For, as she had said in her letter to Mr. Anstruther, Mrs. Murray was a martyr to an acute form of rheumatism, and though few people beyond her old and attached servants knew it, she was seldom long out of pain. And, partly on account of her rheumatism, and partly because she was so very deaf, she shunned society, and was rarely to be met with in any one else's house, although she gladly welcomed any one who, as she put it, was kind enough to come and see her. But, on the other hand, she visited a great deal among the poor, not only in her own village, but in the villages for many miles around Windy Gap, and the sight of her fat, sturdy, grey ponies drawing up outside the doors of their cottages was one that never failed to give pleasure to their inmates. She and Lady Strangways had met over a year ago at the bedside of a poor girl who was suffering from an incurable malady, and whose parents rented a cottage on the Wrexley estate. Lady Strangways, who was conscientiously trying, in the intervals of a very full and busy life, to know all her husband's tenants, and who, wherever she went, heard Mrs. Murray's praises sounded, asked at once to be allowed to call on her. Mrs. Murray answered courteously that it would give her great pleasure to know Lady Strangways, but pleaded her infirmities as an excuse for paying any visits herself. In spite of her deafness and her lameness, Mrs. Murray was the soul of cheerfulness. Though she was cut off from much intercourse with her fellow-creatures, she was never at a loss for occupation, and had so many resources within herself that she rarely had a dull moment. For one thing she was an omnivorous reader, and just as Mrs. Danvers never sat down without a piece of knitting in her hand, so Mrs. Murray never sat down without a book.
"Needlework," she had said once when a friend had tried to induce her to ply a needle of some sort, "is all very well for those who can hear. They can work and listen at the same time, but if I took to knitting, or crochet, or embroidery, I should be shut up with my own thoughts instead of getting out of myself and away into some of the best company in the world. My thinking," she added with a wry little smile, "is done at night, when my rheumatism will not permit me to sleep."
"So you have seen Margaret," she said, in the curious low voice habitual to her, which made it almost as difficult for other people to hear what she said as she found it to hear what they said. "I left you with her so long on purpose that you might make her acquaintance. Is she not a charming girl?"
Now as "charming" was certainly not the word which her short experience of Eleanor's behaviour that afternoon would have led her to apply to her niece, Lady Strangways hesitated.
"Ah!" said Mrs. Murray, quick to notice and to interpret aright her hesitation. "But you have only seen her for the first time to-day. Now I have known her for some weeks, and I have grown to love her. You do not wish," and a pathetically anxious look came into her face, "to take her away from me, do you?"
Lady Strangways' shake of her head reassured Mrs. Murray on that point.
"I hope her grandfather will leave her with me for many months to come yet," she continued. "She is very happy with me; far happier than I think any young girl ought to be with only one old deaf woman for company. But she is so occupied with her studies and her music that I think I count little one way or another with her."
"Oh, no, I cannot believe that," Lady Strangways said in a tone of remonstrance. "You are so good to her that she must be very fond of you, and appreciate all your kindness to her."
"It is not much that I can do," said Mrs. Murray. "She is so absorbed in her work that she makes her own happiness. I wish," she added, a little wistfully, "that she did desire my company a little more, but then I must not be selfish. She did not come here to make a companion of me, but to pursue her own studies. And she certainly does pursue them with an ardour that, from what her grandfather told me of her dreamy, indolent ways, I had not expected from her."
"But surely she does not want to study all day long," said Lady Strangways, with more than a hint of disapprobation in her voice. She read more into Mrs. Murray's wistful remark than the latter had intended to convey, and she began to fear that her new-found niece, in addition to being odd mannered and hasty tempered, was a thoroughly selfish young person into the bargain.