The moat was supplied from the water-works under
special arrangement, and all the electric lights were imitation
candles. He had done the thing thoroughly. He had even designed a
haunted chamber in blue, and a miniature chapel, which he used as a
telephone closet. Young Bute had been invited down there for the
shooting in the autumn. He said he could not be sure whether he was
doing right or wrong, but his intention was to provide himself with a
bow and arrows.
A change was coming over this young man. We had talked on other
subjects and he had been shy and deferential. On this matter of
bricks and mortar he spoke as one explaining things.
I ventured to say a few words in favour of the Tudor house. The
Tudor house, he argued, was a fit and proper residence for the Tudor
citizen--for the man whose wife rode behind him on a pack-saddle, who
conducted his correspondence by the help of a moss-trooper. The
Tudor fireplace was designed for folks to whom coal was unknown, and
who left their smoking to their chimneys. A house that looked
ridiculous with a motor-car before the door, where the electric bell
jarred upon one's sense of fitness every time one heard it, was out
of date, he maintained.
"For you, sir," he continued, "a twentieth-century writer, to build
yourself a Tudor House would be as absurd as for Ben Jonson to have
planned himself a Norman Castle with a torture-chamber underneath the
wine-cellar, and the fireplace in the middle of the dining-hall.
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