Master Toby the steward, bent low to each of us, specially to my unworthy self, and then came Mistress Grace, and the men and the maids, all gathered in the hall to meet us. I don't know how I acquitted myself, but I know I never felt so young and insignificant in all my life.
Mistress Grace marshalled us all to our rooms. I was to have my aunt's, by her special direction, while my father and mother, as was fitting, had the room of state. Dame Grace says some king once slept there, but she can't tell who it was. She thinks 'twas either his Majesty Henry Sixth or King Alfred. I could not but smile, but Cousin Joslyn tells me, that though the unhappy Henry did really pass a night under this roof, there is a tradition that some sort of house stood here in Alfred's time, and that the royal fugitive was really here in some of his many wanderings. A part of the house is as old as the time of Edward the Confessor, and with its heavy, thick walls, low arches, and general massive roughness, makes me think of our shrine of St. Ethelburga, which I shall never see again.
[That was a mistake of mine. I saw all I desired and more of that famous shrine afterward.]
We have now been here four days, and I am beginning to feel at home. I have made friends with the old cat, who after considering me a while, went off and returned with a mouse, which mouse she deposited in my lap with an air of great satisfaction. Cousin Joslyn says it was a tender of service. I praised the old cat and took the mouse in my hand, and then delivered it over to the kits, at which their mother seemed quite satisfied. 'Twas an odd, but methought a mighty pretty trick of the poor brute, and I could see that Mistress Grace took it for a good omen.
I think Joyce is, however, the happiest of any one. As I said, we have arrayed her anew in a dress something suited to her quality, and with her tangled locks smoothed and covered, her face and hands washed, and her eyes growing less like a scared and beaten hound's, she is really a lovely child. She is sixteen years old, but is so small and slight she might easily pass for twelve, which my mother says is all the better, as she is so backward in her education. She has never learned to read, and has forgotten all she ever knew about her religion, save a Hail Mary and a fragment of her paternoster, which she says the chaplain at the hall taught her.
Finding my late aunt's spindle and distaff lying in my room, she begged that she might try to spin, saying that she had once learned of Mistress Earle, and after some trials, in which she showed great patience, she had the spindle dancing merrily on the floor, and drew out a very smooth even thread. She has asked me to teach her to read, and I am going to try. Untaught as she is in everything that it behooves a young lady to know, even in such every-day matters as eating and sitting properly, she is attentive to the slightest hint of my mother or Mistress Warner, who has taken the poor orphan into her kind heart at once, and is laying out great plans for teaching her white-seam, cut-work, and lace-making. Warner has the sense and wisdom to show great deference to Mistress Grace, as being so many years the elder, and they get on well together; and indeed Mistress Warner is a good Christian woman, as my mother says.
[CHAPTER XXXIII.]
July 30.
THIS morning, coming into the hall, I found Joyce quite in ecstasies over a pair of young choughs that Harry had got for her at the risk of his neck. Harry, who is usually very shy of strange young ladies, takes wonderfully to Joyce. She on her part takes to everybody, and is growing so full of spirits that mother now and then has to check her a little. She is very good in general, I must say, though she now and then shows her want of training in a little outburst of temper, and yesterday was so rude to Grace that mother ordered her to beg pardon, and on her refusal sent her to her room. Going thither some hour or two after, I found her drowned in tears, because she had offended my mother.