His
head still ached, and every nerve was irritable. He began to suspect
the servant of having failed to report his arrival; he thought of
ringing for him and announcing himself a second time. Then he
remembered that he was only the man who had come about the books; he
was there on the Hardens' business, and their time was his time. And
there were worse places to wait in than the library of Court House.
He found himself in a long low room that seemed to him immense. It was
lighted by four deep-set windows, one to the south, one (a smaller
side lattice) to the east, two to the west, and still the corners were
left in gloom. The bookcases that covered the length and height of the
walls were of one blackness with the oak floor and ceiling. The
scattered blues and crimsons of the carpets (repeated in duller tones
in the old morocco bindings), the gilded tracery of the tooling, and
here and there a blood-red lettering-piece, gave an effect as of some
dim rich arabesque flung on to the darkness. At this hour the sunlight
made the most of all it found there; it washed the faded carpet with a
new dye; it licked every jutting angle, every polished surface, every
patch of vellum; it streamed out of the great golden white busts on
their pedestals in the windows, it lay in pale gleams over the eastern
walls till it perished in the marble blackness of the roof and floor,
sucked in as by an upper and nether abyss. This blackness intensified
the glory of the April world outside whose luminous greens and blues
were held like blazonry in the leaded lozenge panes.
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