She evidently
found him a very strange and frightful apparition indeed, and was
dreadfully afraid of him. But if the surviving present bowed down to
us, the past did not. We stood up to the dark, long portraits of the
extinguished race--one was a Holbein--and looked them in their sidelong
eyes. They looked back at us. We all, I know, felt the enigmatical
quality in them. Even my uncle was momentarily embarrassed, I think, by
that invincibly self-complacent expression. It was just as though, after
all, he had not bought them up and replaced them altogether; as though
that, secretly, they knew better and could smile at him.
The spirit of the place was akin to Bladesover, but touched with
something older and remoter. That armour that stood about had once
served in tilt-yards, if indeed it had not served in battle, and this
family had sent its blood and treasure, time after time, upon the most
romantic quest in history, to Palestine. Dreams, loyalties, place and
honour, how utterly had it all evaporated, leaving, at last, the final
expression of its spirit, these quaint painted smiles, these smiles
of triumphant completion! It had evaporated, indeed, long before the
ultimate Durgan had died, and in his old age he had cumbered the place
with Early Victorian cushions and carpets and tapestry table-cloths and
invalid appliances of a type even more extinct, it seemed to us, than
the crusades.
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