Free The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West Page B

go up on to the roof.
    He shut Sarah and Henry into the library, and, taking a candle, led the way. Anquetil was moved by this vision of the boy passing, candle in hand, through the shadows and splendours of his inheritance. For the great rooms had lain in darkness till the candle disturbed them; the great rooms of state, that were never used now, but preserved their ancient furnishings, their gildings and velvets, and seemed in the light of the candle to flutter still with a life that had but barely departed from them. Such illumination was far more suggestive than the light of day, by which Anquetil had first seen them. Then, the silver tripods, the portraits, the tapestry, the long, polished floors, had stood out plainly visible, silent and motionless, with no mystery attaching to them—nothing except the very obvious interest of their age, their survival, their state of preservation; and their intrinsic beauty. As dead as a museum, Anquetil had thought, in the resistant mood that then possessed him. He had looked, he had admired, but it had been a dutiful admiration; he had not been touched. Now, he saw the old rooms quiver in the uncertain light thus unexpectedly imported, and learnt that some things gained through being indistinctly seen, things that were too delicate and frail to stand the full truth of day. For not seeing is half-believing. That he should make such an admission was a proof that he had travelled a long way since the morning, when he believed himself to be a matter-of-fact man, concerned only with the hard outlines (as he conceived them) of objects, relationships, and situations. Now, he perceived that aspects might alter, and that actuality was a fiction, dependent solely on the observer, his mood, and his prejudice. The old rooms, in the candlelight, inspired him with a tenderness he would not by daylight have credited. Their beauty, which he had thought to be exterior, became significant; they were quickened by the breath of some existence which they had once enjoyed, when no eye regarded them as a museum, but took them for granted as the natural setting for daily life; and that applied to their furnishings too, to the mirrors into whose dim pools women had stolen many a frank or furtive glance; to the chairs whose now faded velvets had received the weight of limbs regardless of mud on the boots. Nevertheless, Anquetil still strove against them. He would not be deluded into sentimentality about things that were dead, merely because it was possible to convince oneself that they had once been alive. This dead beauty inspired him again almost with horror, as he reacted against his own momentary softening, and the resolution returned to him to save Sebastian if he possibly could. The boy, he thought, is already lying in state in a splendid tomb. We will see if we cannot make the effigy jump up and run.
    The gleam of the candle mounted the dark stairs and stirred the shadows of the long low attics. There was no colour up here, neither velvets nor gilding; nothing but plaster and grey oak the colour of ashes. Anquetil preferred this bareness to the sumptuous rooms downstairs; he thought he saw the bones of the house stripped of their flesh; and indeed these silvery galleries recalled the pallor of a skeleton. In certain tombs, he reflected—his mind still running on dissolution—in certain tombs, the skeleton lies exposed beneath the monument, a humble and yet terrible reminder; but here it is otherwise; the house is dying from the top; this uppermost floor is deserted wholly, and all the cheerful bustle has departed from it; it lies stretched in the ashen hues of mortality, immediately below the roof that thinly divides it from the sky. The tiles are no thicker than paper. And he thought that when he had come downstairs again, and was in the living rooms with their deep curtained windows and comfortable sofas, rooms a degree less dead than the state rooms on the middle floor, he would remember