Dumps - A Plain Girl

by L. T. Meade

“No; but you can come and look on if you like.”

“Don’t you want Mrs Herring? She is so strong. Everything should be turned out; the place should be made very clean.”

“I don’t want none of your herrings nor your sprats neither,” replied Hannah in her most aggressive tone. This was a very old joke of Hannah’s.

I went upstairs now. The spare room was on the same landing as the drawing-room, and, as far as I could tell, had never been of any use at all to any single member of the family. Perhaps in mother’s time it had been of service to some long-forgotten guest. The door was always locked. I supposed Hannah had the key. At nights sometimes, when the wind was blowing high, there was a moaning, through the keyhole of that locked door, and there were times when I flew past it up and up and up to my own attic bedroom. But now I stood outside the door. At the other side of the landing was the drawing-room. It was a very big room with three windows. We sat there sometimes when father had his professors, men very nearly as learned as himself—not quite, of course—to visit him.

I went into the drawing-room. It was very ugly, and not nearly as cosy as the parlour. The spare room I had never seen the inside of that I could remember. Hannah came up now, and took a great bunch of keys from her pocket and opened the door, and we went in.

“Oh, how musty it smells!” I said.

“In course it do,” said Hannah. “When a room’s shut up for going on fourteen years, why shouldn’t it smell musty? But there, child! don’t you go and catch your death of cold. The first thing is to air the room and then to light a fire. Afterwards I’ll rub up the furniture and put up clean hangings. It won’t be exactly a cheerful sort of room, but I suppose the master must be content.”

There were grey-looking curtains hanging at the three tall windows. There were green Venetian blinds, which looked almost white now, so covered were they with dust. There was a sort of rough drugget stuff on the floor, which was quite as grey as the curtains which surrounded the windows. There was a huge four-poster bed, drawn out a little from the wall, and taking one of the best positions in the room. This also was hung with grey moreen, and looked as desolate and as uninviting as a couch could look. There was a huge arm-chair, covered also with the same grey moreen; and there were a few other chairs, hard and dirty. There was a very tall brass fender to the grate, which in itself was large and of generous proportions. There was a chest of drawers, made of mahogany, with brass handles; and a huge wardrobe, almost as big as a small house. I really don’t remember the rest of the furniture of the room, except that there were engravings hanging on the walls, and one in particular portraying Herodias bearing the head of John the Baptist on a charger, hanging exactly over the fireplace. The picture was as ghastly as the room.

“I wouldn’t sleep here for the world,” I said.

“Well, you won’t have the chance,” said Hannah. “Now, you can just go out and make yourself useful somewhere else, while I’m beginning to clean up and get things in order.”