Arabella Stuart. G. P. R. James

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СКАЧАТЬ found. Its course, though almost as rapid as if it had come down from a mountain,--having had, it is true, a pretty sharp descent about a mile to the westward,--was nevertheless, at this spot, directed through soft green meadows, and between flat and even banks. The water was of some depth also, not less in general than from five to six feet, though not in most places above four or five yards in width. Where it crossed the road, however, there being no bridge, and the highway somewhat raised, it spread itself out into a good broad shallow stream, which, in the deepest part, only washed your horse's feet a little above the pastern.

      Having carried it thus far, reader, we will leave it, without pursuing its course on towards the sea, which it reached somehow, and somewhere, by ways and through channels with which we have nothing to do.

      The eye of the traveller, however, on the London road, in tracing this stream farther up, came upon a clump of tall old trees disencumbered of all brushwood, spreading wide at the top, but ungarnished by boughs or green leaves below, and affording habitation to a multitude of busy rooks, whose inharmonious voices--when joined together in full chorus, and heard from a distance--formed a peculiar kind of melody, connecting itself with many memories in the hearts of almost every one, and rousing soft and pensive imaginations from its intimate connexion with those country scenes, and calm pleasures, amongst which must lie all man's sweetest associations. From the top of the hill on which we have placed ourselves, a number of chimney tops, somewhat quaint and fantastic in their forms, appeared to be actually rising from the very heart of the rookery; but if you stopped to let your horse drink at the stream in the bottom of the valley, and looked up its course to the left, you perceived that the house to which those chimneys belonged, lay at the distance of more than two hundred yards from the trees, and had a large garden with a long terrace, and a low wall between it and them.

      The mansion was of no great extent, as we have already hinted, and might belong to a gentleman of limited means, though moving in the better ranks of life; the windows were principally of that peculiar form which was first introduced under the Tudors, as the pointed arch of a preceding epoch began to bow itself down towards the straight line in which it was extinguished not long after. The whole building might have risen from the ground somewhat more than half a century before the period of which we now speak, perhaps in the reign of Mary Tudor, perhaps in that of her brother Edward; and yet I will not take upon myself to say that the bloody and ferocious monster, their father, might not have seen it as he travelled down into Cambridgeshire. The colouring, indeed, was of that soiled and sombre hue, which bespoke long acquaintance with the weather; and though originally the glowing red bricks might have shown as rubicund a face as any newly painted Dutch house at the side of a canal, they were now sobered down with age, and grey with the cankering hand of time. Although the garden was neatly kept, and somewhat prim, according to the fashion of the day, and a bowling-green just within the terrace was as trim and neatly shaved as if the scythe passed over it every morning, nevertheless about the building itself were some signs and symptoms of decay, the work of neglect, rather than of time. Instead of neat and orderly pointing, the brickwork displayed, in various places, many an unstopped joint; and though, doubtless, weather-tight within, the stone coping was here and there broken, while one or two of the chimneys, which were gathered into groups of four set angularly, displayed the want of a brick in various places, which destroyed their fair proportions, without perhaps affecting their soundness.

      It was in the year 1603, two hundred and forty years ago; reader, a long time for you and me to look back to, but yet the men and women of those days were the same creatures that we see moving round us at present, with this slight difference, that they had been less inured to restrain their passions, and conceal their feelings, than we are in a more polished and civilized state of society. Two hundred and forty years! What a lapse of time it seems; and yet to each of the many whose lives have filled up the intervening period, their own allotted portion, when they have looked back from the end of existence to the beginning, has seemed but a mere point--a moment out of the long eternity. To each, too, the changes which have taken place, and which to us in the aggregate appear vast and extraordinary, have been so slow and gradual, that he has scarcely perceived them, any more than we notice the alteration which fashion effects in our garments as we go on from year to year. Customs and manners, indeed, were very different in those days, though human beings were the same; but we must not stop to dwell upon minute particulars, or to detail forms and ceremonies, for it is not so much our object to depict the fashions and habits of that age, as to sketch a sad and extraordinary part of its history.

      Between six and seven o'clock on an evening in the month of May, while the sky overhead was just beginning to be tinged with the hues of the declining sun, and the old trees of the rookery, covered with their young green leaves, looked almost autumnal in the various tints with which spring had decked them, a gentleman of fifty-eight or fifty-nine years of age walked slowly up and down upon the terrace which ran along before the building. He was upright in figure, well made though spare in form, rather below than above the middle height, calm and sedate in his step, thoughtful and perhaps sad in the expression of his countenance. His hair was quite white, soft, silky, and hanging, as was then customary, in curls upon his neck. His eyebrows, which like his hair and beard were colourless, were somewhat bushy and arched. His mustachios were neatly trimmed, and his beard pointed, not very long, but yet not cut round, as was the fashion with the younger men of the day. He was dressed in black velvet, with shoes bearing large black rosettes, a small hat with a single feather, and had no ornament whatsoever about his person, unless the buttons of jet which studded his doublet, and the clasp of the same material which fastened his short cloak, deserved that name.

      He was, indeed, altogether a very grave and serious looking personage, with much mildness and benevolence as well as sagacity in his countenance; and yet there was a certain slight turn of the lip, an occasional twinkle of the eye, and a drawing up of the nostril, which seemed to indicate the slightest possible touch of a sarcastic spirit, which had, perhaps, at an earlier period been more unruly, though it was now chastened by the cares, the sorrows, the anxieties, and the experience of life.

      He walked up and down, then, upon the terrace for some minutes, each time he turned, whether at the one end or the other, gazing down the course of the stream between the slopes of the hills towards the spot where the road from London crossed the valley, and then again bending his eyes upon the ground in meditation. Occasionally, however, he would look up to the sky, or down into the bowling-green; and, after one of the latter contemplations, he descended a flight of four stone steps which led down to the greensward, with the same calm and sedate step which had distinguished his promenade above; and taking up the large, round, wooden ball which lay on the grass, he held it in his hand for a moment, and then bowled it deliberately at a set of skittles which had remained standing at the other end of the green. The ball hit the pin at which it was aimed, which in its fall overthrew a number of others, while the gentleman whose hand had despatched the messenger of mischief on its errand, looked on with a grave smile. There was evidently something more in the expression of his countenance than mere amusement at seeing the heavy pieces of wood tumble over one another, and he murmured to himself as he turned away,----

      "Thus it is with human projects--ay, the best intended and most firmly founded; some accidental stroke overthrows one of our moral ninepins, and down go the whole nine!"

      So saying, he returned to the terrace, and raising his voice he cried, "Lakyn, Lakyn!" upon which a stout old serving-man, with a badge upon his arm, came out unbonneted to receive his master's commands.

      "Take away those ninepins, Lakyn," said the gentleman, "they have no business on the bowling-green; and put the bowls, too, under shelter. It will rain before morning."

      "God bless your worship," replied the servant, looking up to the sky, "you are as weatherwise as a conjuror."

      "Or a shepherd," replied the gentleman, resuming his walk; and the old man proceeded to gather up the implements of the good old game of our ancestors, muttering to himself, "Who would have thought it would rain before morning with such a sky as that. He knows more than other men, that's СКАЧАТЬ