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Susy read on the scroll beneath it: "The Hon'ble Diana Lefanu, fifteenth Countess of Altringham" and heard Strefford say: "Do you remember? It hangs where you noticed the empty space above the mantel-piece, in the Vandyke room. They say Reynolds stipulated that it should be put with the Vandykes."
The stud was superb; the cook, a French artist of consummate genius, who had a brougham to his own use and wore diamonds of the first water; in the broad beech-studded grassy lands no lesser thing than doe and deer ever swept through the thick ferns in the sunlight and the shadow; a retinue of powdered servants filled the old halls, and guests of highest degree dined in its stately banqueting room, with its scarlet and gold, its Vandykes and its Vernets, and yet there was terribly little money at Royallieu with it all.
Under her guidance we passed through a dozen apartments, duly stocked with old pictures, old tapestry, old carvings, old armour, with a hundred ornaments and treasures. The pictures were especially valuable. The two Vandykes, the trio of rosy Rubenses, the sole and sombre Rembrandt, glowed with conscious authenticity.
He saw the Cotswolds round Wyck-on-the-Hill, he made you see them, as they were: the high curves of the hills, multiplied, thrown off, one after another; the squares and oblongs and vandykes and spread fans of the fields; and their many colours; grass green of the pastures, emerald green of the young wheat, white green of the barley; shining, metallic green of the turnips; the pink, the brown, the purple fallows, the sharp canary yellow of the charlock.
The beauty of his countenance, the mystery of his secluded life, the air of melancholy and mental distress which I imagined myself to detect in his manner he often used to sit for minutes together with his eyes fixed on vacancy and his whole face expressive of the bitterest emotion had wrought this spell upon my imagination, and I could no more mingle his name with that of the ordinary men and women we discussed than I could confound his solitary and expressive figure with the very proper but conventional forms of the simpering youths who followed me in parlors or begged to be allowed the honor of a dance at the balls I attended with the Vandykes.
Of his birth and connections little was known; he was called the Hermit of Street. I was not very well one day, and I had been left alone in the house. At seven o'clock how well I remember the hour! I was sitting in my window, waiting for the return of the Vandykes, and watching the face which had now appeared at its usual place in the study.
She sold two Vandykes and a little silver for eleven thousand pounds and she raised, on mortgage, twenty-nine thousand. That went to Edward's money-lending friends in Monte Carlo. So she had to get the twenty-nine thousand back, for she did not regard the Vandykes and the silver as things she would have to replace. They were just frills to the Ashburnham vanity.
"I am Delight Hunter, a country girl, sir, visiting the Vandykes." Then as my lips settled into a determined curve, he himself opened the door, and bowing low, asked if I would accept his protection to the gate. Declining his offer with a wild shake of the head, I dashed from the house and fled with an incomprehensible sense of relief back to that of the Vandykes.
Above them, hovering in the clouds, are three other children, who died in early life. In the Double Cube-room, which is regarded as a gem in its way and has a most magnificent fireplace, there are some thirteen other paintings by Vandyke. Other paintings by Italian masters are also distributed on the walls of the various apartments, but the Vandykes are regarded as the gems of the collection.
But the splendid houses with their marble peristyles, and the painted villas in their orange-groves along the shore, housed a dull and narrow-minded society, content to amass wealth and play biribi under the eyes of their ancestral Vandykes, without any concern as to the questions agitating the world.
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