Mrs. Overtheways Remembrances | Page 9

them, that the secret
which does not concern me has over the facts which do, that what we
wish for has over what we possess.
"If you, my dear, were to open one of those drawers, and find Nurse's
Sunday dress folded up in the corner, it would hardly amuse you; but if,
instead thereof, you found a dress with a long stiff bodice, square at the
neck, and ruffled round the sleeves, such as you have seen in old
pictures, no matter how old or useless it might be, it would shed round
it an atmosphere of delightful and mysterious speculations. This
curiosity, these fancies, roused by the ancient dress, whose wearer has
passed away, are awakened equally by empty houses where someone
must once have lived, though his place knows him no more. It was so
with the manor. How often had I peeped through the gates, catching
sight of garden walks, and wondering whither they led, and who had
walked in them; seeing that the shutters behind one window were partly
open, and longing to look in.
"To-day I had been in the walks and peeped through the window. This
was the happiness.
"Through the window I had seen a large hall with a marble floor and
broad stone stairs winding upwards into unknown regions. By the
walks I had arrived at the locked door of the kitchen garden, at a small
wood or wilderness of endless delights (including a broken swing), and
at a dilapidated summer-house. I had wandered over the spongy lawn,
which was cut into a long green promenade by high clipt yew-hedges,
walking between which, in olden times, the ladies grew erect and
stately, as plants among brushwood stretch up to air and light.
"Finally, I had brought away such relics as it seemed to me that honesty
would allow. I had found half a rusty pair of scissors in the
summer-house. Perhaps some fair lady of former days had lost them
here, and swept distractedly up and down the long walks seeking them.

Perhaps they were a present, and she had given a luck-penny for them,
lest they should cut love. Sarah said the housekeeper might have
dropped them there; but Sarah was not a person of sentiment. I did not
show her the marble I found by the hedge, the acorn I picked up in the
park, nor a puny pansy which, half way back to a wild heartsease, had
touched me as a pathetic memorial of better days. When I got home, I
put the scissors, the marble, and the pansy into a box. The acorn I hung
in a bottle of water--it was to be an oak tree.
"Properly speaking, I was not at home just then, but on a visit to my
grandmother and a married aunt without children who lived with her. A
fever had broken out in my own home, and my visit here had been
prolonged to keep me out of the way of infection. I was very happy and
comfortable except for one single vexation, which was this:
"I slept on a little bed in what had once been the nursery, a large room
which was now used as a workroom. A great deal of sewing was done
in my grandmother's house, and the sewing-maid and at least one other
of the servants sat there every evening. A red silk screen was put before
my bed to shield me from the candlelight, and I was supposed to be
asleep when they came upstairs. But I never remember to have been
otherwise than wide awake, nervously awake, wearily awake. This was
the vexation. I was not a strong child, and had a very excitable brain;
and the torture that it was to hear those maids gossiping on the other
side of the dim red light of my screen I cannot well describe, but I do
most distinctly remember. I tossed till the clothes got hot, and threw
them off till I got cold, and stopped my ears, and pulled the sheet over
my face, and tried not to listen, and listened in spite of all. They told
long stories, and made many jokes that I couldn't understand;
sometimes I heard names that I knew, and fancied I had learnt some
wonderful secret. Sometimes, on the contrary, I made noises to intimate
that I was awake, when one of them would rearrange my glaring screen,
and advise me to go to sleep; and then they talked in whispers, which
was more distracting still.
"One evening--some months after my ramble round the manor--the
maids went out to tea, and I lay in peaceful silence watching the

shadows which crept noiselessly about the room as the fire blazed, and
wishing Sarah and her colleagues nothing less than a month of