The house was
built in the eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in the style of
a French chateau, and save for one pass among the crests which opens to
blue distances, to minute, remote, oast-set farm-houses and copses
and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water, its hundred
and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own wide and handsome
territories. A semi-circular screen of great beeches masks the church
and village, which cluster picturesquely about the high road along the
skirts of the great park. Northward, at the remotest corner of that
enclosure, is a second dependent village, Ropedean, less fortunate in
its greater distance and also on account of a rector. This divine
was indeed rich, but he was vindictively economical because of some
shrinkage of his tithes; and by reason of his use of the word Eucharist
for the Lord's Supper he had become altogether estranged from the great
ladies of Bladesover. So that Ropedean was in the shadows through all
that youthful time.
Now the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair large
house, dominating church, village and the country side, was that they
represented the thing that mattered supremely in the world, and that all
other things had significance only in relation to them.
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