“There, children,” he said, “you have your wish. There is Silverthorns in full moonlight.”
His voice softened a little as he spoke, and something in it made an unexpected suggestion to Gervais.
“Papa,” he said, “you speak as if you were thinking of long ago. Did you ever see Silverthorns like that before—in the moonlight, just as it is now?”
“Yes,” his father replied. “I had almost forgotten it, I think. I remember standing here one night, when I was quite a little fellow, with my grandmother, and seeing it just like this.”
“How curious!” said Charlotte. “But I don’t wonder it has come back to your mind now. It is so beautiful.”
She gave a deep breath of satisfaction. She was right. The old house looked wonderfully fine. It was of the quaintly irregular architecture of some so-called “Elizabethan” mansions, though in point of fact some part of it was nearly two hundred years older than the rest, and the later additions were, to say the least, incongruous. But the last owner’s predecessor had been a man of taste and intelligence, and by some apparently small alterations—a window here, a porchway there—had done much to weld the different parts into a very pleasing if not strictly correct whole. Ivy, too, grew thickly over one end of the building, veiling with its kindly green shadow what had once been an unsightly disproportion of wall; the windows were all latticed, and a broad terrace walk ran round three sides of the house, while here and there on the smooth, close-cut lawn just below stood out, dark and stiff, grotesquely-cut shrubs which had each had its own special designation handed down from one generation to another.
“See,” said Mr Waldron, pointing to these with his whip, as he walked old Dolly slowly on towards the front entrance, “there are the peacocks, one on each side, and the man-of-war at the corner, and—I forget what they are all supposed to represent. They look rather eerie, don’t they?—so black and fierce; the moonlight exaggerates their queer shapes. But it is lovely up there on the windows—each little pane is like a separate jewel.”
“Yes,” repeated the children, “it is lovely.”
“We always say,” Charlotte added, “that Silverthorns is like an old fairy castle. It must be one of the most beautiful houses in the world!—don’t you think so yourself, papa? What would it be to live in a house like that! Just fancy it, Jerry!”