CHAPTER V

TELLING HOW QUEEN MARY'S CRYSTAL BALL CAME TO FALL ON THE GALLERY FLOOR

This world is unquestionably a vastly stimulating and entertaining
place if you take it aright--namely, if you recognise that it is the
creation of a profound humorist, is designed for wholly practical and
personal uses, and proceed to adapt your conduct to that knowledge in
all light-heartedness and good faith. Thus, though in less trenchant
phrase since she was still happily very young, meditated Madame de
Vallorbes, while standing in the pensive October sunshine upon the wide
flight of steps which leads down from the main entrance of Brockhurst
House. Tall, stone pinnacles alternating with seated griffins--long of
tail, fierce of beak and sharp of claw--fill in each of the many angles
of the descending stone balustrade on either hand. Behind her, the
florid, though rectangular, decoration of the house front ranged up,
storey above storey, in arcade and pilaster, heavily mullioned window,
carven plaque and string course, to pairs of matching pinnacles and
griffins--these last rampant, supporting the Calmady shield and
coat-of-arms--the quaint forms of which break the long line of the
pierced, stone parapet in the centre of the facade, and rise above the
rusty red of the low-pitched roofs, until the spires of the one and
crested heads of the other are outlined against the sky. About her feet
the pea-fowl stepped in mincing and self-conscious elegance--the cocks
with rustlings of heavy trailing quills, the hens and half-grown chicks
with squeakings and whifflings--subdued, conversational--accompanied by
the dry tap of many bills picking up the glossy grains of Indian-corn
which she let dribble slowly down upon the shallow steps from between
her pretty fingers. She had huddled a soft sable tippet about her
throat and shoulders. The skirt of her indigo-coloured, poplin dress,
turning upon the step immediately above that on which she stood, showed
some inches of rose-scarlet, silken frill lining the hem of it.

Helen de Vallorbes had a lively consciousness of her surroundings. She
enjoyed every detail of them. Enjoyed the gentle, southwesterly wind
which touched her face and stirred her bright hair, enjoyed the
plaintive, autumn song of a robin perched on a rose-grown wall, enjoyed
the impotent ferocity of the guardian griffins, enjoyed the small
sounds made by the feeding pea-fowl, the modest quaker grays and the
imperial spl