第331页
front of the great mansion, and a protracted, hardy gaze towards it.
'What affectation of diffidence was this at first?' they might have
demanded; 'what stupid regardlessness now?'
Hear an illustration, reader.
A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to
catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals
softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses- fancying
she has stirred: he withdraws; not for worlds would he be seen. All is
still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on
her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the
vision of beauty- warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried
was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he
suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a
moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and
drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps and cries,
and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can
utter- by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly:
he finds she is stone dead.
I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a
blackened ruin.
No need to cower behind a gate-post, indeed!- to peep up at chamber
lattices, fearing life was astir behind them! No need to listen for
doors opening- to fancy steps on the pavement or the gravel-walk!
The lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste: the portal yawned
void. The front was, as I had once seen it in a dream, but a
shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking, perforated with
paneless windows: no roof, no battlements, no chimneys- all had
crashed in.
And there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a
lonesome wild. No wonder that letters addressed to people here had
never received an answer: as well despatch epistles to a vault in a
church aisle. The grim blackness of the stones told by what fate the
Hall had fallen- by conflagration: but how kindled? What story
belonged to this disaster? What loss, besides mortar and marble and
woodwork had followed upon it? Had life been wrecked as well as
property? If so, whose? Dreadful question: there was no one here to
answer it- not even dumb sign, mute token.
In wandering round the shattered walls and through the devastated
interior, I gathered evidence that the calamity was not of late
occurrence. Winter snows, I thought, had drifted through that void
arch, winter rains beaten in at those hollow casements; for, amidst
the drenched piles of rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation:
grass and weed grew here and there between the stones and fallen
rafters. And oh! where meantime was the hapless owner of this wreck?
In what land? Under what auspices? My eye involuntarily wandered to
the grey church tower near the gates, and I asked, 'Is he with Damer
de Rochester, sharing the shelter of his narrow marble house?'