THE GREAT HOUSE AT BEAUDELAYS
It was about a week after this that two men stood on the neglected
lawn, contemplating the long blind front of Beaudelays House. With all
its grandeur the house lacked the dignity of ruin, for ruin presumes a
past, and the larger part of the Great House had no past. The ancient
wing that had welcomed brides, and echoed the laughter of children and
given back the sullen notes of the passing-bell did not suffice to
redeem the whole. By night the house might pass; the silent bulk
imposed on the eye. By day it required no effort of fancy to see the
scaffold still clinging to the brickwork, or to discern that the grand
entrance had never opened to guest or neighbor, that everyday life had
never gazed through the blank windows of the long façade.
The house, indeed, was not only dead. It had never lived.
Certainly Nature had done something to shroud the dead. The lawn was
knee-deep in weeds, and the evergreens about it had pushed out
embracing arms to narrow the vista before the windows. At the lower end
of the lawn a paved terrace, the width of the house, promised a freer
air, but even here grass sprouted between the flags, and elders labored
to uproot the stately balustrade that looked on the lower garden. This
garden, once formal, was now a tangle of vegetation, a wilderness amid
whose broad walks Venuses slowly turned to Dryads, and classic urns lay
in fragments, split by the frosts of some excessive winter. Only the
prospect of the Trent Valley and the Derbyshire foot-hills, visible
beyond the pleasance, still pleased; and this view was vague and sad
and distant. For the Great House, as became its greatness, shunned the
public eye, and, lying far back, set a wide stretch of park between its
bounds and the verge of the upland.
One of the two men was the owner. The other who bore a bunch of keys
was Stubbs. Both had a depressed air. It would have been hard to say
which of the two entered more deeply into the sadness of the place.
Presently my lord turned his back on the house. “The view is fine,” he
said. “The only fine thing about the place,” he added bitterly. “Isn’t
there a sort of Belvedere below the garden?”
“There is, my lord. But I fear that it is out of repair.”
“Like everything else! There, don’t think I’m blaming you for it, man.
You cannot make bricks without straw. But let us look at this
Belvedere.”
They descended the steps, and passed slowly along the grass-grown walk,
now and again stepping aside to avoid the clutch of a straggling rose
bough, or the fragments of a broken pillar. They paused to inspect the
sundial, a giant Butterfly with closed wings, a replica of the stone
monster in the Yew Walk. Lord Audley read the inscription, barely
visible through the verdigris that stained the dial-plate:
“Non sine sole volo!”
“Just so!” he said. “A short life and a merry one!”
A few paces farther along the walk they stopped to examine the basin of
the great fountain. Cracked from edge to centre, and become a shallow
bed of clay and weeds, it was now as unsightly as it had been beautiful
in the days when fair women leaning over it had fed the gold fish, or
viewed their mirrored faces in its waters.
“The fortunes of the Audleys in a nutshell!” muttered the unlucky
owner. And turning on his heel, “Confound it, Stubbs,” he cried, “I
have had as much of this as I can stand! A little more and I shall go
back and cut my throat! It is beginning to rain, too. D—n the
Belvedere! Let us go into the house. That cannot be as bad as this.”
Without waiting for an answer, or looking behind him, he strode back
the way they had come. Stubbs followed in silence, and they regained
the lawn.
“I tell you what it is,” Audley continued, letting the agent come
abreast of him. “You must find some vulgarian to take the place—iron
man or cotton man, I don’t care who he is, if he has got the cash I You
must let it, Stubbs. You must let it! It’s a white elephant, it’s the
d—ndest White Elephant man ever had!”
The lawyer shook his head. “You may be sure, my lord,” he said mildly,
“I should have advised that long ago, if it were possible. But we
couldn’t let it in its present state—for a short term; and we have no
more power to lease it for a long one than, as your lordship knows, we
have power to sell it.”
The other swore. At the outset he had scarcely felt his poverty. But he
was beginning to feel it. There were moments such as this when his
withers were wrung; when the consequence which the title had brought
failed to soften the hardships of his lot—a poor peer with a vast
house. Had he tried to keep the Great House in repair it would have
swallowed the whole income of the peerage—a sum which, as it was,
barely sufficed for his needs as a bachelor.
Already Stubbs had hinted that there was one way out—a rich marriage.
And Audley had received the hint with the easiness of a man who was in
no haste to marry and might, likely enough, marry where money was. But
once or twice during the last few days, which they had been spending in
a review of the property, my lord had shown irritation. When an old
farmer had said to his face, that he must bring home a bride with a
good fat chest, “and his lordship would be what his forbears had been,”
the great man, in place of a laughing answer, had turned glumly away.
Presently the two halted at the door of the north wing. Stubbs unlocked
it and pushed it open. They entered an ante-room of moderate size.
“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!”
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.”
“Yes,” the other answered dryly. “But—when were you here last, Stubbs?”
“Not for a twelvemonth, my lord.”
“Leave your candle?”
“No.”
“Then what’s that?” The young man pointed to something that lay in the
angle between a stair and the wall.
“God bless my soul!” the lawyer cried. “It’s a candle.”
“And clean. It has not been there a week. Who has been here, my
friend?”
Stubbs reflected. “No one with my authority,” he said. “But if the
devil himself has been here,” he continued, stoutly recovering himself,
“he can have done no harm. I can prove that in five minutes, my lord—if
you will kindly hold the light.” He inserted a large key in the lock,
and with an effort, he shot back the bolts. He pushed open the door and
signed to Lord Audley to enter.
He did so, and Stubbs followed. They stood and looked about them. They
were in a whitewashed chamber twelve feet square, clean, bare, empty.
The walls gave back the light so that the one candle lit the place
perfectly.
“It’s as good as air-tight,” Stubbs said with pride. “And you see, my
lord, we swept it as bare as the palm of my hand. I can answer for it
that not a shred of paper or a piece of wax was left.”
Audley, gazing about him, seemed satisfied. His face relaxed. “Yes,” he
said, “you could not overlook anything in a place like this. I’m glad
I’ve seen it.”
He was turning to go when a thought struck him. He lowered the light
and scanned the floor. “All the same, somebody has been here!” he
exclaimed. “There’s one of the things you are so pleased with—a
lucifer!”
Stubbs stooped and looked. “A lucifer?” he repeated. He picked up the
bit of charred wood and examined it. “Now how did that come here? I
never used one till six months ago.”
My lord frowned. “Who is it?” he asked.
“Some one, I fear, who has had a key made,” the agent answered, shaking
his head,
“I can see that for myself. But has he learned anything?”
Stubbs stared. “There’s nothing to learn, my lord,” he said. “You can
see that. Whoever he is, he has cracked the nut and found no kernel!”
The young man looked round him again. He nodded. “I suppose so,” he
said. But he seemed ill at ease and inclined to find fault. He threw
the light of the candle this way and that, as if he expected the clean
white walls to tell a tale. “What’s that?” he asked suddenly. “A crack?
Or what?”
Stubbs looked, passed his hand over the mark on the wall, effaced it.
“No, my lord, a cobweb,” he said. “Nothing.”
There was no more to be seen, yet Audley seemed loth to go. At length
he turned and went out. Stubbs closed and locked the door behind them,
then he took the candle from his lordship and invited him to go down
before him. Still the young man hesitated. “I suppose we can learn
nothing more?” he said.
“Nothing, my lord,” Stubbs answered. “To tell you the truth, I have
long thought Mr. John mad, and it is possible that his madness has
taken this turn. But I am equally sure that there is nothing for him to
discover, if he spends every day of his life here.”
“All the same I don’t like it,” the owner objected. “Whoever has been
here has no right here. It is odd that I had some notion of this before
we came. You may depend upon it that this was why he fixed himself at
the Gatehouse.”
“He may have had something of the sort in his mind,” Stubbs admitted.
“But I don’t think so, my lord. More probably, being here and idle, he
took to wandering in for lack of something to do.”
“And by and by, had a key made and strayed into the Muniment Room! No,
that won’t do, Stubbs. And frankly there should be closer supervision
here. It should not have remained for me to discover this.”
He began to descend, leaving Stubbs to digest the remark; who for his
part thought honestly that too much was being made of the matter.
Probably the intruder was John Audley; the man had a bee in his bonnet,
and what more likely than that he should be taken with a craze to haunt
the house which he believed was his own? But the agent was too prudent
to defend himself while the young man’s vexation was fresh. He followed
him down in silence, and before many minutes had passed, they were in
the open air, and had locked the door behind them.
Clouds hung low on the tops of the trees, mist veiled the view, and a
small rain was falling on the wet lawn. Nevertheless the young man
moved into the open. “Come this way,” he said.
The lawyer turned up the collar of his coat and followed him
unwillingly. “Where does he get in?” my lord asked. It seemed as if the
longer he dwelt on the matter the less he liked it. “Not by that
door—the lock is rusty. The key had shrieked in it. Probably he enters
by one of the windows in the new part.”
He walked towards the middle of the lawn and Stubbs, thankful that he
wore Wellington boots, followed him.
The lawyer thought that he had never seen the house wear so dreary an
aspect as it wore under the gray weeping sky. But his lordship was more
practical. “These windows look the most likely,” he said after a short
survey: and he dragged his unwilling attendant to the point he had
marked.
A nearer view strengthened his suspicions. On the sill of one of the
windows were scratches and stains. “You see?” he said. “It should not
have been left to me to discover this! Probably John Audley comes from
the Gatehouse by the Yew Walk.” He turned to measure the distance with
his eye, the distance which divided the spot from the Iron Gate.
“That’s it,” he said, “he comes——”
Then, “Good G—d!” he muttered. “Look! Look!” Stubbs looked. They both
looked. Beyond the lawn, on the farther side of the iron grille and
clinging to it with both hands, a man stood bareheaded under the rain.
Whether he had come uncovered, or his hat had been jerked from him by
some movement caused by their appearance, they could not tell; nor how
long he had stood thus, gazing at them through the bars. But they could
see that his eyes never wavered, that his hands gripped the iron, and
the two knew by instinct that in the intensity of his hate, the man was
insensible alike to the rain that drenched him, and to the wind that
blew out the skirts of his thin black coat.
Even Stubbs held his breath. Even he felt that there was something
uncanny and ominous in the appearance. For the gazer was John Audley.