“The whole place gives you the creeps, I should think by the look of it,” replied Payne.
“Well,” said his friend, “to tell you the truth it does.”
The silence that followed was stirred by a faint rustle among the rushes by the moat; and it gave them, rationally enough, a slight nervous start when a dark figure brushed along the bank, moving rapidly and almost like a startled bird. But it was only a man walking briskly with a black bag in his hand: a man with a long sallow face and sharp eyes that glanced at the London stranger in a slightly darkling and suspicious manner.
“It’s only Dr. Barnet,” said Wood with a sort of relief. “Good evening, Doctor. Are you going up to the house? I hope nobody’s ill.”
“Everybody’s always ill in a place like that,” growled the doctor, “only sometimes they’re too ill to know it. The very air of the place is a blight and a pestilence. I don’t envy the young man from Australia.”
“And who,” asked Payne abruptly and rather absently, “may the young man from Australia be?”
“Ah!” snorted the doctor; “hasn’t your friend told you about him? As a matter of fact I believe he is arriving today. Quite a romance in the old style of melodrama: the heir back from the colonies to his ruined castle, all complete even down to an old family compact for his marrying the lady watching in the ivied tower. Queer old stuff, isn’t it? but it really happens sometimes. He’s even got a little money, which is the only bright spot there ever was in this business.”
“What does Miss Darnaway herself, in her ivied tower, think of the business?” asked Martin Wood dryly.
“What she thinks of everything else by this time,” replied the doctor. “They don’t think in this weedy old den of superstitions; they only dream and drift. I think she accepts the family contract and the colonial husband as part of the Doom of the Darnaways, don’t you know. I really think that if he turned out to be a humpbacked Negro with one eye and a homicidal mania, she would only think it added a finishing touch and fitted in with the twilight scenery.”
“You’re not giving my friend from London a very lively picture of my friends in the country,” said Wood, laughing. “I had intended taking him there to call; no artist ought to miss those Darnaway portraits if he gets the chance. But perhaps I’d better postpone it if they’re in the middle of the Australian invasion.”
“Oh, do go in and see them, for the Lord’s sake,” said Dr. Barnet warmly. “Anything that will brighten their blighted lives will make my task easier. It will need a good many colonial cousins to cheer things up, I should think; and the more the merrier. Come, I’ll take you in myself.”
As they drew nearer to the house it was seen to be isolated like an island in a moat of brackish water which they crossed by a bridge. On the other side spread a fairly wide stony floor or embankment with great cracks across it, in which little tufts of weed and thorn sprouted here and there. This rock platform looked large and bare in the grey twilight; and Payne could hardly have believed that such a corner of space could have contained so much of the soul of a wilderness. This platform only jutted out on one side, like a giant doorstep, and beyond it was the door; a very low-browed Tudor archway standing open but dark, like a cave.
When the brisk doctor led them inside without ceremony, Payne had, as it were, another shock of depression. He could have expected to find himself mounting to a very ruinous tower, by very narrow winding staircases; but in this case the first steps into the house were actually steps downwards. They went down several short and broken stairways into large twilit rooms which, but for their lines of dark pictures and dusty bookshelves, might have been the traditional dungeons beneath the castle moat. Here and there a candle in an old candlestick lit up some dusty accidental detail of a dead elegance; but the visitor was not so much impressed or depressed by this artificial light as by the one pale gleam of natural light. As he passed down the long room he saw the only window in that wall, a curious low oval window of a late-seventeenth-century fashion. But the strange thing about it was that it did not look out directly on any space of sky but only on a reflection of sky; a pale strip of daylight merely mirrored in the moat, under the hanging shadow of the bank. Payne had a memory of the Lady of Shallot who never saw the world outside except in a mirror. The lady of this Shallot not only in some sense saw the world in a mirror, but even saw the world upside-down.
“It’s as if the house of Darnaway were falling literally as well as metaphorically,” said Wood in a low voice, “as if it were sinking slowly into a swamp or a quicksand; until the sea goes over it like a green roof.”
Even the sturdy Dr. Barnet started a little at the silent approach of the figure that came to receive them. Indeed, the room was so silent that they were all startled to realize that it was not empty. There were three people in it when they entered: three dim figures motionless in the dim room; all three dressed in black and looking like dark shadows. As the foremost figure drew nearer the
