CHAPTER XV
It is perhaps time that the reader should know a little of the ancienthouse and loyalty where many of the personages of whose history thesepages treat, lived and moved and had their being.
The Abbey House, so called, was in reality that part of the monasterywhich had been devoted to the use of successive generations of priors.It was, like the ruins that lay to its rear, entirely built of greymasonry, rendered greyer still by the lichens that fed upon its walls,which were of exceeding strength and thickness. It was a long,irregular building, and roofed with old and narrow tiles, which fromred had, in the course of ages, faded to sober russet. The banqueting-hall was a separate building at its northern end, and connected withthe main dwelling by a covered way. The aspect of the house waswesterly, and the front windows looked on to an expanse of park-likeland, heavily timbered with oaks of large size, some of them pollardsthat might have pushed their first leaves in the time of William theConqueror. In spring their vivid green was diversified by the reddishbrown of a double line of noble walnut-trees, a full half mile inlength, marking the track of the carriage-drive that led to the Roxhamhigh-road.
Behind the house lay the walled garden, celebrated in the time of themonks as being a fortnight earlier than any other in theneighbourhood. Skirting the southern wall of this garden, which was alittle less than a hundred paces long, the visitor reached thescattered ruins of the old monastery that had for generations servedas a stone quarry to the surrounding villages, but of which enough wasleft, including a magnificent gateway, to show how great had been itsformer extent. Passing on through these, he would come to an enclosurethat marked the boundaries of the old graveyard, now turned toagricultural uses, and then to the church itself, a building with avery fine tower, but possessing no particular interest, if we exceptsome exceedingly good brasses and a colossal figure of a monk cut outof the solid heart of an oak, and supposed to be the effigy of a priorof the abbey who died in the time of Edward I. Below the church again,and about one hundred and fifty paces from it, was the vicarage, acomparatively modern building, possessing no architectural attraction,and evidently reared out of the remains of the monastery.
At the south end of the Abbey House itself lay a small grass plot andpleasure-garden fringed with shrubberies, and adorned with two finecedar-trees. One of these trees was at its further extremity, andunder it there ran a path cut through the dense shrubbery. This path,which was edged with limes and called the "Tunnel Walk," led to thelake, and debouched in the little glade where stood Caresfoot's Staff.The lake itself was a fine piece of water, partly natural and partlyconstructed by the monks, measuring a full mile round, and from fiftyto two hundred yards in width. It was in the shape of a man's shoe,the heel facing west like the house, but projecting beyond it, thenarrow part representing the hollow of the instep, being exactlyopposite to it, and the sole swelling out in an easterly direction.
Bratham Abbey was altogether a fine old place, but the most remarkablething about it was its air of antiquity and the solemnity of itspeace. It did not, indeed, strike the spirit with that religious awewhich is apt to fall upon us as we gaze along the vaulted aisles ofgreat cathedrals, but it appealed perhaps with equal strength to thesofter and more reflective side of our nature. For generation aftergeneration that house had been the home of men like ourselves; theyhad passed and were forgotten, but it remained, the sole witness ofthe stories of their lives. Hands of which the very bones had longsince crumbled into dust had planted those old oaks and walnuts, thatstill donned their green robes in summer, and shed them in the autumn,to stand great skeletons through the winter months, awaiting theresurrection of the spring.
There lay upon the place and its surroundings a burden of dead lives,intangible, but none the less real. The air was thick with memories,as suggestive as the grey dust in a vault. Even in the summer, in thefull burst of nature revelling in her strength, the place was sad. Butin the winter, when the wind came howling through the groaning trees,and drove the grey scud across an ashy sky, when the birds were dumb,and there were no cattle on the sodden lawn, its isolated melancholywas a palpable thing.
That hoary house might have been a gateway of the dim land we call thePast, looking down in stony sorrow on the follies of those who so soonmust cross its portals, and, to the wise who could hear the lesson,pregnant with echoes of the warning voices of many generations.
Here it was that Angela grew up to womanhood.