It was in reality nearer the Brad, which as seen foreshortened from it seemed to lave the roof of Frog Farm and sentinel it with its willows. Blackwater Hall should in fact—Jinny would jest—have been called Common Cottage. For it was just a way of living on the Common, protected from the elements, yet sucked up into them: a sort of transparent, transpirable shell amid this universal flying, fluttering, hopping, creeping, crawling, soaring, swooping, scampering, twisting, droning, humming, buzzing, barking, chirping, croaking, cawing, and singing: a human nest niched on the edge of a chaos of twigs, roots, old amorphous trunks, tangled faded fern-branches, mossy patches, gorse, ferruginous-leaved oaks, shrubs, ant-heaps innumerable, rabbit-warrens, wild apple, wild plum, black heather, and endless stubs to catch the feet, or branches to whip the face, or thorns to prick the fingers. A garden path to the Hall lay between homely flowers, periwinkle and marigold and the like.
Behind the Hall lay the Quarles estate of an acre and a lug or two, with its poultry-run, its tethered goats, its vegetables, its clothes-lines, its thatched stables, its odd sheds and little barn, and its well. If Daniel Quarles was not nid-nodding over his big Bible or on the bench in the front porch, or pruning the vine over the kitchen door, or exercising his lopping and topping rights on the Common, it was here the nonagenarian was to be found pottering: planting, hoeing, watering, or weeding. He would usually groom Methusalem of a morning—it was his way of asserting his hold over the business—and on Tuesday and Friday evenings, when the wayworn Jinny drove up along the grassy path ’twixt cottage and Common, rutted only from her own wheels, he would generally rub down Methusalem after high tea. Otherwise the multiform labour of house and land, of cooking and bread-baking and goat-milking and scrubbing and washing, all fell upon the little Carrier. And even the work the Gaffer did was far outbalanced by the work he made.
And yet it was Daniel’s personality, not Jinny’s, that was impressed on the house, even as his name remained on the cart. Her own exiguous claim upon life combined with piety and affection to leave everything as she had found it when he brought her here; not only in the big attic where eight had once huddled and which he now occupied in solitary state, sadly conscious of the great, snoreless silences, but in both the ground-floor rooms over which it stretched. The one with the window was the living-room, and the other—on which the front door opened and where a Dutch clock with hanging weights greeted the visitor with a cheery tick that relieved its deadness—was piled pell-mell with old cypress chests and other-litter of the progeny he had outlived, as well as with a few boxes or parcels left by neighbouring clients or as yet undelivered to them. These two rooms communicating, the box-room served both as a business office and a passage to the living-room, from the rear of which you ascended by a door the wriggling staircase to the patriarch’s big bedroom, or tumbled down two steps from another doorway to a combination of kitchen, larder, wood-cellar, and scullery, lit up and aired by one small swinging pane, a den which even Jinny could not keep free of cobwebs and smells. Here was the Gaffer’s beer-barrel, and the thumb-hole tray, painted with tigers, on which she brought in his morning draught from it. Here also were the jug and basin of her toilette, for bedroom Jinny had none; the need of disturbing the ancient chests or the office—which would have been a sad blow to her grandfather—being avoided through the fortunate talent of the chest of drawers in the living-room for turning into a bed. Its drawers, in which the bedding was concealed, would come out and hook on to one another, while legs would swivel out from beneath them.