“It was a sore trial, Trimmer,” Mrs. Treverton answered, full of confidential friendliness. “But it’s all over now. I could hardly have borne to speak about it before.”
“No, ma’am, I noticed as you was close and silent like, and I knew my place too well to say anything. Troubles take hold of people different. If there’s anything on my mind I must out with it, if it was but to Ginger, the tortoiseshell cat; but some folks can keep their worrits screwed up inside ’em. It hurts ’em to speak.”
“That was my case, Trimmer. It hurt me to speak my husband’s name, or to hear it spoken, while he was forced to be far away from me. But now it’s all different. You cannot talk of him too much to please me. I hope you will be as fond of him as you were of the dear old man who is gone.”
Mr. Treverton must have a sitting room of his own, of course; a den where he might write his letters, and see his bailiff, where he could smoke and meditate at his leisure, study if he ever cared to study, read novels even, were he disposed to be lazy; and where his happy wife could only come on sufferance, deeming it a vast indulgence to be allowed to sit at his feet sometimes, or even to fill his pipe for him, or, in rough winter weather, to kneel down before the blazing fire and warm his slippers, when he had come in from a cold ride round his land, doing good wherever he went, like a benevolent fairy in the modern form of an enlightened landlord.
After much debate and perplexity, Laura decided upon giving her husband, for his own particular sanctum, that very room in which they two had met for the first time, on the snowy winter night when John Treverton came to see his dying kinsman. It was a good old room, not large, but pleasant, oak panelled, with a fireplace in the corner, which gave a quaintness to the room; an oak mantelpiece with half a dozen narrow shelves running in a pyramid above it, and on these shelves an arrangement of old blue Nankin cups and saucers, crowned at the apex with the most delightful thing in teapots. There was an old cabinet in the room, so full of secret drawers, and mysterious boxes and recesses at the back of drawers, that it was in itself the study of a lifetime.
“Never hide anything in it, my dear,” Jasper Treverton had said to his adopted daughter, “for be sure if you do you won’t be able to find it.”
To this room Laura brought other treasures; the most comfortable easy chairs in the house, the best of the small Dutch pictures, the softest of the Turkey carpets, the richest tapestry curtains, two or three fine bronzes, a lovely little Chippendale bookcase. This last she filled with all her own favourite books, robbing the book-room below ruthlessly, in the delight of enriching her husband’s study, as this room was henceforth to be called.
“He shall know and feel that he is welcome,” she said to herself, softly, as she lingered in the room, touching everything, rearranging, polishing, whisking away invisible grains of dust with a dainty feather brush, caressing the things that were so soon to belong to the man she loved.
The adjoining room—the room in which Jasper Treverton had died—was to be her own bedchamber. It was a spacious room, with three long windows and deep window seats, a fireplace at which an ox, or at all events a baron of beef might have been roasted—a tall four-post bed, with twisted columns, richly carved; curtains of Utrecht velvet, crimson and amber, lined with white silk all somewhat faded, but splendid in decay—a noble room altogether, yet Laura had rather a horror of it, dearly as she had loved him whose generous spirit seemed to haunt the chamber.
But Mrs. Trimmer told her that, as the mistress of Hazlehurst Manor, she ought to occupy this room. It always had been the Squire’s bedchamber, and it ought to be so still.
“Nothing like old ways,” said Mrs. Trimmer, decisively.
The room opened into John Treverton’s study. That was a reason why Laura should like it.
If he were to sit up late at night reading or writing, she would be near him. She might see the face she loved, through the open door, bending over his papers in the lamplight.
“We are going to be a regular Darby and Joan, Mrs. Trimmer,” she said to the housekeeper, as she made all her small domestic arrangements.
In such trivial work she contrived to get rid of the third week, and then came the lovely summer noontide when she started on her journey, with the faithful Mary in attendance.
“Mary,” she had said, the night before, “I am going to trust you with a great secret, because I believe you are staunch and true.”
“If you could find another young woman in my capacity, mum, that would be stauncherer or truerer, I’ll undertake to eat her without a grain of salt,” protested Mary, sacrificing grammar to intensity.
The train from Beechampton took them across a stretch of wild moorland, where the granite cropped up in scattered boulders, as if Titans had been pelting one another, to Didford Junction. At Didford they found John Treverton waiting for them, and here they got on to another line of railway, and into a more pastoral landscape, and so on to Lyonstown—pronounced Linson—where they mounted the stagecoach which was to take them across the moor to Camelot. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon by this time, and it would be evening before they reached the little town among the Cornish hills. Oh, what a happy drive it was across the free open moorland, in the mild afternoon light, a thousand feet above the sea-level, above the smoke and turmoil of cities, far away from all mankind, in a lonely world of heather and
