Seventy-five. Seventy-six.
Then silence, and the rooks.
V.
They had already hung the hatchment.
He saw it from the carriage as they came up the lime avenue: the great black lozenge set above the door of Ellerholt Park, painted with the Ferrand arms on a black ground, to tell anyone who passed that the master of the house was dead. It must have been ordered weeks ago. That was like the old man: ready for everything except people.
The servants were in the hall, the whole household drawn up in two lines in their new mourning, which had also been ready. Mrs. Allard the housekeeper came forward and curtseyed to Ivo and said, "Your Grace," in a voice that wobbled; and then she turned to the woman at his side and curtseyed again, lower, and said "Your Grace" in a different voice altogether, and burst into tears. Rosamund put out a hand to her, and Mrs. Allard took it in both of hers and held it, and the two women stood like that in the middle of the hall, while forty servants looked at the floor.
"Where is he?" said Ivo.
"In the King's Room, Your Grace. Pask is with him."
He went up alone. He remembered the way; he found, a little to his surprise, that his feet remembered every turn of the stair and every board that creaked. The King's Room was at the end of the west gallery, so called because Charles the First had slept in it for one night on his way to somewhere worse. The curtains were drawn; candles burned at the head and foot of the great bed. Old Pask, the valet, rose from a chair in the corner, looked at Ivo, and went out without a word.
The old man lay on his back under a white sheet turned down at the chest. Somebody had shaved him and brushed his hair, which was thin and white and stood up a little at the crown as it always had. His hands were folded. His face had gone smooth and waxen, the deep lines of temper and amusement eased out of it, so that he looked both much younger and not like himself at all.
Ivo stood at the foot of the bed for a long time.