Wilfrid Cumbermede | Page 7

love my uncle bore me; but I think it was rather that, because he cared for me, she cared for me too.
Twice during every meal she would rise from the table with some dish in her hand, open the door behind the chimney, and ascend the winding stair.
CHAPTER III.
AT THE TOP OF THE CHIMNEY-STAIR.
I fear my reader may have thought me too long occupied with the explanatory foundations of my structure: I shall at once proceed to raise its walls of narrative. Whatever further explanations may be necessary, can be applied as buttresses in lieu of a broader base.
One Sunday--it was his custom of a Sunday--I fancy I was then somewhere about six years of age--my uncle rose from the table after our homely dinner, took me by the hand, and led me to the dark door with the long arrow-headed hinges, and up the winding stone stair which I never ascended except with him or my aunt. At the top was another rugged door, and within that, one covered with green baize. The last opened on what had always seemed to me a very paradise of a room. It was old-fashioned enough; but childhood is of any and every age, and it was not old-fashioned to me--only intensely cosy and comfortable. The first thing my eyes generally rested upon was an old bureau, with a book-case on the top of it, the glass-doors of which were lined with faded red silk. The next thing I would see was a small tent-bed, with the whitest of curtains, and enchanting fringes of white ball-tassels. The bed was covered with an equally charming counterpane of silk patchwork. The next object was the genius of the place, in a high, close, easy-chair, covered with some dark stuff, against which her face, surrounded with its widow's cap, of ancient form, but dazzling whiteness, was strongly relieved. How shall I describe the shrunken, yet delicate, the gracious, if not graceful form, and the face from which extreme old age had not wasted half the loveliness? Yet I always beheld it with an indescribable sensation, one of whose elements I can isolate and identify as a faint fear. Perhaps this arose partly from the fact that, in going up the stair, more than once my uncle had said to me, 'You must not mind what grannie says, Willie, for old people will often speak strange things that young people cannot understand. But you must love grannie, for she is a very good old lady.'
'Well, grannie, how are you to-day?' said my uncle, as we entered, this particular Sunday.
I may as well mention at once that my uncle called her grannie in his own right and not in mine, for she was in truth my great-grandmother.
'Pretty well, David, I thank you; but much too long out of my grave,' answered grannie; in no sepulchral tones, however, for her voice, although weak and uneven, had a sound in it like that of one of the upper strings of a violin. The plaintiveness of it touched me, and I crept near her--nearer than, I believe, I had ever yet gone of my own will--and laid my hand upon hers. I withdrew it instantly, for there was something in the touch that made me--not shudder, exactly--but creep. Her hand was smooth and soft, and warm too, only somehow the skin of it seemed dead. With a quicker movement than belonged to her years, she caught hold of mine, which she kept in one of her hands, while she stroked it with the other. My slight repugnance vanished for the time, and I looked up in her face, grateful for a tenderness which was altogether new to me.
'What makes you so long out of your grave, grannie?' I asked.
'They won't let me into it, my dear.'
'Who won't let you, grannie?'
'My own grandson there, and the woman down the stair.'
'But you don't really want to go--do you, grannie?'
'I do want to go, Willie. I ought to have been there long ago. I am very old; so old that I've forgotten how old I am. How old am I?' she asked, looking up at my uncle.
'Nearly ninety-five, grannie; and the older you get before you go the better we shall be pleased, as you know very well.'
'There! I told you,' she said with a smile, not all of pleasure, as she turned her head towards me. 'They won't let me go. I want to go to my grave, and they won't let me! Is that an age at which to keep a poor woman from her grave?'
'But it's not a nice place, is it, grannie?' I asked, with the vaguest ideas of what the grave meant. 'I think somebody told me it was in the churchyard.'
But neither did I know with any clearness