Turning to one side, however, he
quickly found an entrance to a labyrinthine walk, which led him at
last to an open space and a rustic summer-house that stood beneath
a gnarled and venerable pear-tree. The summerhouse was a quaint
stockade of dark madrono boughs thatched with red-wood bark,
strongly suggestive of deeper woodland shadow. But in strange
contrast, the floor, table, and benches were thickly strewn with
faded rose-leaves, scattered as if in some riotous play of
children. Captain Carroll brushed them aside hurriedly with his
impatient foot, glanced around hastily, then threw himself on the
rustic bench at full length and twisted his mustache between his
nervous fingers. Then he rose as suddenly, with a few white petals
impaled on his gilded spurs and stepped quickly into the open
sunlight.
He must have been mistaken! Everything was quiet around him, the
far-off sound of wheels in the avenue came faintly, but nothing
more.
His eye fell upon the pear-tree, and even in his preoccupation he
was struck with the signs of its extraordinary age. Twisted out of
all proportion, and knotted with excrescences, it was supported by
iron bands and heavy stakes, as if to prop up its senile decay. He
tried to interest himself in the various initials and symbols
deeply carved in bark, now swollen and half obliterated. As he
turned back to the summer-house, he for the first time noticed that
the ground rose behind it into a long undulation, on the crest of
which the same singular profusion of rose-leaves were scattered.
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