The interior was quite in keeping with the palatial exterior, for the state apartments, situated in the front wing, were of enormous size, splendidly furnished, but which looked lonely in the extreme unless full of company, a gaily-dressed crowd being needed to set them off to advantage. The Errington family were proud of these state-rooms, which were really wonderfully imposing, but, except on grand occasions, when they were thrown open to the county gentry, preferred to inhabit a smaller range of rooms on the western side, which were more comfortable, both as regards size and furniture, than the chilly splendours of the great apartments.
One of these rooms had been especially fitted up for Alizon by her husband, a charming octagon-shaped apartment with windows looking on to a quaint garden set forth in the Dutch fashion, with trim symmetrical lines of box and sombre yew trees clipped into fantastic shapes, known by the name of "My Lady's Pleasaunce."
"I think this is delightful, Guy," said Alizon, as she stood in the garden with her husband; "it is so shut out from the world."
They were amusing themselves by exploring the great house, and Alizon was quite overwhelmed by the size and magnificence of everything. Range after range of splendidly furnished rooms shut up and left to the dust and spiders, lofty wide passages with figures in armour on either side, stained glass windows here and there in which blushed the Errington escutcheon. It was all angles, and turrets, and gables, and crooked windings, so that Alizon clung closely to Guy as they wandered through the lonely rooms, feeling quite afraid of the vastness of the building.
"It puts me in mind of Mrs. Radcliffe's stories," she said with a shudder, "there's something quite awesome about the place."
"Awesome? not a bit of it," replied Guy cheerfully, opening a shutter and letting a flood of sunlight into a room, "it requires living in, that's all. You see, dear, my parents died ages ago, and I've been living here very little, so the whole place has got a little musty. But now we're here we'll have more servants, and a lot of people to come and see us. That will wake the place up a bit."
"But it's so large, Guy. Why was it built so large?"
"I'm sure I don't know," said the young man somewhat ruefully, "it's a deuce of a barn, isn't it? The Erringtons always had a mania for building, and whenever they'd nothing else to do they added wings. More fools they, as it ran away with all the money and put these confounded mortgages on the property. This is a dear old place, and I'm very fond of it, but it's miles too big for us, and is a regular white elephant."
"It must take a lot of money to keep it up."
"It does! So much that there's none left for anything else. I wish to heaven I wasn't sentimental, or I'd pull down a lot of it."