Mr. Phillips blushed.
“Miss Daisy,” he said, “how long is it since the last king lived here?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “and I don’t care. Centuries and centuries, I expect. Come and explore, I want to see the whole of the palace and let the light and air into every room.”
She had shaken off entirely all vestiges of the sense of oppression which had come on her when she first breathed the heavy stale air of the hall and saw it with its decayed furniture, huge and dim before her. It was full of sunlight now and she was merry again in the sunlight and fresh air.
She ran from room to room, pulling shutters back, flinging wide the windows. Phillips followed her, listened to her while she planned these for her father’s rooms, those for her own, how breakfast should be laid on summer mornings on a balcony right over the water, how midday meals should be eaten in a shaded portico.
“And this,” she said, “shall be your room, for you’re to spend all your holidays here. See, if you open the window you can take a header right into the blue water—Oh, isn’t it a beautiful colour?—and have a morning swim.”
Phillips was ready to take a header from any window at the Queen’s command. He would ask nothing better than to spend, not holidays only, but all his days there on the island with her. If he could enter her service—he wondered whether the Queen of Salissa would start a Royal Navy of her own.
They passed from room to room. They ran up winding staircases and emerged in tiny turret chambers, glass enclosed like the tops of lighthouses. They found a roof garden set round with huge stone urns full of dry caked earth. Once, no doubt, flowers had bloomed in them. Flowers, so the Queen determined, should bloom in them again. They descended to cool, spacious kitchens, to cellars where wine had been stored. They passed through a narrow doorway and found suddenly that the sea was lapping at their feet. They were underneath the centre of the house. Around them were high walls. From the water itself arose thick round pillars, supports of the vaulting on which the great hall rested. The light, entering for the most part through the water, was blue and faint. The stones beneath the water gleamed blue. The pillars as they rose changed from blue to purple. The water sighed, murmured, almost moaned. It seemed as if it tried to cling to the smooth stone work, as if it sank back again disappointed, weary of for ever giving kisses which were not returned. They stood in silence, looking, listening. Then Phillips spoke. His voice sounded strangely hollow. He sank it to a whisper.