Amyas looked round the room. It was a low wainscoted room, such as one sees in old houses: everything was in the most perfect neatness. The snow-white sheets on the bed were turned down as if ready for an occupant. There were books arranged on the shelves, fresh flowers on the table; the dressing-table had all its woman's mundus of pins, and rings, and brushes; even the dressing-gown lay over the chair-back. Everything was evidently just as it had been left.
“This was her room, sir,” whispered the old man.
Amyas nodded silently, and half drew back.
“You need not be modest about entering it now, sir,” whispered he, with a sort of sneer. “There has been no frail flesh and blood in it for many a day.”
Amyas sighed.
“I sweep it out myself every morning, and keep all tidy. See here!” and he pulled open a drawer. “Here are all her gowns, and there are her hoods; and there—I know 'em all by heart now, and the place of every one. And there, sir—”
And he opened a cupboard, where lay in rows all Rose's dolls, and the worn-out playthings of her childhood.
“That's the pleasantest place of all in the room to me,” said he, whispering still, “for it minds me of when—and maybe, she may become a little child once more, sir; it's written in the Scripture, you know—”
“Amen!” said Amyas, who felt, to his own wonder, a big tear stealing down each cheek.
“And now,” he whispered, “one thing more. Look here!”—and pulling out a key, he unlocked a chest, and lifted up tray after tray of necklaces and jewels, furs, lawns, cloth of gold. “Look there! Two thousand pound won't buy that chest. Twenty years have I been getting those things together. That's the cream of many a Levant voyage, and East Indian voyage, and West Indian voyage. My Lady Bath can't match those pearls in her grand house at Tawstock; I got 'em from a Genoese, though, and paid for 'em. Look at that embroidered lawn! There's not such a piece in London; no, nor in Alexandria, I'll warrant; nor short of Calicut, where it came from. . . . Look here again, there's a golden cup! I bought that of one that was out with Pizarro in Peru. And look here, again!”—and the old man gloated over the treasure.