Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/45



house stood large and lonely among a wilderness of little streets, brickfields, cabbage-fields, ruined meadows where broken hedges and a few old thorn trees lingered to remind the world of the green lanes and meadows of long ago. Long red walls, buttressed in days when the eighth Henry was king, enclosed a garden that even then had been a garden for uncounted years. The orchard and paddock, too, were ringed with the same high, heavy brickwork, but in front of the house the wall gave place to a tall railing wrought in iron of a very beautiful and graceful design, and at each end of this a double carriage gate, also of wrought iron, flanked by square brick pillars with stone coping and stone balls. A much more magnificent entourage than seemed demanded by the house itself, a dwelling comparatively modern. It could not have seen two hundred summers, and had obviously been built on the site of a much older and more magnificent mansion. Its light Italian structure showed strangely among cedars that had grown up beside the solid splendours of a Tudor dwelling. The long, low, white front of it faced the road, and the queer, squat, round tower at one corner rose against a background of yew hedges that must have been already tall when the house began to rise from its foundations.

Though the house looked deserted it did not look decayed. There were no loose copings on the wall, and the iron screens and gates had not been suffered to rust. The weather had not yet destroyed the stucco complexion of the house, and though ivy rioted over half the green-grey of its roof, every slate was in its place.