“If only you liked me a little better, I could discuss the matter more freely with you.”
“Humbug!” replied Lord Julius, with a geniality which was at least superficially reassuring. “You shouldn’t say such things, much less think them. I can understand your impatience—but it will be possible to straighten out affairs very soon now. I don’t think you will be found to have suffered by the delay.”
“Oh, that is all right,” she answered, almost pettishly. “Everybody assures me of the most magnanimous intentions—but in the meantime”—she checked herself, tossed her head in resentment, apparently, at the tears which had started to her eyes, and forced herself to smile—“in the meantime, you must forgive my tantrums. It is so depressing here—all alone—or worse than alone! I’m really no longer fit to receive anybody. But now”—she raised her voice in an eager simulation of gaiety—“shall the personally conducted tour begin?”
Caermere had been inaccessible to so many generations of sightseers that no formula for its exhibition remained. The party seemed to Christian to wander at haphazard through an interminable succession of rooms, many of them small, some of them what he could only think of as over-large, but all insufficiently lighted, and all suggesting in their meager appointments and somber dejection of aspect a stage of existence well along on the downward path to ruin. He had only to look about him to perceive why Caermere had long ago been removed from the list of England’s show-places. His companions between them kept his attention busy with comments upon the history and purpose of the apartments they passed through, but beyond a general sense of futile and rather shabby immensity he gained very little from the inspection. The mood to postpone comprehension of what he was seeing to another and a more convenient time was upon him, and he almost willfully yielded to it.
Once, when impulse prompted him to climb a little ladder-like staircase, and push open a door from which the black dust fell in a shower, and he discerned in the gloom of the attic chamber piles of armor and ancient weapons, a thrill of fleeting excitement ran through his veins.
“They say that Prince Llewelyn’s armor is there,” called up Lord Julius from the landing below. “Some day we will have it all out, and cleaned and furbished up. But don’t go in now! You’ll get covered with dirt. I used to venture in there and rummage about once in a while when I was a boy,” he added as Christian came down. “But even then one came out black as a sweep.”
There were fine broad stretches of rugged landscape to be seen here and there from narrow casements in the older, higher parts they were now traversing, and occasionally Christian was able to interest himself as well in details of primitive, half-obliterated ornamentation over arches and doorways of early periods, but he was none the less almost glad when they came out at last into a spacious upper hallway, and halted in tacit token that the journey was at an end.
“Now I will leave you,” said the lady, with lifted skirt and a foot poised tentatively over the first step of the broad descending stairs. “I shall have tea in the conservatory when you come down.”
Christian felt that something must be said. “It has all been very wonderful to me,” he assured her. “I am afraid I did not seem very appreciative—but that is because the place is too huge, too vast, to be understood quite at once. And I am so new to it all—you will understand what I mean. But I thank you very much.”
She smiled brightly on him and nodded to them both, and passed down the stairway. Christian was all at once conscious, as his eyes followed her, that there was a novel quickening or fluttering of his heart’s action. For a brief second, the sensation somehow linked itself in his thoughts with the tall, graceful figure receding from him, and he bent forward to grasp more fully the picture she made, moving sedately along, with a hand like a lily on the wide black rail. Then he suddenly became aware that this was an error, and that he was trembling instead because the moment for confronting his grandfather had come.