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Beside a high-road in the extreme West of England stands a house which youmight pass many times without suspecting it of a dark history or, indeed,any history worth mention. The country itself, which here slopes westwardfrom the Mining District to Mount's Bay, has little beauty and—unless youhappen to have studied it—little interest. It is bare, and it comes nearto be savage without attaining to the romantic. It includes, to be sure,one or two spots of singular beauty; but they hide themselves and are notdiscoverable from the road, which rewards you only by its extravagantwealth of wild flowers, its clean sea-breeze, and perhaps a sunset flamingacross the low levels and silhouetting the long shoulder of Godolphin Hillbetween you and the Atlantic, five miles distant.
Noting, as you passed, the size of the house, its evident marks of age,and the meanness of its more modern outbuildings, you would set it downfor the residence of an old yeoman family fallen on evil days. And yoursecond thought—if it suggested a second—might be that these old yeomen,not content with a lonely dwelling in a lonely angle of the land, hadchurlishly built themselves in and away from sight even of the infrequenttraveller; for a high wall enclosing a courtlage in front screens all butthe upper story with its slated roof, heavy chimneys and narrow upperwindows; and these again are half hidden by the boughs of two ragged yewtrees growing within the enclosure. Behind the house, on a rising slope,tilled fields have invaded a plantation of noble ash trees and cut it backto a thin and ugly quadrilateral. Ill-kept as they are, and alreadydilapidated, the modern farm-buildings wear a friendlier look than the oldmansion, and by contrast a cheerful air, as of inferiors out-at-elbows,indeed, but unashamed, having no lost dignities to brood upon.
Yet it may happen that your driver—reading, as he thinks, some curiosityin your glance at Steens (for so the house is called), or politely anxiousto beguile the way—pulls up his horse and with a jerk of his whip drawsyour attention to certain pock-marks in the courtlage wall. Or perhaps,finding you really curious but unable from your seat in the