She shivered, and the gay smile faded on her lips. Their footsteps fell forlorn upon the stone floor. David now seemed to drift apart from her, to move unsubstantial in these forsaken haunts of grandeur. But it was her nature to re-act against such impressions. Her alert eye noted the moth in the tapestry, the rust on the armour, the dust lying thick on the white marble heads and limbs of statues that kept spectre company in the semi-darkness.
“Oh,” she cried suddenly, “what red fires we shall have on these cold hearths! How the village maids shall rub and scrub! How God’s good sunshine shall come pouring in through those dull windows! How rosy this Venus shall shine under the glow of the stained glass!”
He turned to her, as if called by the sound of the young voice back from the habitual grey dream that his own silent home had come to be for him.
“See, cousin David, poor Diana too! She has not felt on her breast a breath of sweet woodland air, I verily believe, since—since I left the place myself these ten years. She shall spring,” added Ellinor, after a moment’s abstraction, “from a grove of palms. And when the wind blows free, the shadow of the leaves shall fall to and fro upon her and cheat her forest heart. At least”—catching herself up as she noted his eye fixed upon her with a strange look—“at least, Sir David, if you will so permit.”
He still looked at her musingly. In reality he was going over the mere sound of her words in his mind, as a man might recall the sweetness of a strain of music.
“You shall have a free hand,” he said. “And, once more, what you do shall be well done.”
An odd sense of emotion took hold of her, she knew not why. More to conceal it than from any set intent, she moved forward and turned the handle of the door that, on the other side of the hall, led to the suite of drawing-rooms. He followed close and they looked in together. The vast abandoned apartment was full of a musty darkness.
“Heavens!” she cried, “do they never open a window?”
Narrow slits of light darting in from the divisions in the shutters cut through the heavy air and revealed, when their eyes had grown accustomed to this deeper gloom, the shapeless, huddled rows of linen-covered furniture.
“Ghosts—ghosts!” said David under his breath.