I set the lamp again upon the table. The old man was right, I thought sadly. There was in that room philosophy which it would indeed profit me to study.
Mr. Curwen returned, rubbing his long, delicate hands one against the other in a flush of triumph.
"I have given orders," he said, and with a gentle accent of conscious pride he repeated the phrase—"I have given orders, Mr. Clavering. You will sleep in my boy's room, and since you are, as I say, very like to him in size——" But his voice trembled, and he turned away and lifted the lamp from the table.
"I will show you the room," he said.
I followed him into the hall, up the staircase, and down a long passage to the very end of the house.
A door stood open. Mr. Curwen led me through it. The room was warmly furnished, and hung with curtains of a dark green, while a newly-lit fire was crackling in the hearth. A couple of candles were burning on the mantelpiece, and Mary Tyson was arranging the bed. She took no notice of me whatever as I entered, being busy with the bed, as I thought.
"You can go, Mary," said Mr. Curwen, with a timid friendliness plainly intended to appease.
Mary sniffed for an answer, and as she turned to go I saw that she had been crying.
"She was Harry's nurse, poor woman," explained Mr. Curwen. "You must forgive her, Mr. Clavering." And then, "He died at Malplaquet."
He crossed over to the bed, and stood looking down at it silently in a very fixed attitude. Then he took up from it a white silk stocking. I approached him, and saw that a suit of white satin was neatly folded upon the white counterpane.