"Then don't open it wrong," said the Duke of Glenn Moore, and went out by the chapel door.
Ned Buick had a bed over the coach house, and he slept badly. That spring he saw a thing which he told to no living soul until he was dying. He told it at the last to his sister's girl, who did not understand it. Three nights after the master came home at sometime 1 in the morning, a light came out into the yard. It was the lantern from the passage. The man carrying it was in his shirt sleeves with no coat on in March. He crossed the yard to the last box on the north side and stood outside it for a long time. Ned watched from the window above and counted, and he made it above a quarter of an hour. Then the Duke went in.
Ned came down the ladder in his stockings and stood in the dark at the corner of the coach house. He was 71. He had known that man since he was in skirts, and there are things a servant will risk a great deal to be near. Inside the box, the Duke said something. It was low, and Ned did not catch the words. He caught the shape of them. It was a man talking to a horse at 1:00 in the morning, quietly going on and on, saying nothing that anybody else would want. He heard the horse blow out through his nose once. Then he heard the Duke say quite clearly, "I am sorry. I am very sorry. I could not come." And after that, nothing for a long while.
When the light came out of the box again, Ned Buick had got himself back into the shadow of the arch. The Duke went across his own yard in the cold with the lantern low in his hand. He was crying. He was not making any noise about it. He was 31 years old. Ned went back up the ladder.
In the morning, he said to Verity, "Put a warm mash in that horse at noon as well."
"On whose order?"
"On mine," said Ned Buick.
The Brindles came on the second Tuesday after Easter. They came in a traveling chariot with four horses and a second carriage behind it for the servants. It was more than Oldtown had seen at its door since the old Duke's funeral. Mrs. Mossup had six women in from the village for a week beforehand. The dust sheets came off the whole of the South Front. The great drawing room was opened and aired and found to have a bloom of mildew along the bottom of the yellow silk which no amount of rubbing would take out. They turned two chairs to stand in front of it. That is how great houses are kept up when the money has gone, by the arrangement of the furniture and by a general agreement not to look at certain walls.
Verity watched the carriages come up the avenue from the fourth window of the library with a paste brush in her hand and she went back to her work before they had stopped at the door. She was sent for at noon the next morning. Mrs. Mossup brought the message herself which was a kindness because it gave her the chance to say on the stairs, "You are to show them the library. Say what you would say to me and nothing else. Miss Brindle asks questions."
"What kind of questions?"
"The kind that sound like admiration," said Mrs. Mossup.
There were four of them in the room when she came down. The Duke stood at the window with his hands behind him. Mr. Brindle was a broad gray man of 60 in an excellent coat, holding his hat as though he had not decided to stay. There was a companion, or an aunt in black, who never once spoke, and whose name Verity did not learn that day. And there was Miss Sidonia Brindle.
She was very handsome. That has to be said plainly because it was the first fact about her and she knew it. She was 6 and 20 and tall with the fair, thick, particular beauty that the fashion papers were then calling classical. Her walking dress was a gray-green that had cost more than the whole of Oldtown's library was to cost to mend. She came forward with her hand out, which no lady of the county would have done to a bookbinder.
"You are Miss Thornburn. His grace has told us about you," Miss Brindle. "He says you are saving 400 books with a paste brush and a bath. Is it true?"
"150 of them, ma'am. The rest will wait."
"Wait for what?"
"For money," said Verity.
Mr. Brindle made a short sound that might have been a laugh. "There," he said, "That is a straight answer, and it is the first one I have had in this county in a fortnight. What does it want, then, all of it? Give me the whole figure."
Verity looked at the Duke. The Duke's face told her nothing whatever, which she had begun to understand was itself a kind of instruction.
"£600, sir," she said, "and two years and a second pair of hands."
"£600 for books that are already bought." Mr. Brindle turned to the shelves and looked at them with the flat, appraising eye of a man who had put up three furnaces and a rolling mill from nothing. "You know what that is, in my trade? That is a boiler burst because nobody would spend £4 on a gauge. It is always the same story. Somebody would not spend the £4."
"Papa is very fond of that story," said Miss Brindle. "It is a good story. It is why we have a house in Warrington and a chariot standing at that door." He said it without shame and without pride, as a plain fact, and Verity liked him better for it than she expected to. "Well, £600. Somebody will find it, I dare say."
He went off down the room with the Duke to look at the wall in the third bay, and Verity was left with Miss Brindle.
"May I see your hands?"
Verity showed them. There was no reason not to. They were clean because they had to be. They were not a lady's hands. The nails were cut down to nothing. There was a callus on the side of the right forefinger from the folder, and the ends of the fingers were stained brown from paste and alum water.