"
I thought I noticed a vague complaint in his voice; and he evidently was
afraid there might have seemed something of the kind, for he added
immediately--
"I don't care for children one jackstraw, you know, myself; can't
understand how any one can, for my part."
If ever a man went out of his way to tell a lie, I said to myself, Mr. Oke
of Okehurst was doing so at the present moment.
When he had left me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted to
me, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinary
imaginative impression which this house had given me.
I am very susceptible to such impressions; and besides the sort of spasm of
imaginative interest sometimes given to me by certain rare and eccentric
personalities, I know nothing more subduing than the charm, quieter and
less analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common-run sort of
house. To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures of
the tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, the
great bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embers
reddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework,
a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by the
hands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, every
now and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, filled the
room;--to do this is a special kind of voluptuousness, peculiar and complex
and indescribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or haschisch, and
which, to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require a
genius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25