Deadham Hard | Page 8

dog-cart awaiting him,
drawn by a remarkably well-shaped and well-groomed black horse. The
coachman was to match. Middle-aged, clean-shaven, his Napoleonic
face set as a mask, his undress livery of pepper-and-salt mixture
soberly immaculate. He touched his hat when our young gentleman
appeared and mounted beside him; the horse, meanwhile, shivering a
little and showing the red of its nostrils as the train, with strident
whistlings, drew out of the station bound westward to Stourmouth and
Barryport.
Later the horse broke up the abiding inertia of Marychurch High Street,
by dancing as it passed the engine of a slowly ambulant thrashing
machine; and only settled fairly into its stride when the three-arched,
twelfth century stone bridge over the Arne was passed, and the
road--leaving the last scattered houses of the little town--turned south
and seaward skirting the shining expanse of The Haven and threading
the semi-amphibious hamlets of Horny Cross and Lampit.

CHAPTER III
THE DOUBTFULLY HARMONIOUS PARTS OF A WHOLE
A long, low, rectangular and rather narrow room, supported across the
centre--where passage walls had been cut away--by an avenue of
dumpy wooden pillars, four on either side, leading to a glass door
opening on to the garden. A man's room rather than a woman's, and,
judging by appearances, a bachelor's at that.--Eighteenth-century
furniture, not ignoble in line, but heavy, wide-seated, designed for the
comfort of bulky paunched figures arrayed in long napped waistcoats
and full-skirted coats. Tabaret curtains and upholsterings, originally
maroon, now dulled by sea damp and bleached by sun-glare to a
uniform tone in which colour and pattern were alike obliterated.
Handsome copperplate engravings of Pisa and of Rome, and pastel

portraits in oval frames; the rest of the whity brown panelled wall space
hidden by book-cases. These surmounted by softly shining, pearl-grey
Chinese godlings, monsters, philosophers and saints, the shelves below
packed with neatly ranged books.
A dusky room, in spite of its rounded, outstanding sash-windows, two
on either side the glass door; the air of it holding, in permanent solution,
an odour of leather-bound volumes. A place, in short, which, though
not inhospitable, imposed itself, its qualities and traditions, to an extent
impossible for any save the most thick-skinned and thick-witted wholly
to ignore or resist.
Young Tom Verity, having no convenient armour-plating of stupidity,
suffered its influence intimately as--looking about him with quick
enquiring glances--he followed the man-servant across it between the
dumpy pillars. He felt self-conscious and disquieted, as by a smile of
silent amusement upon some watchful elderly face. So impressed,
indeed, was he that, on reaching the door, he paused, letting the man
pass on alone to announce him. He wanted time in which to get over
this queer sensation of shyness, before presenting himself to the
company assembled, there, in the garden outside.
Yet he was well aware that the prospect out of doors--its amplitude of
mellow sunlight and of space, its fair windless calm in which no leaf
stirred--was far more attractive than the room in the doorway of which
he thus elected to linger.
For the glass-door gave directly on to an extensive lawn, set out,
immediately before the house front, with scarlet and crimson geraniums
in alternating square and lozenge-shaped beds. Away on the right a
couple of grey-stemmed ilex trees--the largest in height and girth Tom
had ever seen--cast finely vandyked and platted shadow upon the
smooth turf. Beneath them, garden chairs were stationed and a tea-table
spread, at which four ladies sat--one, the elder, dressed in crude purple,
the other three, though of widely differing ages and aspect, in light
coloured summer gowns.
To the left of the lawn, a high plastered wall--masked by hollies, bay,

yew, and at the far end by masses of airy, pink-plumed tamarisk--shut
off the eastward view. But straight before him all lay open, "clean away
to the curve of the world" as he told himself, not without a pull of
emotion remembering his impending voyage. For, about sixty yards
distant, the lawn ended abruptly in a hard straight line--the land cut off
sheer, as it seemed, at the outer edge of a gravelled terrace, upon which
two small antiquated cannon were mounted, their rusty muzzles trained
over swirling blue-green tide river and yellow-grey, high-cambered
sand-bar out to sea.
Between these innocuous engines of destruction, little black cannon
balls had been piled into a mimic pyramid, near to which three men
stood engaged in desultory conversation. One of them, Tom observed
as markedly taller, more commanding and distinguished in bearing,
than his companions. Even from here, the whole length of the lawn
intervening, his presence, once noted, became of arresting importance,
focussing attention as the central interest, the one thing which vitally
mattered in this gracious scene--his figure silhouetted, vertically,
against those long horizontal lines of river, sand-bar, and far-away