Read Online Long Summer Day by R. F. Delderfield - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: R. F. Delderfield
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watching the west windows turn ruby in the sun and as he stared, eyes half closed against the sun, the silent building began to stir with life, so that he saw it as an ageing and once beautiful woman, awaiting the return of sons who had marched away centuries since and been swallowed up in a forgotten war. There was patience here, patience and a kind of desperate dignity, as though all hope of their return had never been abandoned, and that one day all the windows would glow with candles. Craddock tried to relate this dignity and repose with the little that Rudd had told him of the family who had lived here for a century or more but he found this very difficult, for somehow the house did not strike him as morose, merely forsaken and resigned. Yet about the middle section of it, the oldest, Elizabethan block, vitality lingered, the older tenants still seeming to exert more influence than the Lovells and this conviction was so real that Craddock would not have been surprised if, as he watched, lights had flickered in that part of the house leaving each wing dark and lifeless.
He climbed the stone steps and wrestled with the giant key, the lock turning more easily than he had anticipated, and the great door swung back with a sound like an old man’s cough. He left the door open, for it was dim in the slate-slabbed hall and here he saw that the early-Victorian architect’s work on the interior had been more bold than outside, for beyond the great empty fireplace a stair ran up in a well-contrived curve and each step was so broad and shallow that it promised an easy ascent to those short of wind. There was not much furniture in the hall and what there was was shrouded in green dust-sheets. Some of the portraits had lot numbers attached to them and Craddock, recalling the hard faces of Sir George and younger son, guessed they were portraits of Lovells from 1806 onwards; they had the same bleakness of eye and stiff formality of dress that he had noted in the photographs in the magazine.
He glanced in two reception-rooms, one on each side of the hall, finding them half-full of shrouded furniture, most of which was lotted, but here and there was a piece labelled with an ‘R’. The reserved pieces, he noticed, were mostly heavy oak or draperies, like the big refectory table and the faded curtains looped with silk ropes as thick as cables. He went back into the hall and down the stone passage leading to the kitchens but the light here was bad so he returned and ascended the stairs, hesitating at the top where there was a kind of minstrel gallery, trying to decide whether to take the left or the right-hand corridor.
He was standing here when he heard the sound of a footfall on a wooden floor, and hearing it repeated identified the sound of someone walking in one of the rooms in the west wing. He was on the point of retracing his steps, and locking the door behind him, when he remembered that he was as authorised to be here as anyone else, so he walked quietly in the direction of the sounds until he came to the door at the very end of the corridor. It was slightly ajar but when he stopped and listened again the sounds had ceased, so after a preliminary cough he walked into what had obviously been a nursery, for there were toys strewn about, including a large dappled rocking-horse and over in the corner a vast three-fold children’s scrap screen of the kind that every upper-class nursery possessed. Then, over by the tall window, where the square panes had turned to stained glass in the setting sun, he saw the girl.
Astonishment made him the trespasser. He stood just inside the door gaping, and she stared back, an instinctive defiance stemming from anger rather than alarm. She was, Craddock decided on the spot, the most exciting woman he had ever seen. Not in illustrated books, nor in the course of his visits to picture galleries or in his dreams, did he recall having seen anyone who made such an immediate impact upon his senses.
He climbed the stone steps and wrestled with the giant key, the lock turning more easily than he had anticipated, and the great door swung back with a sound like an old man’s cough. He left the door open, for it was dim in the slate-slabbed hall and here he saw that the early-Victorian architect’s work on the interior had been more bold than outside, for beyond the great empty fireplace a stair ran up in a well-contrived curve and each step was so broad and shallow that it promised an easy ascent to those short of wind. There was not much furniture in the hall and what there was was shrouded in green dust-sheets. Some of the portraits had lot numbers attached to them and Craddock, recalling the hard faces of Sir George and younger son, guessed they were portraits of Lovells from 1806 onwards; they had the same bleakness of eye and stiff formality of dress that he had noted in the photographs in the magazine.
He glanced in two reception-rooms, one on each side of the hall, finding them half-full of shrouded furniture, most of which was lotted, but here and there was a piece labelled with an ‘R’. The reserved pieces, he noticed, were mostly heavy oak or draperies, like the big refectory table and the faded curtains looped with silk ropes as thick as cables. He went back into the hall and down the stone passage leading to the kitchens but the light here was bad so he returned and ascended the stairs, hesitating at the top where there was a kind of minstrel gallery, trying to decide whether to take the left or the right-hand corridor.
He was standing here when he heard the sound of a footfall on a wooden floor, and hearing it repeated identified the sound of someone walking in one of the rooms in the west wing. He was on the point of retracing his steps, and locking the door behind him, when he remembered that he was as authorised to be here as anyone else, so he walked quietly in the direction of the sounds until he came to the door at the very end of the corridor. It was slightly ajar but when he stopped and listened again the sounds had ceased, so after a preliminary cough he walked into what had obviously been a nursery, for there were toys strewn about, including a large dappled rocking-horse and over in the corner a vast three-fold children’s scrap screen of the kind that every upper-class nursery possessed. Then, over by the tall window, where the square panes had turned to stained glass in the setting sun, he saw the girl.
Astonishment made him the trespasser. He stood just inside the door gaping, and she stared back, an instinctive defiance stemming from anger rather than alarm. She was, Craddock decided on the spot, the most exciting woman he had ever seen. Not in illustrated books, nor in the course of his visits to picture galleries or in his dreams, did he recall having seen anyone who made such an immediate impact upon his senses.
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