The room had been redecorated for our great-great-grandmother, Mary Geraldine, when she came as a bride to Yearsly, in 1802, and it had hardly been altered since her death, eight years later.
A portrait of her by Jackson hung between the two fireplaces, and there was a miniature of her on a little gilt nail by the further fireplace as well; a dark-eyed, laughing face, very charming, very romantic. There was an atmosphere of romance all about her, since her death in Spain when she was twenty-six. She had followed her husband to the Peninsular War and died of fever there. Her body had been embalmed and sent home to be buried at Yearsly, and the story was told of how, when the coffin was opened, it was seen that her hair had gone on growing after her death, long black hair flowing down below her knees, wrapping her round like a great black shawl.
Our great-grandfather had been a little boy, barely seven years old, but this sight he remembered, naturally enough, and he had told it to his children, Guy and Hugo’s grandfather and my grandmother. My grandmother had told it to us. This impressed us very much and increased the indefinable glamour surrounding our young great-great-grandmother. Her husband had preserved everything after her death exactly as she had left it, and so it had remained down to our time. There were her handkerchiefs and pieces of lace, her little volumes of Italian poetry, even chairs and tables remained where she had put them; yet it was a happy sentimentality; there was no sense of a dead hand in the cult of Mary Geraldine. If Cousin Delia’s own personality was gradually, quite imperceptibly, superseding the fainter older one, it was not deliberately nor of set purpose at all. The two personalities, quite distinct and different in themselves, seemed to blend and merge harmoniously, and Yearsly was the richer for both.
III
Cousin Delia never scolded, and never disapproved. It seems to me, when I think of that time now, that there were no rules at Yearsly, no forbidden places, nothing we might not do. It seems now, as though we had done just what we liked all the day long, only somehow we did not want to do naughty things. To begin with we did not quarrel. I cannot remember any quarrel between Guy and Hugo except once, over a dead robin—when Guy called the cat who killed it cruel, and Hugo insisted that it was not cruel, because it did not understand.
Even then they had not fought, but their voices had been angry, and that was very rare.
We did not want to annoy each other or other people, as my children so often do; we did not want to disobey, but then there were no rules to disobey. Sometimes I have thought that it was easy for Cousin Delia, because Guy and Hugo were so little trouble and so easy to manage, and that I could manage my own children that way, if they had been like them; but this explanation is not enough. Guy and Hugo would not have been so good with another mother. They were not very good at school, and I know that I was often naughty when I was not at Yearsly. I know that it was something in Cousin Delia herself that made the atmosphere; a kind of active peace and contentment that affected us, as it affected the animals and the flowers she had.
She did not play with us often, she seldom took us for walks; she left us much more alone, to ourselves, than I was ever left at my grandmother’s in London, but she was always there when we wanted her, always in the background, doing her own ploys, and because she took pleasure in so many different things in the day, we took pleasure in them also; pigeons and tame birds, that came to her when she went out, and her big dogs and her flowers, and her beautiful embroidery of bright butterflies and flowers. Everything she touched or came in contact with became alive, even the chairs and the curtains, and the little china bowls. There was one chair in the drawing-room that was called the ‘Little Chair.’ It was a little old chair of white-painted wood with a high back and very low seat, and she had covered it herself with an old piece of Mary Geraldine’s gold brocade. This chair was not one of Mary Geraldine’s; it had lain forgotten in a box room till Cousin Delia found it, but now it was a friend. So many things at Yearsly were like that.
Another thing about Cousin Delia was the way she took us as we were, and did not seem to want us different and better all the time, as I do with my children, except perhaps John. We were never afraid to say anything to her, for she was never shocked or disappointed with us. I wonder sometimes if she did disapprove of anything, or merely never thought of what she disliked.
I did not realize this so much until I married Walter, and found that he and his mother disapproved of so many things; and of course my mother did also, though differently.