Mrs. Bean looked a little worried, but she was evidently not the woman to take to heart such a trifle as a suicide in the house, as long as things went all right in the kitchen, and none of the chimneys smoked. Crispin, who seemed to have little trust in her discretion, gave her arm a rough shake of warning as she left the room with the young lady. Mrs. Bean, therefore, kept silence until she and her charge got upstairs. Then she popped her head over the banisters to see that Crispin was out of hearing, and proceeded to unbend in conversation, being evidently delighted to have somebody fresh to speak to.
CHAPTER VIII.
“Oh,” began Mrs. Bean, with a fat and comfortable sigh, “I am glad to have you here, I declare. Ever since the Captain told me, in his short way, that you were coming, I’ve been that anxious to see you, you might have been my own sister.”
“That was very good of you,” said Freda, who was busily taking in all the details of the house, the wide, shallow stairs, low ceilings, and oaken panelling; the air of neglect which hung about it all; the draughts which made her shiver in the corridors and passages. She compared it with the farm-house she had just left, so much less handsome, so much more comfortable. How wide these passages were! The landing at the top of the staircase was like a room, with a long mullioned window and a wide window-seat. But it was all bare, cold, smelling of mould and dust.
“Isn’t this part of the house lived in?” asked Freda.
“Well, yes and no. The Captain lives in it—at least did live in it,” she corrected, lowering her voice and with a hasty glance around. “No one else. This house would hold thirty people, easy, so that three don’t fill it very well.”
“But doesn’t it take a lot of work to keep it clean?”
“It never is kept clean. What’s the good of sweeping it up for the rats?” asked Mrs. Bean comfortably. “I and a girl who comes in to help just keep our own part clean and the two rooms the Captain uses, and the rest has to go. If the Captain had minded dust he’d have had to keep servants; I don’t consider myself a servant, you know,” she continued with a laugh, “and I’m not going to slave myself to a skeleton for people that save a sixpence where they might spend a pound.”
It would have taken a lot of slaving to make a skeleton of Mrs. Bean, Freda thought.
They passed round the head of the staircase and into a long gallery which overlooked the court-yard. It was panelled and hung with dark and dingy portraits in frames which had once been gilt.