“Ah! you will know. They moan and look from corners; or swing from the cobwebs and clutch at you as you go by. You will know. Did I frighten you last night?”
“You startled me, you jade.”
She clapped her hands merrily. Her laugh was the most weird concatenation of rippling discords the baronet had ever heard.
“Poor gentleman!” she said. “Perhaps you shall see my museum for recompense. Will you come?”
“By and by, maybe. Is my breakfast ready?”
She nodded again, with her lips set, and vanished from the room.
CHAPTER VII.
About mid-day Mr. Tuke sat himself down, like a man thoroughly wearied, in his great flagged hall—which, with a fancifulness of conceit, he had dubbed his dining-room—and summarized, with a completely depressed air, the fruits of his morning’s exploration. Briefly, these included, in the matter of “furnished apartments,” the chamber in which he rested—whereof the plainest of necessaries was comprised in a table and a few chairs; his bedroom, already described; two little closets in the north wing, appropriated to Dennis and his sister, and very modestly equipped; and a kitchen embellished with a basketful of odd pots and pans. For the rest, a score of rooms, large and small—of direct access, or approached by way of tortuous passages, whereby unexpected steps to nowhere were the least harmful of many pitfalls and obstructions—represented the present value of his inheritance, and so far as they went, a purely negative one, inasmuch as it seemed that the small fortune that would be required to put them into a moderate state of repair, would be sufficient to purchase elsewhere a messuage in sound and habitable condition.
And, without, it had been the same. The stables, substantial as the house, were in a like condition of neglect. His horse he had found ensconced in a battered stall and feeding out of a bushel basket. All the contiguous offices, of less durable material than the main building—which was of stone, coated with some form of plaster—were lamentably dilapidated and threatening to a collapse that should be general.
Clearly, unless the sum standing to his credit should prove to be a considerable one, he must give up all thought of adequately repairing the ravages of time.