The Hall and the Grange: A Novel

Colonel Eldridge was enjoying an afternoon doze, or a series of dozes, in the Sabbath peace of his garden. His enjoyment was positive, for he had a prejudice against sleeping in the day-time, and sat upright in his basket chair with no support to his head; so that when sleep began to overtake him he nodded heavily and woke up again. If he had provided himself with a cushion from one of the chairs or lounges by his side, he would have slumbered blissfully, but would have been lost to the charm of his surroundings. These included a great expanse of lawn, mown and rolled and tended to a sheeny perfection of soft rich colour; the deep shade of nobly branching trees in their dark dress of mid-July; bright flower-beds; the terraced front of a squarely built stone house of a comfortably established age. These were for the eye to rest upon after one of those heavy nods, and to carry their message of spacious seclusion and domestic well-being. For the other senses there were messages that conveyed the same meaning—the hot brooding peace of the July afternoon, tempered by the soft stirring of flower-scented breezes, the drone of bees and of insects less usefully employed, the occasional sweet pipe of birds still mindful of earlier courtships, the grateful and secure absence of less mundane sounds. The house was empty, except for servants, who obtruded themselves neither on sight nor hearing. The tennis net on the levelled space by the rose garden hung in idle curves. Colonel Eldridge had the whole wide verdurous garden to himself, and the house, too, if he cared to enter it. Though he liked to have his family around him as a general rule, he found it pleasant to keep his own company thus for an hour or so. He was just approaching the time when one of those droops which punctuated his light slumbers would wake him up to a more lively sense of well-being, and he would take up the book that lay on his knee, when his half-closed eyes took in a figure emerging from the trees among which the lawn lost itself at the lower end of the garden. He aroused himself and waved a welcoming hand, which meant among other things: "Here you have a wide-awake man reading a book on Sunday afternoon, but you need not be afraid of disturbing him." The grateful lassitude, however, which enveloped his frame prevented his rising to greet his brother, who came towards him with an answering wave of the hand, and took a seat by his side.