The park gates of Stanby are lion guarded and of stone, and then a long carriage-drive takes one up to the house. The park round the old gray pile was starred with primroses, and ghost-like little lambs were capering noiselessly in the fields. The scent of wallflowers was blown to us from a great brown ribbon of them round the walls of the lodgekeeper's house as we swung through the gates. The sheep in the park, bleating to their young, drew away from the palings where they had been rubbing their woolly sides, and made off to the farther corner of the field, and Mrs. Fielden's gray pony in the paddock tossed his heels in a vindictive fashion at us from a distance of fifty yards or more. And the motor car drew up with a jerk at the great doors of the house.
Stanby is not quite so large now as it originally was, immense though the house undoubtedly is, and only some ruins on the north side show where the chapel used to stand. A mound within the ruin's walls marks the resting-place of Hylda—Hylda, whose history I wrote out at the request of Mrs. Fielden, and sent to her; but I don't suppose she has ever read it.
The evening of our arrival at Stanby it pleased Mrs. Fielden to put on an old-fashioned dress of stiffest brocade, which she had found in some old chest in the house. She wore a high comb of pearls in her dark hair, and she looked a very regal and beautiful figure in the great dining-hall and drawing-rooms of her house. She did not play Bridge, as the others did, but sat on a carved high-backed chair near my sofa, and told me many of the old stories of the house, and asked me to write down some of them for her.
"I sent you the story of Hylda more than a week ago," I said, "and I don't suppose you ever read it."
"I did read it," said Mrs. Fielden gently, "and I liked it very much."
She had put on an unapproachable mood with her beautiful stiff brocade gown, and the gentleness of her voice seemed to heighten rather than to lessen her royalty. The radiance and the holiday air, which are Mrs. Fielden's by divine right, were not dimmed to-night so much as transformed. There was a subtle aromatic scent of dried rose-leaves clinging to the old brocade dress, and about herself a sort of fragrance of old-world dignity and beauty. The pearl comb in her hair made her look taller than usual.
A deerhound got up from his place by the fire and came and laid his head on her lap, and some footmen in old-fashioned bright blue liveries came in to arrange the card-tables and hand round coffee. Everything was stately and magnificent in the house.
"And you pretend," I said, "that you do nothing; yet probably the whole ordering of this house devolves upon you."
"I am quite a domestic person sometimes," said Mrs. Fielden.
"It is rather bewildering," I said, "to find that you are everything in turn."