“Well, well, my dear, we need not judge our neighbours.—Edith, my child, thou knowest the house as well as I; wilt thou carry thy friends above? Rebecca hath made ready My Lady’s Chamber for my Lady,”—with a smile at her old friend—“and the Fetterlock Chamber for Faith and Temperance. The Old Wardrobe is for thee and Lettice, and the lads shall lie in the Nursery.”
Names to every room, after this fashion, were customary in old houses. The party were to stay at Minster Lovel for four days, from Friday to Tuesday, and then to pursue their journey to London.
In the Old Wardrobe, a pleasant bedchamber on the upper floor, Lettice washed off the dust of the journey, and changed her clothes when the little trunk came up which held the necessaries for the night. Then she tried to find her way to the Credence Chamber, and—as was not very surprising—lost it, coming out into a long picture-gallery where she was at once struck and entranced by a picture that hung there. It represented a young girl about her own age, laid on a white couch, and dressed in white, but with such a face as she had never seen on any woman in this life. It was as white as the garments, with large dark eyes, wherein it seemed to Lettice as if her very soul had been melted; a soul that had gone down into some dreadful deep, and having come up safe, was ever afterwards anxiously ready to help other souls out of trouble. She would have thought the painter meant it for an angel, but that angels are not wont to be invalids and lie on couches. Beside this picture hung another, which reminded her of her Grandfather Louvaine; but this was of a young man, not much older than Aubrey, yet it had her grandfather’s eyes, which she had seen in none else save her Aunt Edith. Now Lettice began to wonder where she was, and how she should find her way; and hearing footsteps, she waited till they came up, when she saw old Rebecca.
“Why, my dear heart, what do you here?” said she kindly.
“Truly, I know not,” the youthful visitor answered. “I set forth to go down the stairs, and missed the right turning, as I guess. But pray you, Rebecca, ere you set me in the way, tell me of whom are these two pictures?”
“Why,” said she, “can you not guess? The one is of your own grandfather, Sir Aubrey Louvaine.”
“Oh, then it is Grandfather when he was young. But who is this, Rebecca? It looks like an angel, but angels are never sick, and she seems to be lying sick.”
“There be angels not yet in Heaven, Mistress Lettice,” softly answered the old servant. “And if you were to live to the age of Methuselah, you’d never see a portrait of one nearer the angels than this. ’Tis a picture that old Squire—Mistress Joyce’s father—would have taken, nigh sixty years since, of our angel, our Mistress Anstace, when she was none so many weeks off the golden gate. They set forth with her in a litter for London town, and what came back was her coffin, and that picture.”
“Was she like that?” asked Lettice, scarcely above her breath, for she felt as if she could not speak aloud, any more than in church.
“She was, and she was not,” said old Rebecca. “Them that knew her might be minded of her. She was like nothing in this world. But, my dear heart, I hear Mrs Edith calling for you. Here be the stairs, and the Credence Chamber, where supper is laid, is the first door on your left after you reach the foot.”