We were a strange company, as the train bore us into the country out of the town. Mr. Howarth's face got on my nerves. That something was badly wrong with him one couldn't help seeing. I couldn't help looking his way every now and again, and every time I did my spirits sank a little lower. Lady Violet sat as straight as a broom handle; with pale face, shut lips, and gleaming eyes. Scarcely a word would she speak to any one. The way she treated the young gentleman--considering they were sweethearts, as Miss Desmond had told me--was queer. These two had a depressing effect on all of us. And when you put to that the fact that Mr. FitzHoward had taken it into his head all of a sudden to behave as if he were a mute at a funeral, and would do nothing except look straight along the tip of his nose, it will be seen that we weren't exactly lively. If it hadn't been for the two doctors I doubt if a dozen words would have been said. Somehow I felt that the whole affair amused Dr. Clinton; and he and Sir Gregory kept talking together in whispers nearly the whole of the way.
There were carriages to meet us at the station where we stopped--though I had begun to think that we never should get there; and presently we were bowling along through country lanes. After we had gone some way, perhaps three or four miles, we turned through some open gates into an avenue of trees. One thing I noticed, that they were all elms and silver beeches; and that they were planted in turns, so that when there was an elm on one side there was a beech upon the other.
It was a great old house we came to. We passed under an arch into a courtyard, where there was a fountain in the middle. If all this indeed belonged to my James I couldn't help wondering more and more why he gave it all up; and, above all, how he ever came to marry the likes of me. There was a huge fire blazing in the hall, which cheered it up a bit. It wanted brightening, for it was so large, and the black oak walls made it seem more than a little grim and sombre.
'We'll first have some lunch,' explained the young gentleman to us, as we stood all together in the hall; 'and then afterwards we'll drive over to the mausoleum.'
It wasn't a festive luncheon. Only the doctors and Mr. FitzHoward ate anything. I'm sure the rest of us would have been just as well without it; particularly Mr. Howarth, for he did nothing else but drink. In spite of myself I kept getting more and more into the dumps. The air of the place and the air of the people, the feeling, too, that something unpleasant was at hand, began to fill me with a sense of worry. Mr. Howarth's face and manner, and the way he drank, made it worse. He must have had two or three bottles of wine to himself; if not more, tumbler after tumbler. What wine it was I couldn't say. The fact that nobody else drank anything at all made the fact of his drinking so much all the more conspicuous. We all sat peering at him out of the corners of our eyes, wondering what was going to happen.