By ten o’clock that morning, Arthur, his dog, and his portmanteau, had all arrived together in front of the Abbey House. Before his feet had touched the moss-grown gravel, the hall-door was flung open, and Angela appeared to welcome him, looking, as old Sam the ostler forcibly put it afterwards to his helper, “just like a hangel with the wings off.” Jakes, too, emerged from the recesses of the garden, and asked Angela, in a tone of aggrieved sarcasm, as he edged his way suspiciously past Aleck, why the gentleman had not brought the “rampingest lion from the Zoologic Gardens” with him at once? Having thus expressed his feelings on the subject of bull-dogs, he shouldered the portmanteau, and made his way with it upstairs. Arthur followed him up the wide oak stairs, every one of which was squared out of a single log, stopping for a while on the landing, where the staircase turned, to gaze at the stern-faced picture that hung so that it looked through the large window facing it, right across the park and over the whole stretch of the Abbey lands, and to wonder at the deep-graved inscription of “Devil Caresfoot” set so conspicuously beneath.
His room was the largest upon the first landing, and the same in which Angela’s mother had died. It had never been used from that hour to this, and, indeed, in a little recess or open space between a cupboard and the wall, there still stood two trestles, draped with rotten black cloth, that had originally been brought there to rest her coffin on, and which Angela had overlooked in getting the room ready.
This spacious but somewhat gloomy apartment was hung round with portraits of the Caresfoots of past ages, many of which bore a marked resemblance to Philip, but amongst whom he looked in vain for one in the slightest degree like Angela, whose handiwork he recognized in two large bowls of flowers placed upon the dark oak dressing-table.
Just as Jakes had finished unbuckling his portmanteau, a task that he had undertaken with some groaning, and was departing in haste, lest he should be asked to do something else, Arthur caught sight of the trestles.
“What are those?” he asked, cheerfully.
“Coffin-stools,” was the abrupt reply.
“Coffin-stools!” ejaculated Arthur, feeling that it was unpleasant to have little details connected with one’s latter end brought thus abruptly into notice. “What the deuce are they doing here?”
“Brought to put the last as slept in that ‘ere bed on, and stood ever since.”
“Don’t you think,” insinuated Arthur, gently, “that you had better take them away?”
“Can’t do so; they be part of the furniture, they be—stand there all handy for the next one, too, maybe you;” and he vanished with a sardonic grin.