‘Ivescar?’ said Isabel. ‘Ivescar—oh yes, thank you very much, Gundred. I shall be ever so pleased to go to Ivescar. Oh, those little rooms of ours are too delicious for words. And there’s no ivy too; that would make them conventional. I love them. I don’t think the Castle does, though. They seem too proud to belong to it. They keep themselves to themselves. The ghosts are happier there than in the big tower. My room was simply crammed with them, Gundred. All last night they hovered about.’
‘You don’t say so!’ exclaimed Gundred. ‘How dreadfully inconvenient! I do hope they did not keep you awake, dear. Do you really believe in them? Surely not—no? One believes that God would never allow such things. Anyhow, we must be very careful not to let the servants hear about them, or all the housemaids will be giving notice. But I was talking about Ivescar. We thought of going there in quite a few days now. The summer is getting on, and Kingston wants to show me to all our people there—tenants and so forth. One feels it rather one’s duty—yes?’
‘Ivescar?’ repeated Isabel; ‘I don’t think I am very much interested in Ivescar, am I? Of course, I am looking forward to going there. But it cannot be anything like this. And I belong here. I am sure I do. It is not anything like this, Gundred?’
‘Oh, dear me, no, of course not. There isn’t anything like this anywhere. Ivescar is just a nice modern place, large and comfortable, but quite modern. I haven’t been there yet, but Kingston has told me all about it. His father bought it, estate and all, when he married—didn’t he, Kingston?’
‘Yes,’ replied her husband; ‘he chose a county as far away as possible from all his own people in Kent. They quarrelled with him when he married, and now none of them will have anything to do with us. So he thought when it came to settling down as a landed proprietor and all the rest of it—my mother’s pet fancy, that was—that he would go right away to the other corner of England. So now our own family, the Dadds, are still sitting in Darnley-on-Downe, watching the coal-pits that support the head of the clan at the other end of the country. It is a quaint irony.’
‘Haven’t you any exciting possibilities among your relations?’ asked Isabel, turning to him. ‘They sound a little stodgy, to say nothing of the fact that they have all cut you.’
‘Well, there is a mystery, I believe. An uncle, a brother of my father’s, who ran away to Japan, and is now a Buddhist Abbot or Bishop, or something of the kind. But for all the excitement one is ever likely to get out of him, he might as well never have been born. He is twelve thousand miles away, and we shall probably never set eyes on him again.’
Gundred looked a little pained, and made haste to divert the conversation from this irreligious topic, just as Isabel was about to burst out into enthusiastic curiosity.
‘So Mr. Darnley bought this delightful estate in Yorkshire, and there is no use thinking of unpleasant things in the past. Nothing could sound nicer than Ivescar. Describe it, Kingston.’
‘Oh, well, it sits right up among the fells and moors, just under one of the big mountains, in a tiny little bare glen all of its own. It is a stern, splendid country, very large and stiff and barren, up at Ivescar, and then, down below, there is a great fat valley, all smooth and smiling, that rolls away westward to the sea. There are jolly rivers and waterfalls all about in the hills, too, and wonderful caves and crevasses and pitfalls. It’s quite unlike anything else in England, and it grows on one in the most extraordinary way. There is something very primeval and mysterious about it.’