But when I had answered his question and he had turned to marshal me down the hall towards a door I could dimly see standing open in the twilight of an absolutely sunless interior, I noticed that his step was not without some vigour, despite the feeble bend of his withered body and the incessant swaying of his head, which seemed to be continually saying No!

“I will prepare madam,” he admonished me, after drawing a ponderous curtain two inches or less aside from one of the windows.  “She is very ill, but she will see you.”

The tone was senile, but it was the senility of an educated man, and as the cultivated accents wavered forth, my mind changed in, regard to the position he held in the house.  Interested anew, I sought to give him another look, but he had already vanished through the doorway, and so noiselessly, it was more like a shadow’s flitting than a man’s withdrawal.

The darkness in which I sat was absolute; but gradually, as I continued to look about me, the spaces lightened and certain details came out, which to my astonishment were of a character to show that the plain if substantial exterior of this house with its choked-up approaches and weedy gardens was no sample of what was to be found inside.  Though the walls surrounding me were dismal because unlighted, they betrayed a splendour unusual in any country house.  The frescoes and paintings were of an ancient order, dating from days when life and not death reigned in this isolated dwelling; but in them high art reigned supreme, an art so high and so finished that only great wealth, combined with the most cultivated taste, could have produced such effects.  I was still absorbed in the wonder of it all, when the quiet voice of the old gentleman who had let me in reached me again from the doorway, and I heard: 

“Madam is ready for you.  May I trouble you to accompany me to her room.”

I rose with alacrity.  I was anxious to see madam, if only to satisfy myself that she was as interesting as the house in which she was self-immured.

I found her a great deal more so.  But before I enter upon our interview, let me mention a fact which had attracted my attention in my passage to her room.  During his absence my guide evidently had pulled aside other curtains than those of the room in which he had left me.  The hall, no longer a tunnel of darkness, gave me a glimpse as we went by, of various secluded corners, and it seemed as if everywhere I looked I saw—­a clock.  I counted four before I reached the staircase, all standing on the floor and all of ancient make, though differing much in appearance and value.  A fifth one rose grim and tall at the stair foot, and under an impulse I have never understood I stopped, when I reached it, to note the time.  But it had paused in its task, and faced me with motionless hands and silent works—­a fact which somehow startled me; perhaps, because just then I encountered the old man’s eye watching me with an expression as challenging as it was unintelligible.