"'Tis the garden-parlour made for his lordship's mother when she came as a bride to Kilrush," Goodwin told Antonia, "and his lordship was very strict in his orders that everything should be maintained as her ladyship left it."
In those days of mourning and regret, Antonia preferred the picturesque seclusion of Kilrush to any home that could have been offered to her. The fine park, with its old timber and views over sea and river, pleased her. She loved the ruined abbey, dark with ages, and mantled with ivy of more than a century's growth. The spacious dwelling-house, with its long suites of rooms and shadowy corridors—a house built when Ormond was ruling in Ireland, and when the Delafields lived half the year at their country seat, and divided the other half-year between Limerick and Dublin—the old-fashioned furniture, the family portraits by painters whose fame had never travelled across the Irish Channel, and most of all the gardens, screened by a belt of sea-blown firs, pleased their new owner, and she proposed to remain there till winter.
"My dearest child, would you bury yourself alive in this desolate corner of the earth?" cried Thornton, whose nerves had hardly recovered from the horrors of the funeral, and who could not sleep without a rushlight for fear of the Delafield ghosts, who had indeed more than once in this shattered condition wished himself back in his two-pair chamber in Rupert Buildings. "Was there ever so unreasonable a fancy? You to seclude yourself from humanity! You who ought to be preparing yourself to shine in the beau monde, and who have still to acquire the accomplishments needful to your exalted station! The solid education, which it was my pride and delight to impart, might suffice for Miss Thornton; but Lady Kilrush cannot dispense with the elegant arts of a woman of fashion—the guitar, the harpsichord, to take part in a catch or a glee, or to walk a minuet, to play at faro, to ride, to drive a pair of ponies."
"Oh, pray stop, sir. I shall never be that kind of woman. You have taught me to find happiness in books, and have made me independent of trivial pleasures."
"Books are the paradise of the neglected and the poor, the solace of the prisoner for debt, the comfort of the hopeless invalid; but the accomplishments you call trivial are the serious business of people of rank and fortune, and to be without them is the stamp of the parvenu. My love, with your fortune, you ought to winter in Paris or Rome, to make the Grand Tour, like a young nobleman. Why should our sex have all the privileges of education?"
The word Rome acted like a spell. Antonia's childish dreams—while life in the future lay before her in a romantic light—had been of Italy. She had longed to see the home of her Italian mother.
"I should like to visit Italy by-and-by, sir," she said, "if you think you could bear so long a journey."
"My love, I am an old traveller. Nothing on the road comes amiss to me—Alps, Apennines, Italian inns, Italian post-chaises—so long as there is cash enough to pay the innkeeper."
"My dear father, I shall ever desire to do what pleases you," Antonia answered gently; "and though I love the quiet life here, I am ready to go wherever you wish to take me."
"For your own advantage, my beloved child, I consider foreign travel of the utmost consequence—imprimis, a winter in Paris."