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The staircase terminated by a door opening into the alley of a garden, in which he again beheld the Zingaro hastening down a pleached walk. On two sides, the garden was surrounded by the buildings of the castle a huge old pile, partly castellated, and partly resembling an ecclesiastical building, on the other two sides, the enclosure was a high embattled wall.
But he was again silenced by Lord Huntinglen, who declared he would not hear a word on that topic, and proposed instead, that they should take a turn in the pleached alley, or sit upon the stone bench which overlooked the Thames, until his son's arrival should give the signal for dinner.
First, it was given under gas; then, the hall being darkened, a magnesium-light gave a moon-like radiance, in which the dew on the buds glistened, and the mignonette seemed to exhale a double perfume, and a dreamy melody of Mendelssohn sung by two sweet girl-voices floated out about the "pleached bower," like a song of nightingales.
It was his duty to acquaint her with the fact that the parliament was the army of God, fighting the great red dragon, one of whose seven heads was prelacy, the horn upon it the king, and Laud its crown. He wanted a stroll he would take the path through the woods and the shrubbery to the old sun-dial. She would not be there, of course, but he would walk up the pleached alley and call at the house.
There are but few places as yet in America which afford the clipped-box avenues, the arcades of blossoming rose-vines, the pleached alleys, the finely kept and perfect gravel-walks, or, Better than all, the quiet, old-fashioned gardens, down which the ladies may walk, rivals of the flowers.
The Chevalier des Meloises left the officers and proceeded down the steep road that led to the Palace. The gardens were quiet to-day a few loungers might be seen in the magnificent alleys, pleached walks, and terraces; beyond these gardens, however, stretched the King's wharves and the magazines of the Friponne.
The garden walks were not deserted: their beauty drew out many a couple who sauntered merrily, or lovingly, down the pleached avenues, which looked like the corridors of a gorgeously-decorated palace. Bigot and Angelique moved among the guests, receiving, as they passed, obsequious salutations, which to Angelique seemed a foretaste of royalty.
Whichever way she turned the eidolon of Caroline met her as a bar to all further progress in her design upon the Intendant. The dim half-vision of Caroline which she had seen in the pleached walk, she knew was only the shadow and projection of her own thoughts, a brooding fancy which she had unconsciously conjured up into the form of her hated rival.
The full dress version of the thought is glittering with new images like bracelets and brooches and ear-rings, and fringed with fresh adjectives like edges of embroidery. That one word pleached, an heir-loom from Queen Elizabeth's day, gives to the noble sonnet an antique dignity and charm like the effect of an ancestral jewel.
Though it was February the season was so soft that the orange and lemon trees had been put out in their earthen vases before the lemon-house, and the beds in the parterres were full of violets, daffodils and auriculas; but the scent of the orange-blossoms and the bright colours of the flowers moved Odo less than the noble ordonnance of the pleached alleys, each terminated by a statue or a marble seat; and when he came to the grotto where, amid rearing sea-horses and Tritons, a cascade poured from the grove above, his wonder passed into such delicious awe as hung him speechless on the hunchback's hand.
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