“But when it’s a matter of old masters?” she pursued, with her pale eyes fixed on his face.
“Oh, they’re all pretty much evaluated,” he told her, “provided they are old masters.”
She was about to speak again, but an interruption came in the form of a slow and distant clangor. It was a dinner gong, Conkling suspected. There was, however, no note of blitheness in its summons. It fell on his ears as depressingly mournful as a bell-buoy tolling over a fog-bound reef. It made him think of bells that he had heard in the second act of Macbeth.
“We are about to take tea,” announced Georgina Keswick with the utmost solemnity, “and I trust you will give us the honor of your company.”
Conkling was tempted to smile at this ponderous unbending. But he became sober again as he caught sight of a slender young figure in organdie passing from one side of the old manor to the other.
“That’s very kind of you,” he said, with his gaze following the girl in organdie as she disappeared through one of the French windows. “I should like to very much.”
He saw, as he started toward the house again, the solitary and stately peacock, perched motionless on the moldering upper bar of a grape trellis. He couldn’t help wondering why it had no mate. He couldn’t help wondering how it endured that decrepid grandeur of burnished crest and plume unshared by another. And he couldn’t help wondering, as he meekly followed the gaunt and solemn woman in rusty black across the parched lawn-slopes, just what was ahead of him.
CHAPTER THREE
Conkling found himself in a faded room with faded damask curtains. It was a somber and musty-smelling room, but two walls of it were lined with open bookshelves edged with pinked morocco and surmounted by three Tanagra figurines which momentarily made him forget the mustiness about him. He caught sight of a carved leggio that must have come from the choir of an Italian church, and a mahogany pedestal table with dragon-claw feet on which stood a brass candelabrum with a square marble base. Yet the next moment he was shuddering inwardly at the sight of a handworked fire screen. On this screen, with thread and needle, patient fingers had fabricated a foolish landscape of waterfall and woodland and strolling ladies in hoop-skirts. It impressed him as not so much a monument of wasted effort as it was a betrayal of a childish and impoverished outlook on life. And the house began to depress him, for even the black horsehair furniture so in need of repair became significant of a mean discomfort heroically endured.
His feeling of depression increased when the second sister entered the room. She came austere and silent and arrayed in plum-colored moiré. She impressed him as having hurriedly changed for the occasion and as still chafing under the necessity for that change. She seemed bonier and more muscular than her sister Georgina, and when Conkling saw her hands, calloused and toil-hardened and bloodless as bird claws, he was persuaded that she had been called away from labor in some neighboring field. Even her bow of greeting was a hostile one. And the young man in the stiff-backed horsehair chair fell to wondering why she had been so resolutely commandeered from her agrarian activities; and why, also, he was being so laboriously introduced into that house of sinister antiquities. He expected, until he saw tea actually being served, that the girl, Julia Keswick, would be included in the gathering. But in this he was disappointed.