The Venetians

by M. E. Braddon

It was twilight, the grey twilight of a frosty winter day. Vansittart noted the snowdrops peeping over the box border as he walked up the steep gravel path that made the only approach to the Marchant dwelling. Carriage approach there was none. The Marchant girls’ cheap satin slippers had to trip along that gravel path, in fine weather or foul, when they went to a party, and the poor little feet inside the slippers had to dance away any feeling of chilly dampness which the sodden gravel might occasion.

Vansittart looked about him in the evening grey as he waited for the opening of the door. He had rung a bell that sounded twice too loud for the size of the house, and had set up much barking of indoor and outdoor dogs.

There were two long strips of grass sloping down to the holly-hedge that shut off the road, and a long flower border on either side of the gravel path. This was the garden, so far as ornamental garden went, but beyond the grass strip on one side of the house there were cabbage rows, and the usual features of a vegetable garden. Beyond, right and left, stretched meadow-land, away to the dark background of copse and hillside.

The house, even after all its improvements, had a humble and homely aspect; walls roughly plastered, small lattice windows, and that steep slant of the roof, which Vansittart could have touched with his hand. The porch was a square enclosure, with a sloping thatch, and two little windows, right and left. An old woman, in a blue stuff gown and white cap and apron, opened the door, and even as it opened Vansittart heard again that ripple of silver-clear laughter which he had heard on the hilltop in the snowy night, nearly ten days ago.

Ten days. Only ten! Until ten days ago he had lived in happy ignorance that there was such a woman as Eve Marchant in the world. It seemed to him now as strange not to have known of her as it would be not to know of her namesake—the universal mother.

The same sweet laughter, not loud or boisterous, but soft and clear! Her laugh! He would have known it amidst a chorus of laughing girls.

Miss Marchant was at home, the old woman told him, and thereupon led him through a small, dark room—the original cottage parlour—through another room, faintly lit by a low fire, into a third and much larger room, which was bright with fire and lamp light.

Here the whole Marchant family, except the Colonel, were assembled at afternoon tea, which in this establishment had come to be the most enjoyable meal of the day.

Happily Vansittart had lunched lightly in the woods with the shooters, so was hungry enough to find the odour of toasting bread rather a comfortable addition to the atmosphere; or, at any rate, he was in a humour to be pleased with everything, even the sprawling attitude of a tall overgrown girl in a yellow cotton pinafore, sitting on the hearthrug, and making toast, watched and assisted by a smaller sister.

The three grown-up Miss Marchants sat at the table, two of them with their elbows on the board, where a large home-made cake—in north-country phraseology, a plum-loaf—a glass dish of marmalade and another of jam, and a pile of thick bread and butter, testified to the serious purpose of the meal.