The carriage gates had been closed for years and were bedded deep in dry grass and fallen leaves, and the right-hand smaller gate had perhaps not been opened three times in its more than one hundred years’ existence. But the left-hand gate stood slightly ajar, and beyond it ran a faintly outlined footpath into a deep old garden. The whole elaborate structure, met by the mossy brick wall on both sides, was thick with rust, its scrolls and twisted bars shone brick-red in the last of the sunlight.
David had walked briskly from the village and his blood was moving rapidly, but he shivered as the familiar atmosphere once more enveloped him. Once again the dilapidated, stately old garden with its bottle-edged flower beds, where the ragged rose bushes were already showing red and yellow hips, where the pines were shedding their slippery needles, and where the maples and elms looked tattered and forlorn.
The place had been thickly planted almost two hundred years ago; it was densely overgrown now; the trees crowded each other, and the growth underneath them was sickly. The old path was spongy with wet leaves underfoot, and the air so pungent with their sharp odour as to be almost anæsthetic. Between the blackened trunks on the right David could again see the serenely moving, deeply breathing surface of the ocean, but now the garden and low cliffs shut off the shore.
On all other sides lay the garden and the thicket of the plantation through which presently, after some winding, he came upon Wastewater Hall itself, standing up boldly in the twilight gloom. The last dying fires of the sunset, burning through black tree trunks behind it, seemed only to make darker than ever the outlines of the great dark red brick house, three-storied and with a steep mansard as well, its uncompromising bulk enhanced rather than softened by a thickly wooded coat of black ivy.
It was an enormous old Georgian building, impressive for size if for nothing more. Wastewater’s twenty acres stood on a sharply jutting point of cliff, and the house faced the sea on three sides; the garden was shut off from the road by the long western wall. Immediately back of the kitchen and stable yards there was a rear gate, buried in shrubbery and quite out of sight from the house, for delivery wagons and tradespeople.
The main entrance was on the eastern front, facing straight out to sea, but this presented now only rows of shuttered windows and stone steps deep in fallen leaves, and David stopped instead at the stone steps of the columned side door. Leaves had littered the paths and lay thick upon the struggling grass of the rose beds, but these three steps had been swept clean, their dried surfaces still showing the marks of a wet broom.
David, absorbing the details with the eye of one who perhaps is reluctant to see confirmed previous impressions or fears, shrugged again, made a little face between impatience, amusement, and misgiving, and gave the old-fashioned iron bell-pull a vigorous jerk.
Then came a long wait. But he did not ring again. The first fifteen of David’s thirty-one years had been spent here, within these grave old walls, and he knew exactly what was happening now inside.
The jerk on the brass-handled wire would set into convulsive motion one of a row of precariously balanced bells far down in the enormous stone-floored kitchen. Most of these bells had not been rung for two generations at least. They were connected with the bedrooms and the study—it had been a long time since any resident of Wastewater had felt it necessary to summon a servant to bedrooms or study. In the row, David remembered, were also the front-door bell, dining-room bell, and the side-door bell. He began to wonder if the last were broken.
No, someone was coming. He could not possibly have heard steps behind that massive and impenetrable door, but he assuredly sensed a motion there, stirring, creaking, the distant bang of another door.