On the particular afternoon whereon the story opens, one of the dreariest points of the landscape was the house towards which Hal Dockett’s steps were bent. It was of moderate size, and might have been very comfortable if somebody had taken pains to make it so. But it looked as if the pains had not been taken. Half the windows were covered by shutters; the wainscot was sadly in want of a fresh coat of paint; the woodbine, which should have been trained up beside the porch, hung wearily down, as if it were tired of trying to climb when nobody helped it; the very ivy was ragged and dusty. The doors shut with that hollow sound peculiar to empty uncurtained rooms, and groaned, as they opened, over the scarcity of oil. And if the spectator had passed inside, he would have seen that out of the whole house, only four rooms were inhabited beside the kitchen and its dependencies. In all the rest, the dusty furniture was falling to pieces from long neglect, and the spiders carried on their factories at their own pleasure.
One of these four rooms, a long, narrow chamber, on the upper floor, gave signs of having been inhabited very recently. On the square table lay a quantity of coarse needlework, which somebody seemed to have bundled together and left hastily; and on one of the hard, straight-backed chairs was a sorely-disabled wooden doll, of the earliest Dutch order, with mere rudiments, of arms and legs, and deprived by accidents of a great portion of these. The needlework said plainly that there must be a woman in the dreary house, and the doll, staring at the ceiling with black expressionless eyes, spoke as distinctly for the existence of a child.
Suddenly the door of this room opened with a plaintive creak, and a little woman, on the elderly side of middle life, put in her head.
A bright, energetic, active little woman she seemed,—not the sort of person who might be expected to put up meekly with dim windows and dusty floors.
“Marry La’kin!” (a corruption of “Mary, little Lady!”) she said aloud. “Of a truth, what a charge be these childre!”
The cause of this remark was hardly apparent, since no child was to be seen; but the little woman came further into the room, her gestures soon showing that she was looking for a child who ought to have been visible.
“Well! I’ve searched every chamber in this house save the Master’s closet. Where can yon little popinjay (parrot) have hid her? Marry La’kin!”
This expletive was certainly not appreciated by her who used it. Nothing could much more have astonished or shocked Barbara Polwhele (a fictitious person)—than whom no more uncompromising Protestant breathed between John o’ Groat’s and the Land’s End—than to discover that since she came into the room, she had twice invoked the assistance of Saint Mary the Virgin.
Barbara’s search soon brought her to the conclusion that the child she sought was not in that quarter. She shut the door, and came out into a narrow gallery, from one side of which a wooden staircase ran down into the hall. It was a wide hall of vaulted stone, hung with faded tapestry, old and wanting repair, like everything else in its vicinity. Across the hall Barbara trotted with short, quick steps, and opening a door at the further end, went into the one pleasant room in all the house. This was a very small turret-chamber, hexagonal in shape, three of its six sides being filled with a large bay-window, in the middle compartment of which were several coats of arms in stained glass. A table, which groaned under a mass of books and papers, nearly filled the room; and writing at it sat a venerable-looking, white-haired man, who, seeing Barbara, laid down his pen, wiped his spectacles, and placidly inquired what she wanted. He will be an old friend to some readers: for he was John Avery of Bradmond.
“Master, an’t like you, have you seen Mrs Clare of late?”