Warlock o Glenwarlock | Page 2

looked to
the south, there things put on a different aspect. There the graceful oats
would wave and rustle in the ripening wind, and in the small gardens
would lurk a few cherished strawberries, while potatoes and peas would
be tolerably plentiful in their season.
Upon a natural terrace in such a slope to the south, stood Castle

Warlock. But it turned no smiling face to the region whence came the
warmth and the growth. A more grim, repellant, unlovely building
would be hard to find; and yet, from its extreme simplicity, its utter
indifference to its own looks, its repose, its weight, and its gray
historical consciousness, no one who loved houses would have thought
of calling it ugly. It was like the hard-featured face of a Scotch matron,
suggesting no end of story, of life, of character: she holds a defensive if
not defiant face to the world, but within she is warm, tending carefully
the fires of life. Summer and winter the chimneys of that
desolate-looking house smoked; for though the country was inclement,
and the people that lived in it were poor, the great, sullen, almost
unhappy-looking hills held clasped to their bare cold bosoms, exposed
to all the bitterness of freezing winds and summer hail, the warmth of
household centuries: their peat-bogs were the store-closets and
wine-cellars of the sun, for the hoarded elixir of physical life. And
although the walls of the castle, as it was called, were so thick that in
winter they kept the warmth generated within them from wandering out
and being lost on the awful wastes of homeless hillside and moor, they
also prevented the brief summer heat of the wayfaring sun from
entering with freedom, and hence the fires were needful in the summer
days as well--at least at the time my story commences, for then, as
generally, there were elderly and aged people in the house, who had to
help their souls to keep their bodies warm.
The house was very old. It had been built for more kinds of shelter than
need to be thought of in our days. For the enemies of our ancestors
were not only the cold, and the fierce wind, and the rain, and the snow;
they were men also--enemies harder to keep out than the raging storm
or the creeping frost. Hence the more hospitable a house could be, the
less must it look what it was: it must wear its face haughty, and turn its
smiles inward. The house of Glenwarlock, as it was also sometimes
called, consisted of three massive, narrow, tall blocks of building,
which showed little connection with each other beyond juxtaposition,
two of them standing end to end, with but a few feet of space between,
and the third at right angles to the two. In the two which stood end to
end, and were originally the principal parts, hardly any windows were
to be seen on the side that looked out into the valley; while in the third,
which, though looking much of the same age, was of later build, were

more windows, but none in the lowest story. Narrow as were these
buildings, and four stories high, they had a solid, ponderous look,
suggesting a thickness of the walls such as to leave little of a hollow
within for the indwellers--like great marine shells for a small mollusk.
On the other side was a kind of a court, completed by the stables and
cowhouses, and towards this court were most of the windows--many of
them for size more like those in the cottages around, than suggestive of
a house built by the lords of the soil. The court was now merely that of
a farmyard.
There must have been at one time outer defences to the castle, but they
were no longer to be distinguished by the inexperienced eye; and
indeed the; windowless walls of the house itself seemed strong enough
to repel any attack without artillery--except indeed the assailants had
got into the court. There were however some signs of the windows
there having been enlarged if not increased at a later period.
In the block that stood angle-wise to the rest, was the kitchen, the door
of which opened immediately on the court; and behind the kitchen, in
that part which had no windows to the valley, was the milk-cellar, as
they called the dairy, and places for household storage. A rough
causeway ran along the foot of the walls, connecting the doors in the
different blocks. Of these, the kitchen door for the most part stood open:
sometimes the snow would be coming fast down the wide chimney,
with little soft hisses in the fire, and the business of the house going on
without a thought of closing it, though from it you could