Names to every room, after this fashion, were customary in old houses.
The party were to stay at Minster Lovel for four days, from Friday to
Tuesday, and then to pursue their journey to London.
In the Old Wardrobe, a pleasant bedchamber on the upper floor, Lettice
washed off the dust of the journey, and changed her clothes when the
little trunk came up which held the necessaries for the night. Then she
tried to find her way to the Credence Chamber, and--as was not very
surprising--lost it, coming out into a long picture-gallery where she
was at once struck and entranced by a picture that hung there. It
represented a young girl about her own age, laid on a white couch, and
dressed in white, but with such a face as she had never seen on any
woman in this life. It was as white as the garments, with large dark
eyes, wherein it seemed to Lettice as if her very soul had been melted;
a soul that had gone down into some dreadful deep, and having come up
safe, was ever afterwards anxiously ready to help other souls out of
trouble. She would have thought the painter meant it for an angel, but
that angels are not wont to be invalids and lie on couches. Beside this
picture hung another, which reminded her of her Grandfather Louvaine;
but this was of a young man, not much older than Aubrey, yet it had her
grandfather's eyes, which she had seen in none else save her Aunt Edith.
Now Lettice began to wonder where she was, and how she should find her
way; and hearing footsteps, she waited till they came up, when she saw
old Rebecca.
"Why, my dear heart, what do you here?" said she kindly.
"Truly, I know not," the youthful visitor answered. "I set forth to go
down the stairs, and missed the right turning, as I guess. But pray
you, Rebecca, ere you set me in the way, tell me of whom are these two
pictures?"
"Why," said she, "can you not guess? The one is of your own
grandfather, Sir Aubrey Louvaine."
"Oh, then it is Grandfather when he was young. But who is this,
Rebecca? It looks like an angel, but angels are never sick, and she
seems to be lying sick."
"There be angels not yet in Heaven, Mistress Lettice," softly answered
the old servant. "And if you were to live to the age of Methuselah,
you'd never see a portrait of one nearer the angels than this. 'Tis a
picture that old Squire--Mistress Joyce's father--would have taken, nigh
sixty years since, of our angel, our Mistress Anstace, when she was none
so many weeks off the golden gate. They set forth with her in a litter
for London town, and what came back was her coffin, and that picture."
"Was she like that?" asked Lettice, scarcely above her breath, for she
felt as if she could not speak aloud, any more than in church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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