The great, bare, grey rooms were in keeping with the grey exterior; age had more than softened and coördinated the ancient furnishings, it had rendered them colourless, without accent, making the place empty and monotonous.
Her chair and workbasket stood by a lat[pg 118]ticed window; she seated herself and took up her sewing, watching him where he stood before the fireplace fussing over a little mantel clock—a gilt and ebony affair of the consulate, shaped like a lyre, the pendulum being also the clock itself and containing the works, bell and dial.
When he had adjusted it to his satisfaction he tested it. It still struck five. He continued to fuss over it for half an hour, testing it at intervals, but it always struck five times, and finally he gave up his attempts with a shrug of annoyance.
"I can't do anything with it," he admitted, smiling cheerfully across the room at her; "is there another clock on this floor?"
She directed him; he went into an adjoining room where, on the mantel, a modern enamelled clock was ticking busily. But after a little while he gave up his tinkering; he could do nothing with it; the bell persistently struck five. He returned to where she sat sewing, admitting failure with a perplexed and uneasy smile; and she rose and accompanied him[pg 119] through the house, where he tried, in turn, every one of the other clocks.
When, at length, he realized that he could accomplish nothing by altering their striking mechanism—that every clock in the house persisted in striking five times no matter where the hands were pointing, a sudden, odd, and inward rage possessed him to hurl the clocks at the wall and stamp the last vestiges of mechanism out of them.
As they returned together through the hushed and dusky house, he caught glimpses of faded and depressing tapestries; of vast, tarnished mirrors, through the dim depths of which their passing figures moved like ghosts; of rusted stands of arms, and armoured lay figures where cobwebs clotted the slitted visors and the frail tatters of ancient faded banners drooped.
And he understood why any woman might believe in strange inexplicable things here in the haunting stillness of this house where splendour had turned to mould—where form had become effaced and colour dimmed; where only[pg 120] the shadowy film of texture still remained, and where even that was slowly yielding—under the attacks of Time's relentless mercenaries, moth and dust and rust.