University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.

The house of Argus Gates stood at the end of
an almost unused street, in the populous town of
Kent, once a great seaport. In the old Province records
there is a volume of actions in which Kent
Bay and Kent Bar figure; their storms and disasters
are the memorial treasures of the present time.
The old laws so arbitrarily provided for the encroachments,
changes, accidents of the sea, its shoals,
sands, and rocks, that the inhabitants of Kent have
ever since rested upon their provisions, and look for
no geographical change. Meantime Commerce has
gone elsewhere. Mariners found the White Flat dangerous,
the harbor not navigable, the coast to be
avoided. A hundred younger towns on the Atlantic
coast now surpass Kent; her sails are passing sails,
her hulls wrecked hulls rotting in the sand. The
old piers have tumbled in, and fallen apart; the
black seaweeds are rooted in their own decayed beds
on the foundations; and patches of sorrel grow in
the gravelly tops. The ware-houses are empty along
the water-side; their derricks rattle and swing in the
wind, like empty gibbets. The aristocracy of Kent,
as well as its crowd of laborers, has vanished, leaving
its noble names to monuments, streets, and hills. The
old estates are worse than obliterated; straggling

lanes, crumbling tenements, and pasture tracts represent
an ancient régime, which boasted of the exiled
names of Raleigh, Halifax, and Brooks. From
King's Hill, opposite Temple House, to Apsley River,
where Cyrus Brande's forge stood, Kent was in no
wise the proud, dictatorial, prosperous Kent of former
times. Still the business of ordinary life flourished;
there was buying and selling; the land was tilled, the
sea harvested. Religion, the Supreme Court, the
newspapers, marriage, birth and death, were all established
in the old town.

Kent was not the birth-place of Argus. Temple
House had come to him when a young man, by the
unexpected will of a distant relative, whom he had
never heard of till he heard the tidings of his possession
as an elder son. Being about to sail on his
first voyage as captain, he sent his wife, whom he
had not been married to long, to take possession of
the house, and departed with the determination to
settle in Kent, and seek further fortune from that port.
His wife was dismayed at the size and splendor of
the house. It was full of antique furniture, comfortless
rubbish, in her estimation. Some of it she sold,
some she broke up and and burned, the remainder she
packed in the garret with the portrait of Madame
Temple, the donor of the house, and several other umber-colored
pictures. Argus was a poor man, and his
wages, which were those of a captain of a merchantman,
only furnished the necessities of life; consequently
she could not replace the old furniture with
new, and Temple House was never, in the common acceptation

of the term, furnished. She only used the
great kitchen, and the green room before spoken of,
which she made habitable with the articles belonging
to her simple wedding outfit. Considering the sea
the natural grave of her family, she could not endure
the sight of it, and was thankful for the long espalier,
the stone-mortared wall behind it, and the high ware-house
which screened the quay, and almost shut out
every glimpse of the bay. She loved the old summer-house
best, and strayed with the old, old Provence
and Damask roses, herself as sweet and wild a
rose. A beautiful lawn stretched to the edge of the
bank at the back of which the house was built, so
she saw nothing of the life in the street below; it
was pleasanter for that. When not in the garden
that first long summer, she was in the green room
watching the elms on the lawn. So she lived, waiting
for the return of Argus.

In due time he came, and looked at his property
with amazement. It was the broken and depreciated
estate of the last member of a “first family.” This
was attested by the town records, which he looked into
for the purpose of discovering the antecedents of
Madame Temple. Her portrait was brought out, and
he made a study of it to see what was buried in her
face, and if there was any affinity between them. It
proved a sphinx in both particulars, but Argus hung
it in its old place in the hall. When his wife told
him what she had done with the belongings of the
house he turned red, as if some of the Temple blood
tingled in his veins after all, but he only laughed and

chucked her under the chin. Musing upon the
matter, he concluded not to discuss the subject; the
house must remain a ruin, and he would not ask her
to be happy in it. He felt a blind compunction
towards her, but his resolve never changed. Nor did
he speak of the absolute presentiment which clung
to him, that in this ruin, whatever the vicissitudes of
the coming years, he should end his life.

One day, just before he went to sea again, when
the garden paths were full of rustling leaves, and only
the thorns grew on the rose trees, they walked to the
summer-house, and having a brighter, happier feeling
towards the place, she kissed him, and told him she
loved the garden, and would think the summer-house
her own domain. She could not love the old desolate
haunted house, however; it was not fit for poor, young
people like themselves. An echo of grandeur could not
make up for its want of comfort; but she would not
complain. Argus kissed her, but was silent. No,
she repeated, she would never complain; not if he
chose to hang the umber-colored pictures in the very
room where she slept.

“Let us get the lay of the land, now that we are
out,” he said abruptly. “I believe I do not understand
the premises thoroughly.”

They crossed the garden, went round the grounds,
and looked at the outside bounds. Argus described
and named every spot, as though he was making a
chart. On the town side they were shut in by an
alley, along which stood a row of mean houses, whose
sheds and yards came up to the empty stables and

out-buildings inside the wall. A door, padlocked
in it, communicated with the alley at the upper end.
Beyond the premises at the rear, where poplar and
button-wood trees grew, wild, grassy pastures stretched,
marshy towards the high shores of the bay, and
hilly towards the town. On all sides they were shut
in from the bay, the town, and the common business
of life. Argus was so well satisfied with his survey,
that he was on the point of expressing his satisfaction,
but seeing that his wife's eyes were fixed on the
high dormer windows, higher than King's Hill even,
he forbore. They wandered back to the garden, and
sat in the summer-house again, and once more kissed
each other with those kisses which for the moment
disenthrall mortals from the burden and influence of
the universe.

The yellow twilight creeping round them, the flame
edged clouds rolling down with sunset, the inarticulate
noise of tree and bush, the sound of the drowsy
sea pushing on Kent beach a mile away, were always
remembered by Mrs. Gates; perhaps Argus also treasured
the hour in his memory. At last they went
into the house, and their mood naturally slipped
away. She busied herself with supper, while Argus
stood in the embrasure of the green-room window,
and continued his mental inventory of his property.

It is possible that the ownership of Temple House
influenced the temporal affairs of Argus more than
he supposed. A vessel was offered him, within a
year from this time, and a venture in the cargo, which
he accepted, and made money by. Meantime his wife

had departed. Swiftly and silently her brief, short
life ended. He found her grave in the high hill yard
where the Temple ancestry slept—her closed eyes
and deaf ears insensible to the sight and sound of
shore and sea, to obtain which the living often sought
the hill. From the day that Argus went there, he
hated the scene which broke upon his vision. The
raging white surf breaking on the white beach, that
darted like a tongue from the headland below the
town; the sand-stained ripples of the one, and the
beating waves of the other; the glittering capes,
stretching into the circle of the sea; the restless
clouds spreading and sinking in the horizon, borrowed
his grief, and mirrored it in his mind again.
It was a moment when nature seemed only capable
of leading the soul to death.

He remained a month or two alone in Temple
House, brooding over his past, or, it may be, planning
his future, no one really knew which. Cyrus
Brande, the only man who was intrusted with his
affairs, pretended ignorance when questioned concerning
them. When Argus had been gone a week
Mr. Brande circulated a report that the house would
be closed for some time, and for information concerning
Captain Gates application must be made at the
office of Brande's Forge. Nobody ever applied, and
no information was obtained at the office; the clumsy
key of the front door at Temple House hung on a
nail for years. Meantime the velvet moss thickened
on the roof; the rose-trees and shrubs mixed their
leaves with the black mould in the garden paths;

the mortar powdered in the crevices of the walls, and
ran down like the sand in an hour-glass; and the
edges of the bank crumbled and slid into the street,
threatening to wear the lawn to its level before Argus
returned.

But he did return, taking the key of his house
from Mr. Brande's office as quietly as he had brought
it there. He found the town at work on his premises,
walling the bank from the quay below them to the
corner of the alley above. His lawn gate now opened
into the gully, which was so deep opposite—the other
side being the walled portion of King's Hill—that
only a strip of sky could be seen over it. To make
his house more suitable for solitary confinement, he
repaired his garden wall, replaced the old brick
coping, and mended the roof with slate stones.