From The Month
THE MYSTERY OF THE THATCHED HOUSE.
It was a clean, bright, wholesome, thoroughly lovable house. The first time I saw it, I fell in love with it, and wanted to live in it at once. It fascinated me. When I crossed its threshold, I felt as if I had opened a book whose perusal promised enchantment. I felt a passionate longing to have been born here, to have been expected by the brown old watchful walls for years before it had been my turn to exist in the world. I felt despoiled of my rights; because there was here a hoard of wealth which I might not touch, placed just beyond the reach of my hand. I was tantilized; because the secrets of a sweetly odorous past hung about the shady corners, and the sunny window-frames, and the grotesque hearth-places; and their breath was no more to me than the scent of dried rose-leaves.
It was my fault that we bought the Thatched House. We wanted a country home; and, hearing that this was for sale, we drove many miles one showery April morning to view the place, and judge if it might suit our need. Aunt Featherstone objected to it from the first, and often boasted of her own sagacity in doing so, after the Thatched House had proved itself an incubus—a dreadful Old Man of the Mountains, not to be shaken from our necks. I once was bold enough to tell her that temper, and not sagacity, was the cause of her dislike that April morning. We drove in an open phaeton, and Aunt Featherstone got some drops of rain on her new silk dress. Consequently she was out of humor with everything, and vehemently pronounced her veto upon the purchase of the Thatched House.
I was a spoiled girl, however; and I thought it hard that I might not have my own way in this matter as in everything else. As we drove along a lonely road, across a wild, open country, I had worshipped the broken, gold-edged rain-clouds, and the hills, with their waving lines of light and their soft trailing shadows. I had caught the shower in my face, and laughed; and dried my limp curls with my pocket-handkerchief. I was disposed to love everything I saw, and clapped my hands when we stopped before the sad-looking old gates, with their mossy brick pillars, and their iron arms folded across, as if mournfully forbidding inquiry into some long hushed-up and forgotten mystery. When we swept along the silent avenue my heart leaped up in greeting to the grand old trees, that rose towering freshly at every curve, spreading their masses of green foliage right and left, and flinging showers of diamond drops to the ground whenever the breeze lifted the tresses of a drowsy bough, or a bird poised its slender weight upon a twig, and then shot off sudden into the blue.
Aunt Featherstone exclaimed against the house the very moment we came in sight of it. It was not the sort of thing we wanted at all, she said. It had not got a modern porch, and it was all nooks and angles on the outside. The lower windows were too long and narrow, and the upper ones too small, and pointing up above the eaves in that old-fashioned, inconvenient manner. To crown its [{66}] absurdities, the roof was thatched. No, no, Aunt Featherstone said, it was necessary for such old houses to exist for the sake of pictures and romances; but as for people of common sense going to live in them, that was out of the question.
I left her still outside with her eyeglass levelled at the chimneys, and darted into the house to explore. An old woman preceded me with a jingling bunch of keys, unlocking all the doors, throwing open the shutters and letting the long levels of sunshine fall over the uncarpeted floors. It was all delicious, I thought; the long dining-room with its tall windows opening like doors upon the broad gravel, the circular drawing-room with its stained-glass roofing, the double flights of winding stairs, the roomy passages, the numerous chambers of all shapes and sizes opening one out of another, and chasing each other from end to end of the house; and above all, the charming old rustic balcony, running round the waist of the building like a belt, and carrying one, almost quick as a bird could fly, from one of those dear old pointed windows under the eaves down amongst the flower-beds below.
I said to myself in my own wilful way, "This Thatched House must be my home!" and then I set about coaxing Aunt Featherstone into my way of thinking. It was not at all against her will that she completed the purchase at last. Afterwards, however, she liked to think it was so.
In May it was all settled. The house was filled with painters and paper-hangers, and all through the long summer months they kept on making a mess within the walls, and forbidding us to enter and enjoy the place in the full glorious luxuriance of its summer beauty. At last, on driving there one bright evening, I found to my joy that the workmen had decamped, leaving the Thatched House clean and fresh and gay, ready for the reception of us, and our good's and chattels. I sprang in through one of the open dining-room windows, and began waltzing round the floor from sheer delight. Pausing at last for breath, I saw that the old woman who took care of the place, she who had on my first visit opened the shutters for me and jingled her keys, had entered the room while I danced, and was standing watching me from the doorway with a queer expression on her wrinkled face.