Stubbs opened the nearest door and recoiled. “Take care, my lord!” he said. “Here are the bats!”
“Faugh! What a smell! Can’t you keep them out?”
“We tried years ago—I hate them like poison—but it was of no use. They are in all these upper rooms.”
They were. For when Stubbs, humping his shoulders as under a shower, opened a second door, the bats streamed forth in a long silent procession, only to stream back again as silently. In a dusky corner of the second room a cluster, like a huge bunch of grapes, hung to one of the rafters. Now and again a bat detached itself and joined the living current that swept without a sound through the shadowy rooms.
“There’s nothing beyond these rooms?”
“No.”
“Then let us go down. Rats and bats and rottenness! Non sine sole volo! We may not, but the bats do. Let us go down! Or no! I was forgetting. Where is the Muniment Room?”
“This way, my lord,” Stubbs replied, turning with suspicious readiness—the bats were his pet aversion. “I brought a candle and some of the new lucifers. This way, my lord.”
He led the way down to a door set in a corner of the ante-room. He unlocked this and they found themselves at the foot of a circular staircase. On the farther side of the stairfoot was another door which led, Stubbs explained, into the servants’ quarters. “This turret,” he added, “is older even than the wing, and forms no part of the H. It was retained because it supplied a second staircase, and also a short cut from the servants’ hall to the entrance. The Muniment Room is over this lobby on the first floor. Allow me to go first, my lord.”
The air was close, but not unpleasant, and the stairs were clean. On the first floor a low-browed door, clamped and studded with iron, showed itself. Stubbs halted before it. There was a sputter. A light shone out. “Wonderful invention!” he said. “Electric telegraph not more wonderful, though marvellous invention that, my lord.”