FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost wholly occupied with various phases of the large subject of domestic service. He seemed suddenly to have been transported to some region populated exclusively by clean-shaven men in brown livery. One of these was holding a spirited horse outside the station, and when Lord Plowden had taken the reins, and Thorpe had gathered the rugs about his knees and feet, this menial silently associated himself with the young man who had accompanied them from town, on the back seat of the trap. With these people so close behind him, Thorpe felt that any intimate conversation was out of the question. Indeed, talk of any sort was not invited; the big horse burst forth with high, sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight, once the main road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's energies to regulate. He kept up a continual murmuring monologue to the animal--"So--so--quiet, my pet,--so--so--easy, my beauty---so--so"--and his wrists and gloved hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of strain, as they held their own against the rigid arched neck and mouth of steel. Thorpe kept a grip on the side of the trap, and had only a modified pleasure in the drive.
The road along which they sped seemed, in the gathering dusk, uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good deal as to how frightened the two mutes behind him must be.
But silence was such a law of their life that, though he strained his ears, he could not so much as hear them sigh or gasp.
It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off, with but the most fleeting diminution of pace, upon a private road, which speedily developed into an avenue of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower than ever.
Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out all at once upon an open space, swung smartly round the crescent of a gravel road, and halted before what seemed to be the door of a greenhouse. Thorpe, as he stood up in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a low, pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing behind curtains in several widely separated windows;what he had taken to be a conservatory revealed itself now to be a glass gallery, built along the front of the central portion of this house.
A profusion of hospitable lights--tall wax-candles in brackets among the vines against the trellised wall--gave to this outlying entrance what the stranger felt to be a delightful effect. Its smooth tiled floor, comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the path outside. There were low easy-chairs here, and a little wicker table bearing books and a lady's work-basket.
Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were massed beneath the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis.
Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this glazed vestibule, the broad doorway of the house proper stood open--with warm lights glowing richly upon dark woods in the luxurious obscurity within.
What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants who seemed to swarm everywhere. The two who had alighted from the trap had contrived somehow mysteriously to multiply themselves in the darkness. All at once there were a number of young men--at the horse's head, at the back and sides of the trap, at the first doorway, and the second, and beyond--each presenting such a smooth-faced, pallid, brown-clad replica of all the others that Thorpe knew he should never be able to tell them apart.
Lord Plowden paused for a moment under the candle-light to look at his watch. "We did it in a bit over eight minutes,"he remarked, with obvious satisfaction. "With four people and heavy roads that's not so bad--not so bad.
But come inside."
They moved forward through the wide doorway into an apartment the like of which Thorpe had not seen before.
It was a large, square room, with a big staircase at the end, which separated and went off to right and left, half-way up its visible course. Its floor was of inlaid woods, old and uneven from long use, and carpeted here and there by the skins of tigers and leopards.
There were many other suggestions of the chase about the room: riding boots, whips, spurs, and some stands of archaic weapons caught the eye at various points;the heads of foxes and deer peeped out on the blackened panels of the walls, from among clusters of hooks crowded with coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right, where a fire glowed and blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low chairs and divans drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic occupation.
The irregularity of every thing outside--the great table in the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books, flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches;the shoes, slippers, and leggings scattered under the benches at the sides--all this self-renewing disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a profound surprise.
It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch--and to find it in the ancestral home of an English nobleman, filled to overflowing with servants, amazed him.
The glances that he cast about him, however, were impassive enough. His mind was charged with the ceaseless responsibility of being astonished at nothing.
A man took his hat, and helped him off with his coat.
Another moved toward the staircase with his two bags.
"If you will follow Pangbourn," said his host, indicating this second domestic, "he will look after you.
You would like to go up and change now, wouldn't you?
There's a fire in your room."
Thus dismissed, he went up the stairs in the wake of his portmanteaus, taking the turning to the left, and then proceeding by a long, low passage, round more than one corner, to what he conceived to be a wing of the house.
The servant ushered him into a room--and, in despite of himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it.
