As the Duchess had said, it occupied the site of what had once—about 1740—been the westerly end of a mews belonging to houses in Cureton Street, long since pulled down. The space filled by these houses was now occupied by one great mansion and its gardens. The rest of the mews had been converted into three-story houses of a fair size, looking south, with a back road between them and the gardens of Cureton House. But at the southwesterly corner of what was now Heribert Street, fronting west and quite out of line and keeping with the rest, was this curious little place, built probably at a different date and for some special family reason. The big planes in the Cureton House gardens came close to it and overshadowed it; one side wall of the house, in fact, formed part of the wall of the garden.
The Duchess, full of nervousness, ran up the steps, put in the key herself, and threw open the door. An elderly Scotchwoman, the caretaker, appeared from the back and stood waiting to show them over.
“Oh, Julie, perhaps it’s too queer and musty!” cried the Duchess, looking round her in some dismay. “I thought, you know, it would be a little out-of-the-way and quaint—unlike other people—just what you ought to have. But—”
“I think it’s delightful,” said Julie, standing absently before a case of stuffed birds, somewhat moth-eaten, which took up a good deal of space in the little hall. “I love stuffed birds.”
The Duchess glanced at her uneasily. “What is she thinking about?” she wondered. But Julie roused herself.
“Why, it looks as though everything here had gone to sleep for a hundred years,” she said, gazing in astonishment at the little hall, with its old clock, its two or three stiff hunting-pictures, its drab-painted walls, its poker-work chest.
And the drawing-room! The caretaker had opened the windows. It was a mild March day, and there were misty sun-gleams stealing along the lawns of Cureton House. None entered the room itself, for its two semicircular windows looked north over the gardens. Yet it was not uncheerful. Its faded curtains of blue rep, its buff walls, on which the pictures and miniatures in their tarnished gilt frames were arranged at intervals in stiff patterns and groups; the Italian glass, painted with dilapidated Cupids, over the mantelpiece; the two or three Sheraton armchairs and settees, covered with threadbare needlework from the days of Evelina; a carpet of old and well-preserved Brussels—blue arabesques on a white ground; one or two pieces of old satinwood furniture, very fine and perfect; a heavy centre-table, its cloth garnished with some early Victorian wool-work, and a pair of pink glass vases; on another small table close by, of a most dainty and spindle-legged correctness, a set of Indian chessmen under a glass shade; and on another a collection of tiny animals, stags and dogs for the most part, deftly “pinched” out of soft paper, also under glass, and as perfect as when their slender limbs were first fashioned by Cousin Mary Leicester’s mother, somewhere about the year that Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold. These various elements, ugly and beautiful, combined to make a general effect—clean, fastidious, frugal, and refined—that was, in truth, full of a sort of acid charm.
“Oh, I like it! I like it so much!” cried Julie, throwing herself down into one of the straight-backed armchairs and looking first round the walls and then through the windows to the gardens outside.
“My dear,” said the Duchess, flitting from one thing to another, frowning and a little fussed, “those curtains won’t do at all. I must send some from home.”
“No, no, Evelyn. Not a thing shall be changed. You shall lend it me just as it is or not at all. What a character it has! I taste the person who lived here.”
“Cousin Mary Leicester?” said the Duchess. “Well, she was rather an oddity. She was Low Church, like my mother-in-law; but, oh, so much nicer! Once I let her come to Grosvenor Square and speak to the servants about going to church. The groom of the chambers said she was ‘a dear old lady, and if she were his cousin he wouldn’t mind her being a bit touched,’ My maid said she had no idea poke-bonnets could be so sweet. It made her understand what the Queen looked like when she was young. And none of them have ever been to church since that I can make out. There was one very curious thing about Cousin Mary Leicester,” added the Duchess, slowly—“she had second sight. She saw her old mother, in this room, once or twice, after she had been dead for years. And she saw Freddie once, when he was away on a long voyage—”
“Ghosts, too!” said Julie, crossing her hands before her with a little shiver—“that completes it.”
“Sixty years,” said the Duchess, musing. “It was a long time—wasn’t it?—to live in this little house, and scarcely ever leave it. Oh, she had quite a circle of her own. For many years her funny little sister lived here, too. And there was a time, Freddie says, when there was almost a rivalry between them and two other famous old ladies who lived in Bruton Street—what was their name? Oh, the Miss Berrys! Horace Walpole’s Miss Berrys. All sorts of famous people, I believe, have sat in these chairs. But the Miss Berrys won.”
“Not in years? Cousin Mary outlived them.”
“Ah, but she was dead long before she died,” said the Duchess as she came to perch on the arm of Julie’s chair, and threw her arm round her friend’s neck. “After her little sister
