Claire, a little bored, a slim, white figure in the violet darkness, leaned forward and waved her hand as he entered the postern gate.
"Nunks, what ages you have been!" she exclaimed. "Have you been with Aunt Angèle all this time?"
"Where have you been then?" she persisted. "You look half asleep."
He sank back into his chair. Again he seemed to hear the echo of some tinkling instrument, to find in his nostrils a perfume more pungent even than the perfume of the cedar tree. To him there was something ominous in what seemed to be almost a message of recall.
"A long journey," he muttered, a little vaguely.
It was only after he had shown her around the picture gallery on the following Sunday afternoon that Claire properly appreciated Henry Ballaston. She listened to his last little dissertation--stiff perhaps and a trifle pedantic, and yet in its way eloquent--as to a supposed Romney, with something more than interest, almost enthusiasm. Here was a man who spoke from his heart of things he loved, and a man whom no one in the world, meeting him casually, would have suspected of possessing such a thing as a heart.
"Tell me what first made you love these things so," she begged.
She had seated herself upon the huge divan at the end of the gallery from which, in the afternoon light, was a wonderful view on one side of the great oil paintings which lined the staircase, and on the other, through the wide-flung mullioned windows, a curiously beautiful vignette of the park with its beech and oak trees, and beyond, at the top of the slope, the famous home covert.
"I have had no other life," he told her calmly. "At Eton I developed no tastes either for athletics or affairs. At Oxford they spoke of the Church. The suggestion was repugnant to me. I had some inclinations towards Roman Catholicism, but the Ballastons have always been a Protestant family. I considered the army and discarded the idea. All the time, wherever I was, I wanted to come back to Ballaston. In the end I came back. The old librarian here had just died, and somehow or other I drifted into his place. That was twenty-seven years ago and it seems almost like yesterday."
"It would have suited few other men," he rejoined. "It has suited me. I have activities out of doors as well as within. There is scarcely a tree in the park, for instance, whose history I could not tell you, nor an acre of the gardens I have not watched through the winter and summer; I have helped to protect the fruits and flowers from the frosts, and tried my best to gather in the sunshine for them. Indoors, of course," he went on, after a moment's pause, "has been the scene of my real labours, if labours they can be called. I have catalogued the pictures and the china, the armour and the various curios, after a style of my own, with the history, so far as possible, of each of the masters, the date and a copy of such criticisms as have appeared in the press. The catalogues, you observe, are all written by hand."