CHAPTER II.
MONK’S GATE.
It was a glorious afternoon in the beginning of August, on which Wellfield left Manchester for his two hours’ journey to Wellfield, to arrive at which spot he had to pass through some of the roughest, dirtiest, richest and most prosperous of the numerous manufacturing towns of Lancashire.
Burnham was the last of these towns—a place of great size, great riches, and of an absolutely stupendous ugliness—a great collection of ugly, grimy buildings, paved streets, and ghastly-looking tall chimneys, the whole planted at the bottom of a hollow which had once been as fair as valley could be, in the rough, stony moorland style of sparkling stream and rugged rock. Even now, when the veil of smoke permitted one to see them, high and beautiful hills might be perceived, blue, calm and eternal. The prospect of them gave one a longing to ascend them, and from their summits to breathe an air which should be free and pure.
After Burnham came one or two little wayside stations, and then Wellfield. The railway here ran over a high viaduct, much raised above the village. Jerome felt his heart throb as he looked out, and saw below him on the right, slumbering amid orchard trees and some fine old elms, some ancient brown walls, two vast and massive gateways—a broken line which showed where the cloisters had formerly run beside the river. That was the Abbey, which, with its grounds, took up pretty nearly as much space as all the rest of the village put together. He saw the calm river gliding by; then raised his eyes to where in sturdy pride old Penhull stretched his great carcase, shutting all in to the east. It was a fair land—it was a goodly heritage, and his heart was bitter within him.
The train stopped, and he got out and stood on the platform. He was a stranger there. No one took the least notice of him. He found himself at the farther end of the little platform, and before walking forward to leave the station, he paused and looked round him. From the place where he now stood, the Abbey was not visible. He was looking in another direction, towards the north-west. Behind him rose the great wall of Penhull, over which his ancestors in the good old days had helped King Jamie to hunt witches with vigour and malignity. Before him he saw a more level country, spreading towards an ancient town called Clyderhow, with its quaint old castle. Farther to the west came some other long-backed fells, on the other side of which was St. George’s Channel: and nearer, on the brow of one of the said fells, some three miles away, he saw faintly the grey tower of an ancient church, and just above that, where the ground began to rise towards the western fells, a long, large, imposing building of whitish stone, exquisitely situated, and from its commanding position, a landmark for miles around. This was the great Jesuit college of Brentwood, which had once belonged to a branch of the Wellfield family, in the days when they were great men and devout Catholics.
Jerome’s eyes fell upon it, and with the sight of it came the remembrance of his having, years ago, met a certain priest belonging to that establishment.
‘That was more than seven years ago,’ he reflected, ‘before the Abbey had been sold to this roturier. I must have been a mere lad then, but how well I remember him! What was his name? Somerville, surely. Yes. Pablo Somerville. I remember. He was half Spanish—there was some mystery about his father, I recollect. What a musician he was—and a gentleman, if ever there was one. Will it be my luck, I wonder, to renew the acquaintance? One might meet with a worse fate than some of those fellows at Brentwood have, after all, for——’
‘Ticket, sir, please,’ said a curt voice at his elbow. Jerome roused himself, took his eyes off Brentwood, and went along the platform, down a little slanting path, which brought him into a road. Here he met a man, and asked him if he knew where Monk’s Gate was.
‘Dun yo mean th’ heawse, or th’ yate itsel’?’ inquired the man.
‘I mean the house.’
‘Well, yo’ mun go through th’ yate for to get to th’ heawse. Yon’s t’ shortest road,’ he pointed down a grassy lane with trees on either side. ‘Keep down thur, and then turn to th’ left, and yo’ conna miss th’ Monk’s Gate, ’cause it straddles o’ across th’ road, and yo’ mun go under it, and turn in at th’ first gate to your left. Yon’s t’ Monk’s Gate House. But it’s empty, and locked oop,’ he added, looking inquiringly at the person who had an errand to Monk’s Gate.
‘I know. I have the key.’
‘M’ appen you belong to ’t?’
‘It belongs to me,’ responded Jerome. ‘Good-day, and thank you.’ With which he walked on, leaving his interlocutor to stare after him, scratch his head, and remark to himself:
‘Well, I’m dom’d! It mun be John Wellfield’s lad. Eh, but I mun go and tell ’em about this ’ere down at th’ Black Bull.’
Jerome, meantime followed the directions he had received, and soon found the cavernous-looking remains of Monk’s Gate, ‘straddling,’ as his guide had said, ‘o’ across t’ road,’ a huge, grim, ivy-covered portal, showing, by its distance from the rest of what were now the Abbey grounds, what a great and glorious possession this said Abbey had once been.
A little way on the other side of the archway to the left, was a gate, leading into a garden; there was a gravel drive going up to a low quaint-looking grey stone house. This, then, must be Monk’s Gate.
It was a wilderness of a garden, with a large, irregularly shaped lawn, of a velvety softness and greenness, which neglect had not yet ruined. In the very centre of this lawn rose a high, thin old pear-tree. Scattered about were other kinds of fruit-trees. Broad borders of all sweet and old-fashioned flowers were filled with a rank luxuriance of plants, some blooming, some not yet in bloom; others almost choked to death by their more flourishing neighbours. On the left of the broad walk was a high wall, and behind the wall fine beech-trees which cast the shade of their ample boughs far into the garden of Monk’s Gate. The house itself stood back; it looked a small house for such a large, luxuriant garden. It was very low, Jerome saw, with odd-looking windows half-hidden by roses and clematis, while all over the left side of the house, a flourishing ivy revelled healthily. He approached nearer. Just before the house was a great bush of the Gloire de Dijon rose—the fragrance of its second crop that year filled the air for yards around.
Drawing forth the key which Mr. Netley had given him, he applied it to the door, and its rattle in the lock was the first sound to break the almost oppressive hush and stillness, and deadly calm of everything around and about. The lock turned somewhat rustily and unwillingly. It required him to exert the strength of both his hands to induce it entirely to yield. Then he pushed the door open, stepped in, and stood beneath all that he could now call his own roof-tree. A narrow passage—a door to the left, which he passed; the passage was only a few feet long; one stepped out of it, without door or other intervening ceremony, into a large, low, raftered room, with a high old wooden chimney-piece, deep oaken cupboards sunk in the walls, a long, very low window, with a deep, roomy seat in it—a heavy oaken table in the centre of the room, and, at one side, an ancient, shabby, comfortable-looking settee. In a remote corner there was a pile of old furniture, which in its dirt and shabbiness looked remarkably like lumber.
Jerome gazed round the room. Despite the age and decrepitude of all in it, it had a certain attraction for him, from its quaint, unconventional shape and arrangements. The stairs, with old oaken rails and balustrade, led straight out of it. A door which he opened, showed him a roomy kitchen, with a back-kitchen beyond. Turning back, he opened the door to the left of the passage, which he had not yet explored, and found a second sitting-room, smaller than the first, but just as quaint, low and irregular. This room, too, had the agreeable peculiarity of a corner fireplace, and it contained more furniture than the other; very old drawing-room furniture—thin-legged chairs and tables, and a strange-looking thing which was at once cupboard, cabinet, and press, to match the rest of the furniture, which was mahogany. The aforesaid thin-legged chairs were upholstered in a sickly, faded drab damask—relic of a bygone day. The whole place looked like some grave, and yet a grave about which lingered gentle memories, like a soft perfume; recollections of old-fashioned ladies who must have spent countless hours at their tambour-frames, embroidering those elaborate and now pale and faded semblances of pink-cheeked shepherds and blue-eyed shepherdesses which adorned some spindly-looking stools and spider-legged ‘occasional’ chairs. Whose slender fingers had accomplished that triumph of worsted-work which covered a large settee beneath one of the two little deep square windows—a piece of worsted-work with a whole picture upon it, of an elaborate landscape; figures, fountains, sheep, and marble vases?
Jerome passed his hand across his eyes, feeling as if he had lost his identity. Was it—could it be he, Jerome Wellfield, who was standing in this chill, pale, silent place, inhaling the faint, musty, dusty smell, which carries one back full a hundred years; and was this dim old place his home—all the home he now had? He tried to picture Avice there, and succeeded. It would be no inappropriate place for her, he felt, when fires should have dried up all the damp, and when all this faded furniture should have been pulled forth, cleaned, and polished, and arranged. And Sara? Try as he would, he failed to see her there. And yet, he knew that should he ask her to come, she would do so.
He climbed the stairs, and found several bedrooms, corresponding with the rooms below—all with the same raftered roofs, and odd little square windows, made almost dark, too, by the overhanging trailing-plants which covered the side of the house.
He lingered long, unaccountably attracted and fascinated. In such a quiet nook a man might drone out his life, and soon be utterly forgotten—might live on from year to year, and watch the seasons come and go, the flowers bloom and fade, and spring again; might observe the sunlight and the storm-shadows sweep across the broad sides of Penhull, and might at last die and be carried to the graveyard which spread around the old church—might there be laid to his rest, and none be the wiser.
He shivered slightly, as he vividly pictured all this; then, slowly descending the stairs, went out—how hot and balmy the outside air felt, after the dampness of the house!—locked the door behind him, and bent his steps towards the Abbey.