We seemed to ride for innumerable hours, I in the hired chaise, and my husband on the horse he had bought at Bristol. The road wound endlessly up and down, through a green country, with barely a pale patch of reaped field, and all veiled in mist and driving rain. There seemed no villages anywhere, only at distances of miles, a scant cottage or two of grey stone and thatch; and once or twice during all those hours, a desolate square tower among distant trees; and all along rough hedges and grey walls with stones projecting like battlements. Inland mountain lines like cliffs, dim in the rain; and at last, over the pale green fields, the sea—quite pale, almost white. We had to ask our way more than once, losing it again in this vague country without landmarks, where everything appeared and disappeared in mist. I had begun to feel as if St. Salvat's had no real existence, when Eustace rode up to the chaise window and pointed out the top of a tower, and a piece of battlemented wall, emerging from the misty woods, and a minute after we were at a tall gate tower, with a broken escutcheon and a drawbridge, which clanked up behind us so soon as we were over. We stopped in a great castle yard, with paved paths across a kind of bowling green, and at the steps of the house, built unevenly all round, battlemented and turreted, with huge projecting windows made of little panes.
There were a lot of men upon the steps, who surrounded the postchaise; they were roughly and variously dressed, some like fishermen and keepers, but none as I had hitherto seen the gentlemen of this country. But as we stopped, another came down the steps with a masterful air, pushed them aside, opened the chaise, lifted me out, and made me a very fine bow as I stood quite astonished at the suddenness of his ways. He was dressed entirely in black broadcloth, with a frizzled wig and bands, as clergymen are dressed here, and black cloth gaiters.
"May it please the fair Lady Brandling," he said, with a fine gesture, "to accept the hearty welcome of her old Uncle Hubert, and of her other kinsmen." The others came trooping round awkwardly, with little show of manners. But the one called Hubert, the clergyman, gave me his arm, waived them away, said something about my being tired from the long ride, and swept, nay, almost carried me up the great staircase and through the passages to the room where dinner was spread. Of this he excused himself from partaking, alleging the lateness of the hour and his feeble digestion; but he sat over against my husband and me while we were eating, drank wine with me, and kept up a ceaseless flow of conversation, rather fulsomely affable methought and packed with needless witticisms; but which freed me from the embarrassment produced by the novelty of the situation, by my husband's almost utter silence, and also, I must add, by the man's own scrutinising examination of me. I was heartily glad when, the glasses being removed, he summoned the housekeeper, and with another very fine bow, committed me to her charge. Eustace begged to be excused for accompanying me to my chamber, and promised to return and drink his wine presently with his kinsmen.
And now, dear mother, I have told you of our arrival at St. Salvat's; and I have confessed to you my childish fear of I know not what. "Mere bodily fatigue!" I hear you briskly exclaiming, and chiding me for such childish feelings. But if you were here, dearest mother, you would take me also in your arms, and I should know that you knew it was not all foolishness and cowardice, that you would know what it is, for the first time in my little life, to be without you.
October 5, 1772.
It has stopped raining at last, and Eustace, who is again the kindest and most considerate of men, has taken me all over the castle and the grounds, or at least a great part. St. Salvat's is even more romantically situated than I had thought; and with its towers and battlements hidden in deep woods, it makes one think of castles, like that of Otranto, which one reads of in novels; nay, I was the more reminded of the latter work of fiction (which Eustace believes to be from the pen of the accomplished Mr. Walpole, whom we knew in Paris), that there are, let into the stonework on either side of the porch, huge heads of warriors, filleted and crowned with laurel, which though purporting to be those of the Emperors Augustus and Trajan, yet look as if they might fit into some gigantic helmet such as we read of in that admirable tale.
From the house, which has been built at various times (Eustace is of opinion mainly in the time of the famous Cardinal Wolsey, as the architecture, it appears, is similar to that of His Majesty's palace at Hampton Court), into the old castle; from the house, as I say, the gardens descend in great terraces and steps into the woods and to the sea. The gardens are indeed very much neglected, and will require no doubt, a considerable expenditure of labour; but I am secretly charmed by their wild luxuriance: a great vine and a pear tree hang about the mullioned windows almost unpruned, and the box and bay trees have grown into thickets in the extraordinary kindliness of this warm, moist climate. There is in the middle of the terraces, a pond all overgrown with lilies, and with a broken leaden statue of a nymph. Here, when he was a child, Eustace was wont to watch for the transformation into a fairy of a great water snake which was said to have lived in that pond for centuries; but I well remember his awakening my compassion by telling me how, one day, his brother Thomas, wishing to displease him, trapped the poor harmless creature and cruelly skinned it alive. "That is the place of my poor water snake," Eustace said to-day; and it was the first time since our coming, that he has alluded to his own or his family's past. Poor Eustace! I am deeply touched by the evident painful memories awakened by return to St. Salvat's, which have over-clouded his reserved and sensitive nature, in a manner I had not noticed (thank Heaven) since our marriage. But to return to the castle, or rather its grounds. What chiefly delights my romantic temper are the woods in which it is hidden, and its singular position, on an utterly isolated little bay of this wild and dangerous coast. You go down the terraces into a narrow ravine, lined with every manner of fern, and full of venerable trees; past the little church of which our Uncle Hubert is the incumbent, alongside some ruined buildings, once the quarters of the Brandlings' troopers, across a field full of yellow bog flowers, and on to a high wall. And on the other side of that wall, quite unexpected, is the white, misty sea, dashing against a bit of sand and low pale rocks, where our uncles' fishing boats are drawn up, and chafing, further off against the sunken reefs of this murderous coast. And to the right and the left, great clumps of wind-bent trees and sharp cliffs appear and disappear in the faint, misty sunshine.
As we stood on the sea wall, listening to the rustle of the waves, a ship, with three masts and full sail, passed slowly at a great distance, to my very great pleasure.
"Where is she going, do you know?" I asked rather childishly.
"To Bristol," answered Eustace curtly. "It is perhaps, some West Indiaman, laden with sugar, and spirits, and coffee and cotton. All the vessels bound for Bristol sail in front of St. Salvat's."