I called at the Lodge the same evening, to be received by the Master with his usual cordiality. He invited me to stay and dine, admitting he felt somewhat lonely without his ladies in the still partially dismantled house.
‘Unlike the three children in the Babylonian furnace, the smell of fire is very much upon it still,’ he said. ‘Signs and odours of destruction meet me at every turn. I dare say in the end—for I have an excellent architect—we shall make a more comfortable and certainly more sanitary place of it than ever before; but the continuity is broken, much history and many a tradition lost for good. I am only heartily glad you are not among the latter, Brownlow. It was a very near thing.’
Whether this was intended to give me an opening for explanation, I could not say. In any case I did not choose to take advantage of it, preferring to explain at my own time and in my own way.
We talked on general subjects for a while. But at the end of dinner, when the butler left the room, he said, eyeing me with a twinkle—
‘It was a pity you could not manage to meet us at Bath, Brownlow, for you would have found some old friends there. One of whom, a very splendid personage by the same token, made many gracious inquiries after you—put me through the longer catechism in respect of you, and put my sister and nieces through it also, I understand.’
‘Old friends?’ I asked, considerably puzzled both by his words and manner.
‘You had not heard, then, any more than I, that Lord Longmoor has settled permanently at Bath?’
I assured him I had not.
‘Yes—and under sad enough circumstances,’ he went on, with a change of tone. ‘Poor gentleman, he and those about him have cried wolf for so many years that I, for one, had grown sceptical regarding his ailments. But what of constitution he ever possessed has been undermined by coddling and dosing. I was admitted once or twice, and was, I own, most painfully impressed by his appearance and by his state of mind—religious mania, or something alarmingly akin to it, and that of at once the most abject and arrogant sort.’
I was greatly shocked by this news, and said so.