First door to the left, sir! This was the dining-room, sir--'
But Frank had come to a dead stop in the dim, dull, wood-panelled hall. In front of them rose the stairs with old-fashioned banisters, cracked, warped, and dusty.
'It's awful to think of, Maude--awful! To think that she ran up those stairs as a youngish woman--that he took them two at a time as an active man, and then that they hobbled and limped down them, old and weary and broken, and now both dead and gone for ever, and the stairs standing, the very rails, the very treads--I don't know that I ever felt so strongly what bubbles of the air we are, so fragile, so utterly dissolved when the prick comes.'
'How COULD they be happy in such a house?' said Maude. 'I can feel that there have been sorrow and trouble here. There is an atmosphere of gloom.'
The matron-attendant approved of emotion, but in its due order. One should be affected in the dining-room first, and then in the hall. And so at her summons they followed her into the long, low, quaint room in which this curious couple had lived their everyday life. Little of the furniture was left, and the walls were lined with collected pictures bearing upon the life of the Carlyles.
'There's the fireplace that he smoked his pipe up,' said Frank.
'Why up the fireplace?'
'She did not like the smell in the room. He often at night took his friends down into the kitchen.'
'Fancy my driving you into the kitchen.'
'Well, the habit of smoking was looked upon much less charitably at that time.'
'And besides, he smoked clay pipes,' said the matron. 'This is considered a good print of Mrs. Carlyle.'
It was a peaky eager face, with a great spirit looking out of it, and possibilities of passion both for good and evil in the keen, alert features. Just beside her was the dour, grim outline of her husband. Their life-histories were in those two portraits.
'Poor dear!' said Maude.
'Ay, you may say so,' said the matron, whose accent showed that she was from the north of the Tweed. 'He was gey ill to live wi'. His own mither said so. Now, what think you that room was for?'
It was little larger than a cupboard, without window or skylight, opening out of the end of the dining-room.
'I can't imagine.'
'Well, sir, it was the powdering-room in the days when folk wore wigs. The powder made such a mess that they just had a room for nothing else. There was a hole in the door, and the man put his head through the hole, and the barber on the other side powdered him out of the flour-dredger.'
It was curious to be brought back in this fashion to those far-off days, and to suddenly realise how many other people had played their tragi-comedies within these walls. Wigs! Only the dressy people wore wigs. So people of fashion in the days of the early Georges trod these same rooms where Carlyle grumbled and his wife fretted. And they too had grumbled and fretted--or worse perhaps. It was a ghostly old house.
'This,' said the matron, when they had passed up the stair, 'used to be the drawing-room. That's their sofa.'
'Not THE sofa,' said Frank.
'Yes, sir, the sofa that is mentioned in the letters.'
'She was so proud of it, Maude. Gave eighteen shillings for it, and covered and stuffed it herself. And that, I suppose, is THE screen. She was a great housekeeper--brought up a spoiled child, according to her own account, but a great housekeeper all the same. What's that writing in the case?'
'It is the history that he was at work on when he died--something about the kings of Norway, sir. Those are his corrections in blue.'
'I can't read them.'
'No more could any one else, sir. Perhaps that's why the book has never been published. Those are the portraits of the kings of Prussia, about whom he wrote a book.'
Frank looked with interest at the old engravings, one of the schoolmaster face of the great Frederick, the other of the frog-like features of Frederick William, the half-mad recruiter of the big Potsdam grenadiers.