The country is deserted in the rain, and I have the world to myself, a world of frenzied rain among the elms of the lowland, an avenue of elms up to a great house, hidden sheep tinkling and bleating, shepherds muffled, huge slopes of grass and pearled clover above a coombe where a grey heron sails and clanks alone, a farm desolate among elder and ash at the highest part of the hills, and then miles of pathless pasture and stubble descending past an old camp and a tumulus to the submerged vale, where yellow elms tremble about a church tower, a cluster of red cottages and bowed yellow dahlias and chrysanthemums, and a house standing aloof. This house is some way from the Downs themselves, but just at the foot of a lesser slope, a fair golden hill—golden with cowslips in May—that rises on one side with a swift, short ascent and then shoots forward, as if with the impetus, almost level until, after crowning itself with beeches, it descends in a lazy curve to a field, roughened by the foundations of a vanished house, at one corner of which the chimneys join with another group of elms in the haze of rain. Hanging from the wall in rags, too wet even to flap, are the remains of an auctioneer’s announcement of a sale at the house behind. Mahogany—oak chests—certain ounces of silver—two thousand books—portraits and landscapes and pictures of horses and game—of all these and how much else has the red house been disem[236]bowelled? It is all shadowy within, behind the windows, like the eyes of a corpse, and without sound, or form, or light, and it is for no one that the creeper magnificently arrays itself in bediamonded crimson and gold that throbs and wavers in the downpour. The martins are still there, and their play up and down before the twenty windows is a senseless thing, like the play of children outside a chamber of agony or grief. They seem to be machines going on and on when their master and purpose are dead. But then, too, there is gradually a consolation, a restfulness, a deceit, a forgetting, in the continuity of their movement and their unchanged voices. The two hundred autumns perpetuated in the tones of the bricks are in vain. Strangers will come, no doubt—I hope they will not—and be pleased, actually proud, at this mellowness, which ought to have died with the last of the family that built the house.
The tall horse-chestnuts throw down their fruit out of the crisp, rusty foliage and it rolls darkly burnished out of the pods white as mushrooms in the rain, and where it falls it lies, and no child gathers it, and the harvest waggons have crushed a thousand under their wheels. The moss is beginning to encrust the gravel for the soft feet of the ghosts, of the old men and the mothers and the maids and the school-boys and tottering babes that have trodden it once. Now that they are all gone, every one, they seem always to have been ghosts, with loud, happy voices and wails of sorrow, with smiles, dark looks, passionate splendours, bright hair, the bright brown hair as of red deer in the men, the long, heavy coils of living odorous gold in the women, but flitting to and fro, footless, unconfined, like the swallows, returning and wander[237]ing up and down, as if they had left something behind in their home.
When I first entered the house by an accident in passing that way, a great-grandfather, a granddaughter and her son were alone in the house, with two servants. The mother, early widowed, had come with her child to minister to the last days of the ancient man. The house was by then full of the reports of death. In almost every room there had been a deathbed. For it had always been full of life; there was never such a house for calling back its children; the sons of it brought their wives, and the daughters their husbands, and often an excuse was made for one pair to stay on indefinitely; and thus it came to be full also of death. This granddaughter, however, had stayed, as she wished to believe, against her will, because the old man was so fond of his great-grandchild. She was a beautiful, strong woman, with the dark, lustrous skin, gold hair, perfect clear features, proud step and prouder voice, of all the family; she had shone before a thousand eyes; and yet she stayed on and on, obsessed by the multitudinous memories of the house alone under the Downs.
Her grandfather would talk of nothing but his father and his grandfather, the lawyers, the captains, the scholars, whose bones were under the churchyard elms, and his sons and their sons, all of them also now dead. He had their childish ways by heart, the childish ways of men who were white-haired at his birth as well as of those who went golden-haired but yesterday into the grave; and all their names, their stately, their out-of-the-way names, and those which recorded the maiden names of their mothers; their nicknames, too, a whole book of[238] them; the legends about the most conspicuous, their memorable speeches and acts, down to the names of their very dolls, and their legends also, which, of course, recurred again and again in the family fantasy. Every tree and field and gate and room was connected with some one of the dear and beauteous or brave dead, with their birth, their deeds, their ends.
The portraits of many of them, at least one to every generation, hung on the walls, and it was curious to notice, what never any one of them could see, except the granddaughter, the progress and the decline from generation to generation. The earliest of all had sailed and buccaneered with Henry Morgan, a great lover and destroyer of life. It was from him that the expression and air of them all had descended. Love and battle had carved his face. Out from behind his bold but easy face peered a prophetic pitifulness, just as behind the loaded brown clouds of drifting storm peers the innocence of blue, and upon it white clouds that are thin and waved like an infant’s hair. Upon this model his descendants’ faces had been carved, not by love and battle, but by his might alone. Even the tender women flaunted it. It nestled, an eagle, among the old man’s snows; it possessed the little child, and he had nothing but the face of the buccaneer, like an eaglet in a cage.
A house is a perdurable garment, giving and taking of life. If it only fit, straightway it begins to chronicle our days. It beholds our sorrows and our joys; its untale-bearing walls know all our thoughts, and if it be such a house as grows after the builders are gone, our thoughts presently owe much to it; we have but to glance at a certain shadow or a curve in the wall-paper pattern to[239] recall them, softened as by an echo, and that corner or that gable starts many a fancy that reaches beyond the stars, many a fancy gay or enriched with regrets. It is aware of birth, marriage and death; and who dares say that there is not kneaded into the stones a record more pleasing than brass? With what meanings the vesperal beam slips through a staircase window in autumn! The moon has an expression proper to us alone, nested among our limes, or heaving an ivory shoulder above the neighbour roofs. As we enter a room in our house we are conscious of a fitness in its configuration that defies mathematics. Rightly used, such a space will inspire a stately ordering of our lives; it is, in another respect, the amplest canvas for the art of life. It becomes so much a part of us that we exclaim—
“This beautiful house in sand and stone:
What will it be in heaven?”
This beautiful house under the Downs was already more than “sand and stone.” It was a giant, very gentle but very powerful, and ad............