No, he could hardly face that. Hitherto he had not been called upon to say what he would do with his life. Now the question was put to him and he had to answer it. He had to answer it. For many minutes he sat on the bed staring before him. And from time to time he sighed.
CHAPTER XVI
THE GREAT HOUSE AT BEAUDELAYS
It was about a week after this that two men stood on the neglected lawn, contemplating the long blind front of Beaudelays House. With all its grandeur the house lacked the dignity of ruin, for ruin presumes a past, and the larger part of the Great House had no past. The ancient wing that had welcomed brides, and echoed the laughter of children and given back the sullen notes of the passing-bell did not suffice to redeem the whole. By night the house might pass; the silent bulk imposed on the eye. By day it required no effort of fancy to see the scaffold still clinging to the brickwork, or to discern that the grand entrance had never opened to guest or neighbor, that everyday life had never gazed through the blank windows of the long façade.
The house, indeed, was not only dead. It had never lived.
Certainly Nature had done something to shroud the dead. The lawn was knee-deep in weeds, and the evergreens about it had pushed out embracing arms to narrow the vista before the windows. At the lower end of the lawn a paved terrace, the width of the house, promised a freer air, but even here grass sprouted between the flags, and elders labored to uproot the stately balustrade that looked on the lower garden. This garden, once formal, was now a tangle of vegetation, a wilderness amid whose broad walks Venuses slowly turned to Dryads, and classic urns lay in fragments, split by the frosts of some excessive winter. Only the prospect of the Trent Valley and the Derbyshire foot-hills, visible beyond the pleasance, still pleased; and this view was vague and sad and distant. For the Great House, as became its greatness, shunned the public eye, and, lying far back, set a wide stretch of park between its bounds and the verge of the upland.
One of the two men was the owner. The other who bore a bunch of keys was Stubbs. Both had a depressed air. It would have been hard to say which of the two entered more deeply into the sadness of the place.
Presently my lord turned his back on the house. “The view is fine,” he said. “The only fine thing about the place,” he added bitterly. “Isn’t there a sort of Belvedere below the garden?”
“There is, my lord. But I fear that it is out of repair.”
“Like everything else! There, don’t think I’m blaming you for it, man. You cannot make bricks without straw. But let us look at this Belvedere.”
They descended the steps, and passed slowly along the grass-grown walk, now and again stepping aside to avoid the clutch of a straggling rose bough, or the fragments of a broken pillar. They paused to inspect the sundial, a giant Butterfly with closed wings, a replica of the stone monster in the Yew Walk. Lord Audley read the inscription, barely visible through the verdigris that stained the dial-plate: