Mildred went up to town with Miss Ransome and her betrothed at the end of the young lady’s visit. Miss Fausset had been coldly gracious, after her manner, had allowed Mr. Stuart to come to her house whenever he pleased, and had given up the rarely-used front drawing-room to the lovers, who sat and whispered and tittered over their own little witticisms, by the distant piano, and behaved altogether like those proverbial children of whom we are told in our childhood, who are seen but not heard. Mildred lunched in Grosvenor Gardens, and went to Chertsey by an afternoon train. The housekeeper who had once ruled over both Mr. Fausset’s houses, subject to interference from Bell, was now caretaker at The Hook, with a housemaid under her. She was an elderly woman, but considerably Bell’s junior, and she was an admirable cook and manager. A telegram two days before had told her to expect her mistress, and the house was in perfect order when Mrs. Greswold arrived in the summer twilight. All things had been made to look as if the place were in family occupation, though no one but the two servants had been living there since Mr. Fausset’s death. The familiar aspect of the rooms smote Mildred with a sudden unexpected pain. There were the old lamps burning on the tables, the well-remembered vases—her mother’s choice, and always artistic in form and colour—filled with the old June flowers from garden and hothouse. Her father’s chair stood in its old place in the bay-window in front of the table at which he used to write his letters sometimes, looking out at the river between whiles. Mrs. Dawson had put a lamp in his study, a small room opening out of the drawing-room, and with windows on two sides, and both looking towards the river, which he had loved so well. The windows were open in the twilight, and the rose-garden was like a sea of bloom.
In her father’s room nothing was altered. As it had been in the last days he had lived there, so it was now.
“I haven’t moved so much as a penholder, ma’am,” said Dawson tearfully.
CHAPTER IX.
LITERA SCRIPTA MANET.
The house and grounds were in such perfect order that there was very little to be done in the way of preparation for the honeymoon visitors. Even the pianos had been periodically tuned, and the clocks had been regularly wound. Two or three servants would have to be engaged for the period, and that was all; and even this want Mrs. Dawson proposed to supply without going off the premises.
The housemaid had a sister, who was an accomplished parlourmaid and carver; the under-gardener’s eldest daughter was pining for a preliminary canter in the kitchen, and the gardener’s wife was a retired cook, and would be delighted to take all the rougher part of the cooking, while Mrs. Dawson devoted her art to those pretty tiny kickshaws in which she excelled. There were peaches ripening in the peach-house, and the apricots were going to be a show. There was wine in the cellar that would have satisfied an alderman on his honeymoon. Mildred’s business at The Hook might have been completed in a day, yet she lingered there for a week, and still lingered on, loving the place with a love which was mingled with pain, yet happier there than she could have been anywhere else in the world, she thought.
The chief gardener rowed her about the river, never going very far from home, but meandering about the summer stream, by flowery meadows, and reedy eyots, and sometimes diverging into a tributary stream, where the shallow water seemed only an excuse for wild flowers. He had rowed her up and down those same streams when she was a child with streaming hair and he was the under-gardener. He had rowed her about in that brief summer season when Fay was her companion.
She revisited all those spots in which she had wandered with her lover. She would land here or there along the island, and as she remembered each particular object in the landscape, her feet seemed to grow light again, with the lightness of joyous youth, as they touched the familiar shore. It was almost as if her youth came back to her.
Thus it was that she lingered from day to day, loth to leave the beloved place. She wrote frankly to her aunt, saying how much good the change of air and scene had done her, and promising to return to Brighton in a few days. She felt that it was her duty to resume her place beside that fading existence; and yet it was an infinite relief to her to escape from that dull gray house, and the dull gray life. She acknowledged to herself that her aunt’s life was a good life, full of unselfish work and large charity, and yet there was something that repelled her, even while she admired. It was too much like a life lived up to a certain model, adjusted line by line to a carefully-studied plan. There was a lack of spontaneity, a sense of perpetual effort. The benevolence which had made Enderby village like one family in the sweet time that was gone had been of a very different character. There had been the warmth of love and sympathy in every kindness of George Greswold’s, and there had been infinite pity for wrong-doers. Miss Fausset’s almsgiving was after the fashion of the Pharisee of old, and it was upon the amount given that she held herself justified before God, not upon the manner of giving.
In those quiet days, spent alone in her old home, Mildred had chosen to occupy Mr. Fausset’s study rather than the large bright drawing-room. The smaller room was more completely associated with her father. It was here—seated in the chair before the writing-table, where she was sitting now—that he had first talked to her of George Greswold, and had discussed her future life, questioning his motherless girl with more than a father’s tenderness about the promptings of her own heart. She loved the room and all that it contained for the sake of the cherished hands that had touched these things, and the gentle life that had been lived here. There had been but one error in his life, she thought—his treatment of Fay.