The general character of the room was more cheerful than the statelier chambers I had hitherto passed through, for it had still the look of habitation,--the armchair by the fireplace; the kneehole writing-table beside it; the sofa near the recess of a large bay-window, with book-prop and candlestick screwed to its back; maps, coiled in their cylinders, ranged under the cornice; low strong safes, skirting two sides of the room, and apparently intended to hold papers and title-deeds, seals carefully affixed to their jealous locks. Placed on the top of these old-fashioned receptacles were articles familiar to modern use,--a fowling-piece here, fishing-rods there, two or three simple flower-vases, a pile of music books, a box of crayons. All in this room seemed to speak of residence and ownership,--of the idiosyncrasies of a lone single man, it is true, but of a man of one's own time,--a country gentleman of plain habits but not uncultivated tastes.
I moved to the window; it opened by a sash upon a large balcony, from which a wooden stair wound to a little garden, not visible in front of the house, surrounded by a thick grove of evergreens, through which one broad vista was cut, and that vista was closed by a view of the mausoleum.
I stepped out into the garden,--a patch of sward with a fountain in the centre, and parterres, now more filled with weeds than flowers. At the left corner was a tall wooden summer-house or pavilion,--its door wide open. "Oh, that's where Sir Philip used to study many a long summer's night," said the steward.
"What! in that damp pavilion?"
"It was a pretty place enough then, sir; but it is very old,--they say as old as the room you have just left."
"Indeed, I must look at it, then."
The walls of this summer-house had once been painted in the arabesques of the Renaissance period; but the figures were now scarcely traceable. The woodwork had started in some places, and the sunbeams stole through the chinks and played on the floor, which was formed from old tiles quaintly tessellated and in triangular patterns; similar to those I had observed in the chimneypiece. The room in the pavilion was large, furnished with old worm-eaten tables and settles. "It was not only here that Sir Philip studied, but sometimes in the room above," said the steward.
"How do you get to the room above? Oh, I see; a stair case in the angle." I ascended the stairs with some caution, for they were crooked and decayed; and, on entering the room above, comprehended at once why Sir Philip had favoured it.
The cornice of the ceiling rested on pilasters, within which the compartments were formed into open unglazed arches, surrounded by a railed balcony. Through these arches, on three sides of the room, the eye commanded a magnificent extent of prospect. On the fourth side the view was bounded by the mausoleum. In this room was a large telescope; and on stepping into the balcony, I saw that a winding stair mounted thence to a platform on the top of the pavilion,--perhaps once used as an observatory by Forman himself.
"The gentleman who was here to-day was very much pleased with this look-out, sir," said the housekeeper. "Who would not be? I suppose Sir Philip has a taste for astronomy."
"I dare say, sir," said the steward, looking grave; "he likes most out-of-the-way things."
The position of the sun now warned me that my time pressed, and that I should have to ride fast to reach my new patient at the hour appointed. I therefore hastened back to my horse, and spurred on, wondering whether, in the chain of association which so subtly links our pursuits in manhood to our impressions in childhood, it was the Latin inscription on the chimneypiece that had originally biassed Sir Philip Derval's literary taste towards the mystic jargon of the books at which I had contemptuously glanced.
CHAPTER XXIX.
I did not see Margrave the following day, but the next morning, a little after sunrise, he walked into my study, according to his ordinary habit.
"So you know something about Sir Philip Derval?" said I. "What sort of a man is he?"
"Hateful!" cried Margrave; and then checking himself, burst out into his merry laugh. "Just like my exaggerations! I am not acquainted with anything to his prejudice. I came across his track once or twice in the East. Travellers are always apt to be jealous of each other."
"You are a strange compound of cynicism and credulity; but I should have fancied that you and Sir Philip would have been congenial spirits, when I found, among his favourite books, Van Helmont and Paracelsus. Perhaps you, too, study Swedenborg, or, worse still, Ptolemy and Lilly?"
"Astrologers? No! They deal with the future! I live for the day; only I wish the day never had a morrow!"
"Have you not, then that vague desire for the something beyond,--that not unhappy, but grand discontent with the limits of the immediate Present, from which man takes his passion for improvement and progress, and from which some sentimental philosophers have deduced an argument in favour of his destined immortality?"
"Eh!" said Margrave, with as vacant a stare as that of a peasant whom one has addressed in Hebrew.