Page:Guy Boothby--A Bid for Fortune.djvu/75

Rh put it in his pocket, took it out again, ruminated a moment, and then reluctantly handed it back to me.

"Nay, nay! my laddie, keep your money, keep your money. Ye can send me the Catullus." Then to him self, unconscious that he was speaking his thoughts aloud. "It was a good edition, and I have no doubt would bring five shillings any day."

From one room we passed into another, and yet an other. They were all alike—shut up, dust-ridden, and forsaken. And yet with it all what a noble place it was—one which any man might be proud to call his own. And to think that it was all going to rack and ruin because of the miserly nature of its owner. In the course of our ramble I discovered that he kept but two servants, the old man who had admitted me to his presence and his wife, who, as that peculiar phrase has it, cooked and did for him. I discovered later that he had not paid either of them wages for some years past, and that they only stayed on with him because they were too poor and proud to seek shelter elsewhere.

When we had inspected the house we left it by a side door and crossed a courtyard to the stables. There the desolation was, perhaps, even more marked than before. The great clock on the tower above the main building had stopped at a quarter to ten on some long-forgotten day, and a spider now ran his web from hand to hand.

At our feet, between the stones, grass grew luxuriantly, thick moss covered the coping of the well, the doors were almost off their hinges, and rats scuttled through the empty loose boxes at our approach. So large was the place, that thirty horses might have found a lodging comfortably, and as far as I could gather, there was room for half as many vehicles in the coach-houses that bordered either side. The intense quiet was only