The old horses took them back to the Manor, but not the old coachman. A great change in the household had come about after Lola’s funeral. George Greswold had been merciless to those servants whose carelessness had brought about that great calamity, which made seven new graves in the churchyard before all was done. He dismissed his bailiff, Mrs. Wadman and her husband, an under-dairymaid and a cowman, and his housekeeper, all of whom he considered accountable for the use of that foul water from the old well—accountable, inasmuch as they had given him no notice of the evil, and had exercised no care or common sense in their management of the dairy. These he dismissed sternly, and that party feeling which rules among servants took this severity amiss, and several other members of the household gave warning.
“Let it be a clean sweep, then,” said Mr. Greswold to Bell, who announced the falling-away of his old servants. “Let there be none of the old faces here when we come back next year—except yours. There will be plenty of time for you to get new people.”
“A clean sweep” suited Bell’s temper admirably. To engage new servants who should owe their places to her, and bow themselves down before her, was a delight to the old Irishwoman.
Thus it was that all things had a strange aspect when Mildred Greswold reëntered her old home. Even the rooms had a different air. The new servants had arranged the furniture upon new lines, not knowing that old order which had been a part of daily life.
“Let us go and look at her rooms first,” said Mildred softly; and husband and wife went silently to the rooms in the south wing—the octagon-room with its dwarf bookcases and bright bindings, its proof-engravings after Landseer—pictures chosen by Lola herself. Here nothing was changed. Bell’s own hands had kept all things in order. No unfamiliar touch had disturbed the relics of the dead.
Mrs. Greswold stayed in that once happy scene for nearly an hour. It was hard to realise that she and her daughter were never to be together again, they who had been almost inseparable—who had sat side by side by yonder window or yonder hearth in all the changes of the seasons. There was the piano at which they had played and sung together. The music-stand still contained the prettily-bound volumes—sonatinas by Hummel and Clementi—easy duets by Mozart, national melodies, Volks Lieder. In music the child had been in advance of her years. With the mother music was a passion, and she had imbued her daughter with her own tastes in all things. The child’s nature had been a carrying on and completing of the mother’s character, a development of all the mother’s gifts.
She was gone, and the mother’s life seemed desolate and empty—the future a blank. Never in her life had she so much needed her husband’s love—active, considerate, sympathetic—and yet never had he seemed so far apart from her. It was not that he was unkind or neglectful, it was only that his heart made no movement towards hers; he was not in sympathy with her. He had wrapped himself in his grief as in a mantle; he stood aloof from her, and seemed never to have understood that her sorrow was as great as his own.
He left her on the threshold of Lola’s room. It might be that he could not endure the sight of those things which she had looked at weeping, in an ecstasy of grief. To her that agony of touch and memory, the aspect of things that belonged to the past, seemed to bring her lost child nearer to her—it was as if she stretched her hands across the gulf and touched those vanished hands.
“Poor piano!” she sighed; “poor piano, that she loved.”
She touched the keys softly, playing the opening bars of La ci darem la mano. It was the first melody they had played together, mother and child—arranged easily as a duet. Later they had sung it together, the girl’s voice clear as a bird’s, and seeming to need training no more than a bird’s voice. These things had been, and were all over.