The dwelling-rooms of the house, with the exception of the drawing-room and billiard-room, were long and low, with the same painted ceilings and heavy oak carvings; and some of the windows, especially in the library and morning-room, were furnished with such deep embrasures, as to form small withdrawing rooms in themselves, and leave the further end of the apartment in twilight obscurity even on the brightest summer’s day.
Many people were of opinion that the old Hall needed complete renovation, but Sir Wilfred had cared little for such things. In his father’s time a few of the rooms had been modernized and refurnished, the damask drawing-room for example, a handsome billiard-room added, and two or three bedrooms fitted up according to nineteenth century taste.
But Sir Wilfred had preferred the old rooms in the quaint embrasures, where many a fair Redmond dame had worked with her daughters at the tapestry that hung in the green bedroom, which represented the death of Saul and the history of Gideon.
In these rooms was furniture belonging to many a different age. Carpets and chair-cushions worked in tent stitch and cross stitch and old-fashioned harpsichord; gaudy white and gold furniture of the Louis Quatorze time, mixed with the spindle-legged tables of the Queen Anne epoch.
At the back of the Hall lay a broad stone terrace reaching from one end of the house to the other.
On one side were the stables and kennels, and on the other a walled sunny garden, with fruit trees and a clipped yew-hedge, and a sun-dial, on which a stately race of peacocks loved to plume themselves.
Beyond, divided by the yew-hedge, was the herb-garden, where in the olden time many a notable house-mother, with her chintz skirts hustled through her pocket-holes, gathered simples for her medicines, and sweet-smelling lavender and rosemary for her presses of home-spun linen.
These gardens were walled and entered by a curiously wrought iron door, said to be Flemish work; and below the terrace lay a smooth, gently sloping lawn, that stretched to the edge of a large sheet of water, called by courtesy the lake—the whole shut in by the background of the Redmond wood.
Here through the sunny afternoon slept purple shadows, falling aslant the yellow water-lilies, and here underneath the willows and silvery birches, in what was called “The Lover’s Walk,” had Hugh dreamed many a day-dream, whose beginning and whose end was Margaret.
Poor Hugh! he little thought as he paced that walk that the day should come when his wife should walk there beside him, and look at him with eyes that were not Margaret’s.