Vera Nevill | Page 7

night."
"What shall I do? Shall I help you to darn Eustace's socks?" reaching at
one of them out of the basket.
Mrs. Daintree wrenched it angrily from her hand.
"Good gracious! as if you could! What a bungle it would be. Why, I
never saw you with a piece of work in your hand in my life. I dare say
you could not even thread a needle."
"I am quite sure I have never threaded one yet," laughed Vera, lazily. "I
might try; but you see you won't let me be useful, so I had better resign
myself to idleness." And then she rose and took her hat, and went out
through the French window, out among the fallen yellow leaves,
leaving the other women to discuss the vexed problem of her existence.
She discussed it to herself as she walked dreamily along under the trees
in the lane beyond the garden, her head bent, and her eyes fixed upon
the ground; she swung her hat idly in her hand, for it was warm for the
time of year, and the gold-brown leaves fluttered down about her head
and rustled under the dark, trailing skirts behind her.
About half a mile up the lane, beyond the vicarage, stood an old iron
gateway leading into a park. It was flanked by square red-brick
columns, upon whose summits two stone griffins, "rampant," had
looked each other in the face for the space of some two hundred years
or so, peering grimly over the tops of the shields against which they
stood on end, upon which all the family arms and quarterings of the
Kynastons had become softly coated over by an indistinct veil of
gray-green moss.
Vera turned in at this gate, nodding to the woman at the lodge within,
who looked out for a minute at her as she passed. It was her daily walk,

for Kynaston was uninhabited and empty, and any one was free to
wander unreproved among its chestnut glades, or to stand and gossip to
its ancient housekeeper in the great bare rooms of the deserted house.
Vera did so often. The square, red-brick building, with its stone copings,
the terrace walk before the windows, the peacocks sunning themselves
before the front door, the fountain plashing sleepily in the stone basin,
the statues down the square Italian garden--all had a certain fascination
for her dreamy poetical nature. Then turning in at the high narrow
doorway, whose threshold Mrs. Eccles, the housekeeper, had long ago
given her free leave to cross, she would stroll through the deserted
rooms, touching the queer spindle-legged furniture with gentle reverent
fingers, gazing absorbedly at the dark rows of family portraits, and
speculating always to herself what they had been like, these dead and
gone Kynastons, who had once lived and laughed, and sorrowed and
died, in the now empty rooms, where nothing was left of them save
those dim and faded portraits, and where the echo of her own footsteps
was the only sound in the wilderness of the carpetless chambers where
once they had reigned supreme.
She got to know them all at last by name--whole generations of them.
There was Sir Ralph in armour, and Bridget, his wife, in a ruff and a
farthingale; young Sir Maurice, who died in boyhood, and Sir Penrhyn,
his brother, in long love-locks and lace ruffles. A whole succession of
Sir Martins and Sir Henrys; then came the first Sir John and his wife in
powder and patches, with their fourteen children all in a row, whose
elaborate marriages and family histories, Vera, although assisted by
Mrs. Eccles, who had them all at her fingers' ends, had considerable
difficulty in clearly comprehending. It was a relief to be firmly landed
with Sir Maurice, in a sad-coloured suit and full-bottomed wig, "the
present baronet's grandfather," and, lastly, Sir John, "the present
baronet's father," in a deputy-lieutenant's scarlet uniform, with a cocked
hat under his arm--by far the worst and most inartistic painting in the
whole collection.
It was all wonderful and interesting to Vera. She elaborated whole
romances to herself out of these portraits. She settled their loves and

their temptations, heart-broken separations, and true lovers' meetings
between them. Each one had his or her history woven out of the slender
materials which Mrs. Eccles could give her of their real lives. Only one
thing disappointed her, there was no portrait of the present Sir John.
She would have liked to have seen what he was like, this man who was
unmarried still, and who had never cared to live in the house of his
fathers. She wondered what the mystery had been that kept him from it.
She could not understand that a man should deliberately prefer dark,
dirty, dingy London, which she had only