She learned that Wallace frequently exhibited at the minor picture-shows, and, further, that he was a regular contributor of black-and-white drawings to more than one English and American magazine.
"You see I can't give the work the time I would like," he explained, "though luckily banking hours are not onerous. I sit down-stairs from ten until four, with a calculating-machine clicking away in my brain; but in the early summer mornings or the long winter evenings I bring my heart and mind up here."
At this point Clare, tired of a conversation which was no longer specially addressed to her, suggested a move to the South Sea Room, which she declared herself "dying to see;" and to the first floor they forthwith descended to a vast apartment, with floor of shining polished oak and an immense mantelpiece in carved and coloured marble, an apartment in which the electric-light, shining down from bosses in the elaborately-carved ceiling, seemed a glaring anachronism, and in which a few old-fashioned chairs and sofas, covered with moth-eaten brocade and set in far corners of the room, suggested ghostly dowagers and wall-flowers silently watching a rustling fleshless ball.
Mrs. Vandeleur was delighted, and went about with upraised eye-glasses, "sniffling the air for ghosts," as Clare irreverently whispered to Wallace Armstrong.
"You have done your very worst," the little lady observed with much severity to old Alexander, "with your odious glaring electric-light. And, as I perceive, some Vandal forefather of yours has gilded and whitened over all the lovely woodwork of the ceiling! As to your dreadful Chinese wall-paper, sticky with varnish and most inartistic and patchy in effect, I haven't a doubt that it is plastered all over the original beautiful oak-panelled walls, and that the spirits of the malevolent little pigtailed horrors who designed and executed it have driven away all the dear, charming, picturesque people in patches and powder and stiff brocade who used to congregate here a hundred years ago. I declare I can hardly hear a rustle of their silk petticoats or a tap of their high-heeled shoes!"
"If you hear as much as that, madam, you are cleverer than I," said the old Scotchman, drily.
"If I had my way with this room," pursued Mrs. Vandeleur, "I'd have all the paper and all the paint and varnish off, and take down your nasty electric-light and substitute wax candles. And I would have an old spinet in the corner and play it softly in the evenings, until I had reconstituted the entire scene. As it is, it hurts me to see a place so desecrated. Is there no corner in the entire house left sacred for the poor spirits to come back to and feel themselves at home?"
But here Adams, who had been listening, equally scared and scandalised, interposed to suggest that if the lady liked old things she might admire the banqueting-hall, which had never yet been "properly restored;" and thither he led the way, followed by Mrs. Vandeleur, still intent upon demonstrating to the old Scotchman his enormities and that of his predecessors in the arrangement of the old rooms.
Laline, who had been examining with interest the odd designs upon the walls, turned to follow her employer; but Clare had already gone out, and Wallace detained her as she tried to pass him.
"Don't go yet!" he whispered, quickly. "I must speak to you. Why are you so cold to me again to-day?"