Sir Vavasour winced, but the future was full of glory and the present of excitement; and he wished Mr Hatton good morning, with a promise that he would himself bring the papers on the morrow.
Mr Hatton was buried for a few moments in a reverie, during which he played with the tail of the Persian cat.
Book 4 Chapter 8
We left Sybil and Egremont just at the moment that Gerard arrived at the very threshold which they had themselves reached.
“Ah! my father,” exclaimed Sybil, and then with a faint blush of which she was perhaps unconscious, she added, as if apprehensive Gerard would not recall his old companion, “you remember Mr Franklin?”
“This gentleman and myself had the pleasure of meeting yesterday,” said Gerard embarrassed, while Egremont himself changed colour and was infinitely confused. Sybil felt surprised that her father should have met Mr Franklin and not have mentioned a circumstance naturally interesting to her. Egremont was about to speak when the street-door was opened. And were they to part again, and no explanation? And was Sybil to be left with her father, who was evidently in no haste, perhaps had no great tendency, to give that explanation? Every feeling of an ingenuous spirit urged Egremont personally to terminate this prolonged misconception.
“You will permit me, I hope,” he said, appealing as much to Gerard as to his daughter, “to enter with you for a few moments.”
It was not possible to resist such a request, yet it was conceded on the part of Gerard with no cordiality. So they entered the large gloomy hall of the house, and towards the end of a long passage Gerard opened a door, and they all went into a spacious melancholy room, situate at the back of the house, and looking upon a small square plot of dank grass, in the midst of which rose a very weather-stained Cupid, with one arm broken, and the other raised in the air with a long shell to its mouth. It seemed that in old days it might have been a fountain. At the end of the plot the blind side of a house offered a high wall which had once been painted in fresco. Though much of the coloured plaster had cracked and peeled away, and all that remained was stained and faded, still some traces of the original design might yet be detected: festive wreaths, the colonnades and perspective of a palace.
The wails of the room itself were waincsotted in pannels of dark-stained wood; the window-curtains were of coarse green worsted, and encrusted with dust so ancient and irremovable, that it presented almost a lava-like appearance; the carpet that had once been bright and showy, was entirely threadbare, and had become grey with age. There were several heavy mahogany arm-chairs in the room, a Pembroke table, and an immense unwieldy sideboard, garnished with a few wine-glasses of a deep blue colour. Over the lofty uncouth mantel was a portrait of the Marquis of Granby, which might have been a sign, and opposite to him, over the sideboard, was a large tawdry-coloured print, by Bunbury, of Ranelagh in its most festive hour. The general appearance of the room however though dingy, was not squalid: and what with its spaciousness, its extreme repose, and the associations raised by such few images as it did suggest, the impression on the mind of the spectator was far from unpleasing, partaking indeed of that vague melancholy which springs from the contemplation of the past, and which at all times softens the spirit.