Elizabeth watched them with singular interest as the carriage rolled off. She had never expected to feel an interest in anything again, and that which she felt in these strange people seemed ominous. For Elizabeth, being a woman, was superstitious, and where before had she seen the face and figure of that man?
Chapter Eight
Sara Luttrell, as General Brandon called her, was sitting in her fine, old-fashioned drawing-room, enjoying her invariable Saturday evening gossip with her nephew-in-law, Richard Baskerville, preparatory to her customary Saturday evening dinner. This Saturday dinner was as much of an institution with Mrs. Luttrell as her ermine cape and her black-velvet gown, which were annually renewed, or her free-spoken tongue, all of them being Medic and Persian in nature.
Nobody knew how many decades this Saturday evening dinner had been established, just as nobody knew Mrs. Luttrell’s age, except that it was somewhere between sixty and ninety. This dinner, which no more than six persons attended, took place at the unfashionable hour of seven. But seven had been the fashionable hour when Mrs. Luttrell began her Saturday dinners, and although she conceded much to the new fashions introduced by the smart set—more indeed than she ever admitted—and had advanced her formal dinner hour to half-past eight, yet she clung to seven for this Saturday evening institution. No other dinner invitation could lure Mrs. Luttrell from her own table on Saturday evenings, and it was one of the incidents of the warfare which had once raged between her and the then lady of the White House that Mrs. Luttrell should have been asked to dine at the White House on a Saturday evening. Mrs. Luttrell, however, came off triumphant. She could not have her own dinner that night, but in the very nick of time she heard of the death of a seventeenth cousin in Maryland. Mrs. Luttrell immediately asked to be excused from the White House on the ground of the death of a relative, and clapped herself, her coachman, and footman in mourning for a seventeenth cousin she had not seen in thirty years and had always cordially detested.
To be in ignorance of the sacredness of Mrs. Luttrell’s Saturday evenings was a crime of grave magnitude in her eyes, and to respect her rights on Saturday was to take a toboggan slide in her favor. It was the law that Richard Baskerville should dine with her on Saturday, and although that young gentleman maintained a perfect independence towards her in every other respect, in spite of the fact that she had made a will giving him every stiver of her fortune, he was careful to reserve his Saturday evenings for her.
The old lady and the young man sat opposite each other before a glowing wood fire in the great drawing-room. Mrs. Luttrell was a small, high-bred, handsome woman, with snow-white hair, perfect teeth, a charming smile, a reckless tongue, and a fixed determination to have her own way twenty-four hours out of the day and three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, with an additional day thrown in at leap-year. Time had left a few external marks upon her, but in essentials she was the same woman General Brandon had danced with forty-five years before. She was in love with the same man, who even then was in his early grave,—Richard Luttrell, the husband of her youth. He had been dead unnumbered years, and only one person on earth—his nephew, Richard Baskerville—suspected that Mrs. Luttrell cherished her husband’s memory with a smouldering and silent passion,—the only thing she was ever known to be silent about in her life.
Mrs. Luttrell sat bolt upright, after the ancient fashion, in her carved ebony chair, while Richard Baskerville lounged at his ease on the other side of the marble mantel. He was a well-made man of thirty-five, without any particular merit in the way of beauty; but so clear of eye, so clean cut of feature, so expressive of a man’s intelligence and a man’s courage, that people forgot to ask whether he was handsome or not. Mrs. Luttrell always maintained that he was very handsome, but found few to agree with her. Her belief came, however, from his resemblance to the miniature of her husband which she kept in her capacious pocket—for she still insisted on pockets in her gowns, and this miniature never left her by day or night.
Mrs. Luttrell’s drawing-room was the admiration and the despair of people who knew something about drawing-rooms. It might have been taken bodily from the Second French Embassy, of which Mrs. Luttrell had seen a good deal, for she had known the third Napoleon well at some indefinite period in her history. The room was large and square and high-pitched, and wholly innocent of bay-windows, cosey corners, and such architectural fallals. The ceiling was heavily ornamented with plaster in the Italian style, and the cornice was superb. Over the fireplace was a great white marble mantel with a huge mirror above it, and in one corner of the room a grand piano something under a hundred years old looked like a belle in hoopskirts. There was a wealth of old rosewood furniture, pictures, candelabra, girandoles, Dresden ornaments, and other beautiful old things which would have made a collector turn green with envy.