After dinner there was some music in the hall, and a game of whist in
the drawing-room, and after the ladies had gone upstairs, Lynton and I
retired to the smoking-room, where we sat up talking the best part of
the night. I think it must have been near three when I retired. Once in
bed, I slept so soundly that my servant's entrance the next morning
failed to arouse me, and it was past nine when I awoke.
After breakfast and the disposal of the newspapers, Lynton retired to
his letters, and I asked Lady Lynton if one of her daughters might show
me the house. Elizabeth, the eldest, was summoned, and seemed in no way
to dislike the task.
The house was, as already intimated, by no means large; it occupied
three sides of a square, the entrance and one end of the stables making
the fourth side. The interior was full of interest--passages, rooms,
galleries, as well as hall, were panelled in dark wood and hung with
pictures. I was shown everything on the ground floor, and then on the
first floor. Then my guide proposed that we should ascend a narrow
twisting staircase that led to a gallery. We did as proposed, and
entered a handsome long room or passage, leading to a small chamber at
one end, in which my guide told me her father kept books and papers.
I asked if anyone slept in this gallery, as I noticed a bed, and
fireplace, and rods, by means of which curtains might be drawn,
enclosing one portion where were bed and fireplace, so as to convert it
into a very cosy chamber.
She answered "No," the place was not really used except as a playroom,
though sometimes, if the house happened to be very full, in her
great-grandfather's time, she had heard that it had been occupied.
By the time we had been over the house, and I had also been shown the
garden and the stables, and introduced to the dogs, it was nearly one
o'clock. We were to have an early luncheon, and to drive afterwards to
see the ruins of one of the grand old Yorkshire abbeys.
This was a pleasant expedition, and we got back just in time for tea,
after which there was some reading aloud. The evening passed much in the
same way as the preceding one, except that Lynton, who had some
business, did not go down to the smoking-room, and I took the
opportunity of retiring early in order to write a letter for the Indian
mail, something having been said as to the prospect of hunting the next
day.
I had finished my letter, which was a long one, together with two or
three others, and had just got into bed when I heard a step overhead as
of someone walking along the gallery, which I now knew ran immediately
above my room. It was a slow, heavy, measured tread which I could hear
getting gradually louder and nearer, and then as gradually fading away
as it retreated into the distance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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