The bridal feast was strewn about the table; the teapot was steaming;
the cream melted to ivory richness, and, among many more familiar
eatables, the saffron cake looked gaudy and exotic. After the first
bashful make-weights of conversation, Jenny and May put their cloaks
down, took off wraps, and made the travelers' quick preparation for a
meal which has expected their arrival for some time. Then down they all
sat, and with the distraction of common hunger the painful air of
embarrassment was temporarily driven off. Old Mrs. Trewhella was
inclined with much assertion of humility to yield to Jenny her position
at the head of the table; but she, overawed by the prodigal display of
new dishes, of saffron cake and pasties and bowls of cream, prevailed
upon the older woman to withhold her resignation.
The living-room of Bochyn was long, low, and raftered, extending
apparently to the whole length of the farmhouse, except where a parlor
on the left of the front door usurped a corner. Very conspicuous was the
hearth, with its large double range extravagantly embossed with brass
ornaments and handles. On closer inspection the ironwork itself was
hammered out into a florid landscape of pagodas, mandarins and dragons.
Jenny could not take her eyes off this ostentatious piece of utility.
"Handsome slab, isn't it?" said Trewhella proudly.
"Slab?"
"Stove--we do call them slabs in Cornwall."
"It's nice. Only what a dreadful thing to clean, I should say."
"Maid Emily does that," explained Mrs. Trewhella.
Jenny turned her glances to the rest of the room. By the side of the
slab hung a copper warming-pan holding in ruddy miniature the room's
reflection. Here were also brass ladles and straining spoons and a pair
of bellows, whose perfectly circular box was painted with love-knots and
quivers. On the high mantlepiece stood several large and astonished
china dogs with groups of roughly cast, crudely tinted pottery including
Lord Nelson and Elijah, all set in a thicket of brass candle-sticks.
Indeed, brass was the predominant note in the general decoration. The
walls were shining with tobacco boxes, snuffers, sconces and trays. Very
little space on the low walls could be found for pictures; but one or
two chromolithographs, including "Cherry Ripe" and "Bubbles," had
succeeded in establishing a right to be hung. All down the middle of the
room ran a long oak trestle-table, set with Chippendale chairs at the
end which Jenny and the family occupied, but where the rest of the
household sat, with benches. The five windows were veiled in curtains of
some dim red stuff, and between the two on the farther side from the
front door stood an exceptionally tall grandfather's clock, above whose
face, in a marine upheaval that involved the sun, moon and stars, united
rising, a ship rocked violently with every swing of the pendulum. A door
at the back opened to an echoing vault of laundries, sculleries, larders
and pantries, while in the corner beyond the outhouse door was a dark
and boxed staircase very straight and steep, a cavernous staircase
gaping to unknown corridors and rooms far away.
Old Mrs. Trewhella suited somehow that sinister gangway, for, being so
lame as to depend on a crutch, the measured thump of her progress was
carried down the gloom with an eternal sameness of sound that produced
in the listener a sensation of uneasiness. She had a hen-like face, the
brightness of whose eyes was continually shuttered by rapid blinks. Her
hair, very thin but scarcely gray, was smoothed down so close as to give
her head the appearance of a Dutch doll's. She had a slight mustache
and several tufted moles. There was much of the witch about her and more
of the old maid than the mother.
When the new arrivals had been seated at the table for some minutes, the
rest of the household trooped in through the outhouse door. Thomas
Hosken led the procession. His face under the glaze of soap looked more
like an orange than ever, and he had in his walk the indeterminate roll
of that fruit. Emily Day came next, a dark slip of a maid with
long-lashed stag's eyes, too large for the rest of her. She was followed
by Dicky Rosewarne, a full-blooded, handsome, awkward boy of about
twenty-three, loose-jointed like a yearling colt and bringing in with
him a smell of deep-turned earth, of bonfires and autumn leaves. Bessie
Trevorrow, the dairymaid, ripe as a pippin, came in, turning down the
sleeves of a bird's-eye print dress over forearms that made Jenny gasp.
She could not reconcile the inconsistencies of feature in Bessie, could
not match the burning almond eyes with the coarse lips, nor see how such
weather-stained cheeks could belong to so white a neck. Last of all came
Old Man Veal, whose duties and status no one rightly knew. The household
individually slid into their separate places along the benches with
sidelong shy greetings to Jenny and May, who for their part would have
sat down with more ease to supper with a flock of sheep. One chair still
remained empty.
"Where's Granfa Champion?" asked Trewhella.
"Oh, my dear life, that old man is always last," grumbled Mrs.
Trewhella. "What a thing 'tis to have ancient old relations as do never
know to come in to a meal. Go find him, boy Thomas," she added with a
sigh.
Thomas was much embarrassed by this order, and a subdued titter ran
round the lower part of the table as Thomas made one of his fruit-like
exits to find Granfa Champion.
"He's my uncle," explained Mrs. Trewhella to Jenny. "A decent old man as
anyone could wish to meet, but most terrible unknowing of the time. I
believe he's so old that time do mean nothing to him. I believe he's
grown to despise it."
"Is he very old?" asked Jenny, for want of anything better to say.
"Well, nobody do know how old he is. There's a difference of twenty
years in the opinions you'll hear put about. Poor old soul, he do give
very little trouble at all. For when the sun do shine, he's all the time
walking up and down the garden, and when 'tis dropping, he do sit in his
room so quiet as a great old lamb."
Here Thomas came back with positive news.
"Mr. Champion can't get his boot off and he's in some frizz about it."
"How can't he get his boot off? How didn't 'ee help him?"
"So I did," said Thomas. "But he wouldn't hear nothing of what I do know
about boots, and kept on all the time telling what a fool I was. I done
my best with 'en."
At this moment Granfa Champion himself appeared, his countenance flushed
with conquest, his eyes shining in a limpid blue, his snow-white hair
like spindrift round his face.
"Come in, you Granfa," his nephew invited.
"Is the maids come?" he asked.
"Ess, ess, here they are sitting down waiting for 'ee."
Mr. Champion advanced with a fine stateliness and nobility of welcome.
Indeed, shy as she was, his entrance tempted Jenny to rise from her
chair.
"Come, leave me look at 'ee," said Granfa, placing his hands on her
shoulders.
"Keep quiet, uncle," said Mrs. Trewhella. "You'll make her fire up."
"Ah, nonsense," contradicted the old man. "That's nothing. I do dearly
love to see maids' cheeks in a blush. Wish you well, my lovely," he
added, clasping Jenny's hands. "I'm terrible hurried I wasn't here to
give 'ee a welcome by the door."
Jenny liked this old man, who for the exile from a distant country by
his age and dignity and sweetness conjured a few tears of home. The
supper, a late meal for such a household, went its course at a fair
speed; for they were all anxious to be off to bed with the prospect of
work in the windy November dawn. Very soon they all vanished through the
out-house door, and Granfa, with lighted candle, a hot brick wrapped in
flannel under his arm, twinkled slowly up to bed through the hollow
staircase. The rest of them were left alone in a silence. It was ten
o'clock, and the fire was already paling behind the fluted bars of the
slab.
"Well, I suppose you're thinking of bed?" suggested Mrs. Trewhella.
May looked anxiously at her sister.
"Yes, I suppose we are," Jenny agreed.
Zachary began to whistle a Sankey hymn tune.
"You'll be wishing to unpack your things first," continued Mrs.
Trewhella.
"Yes, I ought to unpack," Jenny said in a frozen voice.
"I've put May in the bedroom next to you. Come, I'll show 'ee."
Zachary still sat whistling his hymn tune. A bird shielded from view by
the window-curtain stirred in his cage. Mrs. Trewhella lighted three
candles. Cloaks were picked up and flung over arms, and in single file
the three figures, each with her winking guide, vanished up the
staircase.
"What a long passage," whispered Jenny when they stood in a bunch at the
top.
Mrs. Trewhella led the way to the bride's chamber.
"You're here, where the wives of the Trewhellas have slept some long
time."
After the low room downstairs the bedroom seemed enormous. The ceiling
in Gothic irregularities of outline slanted up and up to cobwebs and
shadows. It was a great barn of a room. A tall four-post bed, hung with
faded tapestries of Love and War, was set off by oak chests-of-drawers
and Court cupboards. The floor was uneven, strangely out of keeping with
the rose-infested Brussels carpet so vividly new. Most of the windows,
latticed and small, were set flush with the floor; but high up in a
dormer was a large window with diamonded panes, uncurtained, black and
ominous. A couple of tall cheval-glasses added to the mystery of the
room with their reduplication of shadowy corners.
"And May's in here," Mrs. Trewhella informed them, leading the way. "The
loft begins again after your bedroom, so the ceiling isn't so tall."
Certainly, May's room was ordinary enough, even dainty, with the dimity
curtains and wall-paper of bows and forget-me-nots. Round the
toilet-table crackled a pink chintz valance, draped in stiffest muslin.
Mrs. Trewhella looked closely at Jenny for a moment before she left
them.
"You're thin, my dear," she commented. "Ah, well, so was I; and I can
mind the time when they wondered what a man could see in such a maid.
The men was all for plumpness then. Wish you good night."
The old woman thumped off down the corridor, her candle a-bob with every
limping step.
"What a dreadful place," said Jenny.
"Don't let's stay," said May eagerly. "Don't let's stay. Let's go
back--now--now."
"_Don't_ be silly. How can we? But we never oughtn't to have come. Oh,
May, I only wish I could sleep in here with you."
"Well, why don't you?" suggested May, who was shocked to see how the
usually so indomitable sister was shaking with apprehension. "There's
plenty of room and I'd chance what _he_ says."
Jenny pulled herself together by a visible effort.
"No, I can't go on sleeping with you. I've _got_ to be married, now I've
done it."
The two sisters, as if drawn by some horrid enchantment, went back to
the bride's room.
"How big that candle looks, doesn't it, but small in one way. May, I'm
frightened," whispered the bride.
There was a rattle of falling plaster, a squeak, a dying scamper.
"Oo-er, what was that?" cried May.
"Rats, I suppose. Oh, this is a shocking place," said Jenny, trembling.
"Never mind, it's got to be done. It's got to be finished some day.
It'll be all the same in a hundred years, and anyway, perhaps it won't
be so bad in the morning. May!" she added sharply.
"What?"
"Why, when you come to think of it, the second ballet's well on now and
here am I starting off to undress in this dog's island. Let's go back to
your room for a minute."
Again the sisters sought May's kindlier room and Jenny had an idea.
"May, if we pushed your bed back close to the wall, you could tap
sometimes, and if I was awake in the night I'd hear you. May, don't go
to sleep. Promise you won't go to sleep."
They pushed the bedstead back against the ribbons and forget-me-nots.
Then Jenny, summoning every tradition of pride, every throb of
determination, kissed May and ran to the lonely Gothic room, where the
flame of the solitary candle burned so still and shapely in the
breathless night. She undressed herself in a frenzy. It was like falling
into a river to enter those cold linen sheets and, worse, to lie there
with pulses thudding and breast heaving under a bravery of new pink bows
and ribbons. It could not be long now. She sat up in bed thinking to tap
on the wall; but the tapestried headpiece muffled the sound. May,
however, heard and rapped her answer.
"To-morrow," vowed Jenny, "I'll slit those unnatural curtains with my
scissors so as I can tap easily."
Then down the passage she heard her husband's tread. He was still
whistling that tune, more softly, indeed, but with a continuous
reiteration that was maddening. Round the door his shadow slipped
before him. Jenny hid beneath the bed-clothes, breathing faster than a
trapped bird. She heard his movements slow and dull and heavy,
accompanied by the whistling, the endless damnable whistling. Then the
lights went out and, as if he walked on black velvet, Trewhella stole
nearer to the bed.