“Faugh!” Audley cried. “Open a window! Break one if necessary.”
Stubbs succeeded in opening one, and they passed on into the great hall, a room sixty feet long and open to the roof, a gallery running round it. A withdrawing-room of half the length opened at one end, and midway along the inner side a short passage led to a second hall—the servants’ hall—the twin of this. Together they formed an H, and were probably a Jacobean copy of a Henry the Eighth building. A long table, some benches, and a score of massive chairs furnished the room. Between the windows hung a few ragged pictures, and on either side of the farther door a piece of tapestry hung askew.
Audley looked about him. In this room eighty years before the old lord had held his revels. The two hearths had glowed with logs, a hundred wax-lights had shone on silver and glass and the rosy tints of old wine. Guests in satin and velvet, henchmen and led captains, had filled it with laughter and jest, and song. With a foot on the table they had toasted the young king—not stout Farmer George, not the old, mad monarch, but the gay young sovereign. To-day desolation reigned. The windows gray with dirt let in a grisly light. All was bare and cold and rusty—the webs of spiders crossed the very hearths. The old lord, mouldering in his coffin, was not more unlike that Georgian reveller than was the room of to-day unlike the room of eighty years before.
Perhaps the thought struck his descendant. “God! What a charnel-house!” he cried. “To think that men made merry in this room. It’s a vault, it’s a grave! Let us get away from it. What’s through, man?”
They passed into the withdrawing-room, where panels of needlework of Queen Anne’s time, gloomy with age, filled the wall spaces, and a few pieces of furniture crouched under shrouds of dust. As they stood gazing two rats leapt from a screen of Cordovan leather that lay in tatters on the floor. The rats paused an instant to stare at the intruders, then fled in panic.
The younger man advanced to one of the panels in the wall. “A hunting scene?” he said. “These may be worth money some day.”
The lawyer looked doubtful. “It will be a long day first, I am afraid,” he said. “It’s funereal stuff at the best, my lord.”
“At any rate it is out of reach of the rats,” Lord Audley answered. He cast a look of distaste at the shreds of the screen. He touched them with his foot. A third rat sprang out and fled squeaking to covert. “Oh, d—n!” he said. “Let us see something else.”
The lawyer led the way upstairs to the ghostly, echoing gallery that ran round the hall. They glanced into the principal guest-room, which was over the drawing-room. Then they went by the short passage of the H to the range of bedrooms over the servants’ hall. For the most part they opened one from the other.
“The parents slept in the outer and the young ladies in the inner,” Audley said, smiling. “Gad! it tells a tale of the times!”