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It was a humble dwelling of plastered stone standing between two tall fir-trees, with ivy growing over the walls, lilies and hollyhocks blooming in the garden. Pierre found it not half so good a house as "L'Alouette." But to the custodian it was more precious than a palace. In this upper room with its low mullioned window the Maid began her life.
There are, or were, a great many old halls in Lancashire that belonged to the old families, which have now for the most part disappeared. Hollins was between the two extremes, and when in its perfection, must have been rather a good specimen, with its mullioned windows, its numerous gables, and its formal front garden, with a straight avenue beyond.
But that it was at the original homestead of the Swetmans can be shown in various ways; chiefly by the unbroken traditions of the family, and indirectly by the evidence of the walls themselves, which are the only ones thereabout with windows mullioned in the Elizabethan manner, and plainly of a date anterior to the event; while those of the other house might well have been erected fifty or eighty years later, and probably were; since the choice of Swetman's house by the fugitive was doubtless dictated by no other circumstance than its then suitable loneliness.
It is the place where there is a small fifteenth-century villa, with those mullioned windows like Palazzo di Venezia, and a little portico, seeming to tell, among the rubbish heaps and onions, of Riario and Borgia suppers.
The front of the house exhibited an ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-colored freestone from local quarries. The ashlar of the walls, where not overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every shade, intensifying its luxuriance with its nearness to the ground, till, below the plinth, it merged in moss.
The rooms had deep mullioned windows east and west, and very handsome groined ceilings, and were entered by two steps down from the gallery round the upper part of the hall.
It was a humble dwelling of plastered stone, standing between two tall fir-trees, with ivy growing over the walls, lilies and hollyhocks blooming in the garden. Pierre found it not half so good a house as "L'Alouette." But to the custodian it was more precious than a palace. In this upper room with its low mullioned window the Maid began her life.
It faces to the south, so that the little court between the gables is a veritable sun-trap, wherein grow magnolia and jessamine; while roses, Dutch honeysuckle, clematis and wistaria cover the whole front of the house and almost hide the mullioned windows.
To Gimblet, examining it from the outside, it looked as if the room had been hewn out of the solid walls of the ancient fortress; for beyond the mullioned, seventeenth-century window, the wall turned sharply to the left and was continued with scarce a loophole in the stupendous blocks of its surface for a distance of fifty yards or so, where it was succeeded by the lower, less heavy battlements of the old out-works.
Gradually the embers grew paler; the figures in the tapestry more shadowy; the columned and curtained bed loomed out vaguer; the room seemed to fill with greyness; and my eyes wandered to the mullioned bow-window, beyond whose panes, between whose heavy stonework, stretched a greyish-brown expanse of sore and sodden park grass, dotted with big oaks; while far off, behind a jagged fringe of dark Scotch firs, the wet sky was suffused with the blood-red of the sunset.
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