Bayre went further in his search and passed round a protruding wing, beyond which was a courtyard where the stones were moss-grown, little patches of green peeping up between the snow-drifts.
There was a sort of atmosphere about this corner which suggested the home of the sleeping beauty, for the trees had been allowed to grow as they liked, and their branches straggled across the pathway which led from this point through the wood. There was a stable, small for the size of the mansion, as was to be expected on the island: it appeared to be untenanted, and one of the windows was broken. The servants’ quarters, which were at this end of the house, had a desolate appearance. Bayre could hear certain sounds of work going on within; but it was rather the clanking of one pair of sabots on the flagged floor, and the clatter caused by one, or at most two, pair of hands, than the life and bustle of a large establishment.
He turned into the footpath, came upon a stiff-terraced garden with some mournful evergreens and still more mournful statues, and turned back towards the house.
It was that row of long, narrow windows high up in the wall that fascinated him and made him wonder what was behind: for this part of the house looked like a scrap of mediævalism wedged awkwardly between the products of other periods. Here, he thought, must be the treasures of which he had heard so much. As he stood looking upwards and wondering what was within, a strange sound reached his ears, as of the splintering of wood, the rattling of boards, and blows with a heavy instrument upon some hard substance. A movable pane in the window immediately over his head, opened for ventilation, enabled him to ascertain that these sounds came from the interior of the building.
The surface of the stone wall was rough: the young man’s curiosity was great. After a moment’s hesitation he threw his scruples to the winds, and with the assistance of an ill-kept growth of ivy which covered the lower part of the wall under some of the windows, managed to hoist himself to the level of one of them and to look in.
When his eyes, dazzled by the glare of the snow outside, had got used to the obscurity within, he found himself gazing upon a spectacle so strange, so grim, that he began to have a sort of feeling that the cold must have benumbed his senses and distorted his vision, so that real objects took the fantastic shape of things seen in dreams.
In the dimness of an open timber roof he saw winged things fluttering about, perching on the beams, uttering odd little twitterings and cooings in the darkness. On the wall opposite to him there were tapestries, some almost colourless with age, and some beautiful in tints which, in the dim light, all took a softening tone of tender mouse grey. There were glints of steel, too, against these hangings; here and there a ghostly figure in ancient armour, with lance in rest and helmet plumed, stood out from the dim background.
Clinging on with difficulty to the narrow slanting ledge, Bayre looked in with eager eyes, saw these things before him, and at one end, hazy in the distance, a gallery crossing the great hall from end to end, where old silver lamps hung by chains from above, and where the pipes of an organ and the graceful outline of a harp gleamed faintly out of the misty grey.
The other end of the hall he could not see. But he saw pictures hanging below the level of the windows, and on the floor beneath something that groped its way along slowly and painfully like an animal hunting for food.
Dog, or wild beast, or what? For a long time Bayre strained his eyes, unable to make out what that dark object was that groped and groped, at first quietly, and then with a sudden impulse of impatience, in the obscurity below him.