Miss Searle, while I spoke, had fixed her eyes on my friend as he stood silent beneath Sir Joshua’s portrait. The housekeeper, agitated and mystified, fairly let herself go. “Heaven preserve us, Miss! It’s your great-uncle’s picture come to life.”
“I’m not mistaken then,” said Miss Searle—“we must be distantly related.” She had the air of the shyest of women, for whom it was almost anguish to make an advance without help. Searle eyed her with gentle wonder from head to foot, and I could easily read his thoughts. This then was his maiden-cousin, prospective mistress of these hereditary treasures. She was of some thirty-five years of age, taller than was then common and perhaps stouter than is now enjoined. She had small kind grey eyes, a considerable quantity of very light-brown hair and a smiling well-formed mouth. She was dressed in a lustreless black satin gown with a short train. Disposed about her neck was a blue handkerchief, and over this handkerchief, in many convolutions, a string of amber beads. Her appearance was singular; she was large yet somehow vague, mature yet undeveloped. Her manner of addressing us spoke of all sorts of deep diffidences. Searle, I think, had prefigured to himself some proud cold beauty of five-and-twenty; he was relieved at finding the lady timid and not obtrusively fair. He at once had an excellent tone.
“We’re distant cousins, I believe. I’m happy to claim a relationship which you’re so good as to remember. I hadn’t counted on your knowing anything about me.”
“Perhaps I’ve done wrong.” And Miss Searle blushed and smiled anew. “But I’ve always known of there being people of our blood in America, and have often wondered and asked about them—without ever learning much. To-day, when this card was brought me and I understood a Clement Searle to be under our roof as a stranger, I felt I ought to do something. But, you know, I hardly knew what. My brother’s in London. I’ve done what I think he would have done. Welcome as a cousin.” And with a resolution that ceased to be awkward she put out her hand.
“I’m welcome indeed if he would have done it half so graciously!” Again Searle, taking her hand, acquitted himself beautifully.
“You’ve seen what there is, I think,” Miss Searle went on. “Perhaps now you’ll have luncheon.” We followed her into a small breakfast-room where a deep bay window opened on the mossy flags of a terrace. Here, for some moments, she remained dumb and abashed, as if resting from a measurable effort. Searle too had ceased to overflow, so that I had to relieve the silence. It was of course easy to descant on the beauties of park and mansion, and as I did so I observed our hostess. She had no arts, no impulses nor graces—scarce even any manners; she was queerly, almost frowsily dressed; yet she pleased me well. She had an antique sweetness, a homely fragrance of old traditions. To be so simple, among those complicated treasures, so pampered and yet so fresh, so modest and yet so placid, told of just the spacious leisure in which Searle and I had imagined human life to be steeped in such places as that. This figure was to the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood what a fact is to a fairy-tale, an interpretation to a myth. We, on our side, were to our hostess subjects of a curiosity not cunningly veiled.
“I should like so to go abroad!” she exclaimed suddenly, as if she meant us to take the speech for an expression of interest in ourselves.
“Have you never been?” one of us asked.
“Only once. Three years ago my brother took me to Switzerland. We thought it extremely beautiful. Except for that journey I’ve always lived here. I was born in this house. It’s a dear old place indeed, and I know it well. Sometimes one wants a change.” And on my asking her how she spent her time and what society she saw, “Of course it’s very quiet,” she went on, proceeding by short steps and simple statements, in the manner of a person called upon for the first time to analyse to that extent her situation. “We see very few people. I don’t think there are many nice ones hereabouts. At least we don’t know them. Our own family’s very small. My brother cares for nothing but riding and books. He had a great sorrow ten years ago. He lost his wife and his only son, a dear little boy, who of course would have had everything. Do you know that that makes me the heir, as they’ve done something—I don’t quite know what—to the entail? Poor old me! Since his loss my brother has preferred to be quite alone. I’m sorry he’s away. But you must wait till he comes back. I expect him in a day or two.” She talked more and more, as if our very strangeness led her on, about her circumstances, her solitude, her bad eyes, so that she couldn’t read, her flowers, her ferns, her dogs, and the vicar, recently presented to the living by her brother and warranted quite safe, who had lately begun to light his altar candles; pausing every now and then to gasp in self-surprise, yet, in the quaintest way in the world, keeping up her story as if it were a slow rather awkward old-time dance, a difficult pas seul in which she would have been better with more practice, but of which she must complete the figure. Of all the old things I had seen in England this exhibited mind of Miss Searle’s seemed to me the oldest, the most handed down and taken for granted; fenced and protected as it was by convention and precedent and usage, thoroughly acquainted with its subordinate place. I felt as if I were talking with the heroine of a last-century novel. As she talked she rested her dull eyes on her kinsman with wondering kindness. At last she put it to him: “Did you mean to go away without asking for us?”
“I had thought it over, Miss Searle, and had determined not to trouble you. You’ve shown me how unfriendly I should have been.”