An ancient beech tree swept
the ground with smooth, grey limbs, surrounded by long-accumulated dead
leaves. James Polder shut off the motor by the low, stone wall that
supported the lawn from the roadway; he crossed to the farm, where the
house keys were kept, and Howat and Mariana moved slowly forward. A
porch, added, the former said, in Jasper Penny's time, extended at the
left; and they stood on the broken flooring and gazed down at a
featureless tangle once a garden and the gnarled remainder of a small
apple orchard beyond.
Polder soon returned, and they proceeded to a door on the further side,
where the kitchen angle partly enclosed a flagging of broad stones.
Inside, the house, empty of furnishing, was a place of echoes muffled in
dust; the insidious, dank odours of corrupting wood and plaster; walls
with melancholy, superimposed, stripping papers; older, sombrely
blistered paint and panelled wainscoting varnished in an imitation,
yellow graining. It was without a relic of past dignity. Mariana was
unable to discover a souvenir of the generations of Pennys that had
filled the rooms with the stir of their living. Once more outside they
sat on the stone threshold of an office-like structure back of the main
dwelling and indulged in cigarettes.
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