Queen Lucia | Page 3

on the spot where ten years

ago an agricultural population had led bovine and unilluminated lives
in their cottages of grey stone or brick and timber. Before that, while
her husband was amassing a fortune, comfortable in amount and
respectable in origin, at the Bar, she had merely held up a small dim
lamp of culture in Onslow Gardens. But both her ambition and his had
been to bask and be busy in artistic realms of their own when the
materialistic needs were provided for by sound investments, and so
when there were the requisite thousands of pounds in secure securities
she had easily persuaded him to buy three of these cottages that stood
together in a low two-storied block. Then, by judicious removal of
partition-walls, she had, with the aid of a sympathetic architect,
transmuted them into a most comfortable dwelling, subsequently
building on to them a new wing, that ran at right angles at the back,
which was, if anything, a shade more inexorably Elizabethan than the
stem onto which it was grafted, for here was situated the famous
smoking-parlour, with rushes on the floor, and a dresser ranged with
pewter tankards, and leaded lattice-windows of glass so antique that it
was practically impossible to see out of them. It had a huge open
fireplace framed in oak-beams with a seat on each side of the
iron-backed hearth within the chimney, and a genuine spit hung over
the middle of the fire. Here, though in the rest of the house she had for
the sake of convenience allowed the installation of electric light, there
was no such concession made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron
lamps, so that only those of the most acute vision were able to read.
Even then reading was difficult, for the book-stand on the table
contained nothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from
not later than the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a
frantically Elizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there. But Mrs
Lucas often spent some of her rare leisure moments in the
smoking-parlour, playing on the virginal that stood in the window, or
kippering herself in the fumes of the wood-fire as with streaming eyes
she deciphered an Elzevir Horace rather late for inclusion under the
rule, but an undoubted bargain.
The house stood at the end of the village that was nearest the station,
and thus, when the panorama of her kingdom opened before her, she
had but a few steps further to go. A yew-hedge, bought entire from a

neighboring farm, and transplanted with solid lumps of earth and
indignant snails around its roots, separated the small oblong of garden
from the road, and cast monstrous shadows of the shapes into which it
was cut, across the little lawns inside. Here, as was only right and
proper, there was not a flower to be found save such as were mentioned
in the plays of Shakespeare; indeed it was called Shakespeare's garden,
and the bed that ran below the windows of the dining room was
Ophelia's border, for it consisted solely of those flowers which that
distraught maiden distributed to her friends when she should have been
in a lunatic asylum. Mrs Lucas often reflected how lucky it was that
such institutions were unknown in Elizabeth's day, or that, if known,
Shakespeare artistically ignored their existence. Pansies, naturally,
formed the chief decoration--though there were some very flourishing
plants of rue. Mrs Lucas always wore a little bunch of them when in
flower, to inspire her thoughts, and found them wonderfully efficacious.
Round the sundial, which was set in the middle of one of the squares of
grass between which a path of broken paving-stone led to the front door,
was a circular border, now, in July, sadly vacant, for it harboured only
the spring-flowers enumerated by Perdita. But the first day every year
when Perdita's border put forth its earliest blossom was a delicious
anniversary, and the news of it spread like wild-fire through Mrs
Lucas's kingdom, and her subjects were very joyful, and came to salute
the violet or daffodil, or whatever it was.
The three cottages dexterously transformed into The Hurst, presented a
charmingly irregular and picturesque front. Two were of the grey stone
of the district and the middle one, to the door of which led the paved
path, of brick and timber; latticed windows with stone mullions gave
little light to the room within, and certain new windows had been added;
these could be detected by the observant eye for they had a markedly
older appearance than the rest. The front-door, similarly, seemed as if it
must have been made years before the house, the fact being that the one
which Mrs Lucas had found there was too