for her, he felt, when fires should have dried up all the damp, and when all this faded furniture should have been pulled forth, cleaned, and polished, and arranged. And Sara? Try as he would, he failed to see her there. And yet, he knew that should he ask her to come, she would do so.
He climbed the stairs, and found several bedrooms, corresponding with the rooms below—all with the same raftered roofs, and odd little square windows, made almost dark, too, by the overhanging trailing-plants which covered the side of the house.
He lingered long, unaccountably attracted and fascinated. In such a quiet nook a man might drone out his life, and soon be utterly forgotten—might live on from year to year, and watch the seasons come and go, the flowers bloom and fade, and spring again; might observe the sunlight and the storm-shadows sweep across the broad sides of Penhull, and might at last die and be carried to the graveyard which spread around the old church—might there be laid to his rest, and none be the wiser.
He shivered slightly, as he vividly pictured all this; then, slowly descending the stairs, went out—how hot and balmy the outside air felt, after the dampness of the house!—locked the door behind him, and bent his steps towards the Abbey.
