More than an hour after Allan had set forth on his exploring
expedition through his own grounds, Midwinter rose, and enjoyed, in his turn, a full view by daylight of the magnificence of the new house.
Refreshed by his long night's rest, he descended the great
staircase as cheerfully as Allan himself. One after another, he, too, looked into the spacious rooms on the ground floor in breathless astonishment at the beauty and the luxury which surrounded him. "The house where I lived in service when I was a boy, was a fine one," he thought, gayly; "but it was nothing to this! I wonder if Allan is as surprised and delighted as I am?" The beauty of the summer morning drew him out through the open hall door, as it had drawn his friend out before him. He ran briskly down the steps, humming the burden of one of the old vagabond tunes which he had danced to long since in the old vagabond time. Even the memories of his wretched childhood took their color, on that happy morning. from the bright medium through which he looked back at them. "If I was not out of practice," he thought to himself, as he leaned on the fence and looked over at the park, "I could try some of my old tumbling tricks on that delicious grass." He turned, noticed two of the servants talking together near the shrubbery, and asked for news of the master of the house.
The men pointed with a smile in the direction of the gardens; Mr. Armadale had gone that way more than an hour since, and had met (as had been reported) with Miss Milroy in the grounds. Midwinter followed the path through the shrubbery, but, on reaching the flower garden, stopped, considered a little, and retraced his steps. "If Allan has met with the young lady," he said to himself, "Allan doesn't want me." He laughed as he drew that inevitable inference, and turned considerately to explore the beauties of Thorpe Ambrose on the other side of the house.
Passing the angle of the front wall of the building, he descended
some steps, advanced along a paved walk, turned another angle, and found himself in a strip of garden ground at the back of the house.
Behind him was a row of small rooms situated on the level of the
servants' offices. In front of him, on the further side of the
little garden, rose a wall, screened by a laurel hedge, and
having a door at one end of it, leading past the stables to a
gate that opened on the high-road. Perceiving that he had only
discovered thus far the shorter way to the house, used by the
servants and trades-people, Midwinter turned back again, and
looked in at the window of one of the rooms on the basement
story as he passed it. Were these the servants' offices? No; the
offices were apparently in some other part of the ground-floor; the window he had looked in at was the window of a lumber-room. The next two rooms in the row were both empty. The fourth window, when he approached it, presented a little variety. It served also as a door; and it stood open to the garden at that moment.
Attracted by the book-shelves which he noticed on one of the
walls, Midwinter stepped into the room.
The books, few in number, did not detain him long; a glance at
their backs was enough without taking them down. The Waverley
Novels, Tales by Miss Edgeworth, and by Miss Edgeworth's many
followers, the Poems of Mrs. Hemans, with a few odd volumes of
the illustrated gift-books of the period, composed the bulk of
the little library. Midwinter turned to leave the room, when an
object on one side of the window, which he had not previously
noticed, caught his attention and stopped him. It was a statuette
standing on a bracket—a reduced copy of the famous Niobe of the
Florence Museum. He glanced from the statuette to the window, with a sudden doubt which set his heart throbbing fast. It was a French window. He looked out with a suspicion which he had not felt yet. The view before him was the view of a lawn and garden. For a moment his mind struggled blindly to escape the conclusion which had seized it, and struggled in vain. Here, close round him and close before him—here, forcing him mercilessly back from the happy present to the horrible past, was the room that Allan had seen in the Second Vision of the Dream.