Melrose meanwhile was absorbed in trying to recover a paragraph in the
_Times_ he had caught sight of on a first reading, and had then lost in
the excitement of studying the prices of a sale at Christie's, held the
day before, wherein his own ill luck had led to the bad temper from which
he was suffering. He tracked the passage at last. It ran as follows:
"The late Professor William Mackworth has left the majority of his costly
collections to the nation. To the British Museum will go the marbles and
bronzes, to the South Kensington, the china and the tapestries. Professor
Mackworth made no stipulations, and the authorities of both museums are
free to deal with his bequests as they think best."
Melrose folded the newspaper and put it back into his pocket with a short
sudden laugh, which startled the man beside him. "Stipulations! I should
rather think not! What museum in its senses would accept such piffling
stuff with any _stipulations_ attached? As it is, the greater part will
go into the lumber-rooms; they'll never show them! There's only one
collection that Mackworth ever had that was worth having. Not a word
about _that_. People don't give their best things to the country--not
they. Hypocrites! What on earth has he done with them? There are several
things _I want_."
And he fell into a long and greedy meditation, in which, as usual, his
fancy pursued a quarry and brought it down. He took no notice meanwhile
of the objects passed as they approached the Tower, although among them
were many that might well have roused the attention of a landlord; as,
for instance, the condition of the long drive leading up to the house,
with its deep ruts and grass-grown sides; a tree blown down, not
apparently by any very recent storm, and now lying half across the
roadway, so that the horse and carriage picked their way with difficulty
round its withered branches; one of the pillars of the fine gateway,
which gave access to the walled enclosure round the house, broken away;
and the enclosure within, which had been designed originally as a formal
garden in the Italian style, and was now a mere tangled wilderness of
weeds and coarse grass, backed by dense thickets of laurel and yew which
had grown up in a close jungle round the house, so that many of the lower
windows were impenetrably overgrown.
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