Donald was not given to the making of long speeches. His voice broke many times in the course of this, and the tears were running down Lady Grizell’s pale cheeks. She held out her hands to him, saying simply, “Take me to her!” and the two tall figures went out across the grass together.
Basil sat alone in the schoolroom, although it was past bedtime. Nurse, like everybody else, had apparently forgotten him, but Basil, absorbed in his own thoughts, sat on by the dying fire. There were always fires in his grandfather’s house whenever it was in the least cold, and that August it was very cold, so cold that grandfather, getting wet through out shooting, somehow got a chill, was ill only three days, and now was lying dead in the big bedroom over Basil’s head. So Basil had a good deal to think about. It was not that death was new to him--from his earliest infancy it had been impressed upon him that his father was dead--but that he could not by any stretch of fancy imagine what life would be without grandfather--grandfather who was lying with his beautiful hands crossed on his breast in that long, light-colored wooden box upstairs.
Basil resented the fact that grandfather’s coffin should be made of light wood. It seemed incongruous and impertinent, somehow, that anything used by grandfather should be otherwise than old--old and rich-colored and seemly; and the child found himself wondering whether grandfather was annoyed. There were many things in that bedroom calculated to annoy him, Basil reflected. In the first place, when mother took him in that afternoon that he might lay the asters gathered in his own garden at his grandfather’s feet, he remarked that all the blinds were down, and grandfather would have hated that, and the windows were shut, and there was a heavy scent of hot-house flowers. “I fear he’s very uncomfortable,” whispered Basil to himself. “He’ll be glad to get to heaven out of that stuffy room.” For grandfather had loved air as much as he liked fires.
The horizon of Basil’s experience was somewhat limited. It consisted of mother and grandfather, and of “other grandfather,” who lived at Altringham in Cheshire, and was mother’s father.
Every year Basil and mother went to Altringham for six weeks, and life there was so utterly different from what it was with grandfather that Basil never ceased to puzzle over it and to wonder why mother always cried when she came away, and why “other grandfather” always said: “You moost bear with the old heathen, Sophia; he’s been generous enough as regards mooney, and, remember, you can be _in_ the world but not of it.”