Now Reginald is gone, and he, Arthur, reigns in his stead, and——Alas! alas! poor Reggy!—Poor, dear old fellow!
He rouses himself with an effort, and, going very softly to a small door that opens from the apartment, beckons gently to somebody beyond.
An old woman, dressed in deepest mourning, and of the housekeeper type, answers his summons, her eyes red with excessive weeping.
"I am going now," Lord Sartoris whispers to her in a low tone. "I have finished everything. You will remain here until my return."
"Yes, Mr. Arthur,—yes, my Lord," she answers, nervously; and then, as she gives the old title for the first time to the man before her, she bursts out crying afresh, yet silently, in a subdued fashion, as though ashamed of her emotion.
Sartoris pats her shoulder kindly, and then with a sigh turns away, and passes from the room with bent head and hands still clasped behind him, as has become a habit with him of late years.
Down the stairs and along the hall he goes, until, reaching a door at the lower end, he pauses before it, and, opening it, enters a room, half library, half boudoir, furnished in a somewhat rococo style.
It is a room curiously built, being a complete oval, with two French windows opening to the ground, and a glass door between them—partly stained—that leads to the parterre outside. It is filled with mediæval furniture, uncompromising and as strictly uncomfortable as should be, and has its walls (above the wooden dado) covered with a high-art paper, on which impossible storks, and unearthly birds of all descriptions, are depicted as rising out of blue-green rushes.
This room is known as "my lady's chamber,"—having ever been the exclusive property of the mistress of the house, until Mrs. Dorian Branscombe, in default of any other mistress, had made her own of it during her frequent visits to Hythe, and had refurnished it to suit her own tastes, which were slightly Æsthetic.
Now, she too is dead and gone, and the room, though never entirely closed or suffered to sink into disrepair, is seldom used by any of the household.