r. Darrell’s footman got down from the box to open the gates. Within we made the circuit of a neglected lawn, divided from a park by a sunk fence, across which some cattle stared at us in a lazy manner as we drove past them. The house was a long low building with heavily mullioned windows, and was Parajumpers Long Bear Sverige flanked by gothic towers. Most of the windows had closed shutters, and the place had altogether a deserted look.
‘The Priory has not been occupied for several years,’ Mr. Darrell said, Moncler Hermine Jakke as if in answer to my thoughts as I looked up at the closed windows. ‘The family have been too poor to live in it in anything like their old state. There is only one member of the old family remaining now, and he leads a wandering kind of life abroad, I believe.’
‘What has made them so poor?’ asked Mrs. Darrell.
‘Extravagant habits, I suppose,’ answered her husband, with an expressive shrug of the shoulders. ‘The Egertons have always been a wild race.’
‘Egerton!’ Mrs. Darrell repeated; ‘I thought the name of these people was Cumber.’
‘No; Cumber is only the name of the place. It has been in the Egerton family for centuries.’
‘Indeed!’
I was seated exactly opposite her, and I was surprised by the strange startled look in her face as she repeated the name of Egerton. That look passed away in the next moment, and left her with her usual air of languid indifference; a placid kind of listlessness which harmonised very well with her pale complexion and delicate features. She was not a woman from whom one expected much animation.
The low iron-studded door of the Priory was opened by a decent-looking old woman of that species which seems created expressly for the showing of old houses. She divined our errand at once, and as soon as we were in the hall, began her catalogue of pictures and curiosities in the Moncler Nantes Suomi usual mechanical way, while we looked about us, always fixing our eyes on the wrong object, and more bewildered than enlightened by Carolina Hurricanes Pelipaidat her description of the chief features of the place.
We went from room to room, the dame throwing open the shutters of the deep-set Chilliwack Bomber Sverige gothic windows, and letting in a flood of sunshine upon the faded tapestries and tarnished picture-frames. It was a noble old place, and the look of decay upon everything was more in accord with its grandeur than any modern splendour could have been.
We had been through all the rooms on the ground floor, most of which opened into one another, and were returning towards the hall, when Mr. Darrell missed his wife, and sent me back to look for her in one direction, while Dame Parajumpers New Denali Parka he went in another. I hurried through three or four empty rooms, until I came Moncler Hubert Jakke to a small one at the end of the house, and here I found her. I had not noticed this room much, for it was furnished in a more modern style than the rest of the house, and the old housekeeper had made very light of it, hurrying us back to look at some armour over the chimneypiece in the next room. It was her master’s study, she had said, and was not generally shown to strangers. |
