Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (251 page)

  
Miss Laury was sitting after breakfast in a small library. Her desk lay before her and two large ruled quartos filled with items and figures which she seemed to be comparing. Behind her chair stood a tall, well-made, soldierly young man with light hair. His dress was plain and gentlemanly; the epaulette on one shoulder alone indicated an official capacity. He watched with fixed look of attention the movements of the small finger which ascended in rapid calculation the long columns of accounts. It was strange to see the absorption of mind expressed in Miss Laury’s face, the gravity of her smooth white brw shaded with drooping curls, the scarcely perceptible and unsmiling movement of her lips, though those lips in their rosy sweetness seemed formed only for smiles. Edward Percy at his ledger could not have appeared more completely wrapt in the mysteries of practice and fractions. An hour or more elapsed in this employement, the room, meantime, continuing in profound silence broken only by an occasional observation addressed by Miss Laury to the gentlemen behind her cncerning the legitimacy of some item or the absence of some stray farthing wanted to complete the accuracy of the sum total. In this balancing of the books she displayed a most business-like sharpness and strictness. The slightest fault was detected and remarked on in few words but with a quick searching glance. However, the accountant had evidently been accustomed to her surveillance, for on the whole his books were a specimen of arithmetical correctness.

 
‘Very well’, said Miss Laury, as she closd the volumes. ‘Your accounts do you credit, Mr. O’Neill. You may tell his Grace that all is quite right. Your memoranda tally with my own exactly.’

 
Mr. O’Neill bowed. ‘Thank you, madam. This will bear me out against Lord Hartford. His lordship lectured me severely last time he came to inspect Fort Adrian’.

 
‘What about?’ asked Miss Laury turning aside her face to hide the deepening of colour which overspread it at the mention of Lord Hartford’s name.

 
‘I can hardly tell you, madam, but his lordship was in a savage temper. Nothing would please him. He found fault with everything and everybody. I thought he scarcely appeared himself, and that has been the opinion of many lately’.

 
Miss Laury gently shook her head. ‘You should not say so, Ryan’, she replied in a soft tone of reproof. ‘Lord Hartford has a great many things to think about, and he is naturally rather stern. You ought to bear with his tempers’.

 
‘Necessity has no law, madam’, replied Mr. O’Neill with a smile, ‘and I must bear with them, but his lordship is not a popular man in the army. He orders the lash so unsparingly. We like the Earl of Arundel ten times better’.

 
‘Ah’, said Miss Laury smiling, ‘you and I are Westerns, Mr. O’Neill – Irish – and we favour our countrymen. But Hartford is a gallant commander. His men can always trust him. Do not let us be partial’.

 
Mr O’Neill bowed in deference to her opinion, but smiled at the same time, as if he doubted its justice. Taking up his books, he seemed about to leave the room. Before he did so, however, he turned and said: ‘The Duke wished me to inform you, madam, that he would probably be here about four or five o’clock in the afternoon’.

 
‘Today?’ asked Miss Laury in an accent of surprise.

 
‘Yes, madam’.

 
She mused a moment, then said quickly, ‘Very well, sir.’
        

 
Mr. O’Neill now took his leave with another low and respectful obeisance. Miss Laury returned it with a slight abstracted bow. Her thoughts were all caught up and hurried away by that last communication. For a long time after the door had closed she sat with her head on her hand, lost in a tumultuous flush of ideas
 
- anticipations awakened by that simple sentence, ‘The Duke will be here today’.

 
The striking of a timepiece roused her. She remembered that twenty tasks awaited her direction. Always active, always employed, it was not her custom to waste many hours in dreaming. She rose, closed her desk, and left the quiet library for busier scenes.

 
Four o’clock came, and Miss Laury’s foot was heard on the stair case descending from her chamber. She crossed the large light passagew – such an apparition of feminine elegance and beauty! She had dressed herself splendidly. The robe of black satin became at once her slender form, which it enveloped in full and shining folds, and her bright blooming complexion, which it set off by the contrast of colour. Glittering through her curls, there was a band of fine diamonds, and drops of the same pure gems trembled from her small, delicate ears. These ornaments, so regal in their nature, had been the gift of royalty, and were worn now chiefly for the associations of soft and happy moments which their gleam might be supposed to convey.

 
She entered her drawing room and stood by the window. From thence appeared one glimpse of the high-road visible through the thickening shades of Rivaulx. Even that was now almost concealed by the frozen mist in which the approach of twilight was wrapped. All was very quiet both in the house and in the woods. A carriage drew near. She heard the sound. She saw it shoot through the fog; but it was not Zamorna. No; the driving was neither the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi, nor that of Jehu’s postillions. She had not gazed a minute before her experienced eye discerned that there was something wrong with the horses. The harness had got entangled or they were frightened. The coachman had lost command over them: they were plunging violently.

 
She rang the bell. A servant entered. She ordered immediate assistance to be despatched to that carriage on the road. Two grooms presently hurried down the drive to execute her command, but before they could reach the spot, one of the horses , in its gambols, had slipped on the icy road and fallen. The others grew more unmanageable, and presently the carriage lay overturned on the radside. One of Miss Laury’s messengers came back. She threw up the window that she might communicate with him more readily.

 
‘Any accident?’ she asked. ‘Anybody hurt?’

 
‘I hope not much, madam’.

 
‘Who is in the carriage?’

‘Only one lady, and she seems to have fainted. She looked very white when I opened the door. What is to be done, madam?’

 
Miss Laury, with Irish frankness, answered directly, ‘Bring them all into the house. Let the horses be taken into the stables. And the servants – how many are there?’

 
‘Three, Madam. Postillions grey and white; footman in plain clothes. Horses frightened at a drove of Sydenham oxen, they say: very spirited nags.’

 
‘Well, you have my orders: bring the lady in directly, and make the others comfortable.’

 
‘Yes, madam’.

 
The groom touched his hat and departed. Miss Laury shut her window. It was very cold. Not many minutes elapsed before the lady in the arms of her own servants was slowly brought up the lawn and ushered into the drawing room.

 
‘Lay her on the sofa’, said Miss Laury.

 
She was obeyed. The lady’s travelling cloak was carefully removed, and a thin figure became apparent in a dark silk dress. The cushions of down scarcely sank under the pressure, it was so light.

 
Her swoon was now passing off. The genial warmth of the fire which shone full on her revived her. Opening her eyes, she looked up at Miss Laury’’ face who was bending close over her and wetting her lips with some cordial. Recognising a stranger, she shyly turned her glance aside and asked for her servants.

 
‘They are in the house, madam, and perfectly safe.But you cannot pursue your journey at present; the carriage is much broken.’

 
The lady lay silent. She looked keenly round the room and seeing the perfect elegance of its arrangement, the cheerful and tranquil glow of its hearth-light, she appeared to grow more composed. Turning a little on the cushions which supported her, and by no means looking at Miss Laury, but straight the other way, she said, ‘To whom am I indebted for this kindness? Where am I?’

 
‘In a hospitable country, madam. The Angrians never turn their backs on strangers.’

 
‘I know I am in Angria’ she said quickly, ‘but where? What is the name of the house? Who are you?’

 
‘Miss Laury coloured slightly. Iat seemed as if there was some undefined reluctance to give her real name that she knew was widely celebrated
 
- too widely. Most likely the lady would turn from her in contempt if she heard it, and Miss Laury felt she could not bear that.

 
‘I am only the housekeeper’, she said. ‘This is a shooting-lodge belonging to a great Angrian proprietor’.

 
‘Who?’asked the lady, who was not to be put off by indirect answers.

 
Again Miss Laury hesitated. For her life she could not have said ‘His Grace the Duke of Zamorna’. She replied hastily, ‘A gentleman of Western extraction, a distant branch of the freat Pakenhams, so at least the family records say, but they have been long naturalised in the East’.

 
‘I never heard of them’, replied the lady. ‘Pakenham!that is not an Angrian name?’

 
‘Perhaps, madam, you are not particularly acquainted with this part of the country?’

 
‘I know Hawkscliffe’, said the lady, ‘and your house is on the very borders, within the royal liberties, is it not?’

 
‘Yes, madam, it stood there before the Great Duke bought up the forest-manor, and his Majesty allowed my master to retain this lodge and the privilege of sporting in the chase’’

 
‘Well, and you are Mr. Pakenham’s housekeeper?’

 
‘Yes, madam.’

 
The lady surveyed Miss Laury with another furtive side-glance of her large majestic eyes. Those eyes lingered upon diamond ear-rings, the bandeau of brilliants that flashed from between the clusters of raven curls, then passed over the sweet face, the exquisite figure of the young housekeeper, and finally were reverted to the wall with an expression that spoke volumes.

 
Miss Laury could have torn the dazzling pendants from her ears. She was bitterly stung. ‘Everybody knows me’, she said to herself. ‘ ‘’Mistress’’, I suppose, is branded on my brow’.

 
In her turn she gazed on her guest. The lady was but a young creature, though so high and commanding in her demeanour. She had very small and feminine features, handsome eyes, a neck of delicate curve, and fair, graceful little snowy aristocratic hands, and sandalled feet to match. It would have been difficoult to tell her rank by her dress. None of those dazzling witnesses appeared which had betrayed Miss Laury. Any gentleman’s wife might have worn the grown of dark-blue silk, the tinted gloves of Parisian kid, and the fairy sandals of black satin in which she was attired.

 
‘May I have a room to myself?’ she asked, again turning her eyes with something like a smile toward Miss Laury.

 
‘Certainly, madam, I wish to make you comfortable. Can you walk upstairs?’

 
‘Oh, yes!’

 
She rose from the couch, and, leaning on Miss Laury’s offered arm in a way that showed she had been used to that sort of support, they both glided from the room. Having seen her fair but somewhat haughty guest carefully laid on a stately crimson bed in a quiet and spacious chamber, having seen her head sink (with all her curls) onto the pillow of down, her larfe shy eyes close under their smooth eyelids, and her little slender hands fold on her breast in an attitude of perfect repose, Miss Laury prepared to leave her.

 
‘Come back a moment’, she said. She was obeyed – there was something in the tone of her voice which exacted obedience. ‘I don’t know who you are’, she said, ‘but I am very much obliged to you for your kindness. If my manners are displeasing, forgive me. I mean no incivility. I suppose you will wish to know my name: it is Mrs. Irving. My husband is a minister in the northern kirk; I come from Sneachiesland. Now you may go!’