it was now in all the days he could remember. It was a large room with rep-curtained bays on two sides. The furniture was all dark and heavy, sixty, seventy years old. Carved walnut, oak, horsehair, heavy-fringed upholstery, stiffly laundered antimacassars, bookcases whose glass doors mirrored the room, gas jets on heavy black-and-gilt brass arms.

A hanging lamp was lowered over the centre table, where albums and gift books, shells and vases were neatly ranged upon a mat of Berlin wool. A coal fire was smoking sulkily in the steel-rodded grate; the mantelpiece was of brown marble flanked with columns of shining black; the mantelshelf bore another fringed specimen of Berlin wool work and was decorated by a solid black marble clock with gilt horses mounting it in a mad scramble; two beautiful great Sèvres vases of blue china wreathed with white roses and filled with dry teazels, some small photographs in tarnished metal frames, and several smaller articles: Turkish and Chinese boxes, Japanese lacquer ash trays, and a tiny Dresden couple.

There were what-nots in two corners, with their flights of graded and scalloped shelves similarly loaded; here were more photographs, more gift books, a row of lichen owls on a strip of stiff silvery lichen, small specimens of Swiss wood-carving and cloisonné, a china clock that had not moved its hands in all of David’s[13] lifetime, a teacup or two, a vial of sand from the banks of the Jordan, a bowl of Indian brass filled with coloured pebbles, bits of branched coral, goldstone, a chain of Indian beads, and some Aztec pottery in rich brick-brown and painted stripes.

[13]

On the walls were dark old paintings, engravings, and woodcuts in heavy frames, interspersed here and there with rubbishy later contributions: “A Yard of Roses” in a white-and-gilt mat and frame, and a coloured photograph of ladies and children, too sickeningly pretty, in high-belted empire gowns and curls, dancing to the music of a spinet.

The only notable thing among all these was a life-size study that hung above the mantel: the portrait in oil of a man of perhaps thirty or thirty-five. David ended his inspection with a long look at it, and his thoughts went to its subject.

[14]

CHAPTER II

This was Black Roger, who had been master here at Wastewater all the days of his stormy and brilliant life. The face at which David was staring now so thoughtfully had been one of 

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