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Chapter LII
After a long time, the schoolmaster appeared at the wicket-gate of the
churchyard, and hurried towards them, Tingling in his hand, as he
came along, a bundle of rusty keys. He was quite breathless with
pleasure and haste when he reached the porch, and at first could only
point towards the old building which the child had been
contemplating so earnestly.
'You see those two old houses,' he said at last.
'Yes, surely,' replied Nell. 'I have been looking at them nearly all the
time you have been away.'
'And you would have looked at them more curiously yet, if you could
have guessed what I have to tell you,' said her friend. 'One of those
houses is mine.'
Without saying any more, or giving the child time to reply, the
schoolmaster took her hand, and, his honest face quite radiant with
exultation, led her to the place of which he spoke.
They stopped before its low arched door. After trying several of the
keys in vain, the schoolmaster found one to fit the huge lock, which
turned back, creaking, and admitted them into the house.
The room into which they entered was a vaulted chamber once nobly
ornamented by cunning architects, and still retaining, in its beautiful
groined roof and rich stone tracery, choice remnants of its ancient
splendour. Foliage carved in the stone, and emulating the mastery of
Nature's hand, yet remained to tell how many times the leaves outside
had come and gone, while it lived on unchanged. The broken figures
supporting the burden of the chimney-piece, though mutilated, were
still distinguishable for what they had been - far different from the
dust without - and showed sadly by the empty hearth, like creatures
who had outlived their kind, and mourned their own too slow decay.
In some old time - for even change was old in that old place - a
wooden partition had been constructed in one part of the chamber to
form a sleeping-closet, into which the light was admitted at the same
period by a rude window, or rather niche, cut in the solid wall. This
screen, together with two seats in the broad chimney, had at some
forgotten date been part of the church or convent; for the oak, hastily
appropriated to its present purpose, had been little altered from its
former shape, and presented to the eye a pile of fragments of rich
carving from old monkish stalls.
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