The Yellow Admiral Read Online Free PDF Page B

closet.
    'Why, Stephen, there you are,' called Jack from the breakfast-room, hearing him on the stairs. 'Good morning to you. What an early worm you are to be sure. I trust you slept? You was quite fagged out.'
    'Wonderfully, I thank you: wonderfully: I do not remember getting into bed, and when I woke I could hardly tell where I was, at all. What a pure joy it is, the awareness of having slept.'
    'I am sure of it,' said Jack, for whom this was an everyday occurrence. He poured him a cup of coffee and went on, 'What do you say to taking out a gun and seeing whether we can knock over a rabbit or two? And there might be a snipe in the plashy bottom.'
    'With all my heart.'
    'We can breakfast properly when we come back. But before the women get up let us first have a quick look into the library and the justice-room. I am rather proud of them, and you will not mind a little dust. Or squalor.'
    The library was indeed a noble room, running almost the whole width of the first floor, with five bays to the south and an east window; though the early light had scarcely yet strength enough to show more than shadowy ranges of book-cases, all of a kind, panelling, and countless dim spines behind glass, long tables in the middle, wing-chairs by the fireplace, and some rolled-up sacking bundles, Sophie's shame. 'My great-grandfather the judge was a prodigious reader,' said Jack, 'and so was his great-grandfather - it skips generations, sometimes, like stamina in horses. You must spend a day or two in here, if it comes on to rain.'
    'So must Clarissa Oakes. She has been fairly starved for books.'
    'I had no idea she was a learned lady.'
    'Sure, she has nothing of the bluestocking; but she reads Latin as easily as French, and Greek with no more difficulty than most of us. And she dearly loves a book-room.'
    'Do you suppose she would teach George amo amas amat?'
    'She is a very good-natured woman, in spite of her apparent reserve.'
    'I shall get Sophie to ask her. But for the moment we must jump down to the justice-room and away, or the rabbits will all have gone to ground. I am sorry about this staircase,' he said as they went down. 'I had hoped to make it as it was when I was a boy - I did have the panelling put back in my mother's room - but before the men could get to work on this, funds ran out. Here' - opening a door - 'is the justice-room.'
    'It is not a term I know,' said Stephen, looking at the bare, formal arrangement of a large table set across, with some chairs and benches facing it, the walls clothed in the soberest linenfold oak: no pictures. 'What happens here?'
    'This is where we deal with the manor's legal proceedings, court baron, court leet, and so on. And when I am sitting as a justice of the peace, that is my chair behind the table, with the high back. Sitting as a magistrate, if you follow me.'
    'Long, long ago you once told me that you had it in mind to preach a sermon to the ship's company, there being no chaplain aboard: but even that did not so astonish me as now hearing that you are a judge, my dear; one of the righteous.'
    'Oh,' said Jack, carelessly, 'the Aubreys have always been justices of the county, time out of mind. It had nothing at all to do with the righteousness. Mind your step in the doorway:there is a damned awkward plank. No. I regard it as an infernal nuisance, and it has caused a deal of trouble with my preserving neighbours, because I will not come down heavy on poachers - I often knew them as boys. This is the way to the gun-room. Here is a fourteen-gauge Manton that might suit you.'
    They walked along a passage to the back of the house, coming out in the stable-yard, where Harding was waiting with a dog. 'Should you like me to come along, sir?' he asked.
    'No,' said Jack, 'you wait here for Master George and take him along for the paper. But Bess can come.'
    The rough, more-or-less spaniel bitch heard the words and bounded across, quivering with zeal and gazing into Jack's face to see which way they