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East of the yellow-washed, brown-bound fort of Sao Thiago Minor, the island patron, rises a huge white pile, or rather piles, the Lazaretto, with its three-arched bridge spanning the Wady Goncalo Ayres. The fears of the people forbid its being used, although separated from them by a mile of open space.
The impatient horses, getting their heads, swung away down Sandyfield Street scattering a litter of merry, little, black pigs and remonstrant fowls to right and left past modest village shop, and yellow-washed tavern, and red, lichen-stained cottage, beneath the row of tall Lombardy poplars that raised their brown-gray spires to the blue-gray of the autumn sky.
His donkey-chair had been left at the yellow-washed mill beneath the grove of silvery-leaved, ever-rustling, balsam poplars.
The brick floor had never known other cleansing than sprinkling and sweeping, the yellow-washed walls had become with time a pale, mottled brown, the paint had disappeared under a fixed dinginess which the dusting-brush alone could not remove, and the glass of the windows had never been washed except by the rain. Yet, for all that, the place had an air of cleanliness.
At Prajano the wooden doors of green faded to the hue of ancient bronze, the yellow-washed plaster façade and the lichen-covered tiles of the roof and tower make up a charming mass of varied colouring when viewed against the broad blue band of sea and sky beyond. Within, the church is mean and tawdry, just a “Sad charnel-house of humble hopes and crimes, Long dead and buried in obscurity;”
The district is a singular one, suggestive of some sleepy little dead-alive seaport town rather than of London. Quaint water-ways, crossed by foot-bridges, burrow in between small low cottages and warehouses. Some of these have overhanging upper stories to them, are half-timbered or yellow-washed. Some are built wholly of wood. There is an all-pervading odour of tar and hempen rope.
A portress with a rosy smiling face admitted him into a visitors' room, a small but cosy place, with vases of flowers on the table, sacred pictures and a black-and-white crucifix on the yellow-washed walls. Here a Sister clad in conventual garb came to inquire his business.
He walked half the length of the floor and began studying the walls and the bare rafters of the ceiling. These last had once been yellow-washed, age and dust having turned the kalsomine to an old-gold tint, reminding him of a ceiling belonging to a Venetian palace.
A yellow-washed garden-wall on one side, the brook on the other, there was not room for the phaeton to pass. "Whistle," Richard commanded over his shoulder. And the wooden image thereby galvanised into immediate activity whistled shrilly, but without result as far as the waggon was concerned. "The fellow's asleep. Go and tell him to pull out of the way."
Involuntarily they turned to follow the pointing finger, and saw the yellow-washed wall, and the wreath of autumn leaves that always hung there. "What is it, Rejoice?" cried Mandy, terrified. "What do you see? Is it a spirit? Tell us, for pity's sake!" But even at that moment a change came.
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