It was thus that the Gaunt Baron found her. The Gaunt Baron did not belong to Yewcroft, but was attached to a neighbouring house, now empty. With nobody to terrify at home, he found visits to the Blue Lady a not unpleasing variant of the monotony. Except that she was several centuries his junior, he felt for her an emotion which went to a dangerous degree beyond respect. He was pained to find her wailing.
“What, wailing!” he cried, coming on her through the oaken panels, “and nobody to hear you?”
The Blue Lady raised a tortured face towards him. “Who would not wail? And who should hear me? Fools! They can not hear me. Many of them do not even see me. Bah! They have no sense, except the sense of taste: with truffles before them, they see nothing else.”
“To-night is Christmas Eve.”
The Gaunt Baron made the suggestion in a mild, kindly way, but the Blue Lady turned upon him almost angrily, as though he had been the culprit.
“Yes! To-night is Christmas Eve. And what are they doing? Where is the Yule-log? Where is the wassail? Where the dim light of glowing embers? They’ll sit in the glare of this new light—a big party—and play what they call Bridge; and if they feel a mystic chill, will draw the curtains or turn the hot-air pipes full on.... What do these fools know about Romance? The word is dead. I saw some of their novels while the house was shut. Love? Gallantry? Nowhere in the volume. A knock-kneed weakling making love to his friend’s wife, or two infants puling of passion like mere vulgar serfs.... Love, for these people, ends with Marriage, to begin again after Divorce.”
“‘Do a cake-walk, now!’ ‘Encore!’” (page 153).
“You are bitter.” The Gaunt Baron held his head beneath his arm—a fact which gave to all his utterances something of the tone of a ventriloquist.
“Bitter! So would you be bitter! It’s all very well for you, with the Manor empty;—but me, with these vulgarians!... Baron, these mortals are beating us: we’re pretty well played out. ‘Played out!’ Look at our very speech: they’ve ruined that. Do I speak like a woman of the day of Good Queen Bess? Do you speak like a baron of—of King—like an ancient baron?”