The stately homes of England have ever numbered some very odd names.
Every one remembers that beautiful Southern retreat whither, to the
delight of the wags, Mr. Balfour often journeyed for his week-end
holiday--"Clouds," the seat of the Wyndhams. Could there be a much more
fascinating name than "Clouds"? And then there is "Wrest," the late Lord
Lucas's Bedfordshire home, afterwards transformed, how suitably, into a
hospital for soldiers. And there is that Midland paradise which, in the
days of placid, even life, the editors of illustrated weeklies always
recollected with gratitude when they were short of other
pictures--"Compton Wynyates."
But the new name which I have just discovered, and which fills the
inward eye with joy, is a house on a smaller scale than these--a
manor-house rather than a mansion, perhaps one of the smallest that can
be described as a "gentleman's place," but assuredly that. Somewhere in
Sussex, western Sussex.
It is not near the station, and to reach it you walk or drive along
winding roads just now sodden with rain, but smelling of the good wet
Sussex leaves and mast and soil, with the Downs rising not too many
miles away in the South. Then a turn into a narrow lane, with the bare
trees of a copse on either side and a scurrying pheasant in front of
you, and behold the white gate! There is no lodge--the house is just too
small for that, as you can now see for yourself, for there it is, under
the protection of the wood that rises behind it, so quiet and
self-contained that you almost gasp.
Very old it is, but good for many years more. The frame is of timber and
plaster, and a Horsham stone roof. These stones are a little damp and
moss-covered (for our ancestors insisted on building in a hole, or where
would Friday's fish come from?), and the place is as Tudor as Queen Bess
herself, in whose reign its foundations were dug. The chimney stacks,
all smoking with the thin blue smoke of logs, are of tiny Tudor bricks,
and the chimneys are set not square with the house but cornerways. A
long low façade with the central door in a square porch; the whole grave
but serene.
A path of more Horsham stone leads to the door, with thyme and lavender
springing from the interstices undismayed by the feet of man, and smooth
lawns on each side, and under the diamond-paned windows a bed where in
summer would be night stock and lemon verbena and tobacco plant and
mignonette. On the roof a few white fantails; a spaniel near the door;
and a great business of rooks in the sky. Through the windows of the
lower rooms you see the greenery at the back of the house and a
suggestion here and there of books and pictures--everything that makes a
house a home.
Beside the house on the right are the stables; and on the other side is
a dark shrubbery, and beyond that are more lawns and gardens and the
fish-pond.
Do you see it? Perhaps you have already seen it differently; for how
could you help forming some mental picture of it when in every carriage
on the L.B. & S.C.R. is posted up the notice, "Passengers to Lower
Blinds"?
To me "Lower Blinds," whither all these fortunate passengers are
journeying, is just such a manor-house as that.