The tall, young, frock-coated librarian came into the ladies’ reading-room with a noiseless, gliding step and an air of apology. He moved a library ladder against the high shelves of calf-bound volumes, ran up the ladder with a gentle swiftness, selected a tall folio from the top shelf and came down again, leaving the room by the half-glass door as unobtrusively as he had entered it.
There were only two people in the reading-room. One was an elderly woman, who sat in front of a splendid fire, dozing, her head to one side. She rested her cheek in her hand. She was elderly and had a disordered, tousled look. Her hair, which had been a colourless fair, and was now an indeterminate grey, was falling loose about her ears. Yet there was a suggestion of lost beauty and grace, something evanescent, something of youth, of the wreck of loveliness, about the drooped head and the huddled figure.
Outside, the streets were miserable. The flagged courtyard beneath the windows showed a dull surface of glimmering wet reflection. No hope of its clearing. The skies were muddy, and beyond the courtyard in the narrow street there passed now and again an oilskinned figure under an umbrella, or a depressed cab-horse, behind an ancient driver and disgracefully rickety vehicle—himself, poor beast, only fit for the knacker’s yard. It was comfortable in the ladies’ reading-room, where very few people came except the two who now occupied it. There was something that appealed to Esther Denison, the younger of the two ladies, in the rooms which had been undisturbed since Lord Edward Fitzgerald had moved about them, his head full of rare dreams, more than a century ago.
That was the Beloved himself in the portrait above the magnificently carved mantelpiece, set amid the backs of the old volumes on their shelves, glimmering out of the soberly rich surroundings with a suggestion of eternal gaiety and tender charm.
Such colour and vivacity! The brown eyes of the portrait drew Esther Denison from her books and manuscripts, in spite of herself. She was working at ‘Middle Irish’ for a University studentship. Now and again she had to tinkle the little bell for a librarian to find something she wanted. There were several librarians, but it was always the same one who answered her bell. She was hardly conscious of him while she thanked him so sweetly for finding what she wanted. She was hardly aware how painstaking he was, how anxious to help. There never was more than a murmured word between them. They observed the rule of silence of the reading-room, although there was never anyone there but Esther Denison, and that queer old Miss Brooke, who in her waking hours read nothing but eighteenth-century memoirs, with now and again a volume of poetry or a romance.
The ladies’ reading-room was a very good place for such work as Esther Denison’s. The quiet was unbroken, because of the thick walls and the retired situation of the great house between the courtyard and the gardens at the back. All the corridors were lined with books,—such books as no one ever asks to read—old calf and leather-bound volumes, which were never taken from their shelves. Those Transactions of Parliament had been there when the Beloved was young and in love, when he went to and fro between this house and the House of Commons in College Green. The deep walls of books seemed to deaden all rumour of life in the ladies’ reading-room, while downstairs the men’s reading-room was crowded, and the swing-doors went from morn till even.
Esther Denison used to forget that there was any presence in the room but her own while she worked. The work absorbed her: she delighted in it, difficult as it was. Hour after hour she would sit there, her delicate Muse-like head bent over the abstruse page. Her face was as soft in colour, as delicately and firmly moulded, as a pink sweet-pea. She wore her fair hair plaited, and twisted like a laurel-wreath around her small head. She never looked round, nor glanced up, when the librarian came in noiselessly. He went away carrying with him an impression of the pure profile, the softly opening lips, the head filleted with pale gold, which drew him to return against his will.
Little by little something of intimacy sprang up between Esther Denison and Miss Brooke. At first the girl had sent the elder woman a pitying glance and thought. She was half crazed or whole crazed, poor thing. She talked in her sleep, and she was often asleep. When she woke up, she talked to herself or to the picture above the fireplace. Some girls might have been afraid of this strange companion. Not so Esther Denison. She had become accustomed to the odd figure sitting in the chair in front of the fire. She would have missed it if it had not been there.
One very grey, very dull afternoon, the fire sank low in the grate while Miss Brooke slept. Esther realised with a start that the room was cold. She had opened a window and the damp chill had entered. It was nearly time for the lights. She stood up and went to replenish the fire, putting on the coal gently, bit by bit, so as not to disturb the sleeper.
Kneeling between her and the fire, Miss Brooke’s face seemed to glimmer out of the dark. The rooms were always full of mysterious shadows. Glancing at her, as a little flame sprang up in the grate and died away, Esther Denison had a queer illusion. The withered face was for the moment the face of a girl, soft and round and purely tinted—not so unlike the face of which she had caught a careless glimpse in the glass as she arranged her hat before coming out that morning. Then the illusion vanished. Miss Brooke woke up with a weary sigh and shivered. She was elderly and cracked-looking again. Esther stirred up the fire and went to the window, which she closed before returning to her work.