Nor was it on the floor above, tenanted mostly by sexual offenders. His room was not one of the grand succession which lay along the garden front. By the light of the sconces which still shone on their panels of faded satin and clouded gold, he joined the company dispersing to bed through the islands of old furniture. Miles turned back and, as he reached the terrace, the shutters began to close and the great chandeliers were one by one extinguished. Miles knew nothing of such periods and processes, but he felt an incomprehensible tidal pull towards the circumjacent splendors.
Mountjoy had been planned and planted in the years of which he knew nothing generations of skilled and patient husbandmen had weeded and dunged and pruned generations of dilettanti had watered it with cascades and jets generations of collectors had lugged statuary here all, it seemed, for his enjoyment this very night under this huge moon. Never again, perhaps, would he be free to roam these walks. He did not much care for music and this was his last evening at Mountjoy. Miles, sauntering among the sleeping flowers, was suffused with melancholy. No gold fin winked in the porphyry font and any peacock which seemed to be milkily drooping in the moon shadows was indeed a ghost, for the whole flock of them had been found mysteriously and rudely slaughtered a day or two ago in the first disturbing flush of this sudden summer. In the basin the folded lilies had left a brooding sweetness over the water.
Strains of a string quartet floated out from the drawing-room windows and were lost amid the splash and murmur of the gardens. This was a rich, old-fashioned Tennysonian night. The weather varied from day to day and from county to county as it had done of old, most anomalously. The State Meteorological Institute had so far produced only an unseasonable fall of snow and two little thunderbolts no larger than apricots.
DESPITE their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate.
0 kommentar(er)
