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Updated: June 29, 2025
At any rate, the walls of the new chapel were mounting higher and higher all through February, and by the end of the first week in March there stood immediately opposite to the Vicarage gate a hideously ugly building, roofless, doorless, windowless; with those horrid words, "New Salem, 186 " legibly inscribed on a visible stone inserted above the doorway, a thing altogether as objectionable to the eyes of a Church of England parish clergyman as the imagination of any friend or enemy could devise.
From the back he found his way into the roofless hall, and there paced quietly up and down, measuring the floor, and guessing at the height and thickness of the walls, and the sort of roof they had borne. He noted that the wall of the house rose higher than those of the ruin with which it was in contact; and that there was a window in it just over one of those walls.
There was an end of white-capped grandmothers in doorways; an end of people working in the fields. Rents in the roofless walls of unoccupied houses stared at the passer-by. We were in a dead land.
Here are no squalid hovels and roofless sheds where half-starved cattle share the misery of their owners; no rotting crops and naked pastures; but snug homestead, flower gardens, and neat wooden fences encircling fields of golden grain and rich green meadow land.
They passed two or three houses that had been made roofless by the recent storm, and once or twice they came on a fallen tree-trunk with its thin leaves yellowing on the fading grass. Kate was floating vaguely through these sights and sounds. It was all like a dream to her a waking dream in shadow-land. She knew where she was and where she was going. Some glimmering of hope was left yet.
Aveluy itself, being within a mile and a half of enemy gun positions for nearly two years of war, is knocked about, and rather roofless and windowless. A cross-road leading to the causeway across the valley once gave the place some little importance. Not far to the north of Aveluy, the road runs for more than a mile through the Wood of Aveluy, which is a well-grown plantation of trees and shrubs.
Many old carvings that belonged to it are heaped together there; but the water has disappeared, though, had it been a natural spring, it would have outlasted all the heavy stone-work. As far as we were able, and could find our way, we went through every room of the palace, all round the four sides. From the first floor upwards it is entirely roofless.
One of the towers was said to have been the residence of Queen Eleanor; and this was better lighted than the others, containing an oriel-window, looking out of a little oratory, as it seemed to be, with groined arches and traces of ornamental sculpture, so that we could dress up some imperfect image of a queenly chamber, though the tower was roofless and floorless.
I rose and went softly to the ivy-covered gateway of the old garden, and the place seemed transfigured in the white moonlight. Even the kitchen vegetables lost their homely, prosaic aspect. I stole to the lilac-bush, and peered at the home that had been roofless through all the wild storm.
It might have been a plan of the house and grounds, or it might not I can only report that he took the path which led him, by the shortest way, to the ruined Abbey church. As he entered the roofless inclosure, he reverently removed his hat. It was impossible for me to follow him any further, without exposing myself to the risk of discovery.
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