The boy was silent awhile. Perhaps he was thinking of kind Mrs Angell, and of Alse, and of what sort of substitute the old witch woman would make for those gentle ministrants.
‘Yes,’ he said presently, ‘I shall like to see Nol porter,’ and was quiet again, turning over something in his mind. ‘Clerivault,’ he said then, ‘was what is in the house, my—my bed, I mean, and the rest of the things, here before we and the others came?’
‘Narry one, Sir,’ was the answer. ‘The place was as naked as my hand. What thou seest was sent down from his Honour’s house in London. Think not but there’ll be more despatched anon. We’ll have a cosy nest before we’re finished.’
It came to be as he said, indeed, a great cargo of furniture, including many pictures and a quantity of valuable plate and knicknacks, arriving presently by convoy; yet there was never enough, all told, to make more than a scanty show about the house, and to the last the majority of the rooms remained as when Brion first saw them, vacant of everything but dust and spiders.
‘What makes you to ask?’ questioned Clerivault, a little curiously.
‘I was thinking,’ said Brion, ‘of him that lived here before us.’
The man’s countenance fell.
‘Who told you of him?’
‘It was Gammer Harlock.’
‘A murrain on her withered tongue!’ exclaimed the other irritably. ‘Lived, lived! Why, what is a house but to live in!’