I Walked Into Its Dismantled Precincts
The Other Evening About Sunset, And Couldn't Help Pacing Up And
Down For A Little Time, Drowsily Taking In The Aspect Of The Place:
Which Is Repeated Hereabouts In All Directions.
I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, forming two sides of a
weedy, grass-grown court-yard, whereof the house formed a third
side, and a low terrace-walk, overlooking the garden and the
neighbouring hills, the fourth.
I don't believe there was an
uncracked stone in the whole pavement. In the centre was a
melancholy statue, so piebald in its decay, that it looked exactly
as if it had been covered with sticking-plaster, and afterwards
powdered. The stables, coach-houses, offices, were all empty, all
ruinous, all utterly deserted.
Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their latches;
windows were broken, painted plaster had peeled off, and was lying
about in clods; fowls and cats had so taken possession of the out-
buildings, that I couldn't help thinking of the fairy tales, and
eyeing them with suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be
changed back again. One old Tom in particular: a scraggy brute,
with a hungry green eye (a poor relation, in reality, I am inclined
to think): came prowling round and round me, as if he half
believed, for the moment, that I might be the hero come to marry
the lady, and set all to-rights; but discovering his mistake, he
suddenly gave a grim snarl, and walked away with such a tremendous
tail, that he couldn't get into the little hole where he lived, but
was obliged to wait outside, until his indignation and his tail had
gone down together.
In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be, in this
colonnade, some Englishmen had been living, like grubs in a nut;
but the Jesuits had given them notice to go, and they had gone, and
THAT was shut up too. The house: a wandering, echoing, thundering
barrack of a place, with the lower windows barred up, as usual, was
wide open at the door: and I have no doubt I might have gone in,
and gone to bed, and gone dead, and nobody a bit the wiser. Only
one suite of rooms on an upper floor was tenanted; and from one of
these, the voice of a young-lady vocalist, practising bravura
lustily, came flaunting out upon the silent evening.
I went down into the garden, intended to be prim and quaint, with
avenues, and terraces, and orange-trees, and statues, and water in
stone basins; and everything was green, gaunt, weedy, straggling,
under grown or over grown, mildewy, damp, redolent of all sorts of
slabby, clammy, creeping, and uncomfortable life. There was
nothing bright in the whole scene but a firefly--one solitary
firefly--showing against the dark bushes like the last little speck
of the departed Glory of the house; and even it went flitting up
and down at sudden angles, and leaving a place with a jerk, and
describing an irregular circle, and returning to the same place
with a twitch that startled one:
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