“If we will not trouble you too much,” said Lilias, smiling at the limited permission, “I shall be glad to see Murrayshaugh.”
Eesabell turned away at once, and went pattering round to a not very elegant back door. Her visitors followed her.
“Na—na,” said the old woman, fretfully waving them back with her quick, withered hand; “we may be puir, and puir eneugh, but there shall nae gentle come this gate into Murrayshaugh; gae round to the ither side; ye’ll get in by the richt door.”
It was a respectable irritation, and the two young explorers turned with some amusement to obey. The great door of Murrayshaugh was somewhat heavy on its rusted hinges; the opening of it taxed all the impatient strength of Isabell Brown.
There was not much to see within; everything saleable had been removed from those cold, dreary, uninhabited walls before the armed man, Want, drove its last tenant from his father’s house. So much furniture as remained was old and faded; the haughty, proud old man had studiously displayed its poverty; he professed to disdain the mean art of making shifts to hide it—it was the bitter art of unbending pride which left its forlorn nakedness so visible to every eye.
But the little, quick, irascible custodier of the lonely house had been so long used to the poverty of its scanty furniture that she was now unconscious of it; and when she carefully dusted the high-backed chairs of “Miss Lucy’s parlour,” and closed the shutters lest the sun should spoil the colours of the decayed worn carpet, whose colours had been jumbled in incoherent old age when she herself was but a child, Eesabell Brown was perfectly sincere. She had a veneration for those solitary and quiet inhabitants of the house in which she had lived all her days; they were older dwellers than she; and when she thought of the “Miss Lucy” who had been the pattern and glory of her younger days returning to Murrayshaugh—and she did think of it constantly—it was still as Miss Lucy—the fair, young lady whom in her own girlhood she thought chief of women. This was the romance of the little old housekeeper of Murrayshaugh. She had known few fluctuations of fortune since the great era of their departure; somehow or other Isabell herself had grown old; but unchangeable as the high-backed chairs and the faded carpets seemed Murrayshaugh and Miss Lucy—and they would return.
“My mother was housekeeper when the Laird and Miss Lucy gaed to foreign pairts,” she said to Lilias. “Ye’ll have heard o’ Miss Lucy?—ay, but I question if ye ever saw the like o’ her. Wasna auld Greenshaw your grandfather? I thocht that. Weel, Miss Lucy gaed herself, ance errant, to see your mother, to please Mossgray.”
Isabell said this with great importance; but Lilias was not overawed, though her face was very grave.
“There’s no a young lady atween this and her, wherever she be,” continued the old woman with vehemence, “that it wadna be an honour to even to Miss Lucy, though them that should have kent, didna ken.”
A quick indignant glance at the young man accompanied this speech; but the glance of Isabell’s wrath was harmless lightning to the unconscious Halbert.