Rose Trelawney Read Online Free PDF

away. Mulliner ought to have done it earlier,” he said, taking my arm and propelling me into the carriage, still impatient.
    I had again the sensation I didn’t want any enquiries made, but I said nothing. Half a mile farther on, he pointed out the window. “That’s Gwynne’s place there. A little late to call on him tonight. He keeps early hours.”
    It was not later than nine, and the building was well lit on the ground floor, giving the lie to this speech. I understood it to mean Sir Ludwig wished to get on home after a trip from London, and I was hardly in a mood for visiting myself. Another mile of silence and the carriage turned off the main road, up through a pair of stone pillars, along a quarter of a mile of snow-crusted pebbles, with a park around us, whose features were indistinguishable in the darkness. Only the welcome sight of lit windows was to be seen, looming suddenly ahead as we rounded a turn in the road.
    There was a fingernail of moon, enough to give a dim view of a large building of stone. It had a vaguely Classical feeling about it, with a few Corinthian columns to add to the illusion. It was only an illusion, the windows bore traces of Baroque, particularly in the second story where bulges of concrete protruded, yet it was too severely geometrical in other details to qualify as Baroque. A heavy-handed Germanic effort at elegance, I decided. The doorway in the distance had all the lack of joie de vivre to be expected of a Schloss. In my experience, the Germans do not excel in a doorway. They have mastered the window, even improved on it, but from old Schloss Langenburg to newish Schloss Fasanerie, one looks in vain for an exceptional doorway. The Italians have mastered it, and when they fail they at least throw up a row of columns to conceal the lack. The French hide it in the architecture, but do it with style. The English make a great thing of it, but the Germans give you a door that opens excellently without making one welcome. I never met a German yet who wouldn’t give you an argument on the subject, and I was in no mood for an argument, so said nothing.
    I stood regarding the house for some little time, with that old feeling coming over me, the feeling that I had been here before. Then a little laugh escaped me as I looked up and saw the clock in the central portion, embedded in the Mansard roof of the smaller top story, that did not extend to the building’s edge. Schloss Ludwigsburg, of course! It was a sort of inferior copy of the famous home in Württemberg. “Are you related to that Ludwig?” I asked.
    “No. My great-grandfather was an admirer of the German style, however, and had his architect copy a few features. My father in turn had the roof raised in emulation of the original. And I added the clock myself. What was it tipped you off? It is not that good a copy of the original.”
    “No, and the whole approach quite different. It must have been the clock. And of course the doorway,” I added as we approached the entrance, a rounded arch, with the door recessed under it. It was a little finer than I expected at close range. Some effort at embellishment had been made, an ugly crest imbedded in concrete, with a rounded overhang above. Shabby actually, but the door opened well. Not a squeak or squawk.
    Inside we were not so opulent as our prototype. No moulded walls or ceilings, no cupids frolicking around miniature urns. Plain old English plaster and wood and paper, with the entrance floor courtesy of Connemara, Ireland. Furniture an eclectic blend accumulated over the generations, I assumed, by persons of very differing taste. Rather a pity to have a heavy Kent commode weighing some several hundred pounds as the focal point of the room, when there were more elegant and finer periods represented, but then arrival was early for rearranging Sir Ludwig’s furnishings. It would come in time, no doubt, if I were fated to remain long at Granhurst. Certainly the elegant Chippendale