“You can write sonnets?” said Ivywood with something more like emotion in his voice than she had ever heard in it. “What comes first into your mind with these open windows?”
“I know what you mean,” said Joan after a silence. “The same hath oft …”
“Yes,” he said. “That is how I felt … of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn.”
There was another silence and the dog sniffed round and round the circular turret chamber.
“I want it to be like that,” said Ivywood in a low and singularly moved intonation. “I want this to be the end of the house. I want this to be the end of the world. Don’t you feel that is the real beauty of all this eastern art; that it is coloured like the edges of things, like the little clouds of morning and the islands of the blest? Do you know,” and he lowered his voice yet more, “it has the power over me of making me feel as if I were myself absent and distant; some oriental traveller who was lost and for whom men were looking. When I see that greenish lemon yellow enamel there let into the white, I feel that I am standing thousands of leagues from where I stand.”
“You are right,” said Joan, looking at him with some wonder, “I have felt like that myself.”
“This art,” went on Ivywood as in a dream, “does indeed take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea. They say it contains no form of life, but surely we can read its alphabet as easily as the red hieroglyphics of sunrise and sunset which are on the fringes of the robe of God.”
“I never heard you talk like that before,” said the lady, and again stroked the vivid violet feathers of the small eastern bird.
Mr. Quoodle could stand it no longer. He had evidently formed a very low opinion of the turret chamber and of oriental art generally, but seeing Joan’s attention once more transferred to his rival, he trotted out into the longer room, and finding the gap in the woodwork which was soon to be boarded up, but which still opened on an old dark staircase, he went “galumphing” down the stairs.
Lord Ivywood gently placed the bird on the girl’s own finger, and went to one of the open windows, leaning out a little.