The Chinese Shawl by Patricia Wentworth Page B

equally impossible to escape.
    In the cold tone which was in such marked contrast to her usual way of speaking, Miss Adams began with what might have been either a question or a statement.
    “Tanis has been taking you round the house.”
    Laura assented, and Lucy Adams went on.
    “It’s a fine house, and interesting to those who value its associations, but of course it is not a cheap house to run, especially nowadays.”
    Laura supposed not.
    “Very expensive—very expensive indeed. And maids are so difficult to get in the country nowadays. This is my room. I think you haven’t seen any of these rooms. I will show them to you. ” There was a suggestion of effort in voice and manner, as if she had set herself an uncongenial task and meant to carry it through.
    Laura beheld a room which she found distressingly pink. Victorian furniture, grave and heavy, appeared at variance with rose-coloured Axminster on the floor and rose-coloured damask at the windows. There was a pink bedspread which was a little out of key, and rose-flowered china which reminded her of the set in Cousin Sophy’s guest-room. There was some kind of flowered paper on the walls, but almost every inch of it was covered by innumerable sketches, photographs, and engravings of famous pictures. Millais’ Huguenot hung above the mantelpiece in a frame of yellow maple. From it Laura’s bewildered eye wandered over every sort of picture in every imaginable sort of frame. The furniture vied with the walls in supporting photographs of every relation and friend Lucy Adams had ever had. Above all there were pictures of Tanis as a baby, Tanis as a child, Tanis in her teens, Tanis as a debutante, Tanis up to date.
    Laura got no farther than the threshold. The room repelled her. She murmured something, and Miss Adams knocked on the next door and then opened it. The tall, thin woman in grey whom she had seen for a moment the night before looked up from her fine sewing. She had a long nose and pale bitten-in lips without colour. There was no colour about her anywhere. The eyes she turned on Laura were sharp and pale.
    “This is your Cousin Agnes’s maid, Perry. She has been with us—for forty years, is it?”
    “Forty-one, Miss Lucy.”
    Laura came forward to shake hands, but somehow Perry’s hand was not there to shake. That appraising stare and some slight inclination of the head were her limit of response. Laura thought of Carey waiting below. She had a sense of time prolonging itself indefinitely in this unwilling company.
    But Miss Adams turned to the door on the right.
    “Agnes has gone down, so I can show you her room.”
    Laura felt a reluctance beyond her power to conceal. She hesitated, began to say something, and was caught in the tide of Miss Lucy’s offence.
    “Really, Laura! Perhaps you will allow me to know what Agnes would wish. But since you are so scrupulous, I will tell you that she asked me to show you these rooms.”
    Laura coloured faintly, murmured something which never really got into words, and followed a stiffly erect Miss Adams into a room as unlike her own as it was possible to conceive— fine old furniture; rich, quiet colours; no fuss, no frills, no photographs; walls covered with a heavy cream paper; marble mantelpiece supporting a modern atmospheric clock; and, hanging above it to the right and left of the chimney-breast, Armory’s portraits of Lilian Ferrers and Oliver Fane.
    Laura had grown up with the copies, but here in the space and austere dignity of Agnes Fane’s room the originals rather took her breath away. She felt soothed and charmed by their beauty, and then deeply and painfully moved. What had kept the portraits there? Was it courage, pride, stoic endurance, or the perverted instinct which sets pain above pleasure and presses it home to the self-tortured heart? For twenty-two years Oliver and Lilian had hung where Agnes Fane must see them morning by morning and night by night, they in their youth and strength