The road into which they presently came astonished the Duke of Dorset. It was sixty feet wide, smooth as a boulevard and drained with tile. It was supported below by a stone wall, surmounted by a balustrade, and was protected from the slipping of the mountain, at certain points, by a parallel stone wall equally massive. It was covered brown and soft with a carpet of fir needles, and arose in an easy grade above the sea, turning northeastward into the mountains. Strewn with the foliage of autumn, the fir needles, wisps of yellow fern, hits of branches swept together against the stone wall by the wind, it seemed a thing toned and softened into harmony with the wilderness through which it ran.
The stone balustrade set there, naked and jarring, by the builder, had been planted along its border with vines. Vines massed the whole of it; vines patched, laced, and streaked with crimson, with yellow, with green of a thousand shades, moving from one color imperceptibly into another. The wall, too, set against the face of the mountain was thus screened and latticed. The vines fed with dampness from the earth behind the wall were almost wholly green, while those banking the balustrade were largely crimson, a mass of scarlet, flecked with dead leaves, falling now and then, with a faint crackling like tiny twigs snapping in a fire.
The scene was a thing fantastic and tropical. Below was the sea, to the eye oiled and polished, bedded with opal, shifting in the light; and above were the gigantic firs, their brown bodies standing close in a sort of twilight, cast by the verdigris branches crowded together, shutting out the sky; and between, the road crept upward, winding across ravines into the mountains, banked with green and scarlet, and carpeted soft to the foot with brown.
Hurriedly—with a haste incomparable—the wilderness had adopted this intruder; within five years it had covered from sight every trace of human fingers; the work had been swiftly done, and yet carried the effect of years leisurely expended. Nature returning with all things slowly to the wilderness centuries after man was dead. The Duke of Dorset was not a person easily swung skyward by a bit of sun and color. He was accustomed to that brooding mood, lying over solitary lands; to the dignity, to the majestic silence, obtaining in the courts of Nature; to the gorgeous pageantry of that fantastic empress; to the strange, almost human hurry with which she strove to obliterate any trace of man encroaching on her kingdom. And yet, he could not recall anything on the continent of Europe equal to this scene, unless the mountain behind the great road leading to Amalfi, above the Mediterranean, were again clothed with that primeval forest marked by the Phoenician.
The Duke followed behind the big swinging mountaineer and his gaunt, gigantic mule, all moving without a sound, over the bed of soft fir needles, along this road thus clothed and colored as though infinitely old. They might have been traveling on some highway of that mighty fabled empire for which Fernando de Soto hunted the wilderness, with men in armor.
It was a day of autumn, soft in this Western country. A time of Indian summer, the sky deep blue, with here and there a cloud island, unmoving as though painted on a canvas. The mountain chain running northward along the coast faded imperceptibly into haze. Above and within the immediate sweep of the eye the day was bright, but when the eye lifted to a distance the haze deepened, as with smoke coming somewhere from behind the world.
The Duke of Dorest lengthened his stride and came up to the mountaineer. He wished to know something about this remarkable estate, having the sea and wilderness for boundary. He wondered how old it was, how long this road had been built—the work looked like the labor of centuries.
"How long has Mr. Childers owned this estate?" inquired the Duke.
"About ten year, I reckon," replied the man.
"And before that," said the Duke, "who owned it?"