The inspiriting appointment which had led Grace Melbury to indulge in a
six-candle illumination for the arrangement of her attire, carried her
over the ground the next morning with a springy tread. Her sense of
being properly appreciated on her own native soil seemed to brighten
the atmosphere and herbage around her, as the glowworm's lamp
irradiates the grass. Thus she moved along, a vessel of emotion going
to empty itself on she knew not what.
Twenty minutes' walking through copses, over a stile, and along an
upland lawn brought her to the verge of a deep glen, at the bottom of
which Hintock House appeared immediately beneath her eye. To describe
it as standing in a hollow would not express the situation of the
manor-house; it stood in a hole, notwithstanding that the hole was full
of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could easily
have been thrown over or into, the birds'-nested chimneys of the
mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet; but the
gray lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps,
rolls, and skylights, together with incised letterings and
shoe-patterns cut by idlers thereon.
The front of the house exhibited an ordinary manorial presentation of
Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-colored
freestone from local quarries. The ashlar of the walls, where not
overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every
shade, intensifying its luxuriance with its nearness to the ground,
till, below the plinth, it merged in moss.
Above the house to the back was a dense plantation, the roots of whose
trees were above the level of the chimneys. The corresponding high
ground on which Grace stood was richly grassed, with only an old tree
here and there. A few sheep lay about, which, as they ruminated,
looked quietly into the bedroom windows. The situation of the house,
prejudicial to humanity, was a stimulus to vegetation, on which account
an endless shearing of the heavy-armed ivy was necessary, and a
continual lopping of trees and shrubs. It was an edifice built in
times when human constitutions were damp-proof, when shelter from the
boisterous was all that men thought of in choosing a dwelling-place,
the insidious being beneath their notice; and its hollow site was an
ocular reminder, by its unfitness for modern lives, of the fragility to
which these have declined. The highest architectural cunning could
have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and
ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It
was vegetable nature's own home; a spot to inspire the painter and poet
of still life--if they did not suffer too much from the relaxing
atmosphere--and to draw groans from the gregariously disposed. Grace
descended the green escarpment by a zigzag path into the drive, which
swept round beneath the slope. The exterior of the house had been
familiar to her from her childhood, but she had never been inside, and
the approach to knowing an old thing in a new way was a lively
experience. It was with a little flutter that she was shown in; but
she recollected that Mrs. Charmond would probably be alone. Up to a
few days before this time that lady had been accompanied in her
comings, stayings, and goings by a relative believed to be her aunt;
latterly, however, these two ladies had separated, owing, it was
supposed, to a quarrel, and Mrs. Charmond had been left desolate. Being
presumably a woman who did not care for solitude, this deprivation
might possibly account for her sudden interest in Grace.