My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell Read Free Book Online Page A

sitting-room,
trying hard to look as if I had not been crying, and not to walk as if I
was in much pain. I do not know whether my lady saw how near my tears
were to my eyes, but she told me she had sent for me, because she wanted
some help in arranging the drawers of her bureau, and asked me—just as
if it was a favour I was to do her—if I could sit down in the easy-chair
near the window—(all quietly arranged before I came in, with a
footstool, and a table quite near)—and assist her. You will wonder,
perhaps, why I was not bidden to sit or lie on the sofa; but (although I
found one there a morning or two afterwards, when I came down) the fact
was, that there was none in the room at this time. I have even fancied
that the easy-chair was brought in on purpose for me; for it was not the
chair in which I remembered my lady sitting the first time I saw her.
That chair was very much carved and gilded, with a countess' coronet at
the top. I tried it one day, some time afterwards, when my lady was out
of the room, and I had a fancy for seeing how I could move about, and
very uncomfortable it was. Now my chair (as I learnt to call it, and to
think it) was soft and luxurious, and seemed somehow to give one's body
rest just in that part where one most needed it.
    I was not at my ease that first day, nor indeed for many days afterwards,
notwithstanding my chair was so comfortable. Yet I forgot my sad pain in
silently wondering over the meaning of many of the things we turned out
of those curious old drawers. I was puzzled to know why some were kept
at all; a scrap of writing maybe, with only half a dozen common-place
words written on it, or a bit of broken riding-whip, and here and there a
stone, of which I thought I could have picked up twenty just as good in
the first walk I took. But it seems that was just my ignorance; for my
lady told me they were pieces of valuable marble, used to make the floors
of the great Roman emperors palaces long ago; and that when she had been
a girl, and made the grand tour long ago, her cousin Sir Horace Mann, the
Ambassador or Envoy at Florence, had told her to be sure to go into the
fields inside the walls of ancient Rome, when the farmers were preparing
the ground for the onion-sowing, and had to make the soil fine, and pick
up what bits of marble she could find. She had done so, and meant to
have had them made into a table; but somehow that plan fell through, and
there they were with all the dirt out of the onion-field upon them; but
once when I thought of cleaning them with soap and water, at any rate,
she bade me not to do so, for it was Roman dirt—earth, I think, she
called it—but it was dirt all the same.
    Then, in this bureau, were many other things, the value of which I could
understand—locks of hair carefully ticketed, which my lady looked at
very sadly; and lockets and bracelets with miniatures in them,—very
small pictures to what they make now-a-days, and called miniatures: some
of them had even to be looked at through a microscope before you could
see the individual expression of the faces, or how beautifully they were
painted. I don't think that looking at these made may lady seem so
melancholy, as the seeing and touching of the hair did. But, to be sure,
the hair was, as it were, a part of some beloved body which she might
never touch and caress again, but which lay beneath the turf, all faded
and disfigured, except perhaps the very hair, from which the lock she
held had been dissevered; whereas the pictures were but pictures after
all—likenesses, but not the very things themselves. This is only my own
conjecture, mind. My lady rarely spoke out her feelings. For, to begin
with, she was of rank: and I have heard her say that people of rank do
not talk about their feelings except to their equals, and even to them
they conceal them, except upon rare occasions. Secondly,—and this is my
own reflection,—she was an only child and an heiress; and as such was
more apt to think