“Some of the new servants are to be here to-morrow,” said Mrs Grier, to Captain Chancellor. “I hope you will find everything comfortable in the meantime, sir.”
Dinner—or, more properly speaking, supper—was prepared for the travellers in the dining-room—a huge, dark cavern of a room it looked to Eugenia, who shivered as the fireless grate met her view. She was too tired to eat; but, afraid of annoying her husband, she made a pretence of doing so, feeling eager for Sydney’s letter, and a chat with Rachel about “home,” in her own room.
These pleasures were deferred for a little by the appearance of Mrs Grier to do the honour of showing her lady her rooms. The housekeeper had rather taken a fancy to Mrs Chancellor. Eugenia’s allusion to what she “must have had to go through,” had been a most lucky one, for Mrs Grier was one of those curiously constituted beings to whom condolence never comes amiss. The most delicate flattery was less acceptable to her than a sympathising remark that she was “looking far from well,” and no one could pay her a higher compliment than by telling her she bore traces of having known a great deal of trouble. She was not, for her class, an uneducated person; but she was constitutionally superstitious. Omens, dreams, deathbeds, funerals, all things ghastly and ghostly, were dear to her soul; and her thirty-three years’ life in a gloomy, half-deserted house, such as Halswood had been under the old régime, had not conduced to a healthier tone of mind.
“Along this way, if you please, ma’am,” she said to Eugenia, pointing to the long corridor which ran to the right of the great staircase they had come up by. “The rooms to the left have not been occupied for many years. We thought—that is, Mr Blinkhorn and I—that you would prefer to use the rooms which have been the best family-rooms for some generations. It would feel less strange-like—more at home, if I may say so. Here, ma’am,” opening the first door she came to, “is what was the late Mrs Chancellor’s boudoir. It is eight-and-twenty years next month since she was taken ill suddenly, sitting over there by the window in that very chair. It was heart-disease, I believe. She had had a good deal of trouble in her time, poor lady, for the old Squire was always peculiar. They carried her—we did (I was her maid then)—into her bedroom—the next room, ma’am—this,” again opening a door, with an air of peculiar gratification in what she was going to say, “and she died the same night in the bed you see, standing as it does now.”
The present Mrs Chancellor gave a little shiver.
“The next room again, ma’am,” proceeded Mrs Grier, “is quite as pleasant a one as this, and about the same size. It is the room in which old Mr Chancellor breathed his last, last December. He was eighty-nine, ma’am; but he died very hard, for all that. We prepared both these rooms that you might take your choice.”
“Thank you,” replied Eugenia. “I certainly do not feel as if I preferred either. What rooms did the last Mr and Mrs Chancellor use when they were here?” she went on to ask, in a desperate hope that she might light upon some more inviting habitation than these great, dark, musty apartments, with their funereal four-post bedsteads and gloomy associations.
“They had rooms on the other side of the passage,” said Mrs Grier. “Mrs Chancellor had a prejudice against those beautiful mahogany bedsteads,” with indignant emphasis. Evidently Herbert Chancellor’s wife had found small favour in the eyes of Mrs Grier. “But Mr Chancellor died,” with satisfaction, “in his grandfather’s room—the next door, as I told you, ma’am, to this.”
“I don’t wonder at it,” thought Eugenia to herself. She wished she could find courage to ask if it would not be possible for her at once to take up her quarters in one of the rooms in which, so far at least, no Chancellor had lain in state, and was just meditating a request to be shown the one in which Herbert had not died, when Mrs Grier nipped her hopes in the bud.
“To-morrow, of course, any room can be prepared that you like, ma’am,” said the housekeeper; “but for to-night, these two beds are the only ones with sheets on.”