"As you please, Mr. Turnbull," said Mary. "It was merely that I should be sorry to leave you without sufficient help in the shop."
"And I should be sorry," rejoined Turnbull, "that Miss Marston should fancy herself indispensable to the business she turned her back upon."
From that moment, the restraint he had for the last week or two laid upon himself thus broken through, he never spoke to her except with such rudeness that she no longer ventured to address him even on shop-business; and all the people in the place, George included, following the example so plainly set them, she felt, when, at last, in the month of November, a letter from Hesper heralded the hour of her deliverance, that to take any formal leave would be but to expose herself to indignity. She therefore merely told Turnbull, one evening as he left the shop, that she would not be there in the morning, and was gone from Testbridge before it was opened the next day.
CHAPTER XXIV.
MRS. REDMAIN'S DRAWING-ROOM.
A few years ago, a London drawing-room was seldom beautiful; but size is always something, and, if Mrs. Redmain's had not harmony, it had gilding—a regular upholsterer's drawing-room it was, on which about as much taste had been expended as on the fattening of a prize-pig. Happily there is as little need as temptation to give any description of it, with its sheets of glass and steel, its lace curtains, crude-colored walls and floor and couches, and glittering chandeliers of a thousand prisms. Everybody knows the kind of room—a huddle of the chimera ambition wallowing in the chaos of the commonplace—no miniature world of harmonious abiding. The only interesting thing in it was, that on all sides were doors, which must lead out of it, and might lead to a better place.
It was about eleven o'clock of a November morning—more like one in March. There might be a thick fog before the evening, but now the sun was shining like a brilliant lump of ice—so inimical to heat, apparently, that a servant had just dropped the venetian blind of one of the windows to shut his basilisk-gaze from the sickening fire, which was now rapidly recovering. Betwixt the cold sun and the hard earth, a dust-befogged wind, plainly borrowed from March, was sweeping the street.
Mr. and Mrs. Redmain had returned to town thus early because their country-place was in Cornwall, and there Mr. Redmain was too far from his physician. He was now considerably better, however, and had begun to go about again, for the weather did not yet affect him much. He was now in his study, as it was called, where he generally had his breakfast alone. Mrs. Redmain always had hers in bed, as often with a new novel as she could, of which her maid cut the leaves, and skimmed the cream. But now she was descending the stair, straight as a Greek goddess, and about as cold as the marble she is made of—mentally rigid, morally imperturbable, and vacant of countenance to a degree hardly equaled by the most ordinary of goddesses. She entered the drawing-room with a slow, careless, yet stately step, which belonged to her, I can not say by nature, for it was not natural, but by ancestry. She walked to the chimney, seated herself in a low, soft, shiny chair almost on the hearth-rug, and gazed listlessly into the fire. In a minute she rose and rang the bell.
"Send my maid, and shut the door," she said.
The woman came.
"Has Miss Yolland left her room yet?" she asked.