E Phillips Oppenheim

The New Tenant E Phillips Oppenheim

Thurwell Court, by Thurwell-on-the-Sea, lay bathed in the quiet freshness of an earlymorning. The dewdrops were still sparkling upon the terraced lawns like little globules offlashing silver, and the tumult of noisy songsters from the thick shrubberies alone brokethe sweet silence. The peacocks strutting about the grey stone balcony and perched uponthe worn balustrade were in deshabille, not being accustomed to display their splendors toan empty paradise, and the few fat blackbirds who were hopping about on the lawn did soin a desultory manner, as though they were only half awake and had turned out underprotest. Stillness reigned everywhere, but it was the sweet hush of slowly awakening dayrather than the drowsy, languorous quiet of exhausted afternoon. With one's eyes shut onecould tell that the pulse of day was only just beginning to beat. The pure atmosphere wasbuoyant with the vigorous promise of morning, and gently laden with the mingledperfumes of slowly opening flowers. There was life in the breathless air. The sunlight was everywhere. In the distance it lay upon the dark hillside, played upon thedeep yellow gorse and purple heather of the moorland, and, further away still, flashed upona long silver streak of the German Ocean. In the old-fashioned gardens of the court it shoneupon luscious peaches hanging on the time-mellowed red-brick walls; lit up the face andgleamed upon the hands of the stable clock, and warmed the ancient heart of the stooping, grey-haired old gardener's help who, with blinking eyes and hands tucked in his trouserspockets, was smoking a matutinal pipe, seated on the wheelbarrow outside the tool shed. Around the mansion itself it was very busy, casting a thousand sunbeams upon its long lineof oriel windows, and many quaint shadows of its begabled roof upon the lawns and brightflower-beds below. On one of the terraces a breakfast-table was laid for two, and here itssplendour was absolutely dazzling. It gleamed upon the sparkling silver, and the snowwhite tablecloth; shone with a delicate softness upon the freshly-gathered fruit andbrilliant flowers, and seemed to hover with a gentle burnished light upon the ruddy goldenhair of a girl who sat there waiting, with her arm resting lightly upon the stone balustrade, and her eyes straying over the quaint well-kept gardens to the open moorland and darkpatches of wooded country beyon