“Yes. And I think he’s never been in here since she went, but once, and that was five years after. The boudoir bell rang and I came, all of a tremble, to hear it for the first time after so long. He was standing as it may be there. ‘That cushion’s faded, Eliot,’ he said, ‘get another made like it. You are to replace everything that gets torn or faded or worn without troubling me. Keep the rooms just as they are.’ He had a pile of photographs in his hand and a little picture, and he locked them up in that cabinet, and I don’t suppose it’s been opened since. He never made any fuss about it from the first. No, nor altered his ways either.” She drew a cover over a chair and tied the strings viciously. “It’s for all the world as if he’d never had a wife at all.”
Christopher had hung the three sets of curtains now and he sat on the top step and looked round the room curiously. It was less oppressively modern that the rest of the house and he had an idea the master of Stormly was not responsible for that. He felt a vivid interest in the late Mrs. Masters, Why had she gone and why had neither Aymer nor St. Michael mentioned her existence? He longed to override his own sense of etiquette and question Mrs. Eliot, who continued to ramble on in her own way.
“I takes off the coverings every two months, and brushes it all down myself,” she explained, “and I’ve never had anyone to help me before. If I were to let them girls in they’d break every vase in the place with their frills and their ‘didn’t see’s.’”
“Do those sheets hang over the panels?”
“I couldn’t think of troubling you! But if you 244 will, sir, why then, that’s the sheet for there. They are all numbered.”
Christopher covered up the dainty walls regretfully. Why had she left it? Had she and Peter quarrelled? It seemed to Christopher, in his present mood towards Mr. Masters, they might well have done so.
“Do you remember Mrs. Masters?” he was tempted to ask presently.
“Indeed I do, seeing I was here when he brought her home. Tall, thin, and like a queen the way she walked, a great lady, for all she was simple enough by birth, they say. But she went, and where she went none of us know to this day, and some say the Master doesn’t either, but I don’t think it myself.”
Christopher straightened a pen and ink sketch of a workman on the wall. It was a clever piece of work, life-like and sympathetic.
“She did that,” said Mrs. Eliot with a proprietor’s pride. “She was considered clever that way, I’ve been told. That’s another of hers on the easel over there.”