The place seemed to form a sort of thoroughfare to the back premises of the palace, whose walls skirted its length on one side, while the other was bounded by a tall privet-hedge. Between the ragged twigs he could discern the broad flat stretch of country beyond. On the left, some fifty yards off, stood the timbered plaster fronts of a row of street cottages, and a few paces to his right a high narrow iron gateway, flanked by a couple of moss-grown stone pillars surmounted respectively by the royal lion and unicorn. Through this gate's filigreed iron-work, at the end of a somewhat broad, gravel, yew-bordered path, Lee could see a podgy marble Cupid spouting water through a hunting-horn into a basin. Lured by the gentle plash of the water, he approached the gate and attempted to push it open. With a faint screech, as if of surprise at being disturbed, it yielded, and undeterred by its stone guardians, whose jaws seemed indeed to grin less in defiance of his intrusion, than in wonder and derision at his fancy for exploring the deserted place, Lee entered, and strolled towards the fountain. On its broad edge he seated himself, to the great confusion of the gold and silver fish moving about its weedy depths, and found that it formed the centre of a fair-sized garden, the path by which he had come being one of four, radiating off at equal distances between grass-plots, towards the lofty red brick boundary walls, gay now with the snowy blossom of espaliered fruit-trees.
Here and there white stone gods and goddesses gleamed amidst the dark yew paths, and would have seemed to render the silence of the place still more intense, had it not been broken by the voices of the myriad insect creatures footing it merrily among the parterres, and the darting butterflies, while stout old bumble-bees hummed cogitatively as they gathered in their wealth, as if they were mentally reckoning the probable sum total of its returns; and all to the music of Sir Cuckoo, who had a vast deal to promise of the good time coming.
A reverie.
Well, well; and Lawrence Lee, rising from his seat on the fountain's brink, and strolling listlessly onward by the nearest path, heaved a prolonged and heart-vexed sigh, making all the while not too flattering comparisons between these careless denizens of the king's pleasaunce—the bees, of course, simply proving his case by their exceptional prudence—who troubled their feather-brains not one doit about to-morrow's storms, which were as likely as not—more likely than not, indeed, to fall; as you might see if you would but spare half an eye towards the south-eastward horizon—and the king himself. As to the idiotic, selfish, frivolous lot about him, they were beneath contempt, Lawrence considered. To compare them with the butterflies and gnats would be an insult—to the insects.
This stage of his meditations brought him so near to the foot of a flight of rustic wooden steps that he tripped upon the lowermost one; and looking upward, as he recovered his balance, he saw that they wound up to some height, terminating at the entrance of a pavilion of octagon shape, built into the angle of the wall, and partly overhanging the road running beneath. For sheer lack of something better to wile away his enforced leisure—for to see the king again, by hook or by crook, Lawrence was determined—he ascended the steps, and found himself in a small eight-sided chamber. Its walls were studded with morsels of spar, bright-coloured shells, and bits of looking-glass disposed in various and eye-fatiguing geometrical devices, sparkling like Hassan's cave in the rays of sun, now beating fiercely through the two windows. One of these looked upon the road, the other, commanding a view of the rear of the palace, admitted light into the place; but in accordance with the rule of such pleasure-houses, no air, since they were "not made to open."
The summer house.
Nevertheless, a cool breeze rustled in through the doorless entrance; and Lawrence, wearied out, and still dizzy with the fumes of the wine which had been forced upon him, sank upon the part of the bench running round the wall which was nearest the inner window, and fell to a listless contemplation of the scene before him.
Ugly, or altogether unpicturesque it assuredly could not be called; but incongruous and disorderly it was, with its queer irregular mass of wall and roof, new and old, time stained and brand new, all flung together without apparent rhyme or reason, as if they might settle down as they could.
It was some time before Lawrence was able to distinguish, amid such countless odd holes and corners, the door by which he had found his way into the open air; and longer still before, carrying his eye to the upper story, he discovered the row of little bull's-eye casements which lighted the corridor conducting to the king's apartments. That it ran to the rear of the palace he had some hazy sort of notion; since through one of those casements he had caught a glimpse of waving green beechen boughs, and had guessed at the possibility of a garden beyond, while not a single tree shaded the street front of the palace.
A long nap.