One
IOld Lanscombe moved totteringly from room to room, pulling up the blinds. Now and then hepeered with screwed-up rheumy eyes through the windows.
Soon they would be coming back from the funeral. He shuffled¹ along a little faster. There wereso many windows.
Enderby Hall was a vast Victorian house built in the Gothic style. In every room the curtainswere of rich faded brocade or velvet². Some of the walls were still hung with faded silk. In thegreen drawing room, the old butler glanced up at the portrait above the mantelpiece of oldCornelius Abernethie for whom Enderby Hall had been built. Cornelius Abernethie’s brown beardstuck forward aggressively, his hand rested on a terrestrial globe, whether by desire of the sitter, oras a symbolic³ conceit⁴ on the part of the artist, no one could tell.
A very forceful-looking gentleman, so old Lanscombe had always thought, and was glad that hehimself had never known him personally. Mr. Richard had been his gentleman. A good master,Mr. Richard. And taken very sudden, he’d been, though of course the doctor had been attendinghim for some little time. Ah, but the master had never recovered from the shock of young Mr.
Mortimer’s death. The old man shook his head as he hurried through a connecting door into theWhite Boudoir. Terrible, that had been, a real catastrophe⁵. Such a fine upstanding younggentleman, so strong and healthy. You’d never have thought such a thing likely to happen to him.
Pitiful, it had been, quite pitiful. And Mr. Gordon killed in the war. One thing on top of another.
That was the way things went nowadays. Too much for the master, it had been. And yet he’dseemed almost himself a week ago.
The third blind in the White Boudoir refused to go up as it should. It went up a little way andstuck. The springs were weak—that’s what it was—very old, these blinds were, like everythingelse in the house. And you couldn’t get these old things mended nowadays. Too old-fashioned,that’s what they’d say, shaking their heads in that silly superior way—as if the old things weren’t agreat deal better than the new ones! He could tell them that! Gimcrack, half the new stuff was—came to pieces in your hands. The material wasn’t good, or the

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