“GOOD-MORNING, ROSAMOND!”
“GOOD-MORNING, ROSAMOND!”
CHAPTER I
Négligés were unknown in Roseborough. Even at seven in the morning, which was Rosamond Mearely’s hour for greeting the new day, the ladies of Roseborough did not kimono: they dressed.
Young Rosamond Mearely might be—as indeed she was—the richest and fairest woman in Roseborough, and the widow of a gentleman whose name the hamlet and countryside mentioned still with the bated breath of pride; but she would no more have dared to appear at breakfast before her housemaids, the imposing Frigget sorority—Amanda, aged forty-nine years “come Michelmas,” and Jemima, forty-seven and three quarter years—in what they would have pronounced (and condemned as) a “wrapper,” than she would wittingly have committed any other irretrievable faux pas.
The mother of the Frigget sorority had guided the first adventures of the late, distinguished Hibbert Mearely about the by-ways of Trenton Waters, his birthplace, in the infantile push-carts of his period—that is to say, fifty-odd years before this morning when his young widow slipped a decorous print gown (lavender with black floral design) over her dainty, white roundness and the whalebone and batiste article that confined it, and descended to her fourteen hundred and eightieth solitary breakfast. It was four years since Hibbert Mearely’s departure. His faithful nurse was slowly preparing to follow him; she lay bedridden in Trenton Waters. Her two daughters, who had been brought up to serve him, still dominated his household.
Rosamond saw them now, as the stairs circled to the door of the large living room where summer breakfasts were spread. They were tall, multi-boned women with straight, thin, gray hair—drawn sheerly to a polka dot at the back, which one, or at most two, hairpins controlled—and clad in skimpy, dark, cotton dresses, well starched and designed to reveal every puritan angle. They stood at opposite sides of a long, black table. The table was one of Hibbert Mearely’s antiques (a ticket attached to the foot gave its date and history); its “early Seventeenth” carvings were hidden now by a cloth of gleaming white damask bearing Mrs. Mearely’s breakfast. Rosamond’s glance, by habit, travelled in a direct line between her female grenadiers to the wall where a life-size portrait, in oils, of the late master depended. Outside the wide-open doors, the sunlight filtered through the overlacing trees and kindled the proud red of the dahlias to flame. A little breeze, vagrant and wilful, danced through the garden and set all the leaves to clapping their hands. Rosamond sighed. She flitted through the doorway and down the huge room, sedately, to her place.
“Good-mornin’, Mrs. Mearely, ma’am.”