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The great dead lie imprisoned in escutcheoned vaults, but for the little dead Nature spreads out soft small graves, all snowdrops and dewdrops, where day-long they can feel the earth rocking them as in a cradle, and at night hear the hushed singing of the stars. Yes, Earth loves nothing so much as her little graves.
When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging wind swept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemed every moment about to land them in some invisible ravine. Fear and cold at last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being lifted from his seat and torches were flashing on a high escutcheoned doorway set in battlemented walls.
Hitherto she had almost always felt herself a match for circumstances, but now the very dead were leagued to defeat her: people she had never seen and whose names she couldn't even remember seemed to be plotting and contriving against her under the escutcheoned grave-stones of Saint Desert.
"Speak of the Devil," whispered La Fosse in my ear, and, moved by the words and by the significance of his glance, I turned in my chair. The door had opened, and under the lintel stood the thick-set figure of the Comte de Chatellerault. Before him a lacquey in my escutcheoned livery of red-and-gold was receiving, with back obsequiously bent, his hat and cloak.
Apart from the daily routine of the office, which often became mechanical, so that I could pursue it and think of other things even while it was going on, I had no true life in the present that is to say no strongly conscious life of my own, apart from the region of imagination except when I was sitting in the deep old escutcheoned bay-window of the Hall, looking out upon the old shaded courtyard, where the sunlight, darting amidst the spreading plane-trees, flecked and chequered the marble pavement, and the little carved fountain trilled and rippled till it incited the canary hanging in its gilded cage to break into song that drowned its splashing murmur, and silenced the sparrows twittering about the heavy woodwork of the old porch.
The emperor and empress thereupon take their places on the dais beneath the great escutcheoned golden canopy, and in front of the two chairs of state that represent the thrones.
The huge mantelpiece ascending to the carved ceiling in grotesque pilasters, and scroll-work of the blackest oak, with the quartered arms of Brandon and Saville escutcheoned in the centre; the panelled walls of the same dark wainscot; the armorie of ebony; the high-backed chairs, with their tapestried seats; the lofty bed, with its hearse-like plumes and draperies of a crimson damask that seemed, so massy was the substance and so prominent the flowers, as if it were rather a carving than a silk, all conspired with the size of the room to give it a feudal solemnity, not perhaps suited to the rest of the house, but well calculated to strike a gloomy awe into the breast of the worldly and proud man who now entered the death-chamber of his brother.
The huge mantelpiece ascending to the carved ceiling in grotesque pilasters, and scroll-work of the blackest oak, with the quartered arms of Brandon and Saville escutcheoned in the centre; the panelled walls of the same dark wainscot; the armorie of ebony; the high-backed chairs, with their tapestried seats; the lofty bed, with its hearse-like plumes and draperies of a crimson damask that seemed, so massy was the substance and so prominent the flowers, as if it were rather a carving than a silk, all conspired with the size of the room to give it a feudal solemnity, not perhaps suited to the rest of the house, but well calculated to strike a gloomy awe into the breast of the worldly and proud man who now entered the death-chamber of his brother.
For months and months and months he seemed only a bundle of exposed nerves that is, where he had any movement or sensation at all. Now a past, however escutcheoned and fame-enrolled, is even more starvation diet than a future of affection and self-confidence. No help was to be had from either of their homes; it was the day of self-help for all.
The dusky canvases, hung high in tarnished escutcheoned frames, presented a continuous chronicle of the line, from Bracciaforte himself, with his predatory profile outlined by some early Tuscan hand against the turrets of his impregnable fortress.
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