‘It’s awful to think of, Maude—awful! To think that she ran up those stairs as a youngish woman—that he took them two at a time as an active man, and then that they hobbled and limped down them, old and weary and broken, and now both dead and gone for ever, and the stairs standing, the very rails, the very treads—I don’t know that I ever felt so strongly what bubbles of the air we are, so fragile, so utterly dissolved when the prick comes.’
‘How could they be happy in such a house?’ said Maude. ‘I can feel that there have been sorrow and trouble here. There is an atmosphere of gloom.’
The matron-attendant approved of emotion, but in its due order. One should be affected in the dining-room first, and then in the hall. And so at her summons they followed her into the long, low, quaint room in which this curious couple had lived their everyday life. Little of the furniture was left, and the walls were lined with collected pictures bearing upon the life of the Carlyles.
‘There’s the fireplace that he smoked his pipe up,’ said Frank.
‘Why up the fireplace?’
‘She did not like the smell in the room. He often at night took his friends down into the kitchen.’
‘Fancy my driving you into the kitchen.’
‘Well, the habit of smoking was looked upon much less charitably at that time.’
‘And besides, he smoked clay pipes,’ said the matron. ‘This is considered a good print of Mrs. Carlyle.’
It was a peaky eager face, with a great spirit looking out of it, and possibilities of passion both for good and evil in the keen, alert features. Just beside her was the dour, grim outline of her husband. Their life-histories were in those two portraits.