The drive was delightful. It was a few minutes after five when the coach drove past the picturesque old gate-house into Mr. Smithson's Park, and Rood Hall lay on the low ground in front of them, with its back to the river. It was an old red brick house in the Tudor style, with an advanced porch, and four projecting wings, three stories high, with picturesque spire roofs overtopping the main building. Around the house ran a boldly-carved stone parapet, bearing the herons and bulrushes which were the cognisance of the noble race for which the mansion was built. Numerous projecting mullioned windows broke up the line of the park front. Lesbia was fain to own that Rood Hall was even better than Park Lane. In London Mr. Smithson had created a palace; but it was a new palace, which still had a faint flavour of bricks and mortar, and which was apt to remind the spectator of that wonderful erection of Aladdin, the famous Parvenu of Eastern story. Here, in Berkshire, Mr. Smithson had dropped into a nest which had been kept warm for him for three centuries, aired and beautified by generations of a noble race which had obligingly decayed and dwindled in order to make room for Mr. Smithson. Here the Parvenu had bought a home mellowed by the slow growth of years, touched into poetic beauty by the chastening fingers of time. His artist friends told him that every brick in the red walls was 'precious,' a mystery of colour which only a painter could fitly understand and value. Here he had bought associations, he had bought history. He had bought the dust of Elizabeth's senators, the bones of her court beauties. The coffins in the Mausoleum yonder in the ferny depths of the Park, the village church just outside the gates—these had all gone with the property.
Lesbia went up the grand staircase, through the long corridors, in a dream of wonder. Brought up at Fellside, in that new part of the Westmoreland house which had been built by her grandmother and had no history, she felt thrilled by the sober splendour of this fine old manorial mansion. All was sound and substantial, as if created yesterday, so well preserved had been the goods and chattels of the noble race; and yet all wore such unmistakeable marks of age. The deep rich colouring of the wainscot, the faded hues of the tapestry, the draperies of costliest velvet and brocade, were all sobered by the passing of years.
Mr. Smithson had shown his good taste in having kept all things as Sir Hubert Heronville, the last of his race, had left them; and the Heronvilles had been one of those grand old Tory races which change nothing of the past.
Lady Lesbia's bedroom was the State chamber, which had been occupied by kings and queens in days of yore. That grandiose four-poster, with the carved ebony columns, cut velvet curtains, and plumes of ostrich feathers, had been built for Elizabeth, when she deigned to include Rood Hall in one of her royal progresses. Charles the First had rested his weary head upon those very pillows, before he went on to the Inn at Uxbridge, where he was to be lodged less luxuriously. James the Second had stayed there when Duke of York, with Mistress Anne Hyde, before he acknowledged his marriage to the multitude; and Anne's daughter had occupied the same room as Queen of England forty years later; and now the Royal Chamber, with adjacent dressing-room, and oratory, and spacious boudoir all in the same suite, was reserved for Lady Lesbia Haselden.
'I'm afraid you are spoiling me,' she told Mr. Smithson, when he asked if she approved of the rooms that had been allotted to her. 'I feel quite ashamed of myself among the ghosts of dead and gone queens.'
'Why so? Surely the Royalty of beauty has as divine a right as that of an anointed sovereign.'
'I hope the Royal personages don't walk,' exclaimed Lady Kirkbank, in her girlish tone; 'this is just the house in which one would expect ghosts.'
Whereupon Mrs. Mostyn hastened to enlighten the company upon the real causes of ghost-seeing, which she had lately studied in Carpenter's 'Mental Physiology,' and favoured them with a diluted version of the views of that authority.
This was at afternoon tea in the library, where the brass-wired bookcases, filled with mighty folios and handsome octavos in old bindings, looked as if they had not been opened for a century. The literature of past ages furnished the room, and made a delightful background. The literature of the present lay about on the tables, and testified that the highest intellectual flight of the inhabitants of Rood Hall was a dip into the Contemporary or the Nineteenth Century, or the perusal of the last new scandal in the shape of Reminiscences or Autobiography. One large round table was consecrated to Mudie, another to Rolandi. On the one side you had Mrs. Oliphant, on the other Zola, exemplifying the genius of the two nations.
After tea Mr. Smithson's visitors, most of whom had arrived in Sir George's drag, explored the grounds. These were lovely beyond expression in the low afternoon light. Cedars of Lebanon spread their broad shadows on the velvet lawn, yews and Wellingtonias of mighty growth made an atmosphere of gloom in some parts of the grounds. One great feature was the Ladies' Garden, a spot apart, a great square garden surrounded with a laurel wall, eight feet high, containing a rose garden, where the choicest specimens grew and flourished, while in the centre there was a circular fish-pond with a fountain. There was a Lavender Walk too, another feature of the grounds at Rood Hall, an avenue of tall lavender bushes, much affected by the stately dames of old.