FullReads

‘Ah, she’s a charming child, a most interesting little creature,’ the Colonel said to Lyon. ‘She does the most remarkable things.’

Mrs. Capadose stopped, in the rustling procession that followed the hostess out of the room. ‘Don’t tell him, please don’t,’ she said.

‘Don’t tell him what?’

‘Why, what she does. Let him find out for himself.’ And she passed on.

‘She thinks I swagger about the child–that I bore people,’ said the Colonel. ‘I hope you smoke.’ He appeared ten minutes later in the smoking-room, in a brilliant equipment, a suit of crimson foulard covered with little white spots. He gratified Lyon’s eye, made him feel that the modern age has its splendour too and its opportunities for costume. If his wife was an antique he was a fine specimen of the period of colour: he might have passed for a Venetian of the sixteenth century. They were a remarkable couple, Lyon thought, and as he looked at the Colonel standing in bright erectness before the chimney-piece while he emitted great smoke-puffs he did not wonder that Everina could not regret she had not married him. All the gentlemen collected at Stayes were not smokers and some of them had gone to bed. Colonel Capadose remarked that there probably would be a smallish muster, they had had such a hard day’s work. That was the worst of a hunting-house–the men were so sleepy after dinner; it was devilish stupid for the ladies, even for those who hunted themselves–for women were so extraordinary, they never showed it. But most fellows revived under the stimulating influences of the smoking-room, and some of them, in this confidence, would turn up yet. Some of the grounds of their confidence–not all of them–might have been seen in a cluster of glasses and bottles on a table near the fire, which made the great salver and its contents twinkle sociably. The others lurked as yet in various improper corners of the minds of the most loquacious. Lyon was alone with Colonel Capadose for some moments before their companions, in varied eccentricities of uniform, straggled in, and he perceived that this wonderful man had but little loss of vital tissue to repair.

They talked about the house, Lyon having noticed an oddity of construction in the smoking-room; and the Colonel explained that it consisted of two distinct parts, one of which was of very great antiquity. They were two complete houses in short, the old one and the new, each of great extent and each very fine in its way. The two formed together an enormous structure–Lyon must make a point of going all over it. The modern portion had been erected by the old man when he bought the property; oh yes, he had bought it, forty years before–it hadn’t been in the family: there hadn’t been any particular family for it to be in. He had had the good taste not to spoil the original house–he had not touched it beyond what was just necessary for joining it on. It was very curious indeed–a most irregular, rambling, mysterious pile, where they every now and then discovered a walled-up room or a secret staircase. To his mind it was essentially gloomy, however; even the modern additions, splendid as they were, failed to make it cheerful. There was some story about a skeleton having been found years before, during some repairs, under a stone slab of the floor of one of the passages; but the family were rather shy of its being talked about. The place they were in was of course in the old part, which contained after all some of the best rooms: he had an idea it had been the primitive kitchen, half modernised at some intermediate period.

‘My room is in the old part too then–I’m very glad,’ Lyon said. ‘It’s very comfortable and contains all the latest conveniences, but I observed the depth of the recess of the door and the evident antiquity of the corridor and staircase–the first short one–after I came out. That panelled corridor is admirable; it looks as if it stretched away, in its brown dimness (the lamps didn’t seem to me to make much impression on it), for half a mile.’