The great iron gates under the gothic archway stood wide open just as they
had been wont to do in Mr. Lovel's time, and Clarissa and her companion
passed into the quiet garden. How well she remembered the neglected air of
the place when last she had seen it--the mossgrown walks, the duckweed in
the moat, the straggling rose-bushes, everything out of order, from the
broken weathercock on one of the gateway towers, to the scraper by the
half-glass door in one corner of the quadrangle, which had been, used
instead of the chief entrance! It seems natural to a man of decayed fortune
to shut up his hall-door and sneak in and out of his habitation by some
obscure portal.
Now all was changed; a kind of antique primness, which had no taint of
cockney stiffness, pervaded the scene. One might have expected to see Sir
Thomas More or Lord Bacon emerge from the massive gothic porch, and stroll
with slow step and meditative aspect towards the stone sun-dial that stood
in the centre of that square rose-garden. The whole place had an air of
doublet and hose. It seemed older to Clarissa than when she had seen
it last--older and yet newer, like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty,
restored, after a century of decay, to all its original grandeur.
The door under the porch stood open; but there were a couple of men in a
sober livery waiting in the hall--footmen who had never been reared
in those Yorkshire wilds--men with powdered hair, and the stamp of
Grosvenor-square upon them.
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