No Name, Wilkie Collins [reading the story of the TXT] 📗

and winked at her once more. “Now you may talk about the east, my dear,” said the veteran, “for now you know it.”

The east passage, after leading them on for a few yards only, terminated in a vestibule, with a high door in it which faced them as they advanced. The door admitted them to a large and lofty drawing-room, decorated, like all the other apartments, with valuable old-fashioned furniture. Leading the way across this room, Magdalen’s conductor pushed back a heavy sliding-door, opposite the door of entrance. “Put your apron over your head,” said old Mazey. “We are coming to the banqueting-hall now. The floor’s mortal cold, and the damp sticks to the place like cockroaches to a collier. His honor the admiral calls it the Arctic Passage. I’ve got my name for it, too⁠—I call it, Freeze-Your-Bones.”

Magdalen passed through the doorway, and found herself in the ancient banqueting-hall of St. Crux.

On her left hand she saw a row of lofty windows, set deep in embrasures, and extending over a frontage of more than a hundred feet in length. On her right hand, ranged in one long row from end to end of the opposite wall, hung a dismal collection of black, begrimed old pictures, rotting from their frames, and representing battle-scenes by sea and land. Below the pictures, midway down the length of the wall, yawned a huge cavern of a fireplace, surmounted by a towering mantelpiece of black marble. The one object of furniture (if furniture it might be called) visible far or near in the vast emptiness of the place, was a gaunt ancient tripod of curiously chased metal, standing lonely in the middle of the hall, and supporting a wide circular pan, filled deep with ashes from an extinct charcoal fire. The high ceiling, once finely carved and gilt, was foul with dirt and cobwebs; the naked walls at either end of the room were stained with damp; and the cold of the marble floor struck through the narrow strip of matting laid down, parallel with the windows, as a footpath for passengers across the wilderness of the room. No better name for it could have been devised than the name which old Mazey had found. “Freeze-Your-Bones” accurately described, in three words, the banqueting-hall at St. Crux.

“Do you never light a fire in this dismal place?” asked Magdalen.

“It all depends on which side of Freeze-Your-Bones his honor the admiral lives,” said old Mazey. “His honor likes to shift his quarters, sometimes to one side of the house, sometimes to the other. If he lives Noathe of Freeze-Your-Bones⁠—which is where you’ve just come from⁠—we don’t waste our coals here. If he lives South of Freeze-Your-Bones⁠—which is where we are going to next⁠—we light the fire in the grate and the charcoal in the pan. Every night, when we do that, the damp gets the better of us: every morning, we turn to again, and get the better of the damp.”

With this remarkable explanation, old Mazey led the way to the lower end of the hall, opened more doors, and showed Magdalen through another suite of rooms, four in number, all of moderate size, and all furnished in much the same manner as the rooms in the northern wing. She looked out of the windows, and saw the neglected gardens of St. Crux, overgrown with brambles and weeds. Here and there, at no great distance in the grounds, the smoothly curving line of one of the tidal streams peculiar to the locality wound its way, gleaming in the sunlight, through gaps in the brambles and trees. The more distant view ranged over the flat eastward country beyond, speckled with its scattered little villages; crossed and recrossed by its network of “backwaters”; and terminated abruptly by the long straight line of seawall which protects the defenseless coast of Essex from invasion by the sea.

“Have we more rooms still to see?” asked Magdalen, turning from the view of the garden, and looking about her for another door.

“No more, my dear⁠—we’ve run aground here, and we may as well wear round and put back again,” said old Mazey. “There’s another side of the house⁠—due south of you as you stand now⁠—which is all tumbling about our ears. You must go out into the garden if you want to see it; it’s built off from us by a brick bulkhead, t’other side of this wall here. The monks lived due south of us, my dear, hundreds of years afore his honor the admiral was born or thought of, and a fine time of it they had, as I’ve heard. They sang in the church all the morning, and drank grog in the orchard all the afternoon. They slept off their grog on the best of featherbeds, and they fattened on the neighborhood all the year round. Lucky beggars! lucky beggars!”

Apostrophizing the monks in these terms, and evidently regretting that he had not lived himself in those good old times, the veteran led the way back through the rooms. On the return passage across “Freeze-Your-Bones,” Magdalen preceded him. “She’s as straight as a poplar,” mumbled old Mazey to himself, hobbling along after his youthful companion, and wagging his venerable head in cordial approval. “I never was particular what nation they belonged to; but I always did like ’em straight and fine grown, and I always shall like ’em straight and fine grown, to my dying day.”

“Are there more rooms to see upstairs, on the second floor?” asked Magdalen, when they had returned to the point from which they had started.

The naturally clear, distinct tones of her voice had hitherto reached the old sailor’s imperfect sense of hearing easily enough. Rather to her surprise, he became stone deaf on a sudden, to her last question.

“Are you sure of your pints of the compass?” he inquired. “If you’re not sure, put your back ag’in the wall, and we’ll go all over ’em again, my dear, beginning with the Noathe.”

Magdalen assured him that she felt quite familiar, by