The present mansion of Heron Dyke formed three sides of an oblong square. A low, broad, lichen-covered wall made up the fourth side, just outside of which ran the moat, a sluggish stream some ten or dozen feet broad, spanned by an old stone bridge grey with age. The house, which was but two stories high, was built of the black flints so common in that part of the country, set in some sort of cement which age had hardened to the consistency of stone. Here and there the dull uniformity of the thick walls was relieved by diaper-patterned pilasters of faded red brick. The high, narrow, lozenge-paned windows were set in quaintly carved mullions of reddish freestone, the once sharp outlines of which were now blurred with age. The steep, high-pitched roof was covered with blue-black tiles which at one time had been highly glazed, but the rains and snows of many winters had dimmed their brightness, while in summer many-coloured mosses found lodgment in their crevices and patched them here and there with beauty. The tall, twisted chimneys of deep-red brick lent their warmth and colouring to the picture.
There were dormer windows in the roofs of the two wings, but none in the main building itself. The grand entrance was reached by a flight of broad, shallow steps, crowned with a portico that was supported by five Ionic columns: a somewhat incongruous addition to a house that otherwise was thoroughly English in all its aspects. In front of the house was a large oval lawn clumped with evergreens and surrounded by a carriage-drive. The stables and domestic offices were hidden away at the back of the house, where also were the kitchen-garden, the orchard, and a walled-in flower garden, into which looked the windows of Mr. Denison's favourite sitting-room. Just inside the low, broad wall, that bounded the moat, grew seven tall poplars, known to the cottagers and simple fisher-folk thereabouts, as "The Seven Maidens of Heron Dyke."
The park was not of any great extent, the distance from the moat to the lodge-gates on the high-road to Nullington being little more than half a mile. But it was well wooded, and had nothing formal about it, and such as it was it seemed a fitting complement to the old house that looked across its pleasant glades. The house was built in a sheltered hollow not quite half a mile from the sea. It was protected on the north by a shelving cliff that was crowned with a lighthouse. Behind it the ground rose gradually and almost imperceptibly for a couple of miles, till the little town of Nullington was reached. Not far from the southern corner of the Hall, was an artificial hillock of considerable size and some fifty or sixty feet in height, which was thickly planted with larches. The park in front of the house swept softly upward to its outermost wall. Beyond that, was a protecting fringe of young larches and scrub-wood, then the ever-shifting sand-dunes, and, last of all, the cold grey waters of the North Sea. For miles southward the land was almost as flat as a billiard-table. The fields were divided by dykes which had been dug for drainage purposes, with here and there a fringe of pollard willows to break the dead level of monotony. The sea was invisible from the lower windows of the Hall, but there was a fine view of it from the dormer windows in the north wing; and here Ella Winter had had a room fitted up especially for herself. Had you ever slept at Heron Dyke on a winter night, when a strong landward breeze was blowing, you would have been hushed to rest by one of nature's most majestic monotones. When you lay down and when you arose, you would have had in your ears the thunderous beat of countless thousands of white-lipped angry waves on the long level reaches of sand, that stretched away southward for miles as far as the eye could reach.
When Gilbert Denison, uncle to the present Squire of Heron Dyke, died from the results of an accident, at his lodgings in Bloomsbury Square, and when the strange nature of his will came to be noised abroad, there was no lack of ill-advisers, who did their best to induce the youthful heir to contest the validity of the dead man's last testament. But young Gilbert knew that his uncle had never been saner in his life than when he planned that particular proviso; besides which, he was far too proud of his family name to drag the will of a Denison through the mire of the law courts. His uncle, who had always been looked upon as a sober, thrifty, bucolic-minded sort of man, had not failed to redeem the family reputation for eccentricity at the last moment, and young Gilbert had an idea that it was just the sort of thing he himself would have been likely to do under similar circumstances.
To the surprise of his boon companions, he quietly accepted the situation thus forced upon him, and determined to make the best of it. After giving a farewell symposium to the friends who had so kindly helped him to sow his wild oats, London saw him no more for several years. He settled down at Heron Dyke, and became as staid and sober a specimen of a country gentleman as a Denison was ever likely to become. His somewhat shattered constitution was now nursed with all due care and tenderness. If it were in the power of man to defeat that last hateful clause in his uncle's will, he was the man to do it.
"He will be sure to choose a wife before long," said all the anxious matrons in the neighbourhood, who had eligible daughters waiting to be mated. But Gilbert Denison did nothing of the kind. Years went by. He became a middle-aged man, then an elderly man, and all hope of his ever changing his bachelor condition gradually died out. There was a constantly floating rumour in the neighbourhood of a romantic attachment and a disappointment when he was young; but it might be nothing more than an idle story. It was even said that the lady had jilted him in favour of his cousin, and that there would have been bloodshed between the two men had not the other Gilbert hurried away with his young wife to Italy.
It was this other Gilbert, or his descendants, who would come in for the Heron Dyke estates, should the present Squire not live to see his seventieth birthday. There was no love lost between the senior and junior branches of the family. The estrangement begun in early life only widened with years. Its continuance, if not its origin, was probably due to the Squire's hard and unforgiving disposition. The other side had more than once made friendly overtures to the head of the house: but the Squire would have none of them. He hated the whole "vile crew," root and stump, he said; and if any one of them ever dared to darken his threshold, he vowed that he would shoot him without compunction. It was Squire Denison's firm and fixed belief that the spies sometimes seen around his house--for spies he declared them to be--were emissaries of his relatives, sent to see whether he was not likely to die before the all-important birthday.
We made the Squire's acquaintance at his interview with Captain Lennox, after the return of the latter from London. His sixty-ninth birthday was just over. Could he but live eleven months more, all would be well. Ella Winter, in that case, would be heiress to all he had to leave, for he should will it to her; and his hated cousin, and his cousin's family, would be left out in the cold, as they deserved to be. As everybody knew, the Squire had been more or less of an invalid for many years; but latterly his complaint had assumed a rather alarming character, and there were weeks together when he never crossed the threshold of his own rooms. His disorder was a mortal one--one that would most certainly carry him off at no very distant date--but that was a fact known to himself and Dr. Spreckley alone.
For the last twenty years the Squire had not kept up an establishment at the Hall in accordance with his income and position in the county. There was Aaron Stone, his faithful old body-servant and major-domo, and Aaron's wife, who was almost as old as he was. There was the old couple's handsome grandson, Hubert, who was the Squire's steward, bailiff, gamekeeper, and sometimes secretary and companion. There were the gardener and his wife at the lodge on the Nullington road. When to these were added a coachman, a stable-boy, and two or three women-servants, the whole of the establishment was told. Mr. Denison had not given a dinner-party for years; or, for the matter of that, gone to one. Now and then an old acquaintance--such as the vicar, or Sir Peter Dockwray, or Colonel Townson--would drop in unceremoniously, and take the chance of whatever there happened to be for dinner; but beyond such casual visitants, very little company was kept.
Mr. Denison had been compelled to give up horse-exercise some few years ago. He took his airings in a lumbering, old-fashioned brougham, which might have been stylish and handsome once. Very often nothing occupied the shafts but a grey mare, that was nearly as lumbering as the vehicle itself. Old Aaron could get its best paces out of it when he drove it in the dog-cart to Nullington market and back. Ella Winter had a young chestnut filly for riding, powerful yet gentle, for which her uncle had given quite a fancy price. Another horse in the Squire's stables was a big, serviceable hack, which Hubert Stone looked upon as being for his sole use; indeed, no one but himself ever thought of mounting it. He rode it here and there when about the Squire's business; and sometimes, perhaps, when about his own. Better than all else he liked to accompany Ella when she went out riding. He would be dressed somewhat after the style of a gentleman farmer, in cut-away coat, buckskins, and top-boots. He did not ride by the side of Ella as an equal would have done, nor yet so far behind her as a groom. Many were the comments passed by the gossips of Nullington when they encountered Miss Winter and her handsome attendant cantering along the country roads, or quiet lanes that led to nowhere in particular.