‘I know I thought I had walked miles before we got here,’ replied Isabel—‘miles, through the most fascinating dreadful dark halls and passages, just like the dim labyrinths in a Maeterlinck Castle.’
‘Yes,’ answered Gundred; ‘it takes the servants quite a time to answer the bell; and if one didn’t use hot irons in the urn it would be cold before it got to us. And what one would do if anybody fainted or anything I simply can’t imagine. There is just one long passage leading to these rooms, and all the servants are ever so far away in the Georgian part.’
‘Well,’ said Isabel, ‘you can make this your last resort. When the Castle is carried by invaders or catches fire, you can run out here, and shut yourselves up on your little promontory, and nobody will ever be able to get at you again.’
‘This wouldn’t be at all a good place if the Castle took fire,’ said Gundred—‘built of wood, and no other way out. But everything is very safe, I am truly thankful to say. Our great-uncle Henry saw to all that before he was taken poorly.’
For a moment she was the Mortimer, talking to a Mortimer, and leaving her husband outside the conversation. He, for his part, did not notice the recurrence of that little, proudly conscious yet unconscious inflection in her voice. He was too much absorbed in watching Isabel. The returned colonial was even more obviously the daughter of Brakelond than was Gundred. The vividness of her personality was in full harmony with the stern old building to which Gundred’s nature only occasionally chimed in tune. Isabel was the contemporary of Brakelond. The contrast between the two women was that between a jungle and a Dutch garden—between a passionate, loose-petalled rose and a decorous, shapely lily. And, though the lily had its place in the pleasance of Brakelond, though the Dutch garden might be thrust into its vast scheme, yet the true frame of the Castle was the untamable wildness of the forest, its most inevitable ornament the glowing ardour of the rose. In the long list of all who had been March and Brakelond here and there a lily-life occurred, it is true; but the rose, flaming, riotous, red, must always stand for the fittest emblem of the Mortimers.
Suddenly Isabel turned upon Kingston, growing conscious of his attention.
‘Why do you stare at me?’ she asked. ‘Have we met each other before?’
Kingston doubted; a sense of renewed acquaintance was very strong upon him. ‘No,’ he replied; ‘we have never met before. I don’t see how we can ever have met before.’
‘Surely not, dear—no?’ added Gundred.
‘I believe,’ said Isabel abruptly, ‘that one has met everyone in the world before, and that every now and then one remembers something here and there. Your husband and I have probably met in a dream, or—perhaps we loved or hated each other thousands of years ago, or our ancestors did, which is the same thing.’