“Ouch,” she remarked in a matter-of-fact tone. “Please, ma'am, Miss Sanderson wants to know, who's that?”
“Ah,” said the trim little lady in riding-habit, “will you so kindly ask Miss Sanderson that I may speak to her?”
But Mrs. Cullom was already descending the stairs, each step appearing to Mignon to have the nature of a plunge. “My goodness, yes. Come in.” Mignon carried her long skirt over the lintel.
“I am quite grieved to intrude, mademoi—” Mrs. Cullom's matronly proportions seemed to discountenance the diminutive, “a—madame. Mr. Sanderson permitted me to ride one of his horses. He is so generous. And the horse brought me here, oh, quite decisively,” and Mignon laughed such a soft, magical laugh that Susan grinned in broad delight. “It is such a famous place, this, is it not,—Back Meadows? I thought I might be allowed to—to pay tribute to its fame.”
Mrs. Cullom's cordiality was such that if, strictly speaking, two hundred pounds can flutter, she may be said to have fluttered. She plunged through two sombre-curtained parlors, Mignon drifting serenely in the wake of her tumult. Something in the black, old colonial furniture sent a feeling of cold gruesomeness into her sunny veins, and she was glad when Mrs. Cullom declared it chilly and towed her into the dining-room, where a warm light sifted through yellow windows of modern setting high over a long, irregular sideboard, and mellowed the portraits of departed Sandersons on the walls: honorables numerous of colonial times (Blake, first of the horse-breeding Sandersons, booted and spurred but with too much thinness of face and length of jaw for a Squire Western type), all flanked by dames, with a child here and there, above or below—all but the late Israel, whose loneliness in his gilt frame seemed to have a certain harmony with his expression.
“That was Joseph's father, my brother Israel,” said Mrs. Cullom, as Mignon's eyes travelled curiously along and rested on the last. “Joseph keeps his mother hung up in his den.”
“Hung up? Den?” cried Mignon, with a recurrence of the gruesome feeling of the parlors. “Oh, ciel! What does he keep there? Bones?”
“Bones! Goodness no. Books.”
Mrs. Cullom pushed open a door to the right and entered a long, low room piled to the ceiling and littered with books, which, together with the leathern chair and red-shaded lamp before the fireplace, gave a decided air of studious repose, nothing suggesting a breeder of fancy stock. An oil painting of a lady hung over the mantel, and near it some mediæval Madonna, not unresembling the portrait in its pale cheeks, unworldly eyes, and that faint monastic air of vigil and vision and strenuous yearning of the soul to throw its dust aside. Nevertheless the face of the lady was a sweet face, quiet and pure, such as from many a Madonna of the Old World in tawdry regalia looks pityingly down over altar and winking tapers, seeming to say with her tender eyes, “Is it very hard, my dear, the living? Come apart then and rest awhile.” Mignon turned to Mrs. Cullom. “You are dressed for going out, madame,” she said, looking at that lady's well-to-do black silk. “Am I not detaining you?”
“Oh, I was going to church. Goodness, are n't you going to church?” A sudden thought struck her and she added severely: “And you've been riding that wicked little mare on Sunday. And she might have thrown you, and how'd you look pitched headfirst into heaven dressed so everybody ud know you weren't going to church!”