“Does any one live in this part?” asked Freda, shivering.
Mrs. Bean’s candle threw alarming shadows on the walls. The mullioned window, which ran from end to end of the gallery, showed a dreary outlook of dark walls surrounding a stretch of snow.
“Well, no,” admitted her guide reluctantly. “The fact is there isn’t another room in the house that’s fit to put anybody into; they’ve been unused so long that they’re reeking with damp, most of them; some of the windows are broken. And so I thought I’d put you into the Abbot’s room. It’s a long way from the rest of us, but it’s had a fire in it once or twice lately, when the Captain has had young Mulgrave here. It’s a bit gloomy looking and old fashioned, but you mustn’t mind that.”
Freda shivered again. If the room she was to have was more gloomy than the way to it, a mausoleum would be quite as cheerful.
“The Abbot’s room!” exclaimed Freda. “Why is it called that?”
“Why, this house wasn’t all built at the same time, you know. There’s a big stone piece at this end that was built earliest of all. It’s very solid and strong, and they say it was the Abbot’s house. Then in Henry the Eighth’s time it was turned into a gentleman’s house, in what they call the Tudor style. They built two new wings, and carried the gallery all round the three sides. A hundred and fifty years later a banqueting room was built, making the last side of the square; but it was burnt down, and now there’s nothing left of it but the outside walls of the front and sides.”
This explained to Freda the desolate appearance the house had presented as she approached it. The deep interest she felt in this, the second venerable house she had been in since her arrival in England, began to get the better of her alarm at its gloominess. But at the angle of the house, where the gallery turned sharply to the right, Mrs. Bean unlocked a door, and introduced her to a narrow stone passage which was like a charnel-house.
“This,” said Mrs. Bean with some enthusiasm, “is the very oldest part; and I warrant you’ll not find such another bit of masonry, still habitable, mind, in any other house in England!”
Was it habitable? Freda doubted it. The walls of the passage were of great blocks of rough stone. It was so narrow that the two women could scarcely walk abreast. They passed under a pointed arch of rough-hewn stone, and came presently to the end of the passage, where a narrow window, deeply splayed, threw a little line of murky light on to the boards of the floor. On the right was a low and narrow Gothic doorway, with the door in perfect preservation. Mrs. Bean opened it by drawing back a rusty bolt, and ushered Freda, with great pride, into a room which seemed fragrant with the memories of a bygone age. Freda looked round almost in terror. Surely the Abbot must still be lurking about, and would start out presently, in dignified black habit, cowl and sandals, and haughtily demand the reason of her intrusion! For here was the very wide fireplace, reaching four feet from the ground, and without any mantelshelf, where fires had burned for holy Abbot or episcopal guest four hundred years ago. Here were the narrow windows deeply splayed like the one outside from which the prosperous monks had looked out over their wide pasture-lands and well-stocked coverts.
Even in the furniture there was little that was incongruous with the building. The roughly plastered walls were hung with tapestry much less carefully patched and mended than the hangings at Oldcastle Farm. The floor was covered by an old carpet of harmoniously undistinguishable pattern. The rough but solid chairs of unpolished wood, with worn leather seats; the ancient press, long and low, which served at one end as a washhand-stand, and at the other as a dressing-table; a large writing-table, which might have stood in the scriptorium of the Abbey itself, above all, the enormous four-poster bedstead, with faded tapestry to match the walls, and massive worm-eaten carvings of Scriptural subjects: all these combined to make the chamber unlike any that Freda had ever seen.