CHAPTER XXVI
"Wanted, by a young person, aged 17, a situation as companion to an invalid or elderly lady. Salary not so much an object as a comfortable home in a pious family. Address, A. B., Post Office, Naullan, N.W."
This is the modest form in which Miss Craven's desire for work comes before the public. She had begged earnestly for the expunging of the "pious family."
"It is not true, Mrs. Brandon," she says, with vexed tears in her eyes; "it is nothing to me whether they are pious or not – the salary is far the greatest object."
"If it is, my dear, it ought not to be," answers promptly Mrs. Brandon, who, having paid for the insertion of the advertisement, thinks that she has a right to word it as she wishes.
And now it has gone forth through the length and breadth of the civilized world, from the Arctic to the Antarctic Poles – has found its way into clubs and cafés, hotels and private houses, numerous as the sea-sand grains, in the overgrown advertisement sheet of the Times. To not one in ten thousand of that journal's millions of readers is it more interesting than any other announcement in the long columns of —
"Wanted, a cook."
"Wanted, a cook."
"Wanted, a good plain cook."
"Wanted, a footman."
"Wanted, a footman."
A companionship, then, is what has been decided upon as the vocation to which Esther is best suited: it requires neither French nor German, neither astronomy nor the use of the globes: it demands only a patience out-Jobing Job, a meekness out-Mosesing Moses, a capacity for eating dirt greater than that of any parvenu struggling into society, health and spirits more aggressively strong than a schoolboy's, and a pliability greater than an osier's. These qualities being supposed to be more quickly acquirable than music, drawing, and languages, Esther has decided upon entering on the office that will call for the exercise of them all.
Besides the printed advertisement above quoted, Mrs. Brandon has been advertising largely in private, by means of many long-winded epistles; has been seeking far and wide among the circle of her acquaintance for some grey maid, wife, or widow, in the tending of whose haggard, peevish age Esther may waste her sweet, ripe youth, unassailed by wicked men, in safe, respectable misery. And meanwhile Esther waits – waits through the fog-shrouded, sun-forgotten November days, through the eternal black November nights, – waits, straying lonely along the steaming tree-caverned wood-paths – the solemn charnels of the dead summer nations of leaves and flowers.
Preachers are fond of drawing a parallel between us and those forest leaves; telling us that, as in the autumn they fall, rot, are dissolved, and mingle together, stamped down and shapeless, in brown confusion, and yet in the spring come forth again, fresh as ever; so shall we – who, in our autumn, die, rot, and are not – come forth again in our distant spring, in lordly beauty and gladness. So speaking, whether thinkingly or unthinkingly, they equivocate – they lie! It is not the same leaves that reappear; others like them burst from their sappy buds, and burgeon in the "green-haired woods;" but not they —not they! They stir not, nor is there any movement among the sodden earth-mass that was them. If the parallel be complete, others like us – others as good, as fair, as we! but yet not we– other than us, shall break forth in lusty youth, in their strong May-time; but we shall rot on!
"Oh touching, patient earth,
That weepest in thy glee;
Whom God created very good,
And very mournful we!"
how much longer can you bear the weight of all your dead children, that lie so heavy on your mother breast!
One morning, on joining the Brandon family before prayers, Esther finds Mrs. Brandon reading aloud a letter; but on Esther's entrance she desists. Hearing her voice stop, the young girl comes forward eagerly.
"Is it about me?" she asks, panting, forgetting her morning salutations.
"Yes, Esther," replies Mrs. Brandon, laconically, continuing to read, but this time to herself.
Esther walks to the window, drums on the rain-beaten pane, returns to the table; takes up the bread-knife, and begins to chip bits of crust off the loaf; sits down, gets up again; then, unable to contain herself any longer, cries out, hastily, "Will it do? – will it do?"
"If you will give me time, my dear, to finish this letter in peace, I shall have a better chance of being able to tell you," answers the old lady, drily.
Esther sits down again, snubbed; and then the door opens, and the three middle-aged, quakerish maid-servants make their sober entry, each with bible and hymnal in her hand; and the long exposition, the eight-versed hymn, and extempore prayer set in. To Esther's ears, all the words of exposition, hymn, and prayer seem to be, "Will it do? – will it do?"
"I have received a letter," begins Mrs. Brandon, slowly addressing Esther, when the "exercise" is ended, "from a valued Christian friend of mine, who has lately met with a lady and gentleman considerably advanced in life, who are on the look-out for a – "
"Companion?" interrupted Esther, breathlessly.
"For a young person who may supply the place of their failing sight, by reading to them, writing letters for them – may arrange the old lady's work, and make herself a generally useful, agreeable, and ladylike companion."
"That does not sound hard, does it?" says Esther, with a nearer approach to hopefulness in her face than has been seen there since her brother's death. "Neither reading, writing, nor being ladylike are very difficult accomplishments, are they? Oh, Mrs. Brandon, I hope they'll take me, don't you? What is their name?"
"Blessington!"
"Blessington!" repeats Essie, her lips parting in some dismay. "I wonder are they – can they be – any relation to Miss Blessington, Sir Thomas Gerard's ward?"
"I really cannot tell you, my dear. You have given us so very little information as to your visit to the Gerards, that I was not even aware that Blessington was the name of Sir Thomas's ward."
Esther passes by the small reproach in silence.
"Perhaps they may be her father and mother," suggests Bessy.
"She has no father nor mother."
"Her grandfather and grandmother?"
"She has no grandfather nor grandmother."
"Her great-uncle and great-aunt?"
"Possibly."
"Very likely the same family," remarks Mrs. Brandon, intending to say something rather agreeable than otherwise. "Blessington is not a common name."
"I recollect," Esther says, contracting her forehead in the effort to recall all that was said upon a subject which at the time interested her too little to have made much impression – "I recollect her mentioning one day having some old relations in – shire, whom it was a great bore to have to go and visit."
"These people live in – shire."
"Then it must be the same," cries Essie, a look of acute chagrin passing over her features. "Oh, Mrs. Brandon, what a disappointment! I'm afraid we shall have to look out again! I'm afraid this won't do!"
"And why not, pray?" inquires the other, staring in displeased astonishment from under her thick white eyebrows at her young protégée.
Silence.
"Did you," inquires the old lady, looking rather suspiciously at her, "have any quarrel or disagreement with the Gerards during your visit which could render you unwilling to meet any one in any way connected with their family?"
"Oh no! no! – certainly not!" answers Essie, vehemently, blushing scarlet as any June poppy.
The elder woman's sharp ancient eyes pass like a gimlet through and through the younger one. They fasten with the pitiless fixedness of one who has passed the age for blushing, and has consequently no compassion for that infirmity upon the betraying red of her sweet bright cheeks.
"Are you quite sure, Esther?"
"Quite," replies Esther, with steady slowness. "I don't like them, as a family. In fact, I hate them all; but I have had no quarrel with them."
"I wonder that you cared to spend a whole month and more with people that you hated," says Miss Bessy, with a sprightly smile.
"So do I, Bessy," answers Esther, bitterly, turning away her head; "but that's neither here nor there."
"Am I to understand, then," says Mrs. Brandon, with an inquisitorial elevation of nose and spectacles, "that an apparently groundless and, as far as I can judge, ungrateful feeling of dislike towards people who, from the little you have told us of them, seem always to have treated you with indulgent kindness, is your sole motive for wishing to decline this very desirable situation?"
"When one has seen better days," answered the poor proud child, sighing, "one wishes to keep as far as possible from any of those who have known one formerly."
"Tut!" answers Mrs. Brandon, chidingly; "it can be a matter of very little consequence to people in the position of the Gerards whether you have a few pounds a year more or less. They can afford to be kind to you, whatever your circumstances may be!"
"I don't want them to be kind to me," cries the girl, fiercely, stung into swift anger. "I know nothing I should dislike more. The only wish I have, with regard to the whole family, is that I should never hear their names mentioned again!"
Mrs. Brandon seats herself at the table, and begins to pour out the tea out of a huge, deep-bodied family tea-pot. Miss Bessy divides the small curling rashers of fat bacon into four exactly equal portions. At Plas Berwyn it is generally a case of "Cynegan's Feast; or enough and no waste." That is to say, at the first onslaught everything vanishes; and if any one, with fruitless gluttony, craves a second help, he must console himself with the idea that many medical men agree in the opinion that, in order to preserve ourselves in perfect health, we should always rise from table feeling hungry.
"If," says Mrs. Brandon, resuming the conversation, and setting her words to the music of a peculiarly crisp piece of toast, which she eats with a rather infuriating sound of crunching – "If, Esther, you can be deterred by so trivial an obstacle from availing yourself of an opportunity, humanly speaking, so promising – a door, I may say, opened for you in a special and remarkable manner, in answer to prayer – you cannot expect me to exert myself a second time on your behalf."
Esther stoops her head in silence over her fat bacon, which she has not the heart to eat.
"Esther is more difficult to please than we expected, is not she, mamma," says Bessy, smiling slightly – "considering that she told us yesterday she envied the man who brought the coals, because he earned his own living?"
"And so I did," answers Esther, gloomily.
"I'm afraid, Esther," says Mrs. Brandon, taking another piece of toast, and shaking her head prophetically, "that you will have to pass through a burning fiery furnace before the stubborn pride of the unregenerate heart is brought low!"
"Perhaps so," answers the young girl, calmly; but to her own heart she says that she defies any earthly furnace to burn hotlier than the one she has already passed through.
CHAPTER XXVII
In another week letters have passed, references been asked and given; Esther proved unimpeachably respectable; the amount of her salary agreed upon; the day of her journey into – shire fixed, and all preliminaries settled previous to her undertaking the agreeable, free, and independent office of companion to John Blessington, Esq., of Blessington Court, in the county of – , aged eighty-nine, and to Harriet Blessington his wife, aged eighty.
Miss Craven has but one good-bye to say, and on the afternoon of the day before her departure she stands in the churchyard ready to say it. It is only to a grave. Huge cloud headlands, great leaden capes and promontories, mournful and heavy with unwept snow-tears, heap and pile themselves up behind the dim mirk hills; it snowed last night, but the snow has nearly all melted; only enough remains to make the old dirty church-tower, from which great patches of whitewash have fallen, look dirtier than ever. Upon the broken headstones, all awry and askew with age and negligence, the lichens flourish dankly. Wet nettles and faded bents overlie, overcross each cold hillock. No one cares to weed in the garden of the dead. Each hillock is the last chapter in some forgotten history.
Oh! why must all stories that are told truly end amongst the worms? Why must death be always at the end of life? Oh! if we could but get it over, like some cruelest operation, in the middle or early part of our little day; so that we might have some half a life, some quarter or twentieth part even of one, to live merrily in, to breathe and laugh and be gay in, without, in our cheerfullest moments, experiencing the chilly fear of feeling the black-cloaked skeleton-headed phantom lay his bony finger on us, saying, "Thou art mine!"
Upon the grey flat tombstone near the church-gate the great grave yew has been dropping her scarlet berries, one by one – berries that shine, like little lights, amid the night of her changeless foliage: there they lie like a forgotten rosary, that some holy man, having prayed amongst the unpraying dead, going, has left behind him. Evening is closing in fast; the air is raw and chill; no one that can avoid it is outside a house's sheltering walls: there is no one to disturb Esther's meeting with her brother. What cares she for the cold, or for the six feet of miry earth that part them. She flings herself upon the sodden mound; stretching herself all along upon it, as the prophet stretched himself on the young dead child – hand to hand, heart to heart, mouth to mouth. She lays her lips upon the soaked soil, and whispers moaningly, "Good-bye, Jack – good-bye! Oh! why won't they let you answer me? Why have they buried you so deep that you cannot hear me?"
Lord God! of what stuff can Mary and Martha have been made, to have overlived the awful ecstasy of seeing their dead come forth in warm supple life out of the four-days-holding grave! Their hearts must have been made of tougher fibre than ours, or, in the agony of that terrible rapture, soul and body must have sundered suddenly, and they fallen down into the arms of that tomb whence their brother had just issued in his ghastly cerements, in dazed, astonished gladness!
As Esther lifts her streaming eyes, they fall upon the inscription on the cross at the grave-head:
"HERE LIETH THE BODY
OF
JOHN CRAVEN,
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE
SEPT. 24TH, 186-. AGED 21 YEARS."
"Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!"
She casts her arms about the base of the holy symbol; she presses her panting breast against the stone. "Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!" she cries too; and surely the live sinner needs mercy as much as the dead one? And as she so lies prostrate, with her forehead leant against the white damp marble, a hideous doubt flashes into her heart – sits there, like a little bitter serpent, gnawing it: "What if there be no Lord! What if I am praying and weeping to and calling upon nothing!
"...... Let me not go mad!
Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no heaven, no earth in the void world —
The wide, grave, lampless, deep, unpeopled world."
They tell us – don't they? – in our childhood, that wickedness makes people unhappy: I think the converse is full as often true – that unhappiness makes people wicked.
A little icy wind creeps coldly amongst the strong nettles and weak sapless bents, blowing them all one way – creeps, too, through Esther's mourning weeds, and makes a numbness about her shivering breast. For a moment an angry defiant despair masters her.
"What if this great distant being, who, without any foregone sin of ours, has laid upon us the punishment of life– in the hollow of whose hand we lie! – what if He be laughing at us all this while! What if the sight of our writhings, of our unlovely tears and grotesque agonies, be to Him, in His high prosperity, a pleasant diversion!"
So thinking, against her will she involuntarily clasps closer the cross in her straining arms – involuntarily moans a second time, "Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!" No – no! it cannot be so! it is one of those things that are too horrible to be believed! There is no justice here! none! but it exists somewhere! How else could we ever have conceived the idea of it? It is, then, in some other world: we shall find it on the other side of these drenched, nettly charnels – on the other side of corruption's disgrace and abasement:
".....If this be all,
And other life await us not, for one
I say, 'tis a poor cheat, a stupid bungle,
A wretched failure! I, for one, protest
Against it – and I hurl it back with scorn!"
Despair never stays long with any one, unless it is specially invited. Struck with sudden horror at the daring blasphemy of her thoughts, wretched Esther, with clasped hands and a flood of penitential tears, sinks upon her trembling knees. God grant that the thoughts that come to us, we know not whence, that stab us in the dark, that we welcome not, neither cherish at all – yea, rather, drive them away rudely, hatingly – may not be counted to us for crimes in His great Day of Reckoning, any more than the sudden-smiting disease that makes the strong man flag in his noonday is counted to him! With a sudden revulsion of feeling, with a paroxysm of devotion, powerfuller than the former one of doubt had been, the desolate child, prone on the grave of her one treasure, lifts quivering lips and emptied arms to Him who
".....For mankynde's sake
Justed in Jerusalem, a joye to us all!" —
to Him of whom
".....They who loved Him said 'He wept,'
None ever said 'He smiled!'"
Perhaps the good Lord, who was sorry for Mary and Martha, may be sorry for her too. Perhaps, after all, her boy is well rid of troublesome breath – well rid of his cares, and his farm, and his useless loving sister! Perhaps she is falsely fond to desire him again – to be so famished for one sight more of his grey laughing eyes, of his smooth stripling face! Beyond her sight, he may be in the fruition of extremest good – in the sweet shade, beneath pleasant-fruited trees, beside great cool rivers. Would she tear him back again thence to toil in the broiling sun, because, so toiling, he would be in her sight?
"If love were kind, why should we doubt
That holy death were kinder?"
The night falls fast; she can scarcely any longer distinguish the clear, new black letters on the cross. Lights are twinkling from the village alehouse; the forge shines like a great dull-red jewel in the surrounding grey; laughing voices of boisterous men are wafted unseemly amongst the graves. Shuddering at the sound, she raises herself up quickly; then, stooping again, kisses yet once more the wet red earth that is now closest neighbour to her brother, and sobbing "Good-bye, my boy, good-bye! – God bless you, Jack!" gathers her dusky cloak about her slight shivering figure, and passes away through the darkness.
CHAPTER XXVIII
It has snowed all day; an immense white monotony is over all the land. The clouds that piled themselves in sulky threatening last night behind the Welsh hills, and many others like them, have to-day fulfilled their threats, and have been, through all the daylight hours, emptying their flaky load on the patient earth. It is as if a huge white bird had been shaking his pinions somewhere, high up in the air – shaking down millions of little down feathers. Rain always seems in earnest, snow in play – with such delicate leisureliness does it saunter down. The rushing train, that bears Esther to her new distant life, is topped like any twelfth-night cake; so are the wayside stations; so are the houses in the smoky towns; so are the men, sparsely walking about on the country roads; so are the engine drivers and stokers; so are the sheep in the fields.
Miss Craven has been sitting all day long in the narrow enceinte of a railway carriage, between the two close-shut, snow-blinded windows – sitting opposite a courteous warrior, who, travelling with all the luxuriousness which his sex think indispensable, is magnanimous enough to share his buffalo-robe and foot-warmer with her. A tête-à-tête of so many consecutive hours with a man would, under any other circumstances than a railway journey, have produced an intimacy that would last a life-time; but now, all the result of it is a couple of bows on the platform at Paddington – a look of interested curiosity after his late companion's retreating figure, as she hurries herself and her small properties into a filthy four-wheeler, on the part of the warrior, and total oblivion on the part of Esther. Since that time she has traversed London in her dilapidated shambling growler, she has had awful misgiving that the "cabby," with the villany that all women ascribe to all "cabbies," is purposely taking her in a wrong direction – is bearing her away to some dark, policeless slum, there to be robbed and murdered. She has reflected, with cold shivers of terror, as to what would be the wisest course to pursue, supposing such to be the case. Should she look silently out of window till she caught sight of the friendly helmet and tight frock-coat of some delivering "Bobby," and then scream? Should she open the door and jump out on the snowy pavement?
While still undecided, her cab stops, and – all mean back-streets and sorry short-cuts being safely passed – deposits her and her box, bag, and umbrella, beneath the Shoreditch lamps and among the Shoreditch porters. Then an hour's waiting in the crowded general waiting-room, where all the chairs are occupied by fat men, none of whom make a movement towards vacating theirs in favour of the slender weary woman, who, with crape veil thrown back from her sad child-face, is holding her little numb hands over the fire, trying vainly to bring them back to life. Then more train; then a three-miles' drive in a fly, up hill and down dale, along snowy country lanes.
And now her journey is ended: the fly has stopped at the door of a great, vague, snow-whitened bulk, that she takes upon trust as Blessington Court. The driver, having rung the bell, now stands banging his arms, each one against the opposite shoulder, in the rough endeavour to restore circulation. The servants are too comfortable – the butler over his mulled port in the housekeeper's room, and the footmen over their mulled beer in the servants' hall – to be in any hurry to attend to the summons. At length, after five minutes' waiting, a sound of withdrawing bolts and turning keys makes itself heard; the heavy door swings inward, and a footman appears in the aperture, blinking disgustedly at the snow, which drives full into his eyes. Esther immediately descends, and enters with the abrupt haste characteristic of extreme nervousness.
"Will you pay him, please?" she says, with a certain flurry of manner, to the servant. "I – I don't know how much I ought to give him – how many miles it is."
While the man complies with her request, she stands in the huge stone-floored hall, lit only by firelight, shivering with cold and fear. She peers up at the ceiling – of which, by-the-bye, there is none, as the hall runs up to the top of the house; at the walls, from which great life-size figures, dimly naked, glimmer uncomfortably cold. Anxious doubts assail her as to whether there are any rules of which she is ignorant for a "companion's" behaviour and deportment; she is not aware that she has ever seen one of those curious animals hitherto in the course of her life. Ought they to make a reverence on entering a room? Ought they to say "Sir" or "Ma'am" to whoever they address? Ought they to laugh at everybody's jokes? – not sit down unless given leave so to do, and not speak unless spoken to? So wondering, she tremblingly follows the footman as he opens the door of an adjoining apartment, and, announcing "Miss Craven," retires joyfully to the society of his compeers and his beer.
The apartment in which Esther is thus left stranded is as large as the hall that she has just quitted. It seems to her oppressively immense – quite a long walk from the door to the inhabited portion. A very big roasting fire burns on the hearth: and right in front of it, in the very glare of its hot red eyes, sits a very old man, doubled together in an armchair – one hand in his breast, and his aged head sunk upon it, apparently fast asleep. An old lady, wrapped up in a shawl, reposes in another easy-chair, with her eyes likewise closed. A lamp with a green shade burns faintly on a centre table, and beyond lamp and table sits a third person, hidden by the lamp-shade from Esther's eyes.
"Are they all asleep?" thinks the poor girl, advancing with gentle, hesitating steps. "They seem to be. How can I wake them? – or would it be disrespectful?"
While she so speculates, the third person rises and comes forward. "How do you do, Miss Craven? You must have had a cold journey, I'm afraid?" says a bland, unforgotten voice.
It is Miss Blessington. In an instant, Esther seems to have jumped back over the past intervening months – to be just entering on her Felton visit. There is the same voice greeting her – the same tones of polite inquiry; the same words almost, except that then it was, "How do you do, Miss Craven? You must have had a hot journey, I'm afraid?" and now it is, "How do you do, Miss Craven? You must have had a cold journey, I'm afraid?" – the same undulating walk; the same effect of lilac evening clouds. Involuntarily she turns her head and glances towards the window, half-expecting to see St. John's legs disappearing through it. Instead, an old woman's voice sounds quavering: "Are you Miss Craven, my dear? Come here!"
Esther does not hear. "It was rather cold," she says, answering Constance, in half bewilderment between past and present, her eyes dazed with the light after her long, dark journey.
"Mrs. Blessington is speaking to you," says Constance, in mild reminder.
Esther turns round quickly. "Oh! I beg your pardon – I did not hear – I hope I was not rude," she cries, forgetting the "Ma'am" she had half-purposed employing.
"Who's there? – who's talking?" asks the old man, lifting up his head, and speaking in a voice tremulous indeed, but with a remnant of the power and fire that "youth gone out had left in ashes."
No one answers.
"Who's there, Mrs. Blessington?" he repeats, with querulous anger.
"Miss Craven, uncle – the young lady that we expected to-day – don't you know?" replies Constance, stooping gracefully over him, and putting her lips as close as possible to his withered ear.
"H'm! Tell her to come and speak to me. I want to see what she is like," he rejoins, much as if she had not been in the room.
"Go to him, my dear," says the old lady.
"And speak as loud as you can; he is as deaf as a post," adds Constance, not in the least lowering her voice at the announcement, in perfect confidence of the truth of her assertion, shrugging her handsome shoulders as she speaks.
Esther goes trembling, and lays her small cold hand in the long bony wreck of muscle, vein, and flesh that is stretched out to her. He gazes at her face with the eager intentness of the purblind.
"What is your name?" he asks abruptly.
"Esther," she answers, faltering.
"Cannot hear a word you say – you mumble so," he says, pettishly.
"Go round to the other side; the other ear is the best," suggests Constance, calmly.
Esther obeys. "Esther," she repeats, speaking unnecessarily loud this time – at the top of her voice, in fact, out of sheer nervousness.
"You need not scream at me, my dear, as if I were stone deaf. Esther or Hester, did you say?"
"Esther."
"And who gave it you, pray?"
"My father and mother, I suppose."
"H'm! Well, you may tell them, with my compliments," he says, with a senile laugh, "that I think they might have found a prettier name to give a young lady, and that the old squire says so. The old squire says so," he repeats, chuckling a little to himself.
"I cannot tell them," answers Esther, half-crying. "They are dead."
"Oh, indeed!"
There his interest in the new comer seems to cease. His white head sinks back on his breast again, and he relapses into slumber.
Esther has had neither luncheon, dinner, nor tea – a fact which none of her companions appear to contemplate as possible. One bun has been her sole support throughout the long bitter day – only one, because all such buns must be bought with Mrs. Brandon's money.
"I daresay you would like to go to bed, dear, you look tired," says Mrs. Blessington, scanning rather curiously Esther's fagged, woebegone little face. "Travelling is so much more fatiguing than it used to be in former days, when one travelled in one's own carriage, whatever they may say. I remember," she continues, with an old woman's garrulity, "Mr. Blessington and I travelling from London to York by easy stages of twenty miles a day, in our own curricle, with outriders. One never sees a curricle nowadays."
"I am rather tired," the girl answers, with a faint smile, "and cravingly hungry," she might have added, but does not.
"Ring the bell for James to light the candles."
Weak from inanition, and with limbs cramped by long remaining in one position, Esther follows Miss Blessington up low flights of uncarpeted stone stairs, through draughty twisting passages, along a broad bare gallery, down more passages, and then into a huge gloomy, mouldy room – frosty, yet cold, despite the fire burning briskly on the old-fashioned-hobbed grate; a vast dark four-poster, hung with ginger-coloured moreen; a couch that looks highly suitable for lying-in-state on; an old-fashioned screen, covered with caricatures of Fox, Burke, the Regent, and Queen Caroline; and on the walls a highly valuable and curious tapestry, which waves pleasantly in the bitter wind that enters freely beneath the ill-fitting old door, giving an air of galvanic motion and false life to the ill-looking Cupids, green with age, that play hide-and-seek amongst vases, broken pillars and wormy blue trees.
"You have plenty of room, you see," says Miss Blessington, with a curve of her suave lips, as she lights the candles on the dressing-table, which, instead of being pink petticoated, white-muslined deal, is bare sturdy oak, with millions of little useless drawers and pigeon-holes in it.