At once standing in the hall Henry loved the house. It seemed immediately to come towards him with a gesture of friendliness and sympathy. The hall was wide and high with a deep stone fireplace and a dark oak staircase peering from the shadows. It was ill-lit; the central lamp had been designed apparently to throw light only on the portrait of a young man in the dress of the early eighteenth century that hung over the fireplace. Under his portrait Henry read—"Charles Forest Duncombe—October 13th, 1745."
An elderly, grave-looking woman stood there and a young apple-cheeked footman to whom Moffatt was "tee-heeing, tut-tutting" in a supercilious whisper. Lady Bell-Hall recovered a little. "Ah, there you are, Morgan. Quite well? That's right. And we'll have tea in the Blue Boom. It's very late because Mortimer never sent the taxi, but we'll have tea all the same. I must have tea. Take Pretty One, please, Morgan. Don't drop her. Ickle-Ickle-Ickle. Was it cold because we were in a nasty slow cab, was it then? There, then, darling. Morgan shall take her then—kind Morgan. Yes, tea in the Blue Room, please."
At last Henry was in his room, a place to which he had come, as it seemed to him, through endless winding passages and up many corkscrew stairs. It was a queer-shaped little room with stone walls, a stone floor and very narrow high windows. There was, of course, no fire, because in England we keep religiously to the seasons whatever the weather may be. The rain was driving heavily upon the window-panes and some branches drove with irregular monotony against the glass. The furniture was of the simplest, and there was only one picture, an oil-painting over the fireplace, of a thin-faced, dark-browed, eighteenth-century priest, cadaverous, menacing, scornful.
Henry seemed to be miles away from any human company. Not a sound came to him save the rain and the driving branches. He washed his hands, brushed his hair, and prepared to find his way downstairs, but beside the door he paused. As he had fancied in the library in Hill Street, so now again it seemed to him that something was whispering to him, begging him for sympathy and understanding. He looked back to the little chill room, then up to the portrait of the priest, then to the window beyond which he could see the thin grey twilight changing to the rainy dark. He stood listening, then with a little shiver, half of pleasure, half of apprehension, he went out into the passage.
His journey, then, was full of surprises. The house was deserted. The passage in which he found himself was bordered with rooms, and after passing two or three doors he timidly opened one and peered in. In the dusk he could see but little, the air that met him was close and heavy, dust blew into his nostrils, and he could just discern a high four-poster bed. The floor was bare and chill. Another room into which he looked was apparently quite empty. The passage was now very dark and he had no candle; he stumbled along, knocking his elbow against the wall. "They might have put me in a livelier part of the house," he thought; and yet he was not displeased, carrying still with him the sense that he was welcome here and not alone. In the dusk he nearly pitched forward over a sudden staircase, but finding an oak banister he felt his way cautiously downward. On the next floor he was faced with a large oak door, which would lead, he fancied, to the other part of the house. He pushed it slowly back and found himself in a chapel suffused with a dark purple light that fell from the stained-glass window above the altar.
He could see only dimly, but above the oaken seats he fancied that some tattered flags were hanging. Here the consciousness of sympathy that had been with him from the beginning grew stronger. Something seemed to be urging him to sit down there and wait. The air grew thicker and the windows, seats and walls were veiled in purple smoky mist. He crept out half-ashamedly as though he were deserting some one, found the stairs again, and a moment later was in a well-lit carpeted passage. With a sigh of relief he saw beyond him Moffatt and the footman carrying the tea.
He woke next day to an early morning flood of sunshine. His monastic little room with its stone walls and narrow windows swam in the light that sparkled, as though over water, above his faded blue carpet. He went to his window and looked out on to a boxwood garden with a bleached alley that led to a pond, a statue and a little green arbour. Beyond the garden there were woods, pale green, purple, black against the brightness of the early morning sky. Thousands of birds were singing and the grass was intensely vivid after the rain of the day before, running in the far distance around the arbour like a newly painted green board.
The impression that the next week made was all of colour, light and sunshine. That strange melancholy that had seemed to him to pervade everything on the night of his arrival was now altogether gone, although a certain touching, intangible wistfulness was there in everything that he saw and heard.
The house was much smaller than he had at first supposed—compact, square, resembling in many ways an old-fashioned doll's house. Duncombe told him that small as it was they had closed some of the rooms, and apologized to him for giving him a bedroom in the unfurnished portion. "In reality," he explained, "that part of the house where you are is the brightest and most cheerful side. Our mother, to whom my sister was devotedly attached, died in the room next to yours, and my sister cannot bear to cross those passages."