Lady Alice takes Possession.
What to the young would seem an age; what, even in the arithmetic of the
old, counts for something, about seventeen years had glided into the
eternal past since last Lady Alice had beheld the antique front and
noble timber of Marlowe Manor; and memory was busy with her heart, and
sweet and bitter fancies revisiting her old brain, as her saddened eyes
gazed on that fair picture of the past. Old faces gone, old times
changed, and she, too, but the shadow of her former self, soon, like
those whom she remembered there, to vanish quite, and be missed by no
one.
"Where is Miss Beatrix?" inquired the old lady, as she set her long slim
foot upon the oak flooring of the hall. "I'll rest a moment here." And
she sat down upon a carved bench, and looked with sad and dreaming eyes
through the open door upon the autumnal landscape flushed with the
setting sun, the season and the hour harmonising regretfully with her
thoughts.
Her maid came at the summons of the footman. "Tell her that granny has
come," said the old woman gently. "_You_ are quite well, Jones?"
Jones made her smirk and courtesy, and was quite well; and so tripped
up the great stair to apprise her young mistress.
"Tell the new housekeeper, please, that Lady Alice Redcliffe wishes very
much to see her for a moment in the hexagon dressing-room at the end of
the hatchment-gallery," said the old lady, names and localities coming
back to her memory quite naturally in the familiar old hall.
And as she spoke, being an active-minded old lady, she rose, and before
her first message had reached Beatrix, was ascending the well-known
stairs, with its broad shining steps of oak, and her hand on its
ponderous banister, feeling strangely, all in a moment, how much more
she now needed that support, and that the sum of the seventeen years was
something to her as to others.
On the lobby, just outside this dressing-room door, which stood open,
letting the dusky sunset radiance, so pleasant and so sad, fall upon the
floor and touch the edges of the distant banisters, she was met by
smiling Beatrix.
"Darling!" cried the girl, softly, as she threw her young arms round the
neck of the stately and thin old lady. "Darling, darling, I'm so glad!"
She had been living among strangers, and the sight and touch of her true
old friend was reassuring.
Granny's thin hands held her fondly. It was pretty to see this embrace,
in the glow of the evening sun, and the rich brown tresses of the girl
close to the ashen locks of old Lady Alice, who, with unwonted tears in
her eyes, was smiling on her very tenderly. She was softened that
evening. Perhaps it was her real nature, disclosed for a few genial
moments, generally hidden under films of reserve or pride--the veil of
the flesh.
"I think she does like her old granny," said Lady Alice, with a gentle
little laugh; one thin hand on her shoulder, the other smoothing back
her thick girlish tresses.
"I do love you, granny; you were always so good to me, and you are
so--so _fond_ of me. Now, you are tired, darling; you must take a little
wine--here is Mrs. Sinnott coming--Mrs. Sinnott."
"No, dear, no wine; I'm very well. I wish to see Mrs. Sinnott, though.
She's your new housekeeper, is not she?"
"Yes; and I'm so glad poor, good old Donnie Gwynn is with you. You know
she would not stay; but our new housekeeper is, I'm told, a very good
creature too. Grandmamma wants to speak to you, Mrs. Sinnott."
Lady Alice by this time had entered the dressing-room, three sides of
which, projecting like a truncated bastion, formed a great window, which
made it, for its size, the best lighted in the house. In the wall at the
right, close to this entrance, is the door which admits to the green
chamber; in the opposite wall, but nearer the window, a door leading
across the end of the hatchment-gallery, with its large high window, by
a little passage, screened off by a low oak partition, and admitting to
a bed-room on the opposite side of the gallery.
In the middle of the Window dressing-room stood Lady Alice, and looked
round regretfully, and said to herself, with a little shake of the
head--
"Yes, yes, poor thing!"
She was thinking of poor Lady Marlowe, whom, with her usual perversity,
although a step-daughter, she had loved very tenderly, and who in her
last illness had tenanted these rooms, in which, seventeen years ago,
this old lady had sat beside her and soothed her sickness, and by her
tenderness, no doubt, softened those untold troubles which gathered
about her bed as death drew near.
"How do you do, Mrs. Sinnott?" said stately Lady Alice, recovering her
dry and lofty manner.
"Lady Alice Redcliffe, my grandmamma," said Beatrix, in an undertoned
introduction, in the housekeeper's ear.
Mrs. Sinnott made a fussy little courtesy.
"Your ladyship's apartments, which is at the other end of the gallery,
please, is quite ready, my lady."
"I don't mean to have those rooms, though--that's the reason I sent for
you--please read this note, it is from Sir Jekyl Marlowe. By-the-bye, is
your master at home?"
"No, he was out."
"Well, be so good as to read this."
And Lady Alice placed Beatrix's note of invitation in Mrs. Sinnott's
hand, and pointed to a passage in the autograph of Sir Jekyl, which
spoke thus:--
"P.S.--Do come, dearest little mamma, and you shall command everything.
Choose your own apartments and hours, and, in short, rule us all. With
all my worldly goods I thee endow, and place Mrs. Sinnott at your
orders."
"Well, Mrs. Sinnott, I choose _these_ apartments, if you please," said
Lady Alice, sitting down stiffly, and thereby taking possession.
"Very well, my lady," said Mrs. Sinnott, dropping another courtesy; but
her sharp red nose and little black eyes looked sceptical and uneasy;
"and I suppose, Miss," here she paused, looking at Beatrix.
"You are to do whatever Lady Alice directs," said the young lady.
"This here room, you know, Miss, is the dressing-room properly of the
green chamber."
"Lady Jane does not use it, though?" replied the new visitor.
"But the General, when he comes back," insinuated Mrs. Sinnott.
"Of course, he shall have it. I'll remove then; but in the meantime,
liking these rooms, from old remembrances, best of any, I will occupy
them, Beatrix; _this_ as a dressing-room, and the apartment _there_ as
bed-room. I hope I don't give you a great deal of trouble," added Lady
Alice, addressing the housekeeper, with an air that plainly said that
she did not care a pin whether she did or not.
So this point was settled, and Lady Alice sent for her maid and her
boxes; and rising, she approached the door of the green chamber, and
pointing to it, said to Beatrix--
"And so Lady Jane has this room. Do you like her, Beatrix?"
"I can't say I know her, grandmamma."
"No, I dare say not. It is a large room--too large for my notion of a
cheerful bed-room."
The old lady drew near, and knocked.
"She's not there?"
"No, she's in the terrace-garden."
Lady Alice pushed the door open, and looked in.
"A very long room. That room is longer than my drawing-room at Wardlock,
and that is five and thirty feet long. Dismal, I say--though so much
light, and that portrait--Sir Harry smirking there. What a look of
duplicity in that face! He was an old man when I can remember him; an
old beau; a wicked old man, rouged and whitened; he used to paint under
his eyelashes, and had, they said, nine or ten sets of false teeth, and
always wore a black curled wig that made his contracted countenance more
narrow. There were such lines of cunning and meanness about his eyes,
actually crossing one another. Jekyl hated him, I think. I don't think
anybody but a fool could have really liked him; he was so curiously
selfish, and so contemptible; he was attempting the life of a wicked
young man at seventy!"
Lady Alice had been speaking as it were in soliloquy, staring drearily
on the clever portrait in gold lace and ruffles, stricken by the spell
of that painted canvas into a dream.
"Your grandpapa, my dear, was not a good man; and I believe he injured
my poor son irreparably, and your _father_. Well--these things, though
never forgotten, are best not spoken of when people happen to be
connected. For the sake of others we bear our pain in silence; but the
heart knoweth its own bitterness."
And so saying, the old lady drew back from the threshold of Lady Jane's
apartment, and closed the door with a stern countenance.