I have always disliked more than one door in a bedroom, as it seems to me to afford to ghosts and burglars unnecessary facilities; and my dislike of my gaunt apartment reached its climax when I saw a door in the corner on the farther side of the fireplace from the door into the corridor. It had been papered over along with the walls, and its consequent unobtrusiveness had almost the effect of intentional concealment. I opened it, and found that it led into a moderate-sized bedroom. The moonlight which came through the uncurtained window lay in greenish-white patches on the uncarpeted floor, and showed a few pieces of furniture, shrouded in sheets and huddled in one corner. In spite of its chill bareness, an effect of recent occupancy was given to it by a chair that stood sideways in the window with an air of definiteness, and underneath and beside it I noticed a few tattered books.
I went back to my own room with an unexplainable shudder, slamming the door behind me, and proceeded to dress for dinner with all speed.
With the unfailing punctuality of a newcomer, I left my room as the gong sounded, and, hurrying down, found my uncle and Willy waiting for me in the library.
The dining-room was a large and imposing room. A moderate number of portraits of the most orthodox ancestral type hung, interspersed with mezzotints of impassioned Irish clergymen, on its panelled walls. A high old sideboard of what seemed to me an unusual shape stretched up to the ceiling on one side of the room, and the plate upon it twinkled in the blaze of the fire.
We sat down at the long table; and while Willy and his father were absorbed in overcoming the usual embarrassments offered by soup to the wearers of moustaches, I amused myself with speculations as to who was responsible for the subtle combination of yellow and magenta dahlias that adorned the table. I concluded that the artist must have been the old butler, Roche; and as, at the thought, I involuntarily looked towards him, I found his eyes fixed upon me with the abstracted gaze of one who is trying to trace a likeness. Our eyes met, and he shuffled away, but I felt sure that he had been searching for a resemblance to the refined, well-cut, humorous face which, from a miniature of thirty years ago, I knew must be what he remembered of my father.
“It is quite an unusual pleasure to Willy and me to see a charming young lady at our bachelor-table—eh, Willy?” said Uncle Dominick, lifting his face from his now empty soup-plate, and smiling at me.
Willy, whose flow of language seemed checked by his father’s presence, gave an assenting grunt.
“It is a long time since there has been a Miss Sarsfield at Durrus, and it is thirty years since she died. You will find Willy and I are sad barbarians, and we shall have to trust to you to civilize us.”
I am singularly unfitted to deal with the compliments of elderly gentlemen. On this occasion I failed as signally as usual to attain the requisite quality of playful confusion, and diverted the conversation by a question about a claret-coloured ancestor, who had been staring at me from his frame over the fireplace ever since we had sat down to dinner.
“That is my grandfather,” said my uncle. “Dick the Drinker, they called him. He neither is nor was an ornament to the family; but his wife, the beautiful Kate Coppinger, is worth looking at. In fact, my dear”—with another smile and a little bow—“directly I saw you I was reminded of a miniature which we have of her.”