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One evening, having left Antwerpen ringing its innumerable bells over the grave of its dead Art, he leaned out of the casement of an absent friend's old palace in the Brabant street that is named after Mary of Burgundy; an old casement crusted with quaint carvings, and gilded round in Spanish fashion, with many gargoyles and griffins, and illegible scutcheons.
"My recruits," said the Captain, "have been all marched off for the depot at the Isle of Wight; and I want to leave Scotland, and particularly this little burgh, without being worried to death, of which I must despair, should it come to be known that I can provide young griffins, as we call them, with commissions.
He agreed, before he fairly knew what he was about, to David's adopting Gwillym as his own son, to go with him to the house of a good woman in London and be taught all that a lad should learn. In time he might be able to carve stone saints and angels, kings and queens, gargoyles and griffins, for great cathedrals. And all this had come of the forbidden clay toys.
In this contemptible situation had Casimir placed himself by his rash ambition to prove before the world that German princes could bite and scratch like griffins and tigers as well as carry them in their shields. From this position Orange partly rescued him. He made his peace with the states-general.
Mistress Perrote led the way into the room on the right, a pleasant chamber, which looked out into the larger garden. At the further end of the room stood a large bed of blue camlet, with a canopy, worked with fighting griffins in yellow. A large chest of carved oak stood at the foot.
On this particular forenoon, however, neither Miss Hugonin nor Felix Kennaston had eyes for its comeliness; silently they braved the griffins, and in silence they skirted the fish-pond silver-crinkling in the May morning and passed through cloistral ilex-shadowed walks, and amphitheatres of green velvet, and terraces ample and mellow in the sunlight, silently.
So, lying down, with his eyes fixed upon the great stone griffin, he gradually declined, and died. It was a good thing for some of the people of the town that they did not know this. If you should ever visit the old town, you would still see the little griffins on the sides of the church; but the great stone griffin that was over the door is gone. A mountain brook ran through a little village.
The pyramidal façade common in these buildings, the campanili that suspend aërial lanterns upon plain square towers, the domes rising tier over tier from the intersection of nave and transept to end in minarets and pinnacles, the low long colonnades of marble pilasters, the open porches resting upon lions, the harmonious blending of baked clay and rosy-tinted stone, the bold combination of round and pointed arches, and the weird invention whereby every string-course and capital has been carved with lions, sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged horses, lizards, and knights in armour all these are elements that might, we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style.
In one corner a bronze fawn, as if wishing to drink, was inclining its greenish head, grizzled, too, by dampness. The floor of the atrium was of mosaic; the walls, faced partly with red marble and partly with wood, on which were painted fish, birds, and griffins, attracted the eye by the play of colors.
There were burnished brass candle-sticks, with extinguishers in the shape of prancing griffins, and snuffers of the same metal, fashioned after the similitude of some strange and presumably extinct saurian; and a Dresden china shepherdess, whose shattered crook had long since disappeared, peeped coquettishly through the engraved crystal of a tall candle shade at the bloated features of a mandarin, on a tea-pot with a cracked spout that some Darrington, stung by the gad-fly of travel, had brought to the homestead from Nanking.
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