I was very ill at ease, but he did not seem more at his ease than I was. My presence clearly annoyed him.
It is always an interesting thing for an intruder to learn why he is so,—I seized my valise. Lerne observed my gesture and seemed to form a sudden resolve.
“Let it be—let it be, Nicholas,” he said in a tone of command. “I’ll send to fetch your luggage shortly. But first we must have a talk. Come for a walk.”
He took my arm and drew me towards the park. He was still reflecting, however.
We passed near the château. With few exceptions the shutters were closed. The roof in many places was sinking in, sometimes even broken, and the moldy walls from which the whitewash had disappeared in large flakes here and there showed their masonry. The plants in boxes still surrounded the house, but, to tell the truth, for several winters no one had thought of putting the verbenas and orange-trees and laurels under cover. Standing in their battered and rotten tubs they were all dead. The sandy carriage-drive, of yore so carefully raked, might have imagined itself a second-rate meadow, there was so much grass growing there mingled with nettles and hemlock. It was like the castle of “Sleeping Beauty” on the Prince’s arrival. Lerne, clinging to my arm, walked without further talk.
We got to the other side of the dreary pile, and the park lay before our eyes. A jumble. No more baskets of flowers, no more wide, sandy paths like winding ribbons. Except just in front of the château, the lawn—which had been metamorphosed into a paddock fenced with wire and given up to some cattle to feed in—had been encroached on by the valley which had relapsed into its wild state. The garden was no more than a great wood with open spaces and green paths in it. The Ardennes had reassumed their usurped domain.
Lerne thoughtfully filled an immense pipe with feverish fingers, lit it, and then we went under the trees into one of the alleys that were like long caves.
Once more I saw the statues and with a disillusioned eye, the statues which a former master of Fonval had erected in profusion. Those magnificent dumb personages of my dramas were as a matter of fact wretched modern figures, suggested to some commercially-minded magnate of industry of the Second Empire by Rome or Greece. The tunics of concrete swelled out into crinolines, the drapery of the cloaks was like that of a shawl, and the divinities of the woods—Echo, Syrinx, Arethusa—wore low chignons which filled their bag-like nets—in the Benoiton manner. Those hideous representations of exquisite fantasies, of forest charms transmuted into Dryads, were to-day more passable in their mantles of virgin-vine and clematis, although certain heroes were no more than ivy-clad figures of fun, and although a mere moss-clad attitude represented Diana.
After walking for some time, my uncle made me sit down on a bench of stone covered with a coat of lichen, under the shade of flourishing hazels.
A little crackling sound made itself heard in the bower right over our heads.