THE bridal feast was strewn about the table; the teapot was steaming; the cream melted to ivory richness, and, among many more familiar eatables, the saffron cake looked gaudy and exotic. After the first bashful make-weights of conversation, Jenny and May put their cloaks down, took off wraps, and made the travelers' quick preparation for a meal which has expected their arrival for some time. Then down they all sat, and with the distraction of common hunger the painful air of embarrassment was temporarily driven off. Old Mrs. Trewhella was inclined with much assertion of humility to yield to Jenny her position at the head of the table; but she, overawed by the prodigal display of new dishes, of saffron cake and pasties and bowls of cream, prevailed upon the older woman to withhold her resignation.
The living-room of Bochyn was long, low, and raftered, extending apparently to the whole length of the farmhouse, except where a parlor on the left of the front door usurped a corner. Very conspicuous was the hearth, with its large double range extravagantly embossed with brass ornaments and handles. On closer inspection the ironwork itself was hammered out into a florid landscape of pagodas, mandarins and dragons. Jenny could not take her eyes off this ostentatious piece of utility.
"Handsome slab, isn't it?" said Trewhella proudly.
"Slab?"
"Stove—we do call them slabs in Cornwall."
"It's nice. Only what a dreadful thing to clean, I should say."
"Maid Emily does that," explained Mrs. Trewhella.
Jenny turned her glances to the rest of the room. By the side of the slab hung a copper warming-pan holding in ruddy miniature the room's reflection. Here were also brass ladles and straining spoons and a pair of bellows, whose perfectly circular box was painted with love-knots and quivers. On the high mantlepiece stood several large and astonished china dogs with groups of roughly cast, crudely tinted pottery including Lord Nelson and Elijah, all set in a thicket of brass candle-sticks. Indeed, brass was the predominant note in the general decoration. The walls were shining with tobacco boxes, snuffers, sconces and trays. Very little space on the low walls could be found for pictures; but one or two chromolithographs, including "Cherry Ripe" and "Bubbles," had succeeded in establishing a right to be hung. All down the middle of the room ran a long oak trestle-table, set with Chippendale chairs at the end which Jenny and the family occupied, but where the rest of the household sat, with benches. The five windows were veiled in curtains of some dim red stuff, and between the two on the farther side from the front door stood an exceptionally tall grandfather's clock, above whose face, in a marine upheaval that involved the sun, moon and stars, united rising, a ship rocked violently with every swing of the pendulum. A door at the back opened to an echoing vault of laundries, sculleries, larders and pantries, while in the corner beyond the outhouse door was a dark and boxed staircase very straight and steep, a cavernous staircase gaping to unknown corridors and rooms far away.
Old Mrs. Trewhella suited somehow that sinister gangway, for, being so lame as to depend on a crutch, the measured thump of her progress was carried down the gloom with an eternal sameness of sound that produced in the listener a sensation of uneasiness. She had a hen-like face, the brightness of whose eyes was continually shuttered by rapid blinks. Her hair, very thin but scarcely gray, was smoothed down so close as to give her head the appearance of a Dutch doll's. She had a slight mustache and several tufted moles. There was much of the witch about her and more of the old maid than the mother.
When the new arrivals had been seated at the table for some minutes, the rest of the household trooped in through the outhouse door. Thomas Hosken led the procession. His face under the glaze of soap looked more like an orange than ever, and he had in his walk the indeterminate roll of that fruit. Emily Day came next, a dark slip of a maid with long-lashed stag's eyes, too large for the rest of her. She was followed by Dicky Rosewarne, a full-blooded, handsome, awkward boy of about twenty-three, loose-jointed like a yearling colt and bringing in with him a smell of deep-turned earth, of bonfires and autumn leaves. Bessie Trevorrow, the dairymaid, ripe as a pippin, came in, turning down the sleeves of a bird's-eye print dress over forearms that made Jenny gasp. She could not reconcile the inconsistencies of feature in Bessie, could not match the burning almond eyes with the coarse lips, nor see how such weather-stained cheeks could belong to so white a neck. Last of all came Old Man Veal, whose duties and status no one rightly knew. The household individually slid into their separate places along the benches with sidelong shy greetings to Jenny and May, who for their part would have sat down with more ease to supper with a flock of sheep. One chair still remained empty.