Part 2 (1/2)

Before long, a servant knocked at the door, and announced that my room was ready. Then succeeded a pleasant bustle and excitement incident to my removal to it. Kitty insisted upon considering me a perfectly helpless invalid, and would have carried me, if I had not remonstrated, and Mrs. Roberts had not sneered at the idea. As it was, she wrapped me up so that I could hardly move, and supporting me with her arm, preceded by Mrs. Roberts, we crossed the hall, and stopped at the door of the apartment a.s.signed to me.

”Oh, what a pretty room!” I exclaimed, as we entered it. Kitty was charmed that I liked it, and proceeded with great satisfaction to do the honors. Wheeling toward me an easy-chair, and settling me in it before the bright fire that blazed on the hearth, she said with animation:

”Isn't it a pretty room, miss? I've always said, that though the others were bigger and finer, there wasn't one that had such a sweet pretty look about it as the blue room had. It's just fit for a young lady like you.”

Kitty was not wrong about its being a pretty room; I never saw a prettier myself. It was not large, but well-proportioned and airy.

Opposite the door there was a bay window, with white curtains trimmed with blue, and the same at the other two windows. The bed at the end of the room stood in a recess, curtained in the same manner. The walls were papered with a delicate blue paper, the wood-work about the room was oak, and all the furniture was oak and light blue. The carpet, which was in itself a study, was an arabesque pattern of oak upon a light-blue ground. The slender vases on the mantel, the pictures in their carved oak frames, had an inexpressible charm for eyes so long accustomed to the bare walls and wooden presses of a boarding school dormitory. And even to a maturer taste, I think it would have been pleasing; for I do not remember ever to have seen a room more entirely in keeping, and in which there was less out of place and inharmonious. Indeed, this impression was so strong, that I involuntarily begged Kitty to put away my dark plaid shawl, the sight of which, upon the delicate blue sofa, annoyed me exceedingly; and I thought with satisfaction of a certain blue morning dress in my trunk, that I could put on to-morrow, by way of being in keeping with the room. And the white lava pin and earrings, Agnes' parting gift, which I had never worn yet, and admired beyond expression, would come in play exactly.

While Kitty made herself delightfully busy in unpacking my trunk, which stood in the little dressing-room at the right, and bestowing my modest wardrobe in the drawers and closets thereof, I lay nestling in the soft depths of that marvellous Sleepy Hollow of a chair, that holding me lovingly in its capacious arms, seemed to perform every office of a good old nurse, even to the singing of lullabies. Though that kind attention, I think, really emanated from the glowing, merry fire, which sung, crackled, and blazed most hospitably at my feet.

The headache that an hour ago had seemed so insupportable, had now subsided to a dull throbbing that was comparatively ease and comfort; and to lie there, and look at the fire, and think about nothing, and speak to n.o.body, and be sure that Kitty was near me, and Mrs. Roberts and ”the master” very far away, was all I asked or desired.

This negative sort of bliss found a temporary interruption in the necessary departure of Kitty to the kitchen, to procure my tea and bring up candles. I felt rather babyishly about it, and nothing but shame kept me from telling Kitty that I had rather do without my tea, and go to bed by firelight, than have her leave me. She did not stay away very long, however, and the nice cup of tea and crisp thin slice of toast, that she brought back with her, quite compensated me for the self-denial I had had to exercise in letting her go. These edibles, Kitty, with all the pomp and circ.u.mstance of war, arranged upon the little table beside me, placing the tall wax candles in the centre, and distributing the diminutive pieces of the dainty little tete-a-tete set in the most advantageous manner. The tea tasted very nicely out of the thin china cup, that felt like a play-thing when I lifted it, accustomed as I was to the heavy bluish-white crockery of boarding-school, and though I lacked the vigorous appet.i.te, that had made the primitive meals of that establishment enjoyable, still, the delicate food before me had a decided relish. Kitty very much enjoyed my appreciation of it, and was very sorry she could not go down and bring me another slice of toast, but Mr. Rutledge had said I must not have any more.

”I couldn't eat any more, thank you,” I said, rather haughtily, though Mr. Rutledge, and not the kind Kitty, inspired the hauteur. Mrs. Roberts made us a call soon after this, and said it was high time I went to bed, and told Kitty sharply, she knew it was her work, keeping me up so long, and hurried up the preparations for retiring, with energy. Kitty looked saucy, but did not dare to rebel, and only indulged in defiance after the door was closed behind the intruder. She again returned, however, on a final tour of inspection, after I was comfortably arranged in the fair white delicious bed, that seemed to be a special partner of tired nature's sweet restorer, who was good for any amount on its demand. She ”poked in every corner” as Kitty expressed it, and found a dozen things to object to in her arrangements, pulled open drawers, and set Kitty poutingly at work to settle them properly, and made my temples throb again with alarm lest she should find something objectionable among my clothes, some rent in my school frock, or an undarned stocking smuggled through the vigilant scrutiny of last week's wash. She sent Kitty for her mattress and blankets, and superintended the arrangement of them, though I could see she did not enter cordially into the plan; but as Mr.

Rutledge had ordered that Kitty should sleep beside me, I was sure she would not dare to oppose it.

At last there was no excuse for a longer tarry, and she withdrew; Kitty, with a triumphant gesture, slid the bolt upon her, and we ”settled our brains for a long winter's nap.” A nap not altogether uninterrupted on my part, by troubled dreams, and sudden starts, and foolish fears; but my waking was always met by Kitty's ready care and soothing sympathy; and toward morning quieted into a long refres.h.i.+ng sleep.

CHAPTER III.

”O Time! thou must untangle this, not I, 'Tis too hard a knot for me to untie.”

When I awoke, it was to the pleasant reality of morning and suns.h.i.+ne, that had found their way through the light curtains of my pleasant room, and made it pleasanter than ever. Kitty was at my side in an instant, and a brighter fresher face to greet one's waking vision could not be desired. She managed, by prompt and clever measures, to keep off Mrs.

Roberts till I had had my breakfast, and risen and been dressed. It was matter of great astonishment to me to find myself so absurdly weak, my strength and spirits at school having pa.s.sed into a proverb. This sudden illness had reduced me extremely, however, as I found whenever I attempted any exertion, and all Kitty's services were required.

While she was dressing me, she chatted very confidentially, though always with a tone of deference that counterbalanced the liberty she took in talking at all. Our distaste for Mrs. Roberts was potent in putting us on as good terms as young lady and young lady's maid could well be, and there is a sort of freemasonry in youth that sets at defiance the restrictions of rank, and that drew us, the two youngest things in the stately old house, together, naturally and irresistibly.

I call it an old house, because it impressed me at first as such. It was solid and dark, and excepting my room and one or two others on the same floor, had very little that was light and modern-looking about it. It had been built, Kitty said, in the time of Mr. Rutledge's father, and was called the finest house in the country. Loads of money, she informed me, he had spent upon it; workmen had been sent for, hundreds of miles, to do the carving and paint the walls, and no money and no labor was spared to make it a fine place, and indeed there was none like it anywhere around; and now to think of its being shut up like a prison half the year, and sometimes all the year; it was a shame, Kitty thought, upon her honor it was.

I asked her why Mr. Rutledge did not live there?

She did not know; she supposed it was lonesome; he never stayed home for over a couple of months, and then would be off, for no one knew how long. Sometimes he went to Europe, and was gone two or three years at a time. And such dull times as it was _then_ at Rutledge, if you please!

n.o.body but Mrs. Roberts, and the cook, and dairy-woman, besides the farm hands. Nothing to do but stand Mrs. Roberts' preaching from morning till night. She only wished she'd lived in the old times that her father talked about, when Rutledge was the gayest of the gay. (Her father, she explained, had been gardener there for thirty years, and had lived on the place from a boy.) Such fine doings! Ah! if Mr. Rutledge would only take it into his head to have such times now! It was when he was very young, and Mr. Richard and Miss Alice, and there was nothing but b.a.l.l.s and picnics and pleasure-parties all the time, company staying in the house, and visitors from the neighborhood for miles around. Ah! it was mighty different now!

”What has become of the others? Is Mr. Rutledge the only one left?”

Mr. Rutledge, Kitty told me, was the youngest of the three. Mr. Richard died when he was just twenty-four--a month after his father--and so Mr.

Rutledge came into the property when he was a mere lad.

”But the daughter, Alice, what became of her?”

”I don't know exactly,” said Kitty, lowering her voice, and looking anxiously toward the door. ”They never talk about her; something must have happened very strange, for there's always a mystery about Miss Alice. The old servants on the place will never say a word about her; and though I've teased father again and again, I never could get anything out of him.”

”But, Kitty,” I exclaimed eagerly, my curiosity thoroughly excited, ”what makes you think she isn't dead?”

”Oh! that much I know, that she didn't die then, and that she didn't die at home in this house, and isn't buried there below in the churchyard by the others; and I know she was away when old Mr. Rutledge died; because once father said it was an awful thing, when he lay so ill, and out of his head, to hear him call upon her to come home. All that night before he died, he would call 'Alice! Alice!' till you could hear it all over the house. And father says,” continued the girl, in a still lower tone, ”that sometimes of wild dark nights, when he's coming past the house late from his work, he could swear for all the world that he hears the old man still calling 'Alice! Alice!' till it makes his blood freeze to listen to it. And then, when I say 'Where was she, father, all the time, and why didn't she come to him?' he always says, 'that's not for the like of you to hear about; it's none of your business, child, nor mine,'