‘The house is his monument,’ he said, ‘his shrine, his temple. You cannot get away from him. You must not read there again: it is too lonely. They are going to close those rooms. Soon we shall have the fine new building growing up.’
‘Ah,’ she said pitifully. ‘I am sorry. It is like turning them out. And poor Miss Brooke—what will she do?’
She had a sudden thought.
‘I believe she used to see him,’ she said. ‘She talked so oddly that I did not heed her—but now things come back to me.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘She thought she saw him. It began when she was quite a young girl, a student like you, and very pretty. She was always sitting there facing the portrait. It became real to her. He put her out of conceit with common men. She might have married: there was a lover—but then’⸺
‘He was not the Beloved,’ said Esther Denison, and slipped her hand into his. Then she began to weep.
He did not tell her then, not till some weeks had passed, that Miss Brooke was dead. The threat of eviction from her old quarters had killed her. She had been found in some kind of a fit in her familiar place in the ladies’ reading-room, on the very afternoon of the day that was to end with Esther’s falling asleep under the eyes of the Beloved.
She was quite herself again, and within a week of her wedding-day, when he thought it safe to take her to see the alterations which were being made in the ladies’ reading-room. The portrait was gone—to the gallery across the garden. A great number of the books had been removed. The place looked disordered and unhappy—not as she had known it. This would have laid no spell on her.
It was in the workmen’s dinner-hour. They had the place to themselves. He took her hand and held it in a firm, warm clasp. ‘There was a door,’ he said; ‘you were quite right. It was just where we found you in a huddled-up heap on the floor. But it was locked, and the bookcases covered it. You can walk through now.’
They went into the inner room. There was the open door as she had seen it. But what desolation beyond! The long room was bare of furniture; it had evidently been shut up for a long time, for it smelt mouldily. The light came in coldly through the long windows, curtained only with cobwebs. There was dust everywhere, in drifts on the floor, deadening the sounds of their feet. It had dimmed the shepherds and shepherdesses of the painted walls and the flower-wreaths and Cupids of the ceiling.