Read Ebook: Lolly Willowes by Warner Sylvia Townsend

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Ebook has 612 lines and 54722 words, and 13 pages

Emmy unfolded her plan to Laura; that is to say, unfolded the outer wrappings of it. Laura listened with delight to her aunt's tales of Indian life. Compounds and mangoes, the early morning rides along the Kilpawk Road, the grunting song of the porters who carried Mem Sahibs in litters up to the hill-stations, parrots flying through the jungle, ayahs with rubies in their nostrils, kid-gloves preserved in pickle jars with screw-tops--all the solemn and simple pomp of old-fashioned Madras beckoned to her, beckoned like the dark arms tinkling with bangles of soft gold and coloured glass. But when the beckonings took the form of Aunt Emmy's circumstantial invitation Laura held back, demurred this way and that, and pronounced at last the refusal which had been implicit in her mind from the moment the invitation was given.

She did not want to leave her father, nor did she want to leave Lady Place. Her life perfectly contented her. She had no wish for ways other than those she had grown up in. With an easy diligence she played her part as mistress of the house, abetted at every turn by country servants of long tenure, as enamoured of the comfortable amble of day by day as she was. At certain seasons a fresh resinous smell would haunt the house like some rustic spirit. It was Mrs. Bonnet making the traditional beeswax polish that alone could be trusted to give the proper lustre to the elegantly bulging fronts of talboys and cabinets. The grey days of early February were tinged with tropical odours by great-great-aunt Salome's recipe for marmalade; and on the afternoon of Good Friday, if it were fine, the stuffed foxes and otters were taken out of their glass cases, brushed, and set to sweeten on the lawn.

These were old institutions, they dated from long before Laura's day. But the gradual deposit of family customs was always going on, and within her own memory the sum of Willowes ways had been augmented. There was the Midsummer Night's Eve picnic in Potts's Dingle--cold pigeon-pie and cider-cup, and moth-beset candles flickering on the grass. There was the ceremony of the hop-garland, which James had brought back from Germany, and the pantomime party from the workhouse, and a very special kind of sealing-wax that could only be procured from Padua. Long ago the children had been allowed to choose their birthday dinners, and still upon the seventeenth of July James ate duck and green peas and a gooseberry fool, while a cock-pheasant in all the glory of tail-feathers was set before Laura upon the ninth of December. And at the bottom of the orchard flourished unchecked a bed of nettles, for Nannie Quantrell placed much trust in the property of young nettles eaten as spring greens to clear the blood, quoting emphatically and rhythmically a rhyme her grandmother had taught her:

'If they would eat nettles in March And drink mugwort in May, So many fine young maidens Would not go to the clay.'

Laura would very willingly have drunk mugwort in May also, for this rhyme of Nannie's, so often and so impressively rehearsed, had taken fast hold of her imagination. She had always had a taste for botany, she had also inherited a fancy for brewing. One of her earliest pleasures had been to go with Everard to the brewery and look into the great vats while he, holding her firmly with his left hand, with his right plunged a long stick through the clotted froth which, working and murmuring, gradually gave way until far below through the tumbling, dissolving rent the beer was disclosed.

For nearly ten years Laura kept house for Everard and James. Nothing happened to disturb the easy serenity of their days except the birth of first one daughter and then another to Henry and Caroline, and this did not disturb it much. Everard, so happy in a daughter, was prepared to be happy in granddaughters also. When Henry apologised to him with dignity for the accident of their sex Everard quoted to him the nursery rhyme about what little boys and girls were made of. Henry was relieved to find his father taking so lightly a possible failure in the Willowes male line, but he wished the old man wouldn't trifle so. He could not stoop to give his father the lie over this unscientific theory of sex. He observed gloomily that daughters could be very expensive now that so much fuss was being made about the education of women.

Whatever small doubts and regrets Everard and Laura had nursed about James's wife were put away when Sibyl bore a man child. It would not have been loyal to the heir of the Willowes to suppose that his mother was not quite as well-bred as he. Everard did not even need to remind himself of the Duchess of Suffolk. Titus, sprawling his fat hands over his mother's bosom, Titus, a disembodied cooing of contentment in the nursery overhead, would have justified a far more questionable match than James had made.

A year later Everard, amid solemnity, lit the solitary candle of his grandson's first birthday upon the cake that Mrs. Bonnet had made, that Laura had iced, that Sibyl had wreathed with flowers. The flame wavered a little in the draught, and Everard, careful against omens, ordered the French windows to be shut. On so glowing a September afternoon it was strange to see the conifers nodding their heads in the wind and to hear the harsh breath of autumn go forebodingly round the house. Laura gazed at the candle. She understood her father's alarm and, superstitious also, held her breath until she saw the flame straighten itself and the first little trickle of coloured wax flow down upon the glittering tin star that held the candle. That evening, after dinner, there was a show of fireworks for the school children in the garden. So many rockets were let off by Everard and James that for a while the northern sky was laced with a thicket of bright sedge scattering a fiery pollen. So hot and excited did Everard become in manoeuvring this splendour that he forgot the cold wind and took off his coat.

Two days after he complained of a pain in his side. The doctor looked grave as he came out of the bed-chamber, though within it Laura had heard him laughing with his old friend, and rallying him upon his nightcap. Everard had inflammation of the lungs, he told her; he would send for two nurses. They came, and their starched white aprons looked to her like unlettered tombstones. From the beginning her soul had crouched in apprehension, and indeed there was at no time much hope for the old man. When he was conscious he lay very peacefully, his face turned towards the window, watching the swallows fly restlessly from tree to tree. 'It will be a hard winter,' he said to Laura. 'They're gathering early to go.' And then: 'Do you suppose they know where they're going?'

'I'm sure they do,' she answered, thinking to comfort him. He regarded her shrewdly, smiled, and shook his head. 'Then they're wiser than we.'

When grandfather Henry, that masterful man, removed across the border, he was followed by a patriarchal train of manservants and maidservants, mares, geldings, and spaniels, vans full of household stuff, and slow country waggons loaded with nodding greenery. 'I want to make sure of a good eating apple,' said he, 'since I am going to Lady Place for life.' Death was another matter. The Willowes burial-ground was in Dorset, nor would Henry lie elsewhere. Now it was Everard's turn. The dead appeared to welcome him without astonishment--the former Everards and Tituses, Lauras and Emmelines; they were sure that he would come, they approved his decision to join them.

Laura stood by the open grave, but the heap of raw earth and the planks sprawling upon it displeased her. Her eyes strayed to the graves that were completed. Her mind told the tale of them, for she knew them well. Four times a year Mrs. Willowes had visited the family burying place, and as a child Laura had counted it a solemn and delicious honour to accompany her upon these expeditions. In summer especially, it was pleasant to sit on the churchyard wall under the thick roof of lime trees, or to finger the headstones, now hot, now cold, while her mother went from grave to grave with her gauntlet gloves and her gardening basket. Afterwards they would eat their sandwiches in a hayfield, and pay a visit to old Mrs. Dymond, whose sons and grandsons in hereditary office clipped the grass and trimmed the bushes of the family enclosure. As Laura grew older the active part of these excursions fell upon her; and often of late years when she went alone she half yielded her mind to the fancy that the dead mother whose grave she tended was sitting a little apart in the shade, presently to rise and come to meet her, having just recalled and delicately elaborated some odd trait of a neighbouring great-uncle.

The bees droned in the motionless lime trees, A hot ginny churchyard smell detached itself in a leisurely way from the evergreens when the mourners brushed by them. The sun, but an hour or so declined, shone with an ardent and steadfast interest upon the little group. 'In the midst of life we are in death,' said Mr. Warbury, his voice sounding rather shameless taken out of church and displayed upon the basking echoless air. 'In the midst of death we are in life,' Laura thought, would be a more accurate expression of the moment. Her small body encased in tremendous sunlight seemed to throb with an intense vitality, impersonally responding to heat, scent, and colour. With blind clear-sighted eyes she saw the coffin lowered into the grave, and the earth shovelled in on top of it. She was aware of movement around her, of a loosening texture of onlookers, of footsteps and departures. But it did not occur to her that the time was come when she too must depart. She stood and watched the sexton, who had set to work now in a more business-like fashion. An arm was put through hers. A voice said: 'Dear Laura! we must go now,' and Caroline led her away. Tears ran down Caroline's face; she seemed to be weeping because it was time to go.

Laura would have turned for one more backward look, but Caroline prevented her. Her tears ran faster and she shook her head and sighed. They reached the gate. It closed behind them with a contented click, for they were the last to leave.

Opposite the churchyard were the gates of the old home. The drive was long, straight, and formal; it had been a cart-track across a meadow when the old home was a farm. At the end of the drive stood the grey stone house. A purple clematis muffled the porch, and a white cat lay asleep in a bed of nasturtiums. The blinds were drawn down in respect to the dead. Laura looked at it. Since her earliest childhood it had been a familiar sight, a familiar thought. But now she saw it with different eyes: a prescience of exile came over her and, forgetting Lady Place, she looked with the yearning of an outcast at the dwelling so long ago discarded. The house was like an old blind nurse sitting in the sun and ruminating past events. It seemed an act of the most horrible ingratitude to leave it all and go away without one word of love. But the gates were shut, the time of welcome was gone by.

For a while they stood in the road, none making a move, each waiting for the other's lead. A tall poplar grew on the left hand of the churchyard gate. Its scant shadow scarcely indented the white surface of the road. A quantity of wasps were buzzing about its trunk, and presently one of the wasps stung Henry. This seemed to be the spur that they were all waiting for; they turned and walked to the corner of the road where the carriages stood that were to drive them back to the station.

Every one was sorry for Laura, for they knew how much she had loved her father. They agreed that it was a good thing that Henry and Caroline were taking her to London. They hoped that this change would distract her from her grief. Meanwhile, there was a good deal to do, and that also was a distraction. Clothes and belongings had to be sorted out, friends and family pensioners visited, and letters of condolence answered. Beside this she had her own personal accumulation of vagrant odds and ends to dispose of. She had lived for twenty-eight years in a house where there was no lack of cupboard room, and a tradition of hoarding, so the accumulation was considerable. There were old toys, letters, stones of strange shapes or bright colours, lesson-books, water-colour sketches of the dogs and the garden; a bunch of dance programmes kept for the sake of their little pencils, and all the little pencils tangled into an inextricable knot; pieces of unfinished needlework, jeweller's boxes, scraps cut out of the newspaper, and unexplainable objects that could only be remembrancers of things she had forgotten. To go over these hoards amused the surface of her mind. But with everything thrown away she seemed to be denying the significance of her youth.

Thus busied, she was withheld all day from her proper care. But at dusk she would go out of the house and pace up and down the nut alley at the foot of the garden. The cold airs that rose up from the ground spoke sadly to her of burial, the mossy paths were hushed and humble under her tread, and the smells of autumn condoled with her. Brewer the gardener, stamping out the ashes of his bonfire, saw her pass to and fro, a slender figure moving sedately between the unmoving boughs. He alone of all the household had taken his master's death without exclamation. Death coming to the old was a harmless thought to him, but looking at Laura he sighed deeply, as though he had planted her and now saw her dashed and broken by bad weather.

Ten days after Everard's death Henry and Caroline left Lady Place, taking Laura with them. She found the leave-taking less painful than she had expected, and Caroline put her to bed as soon as they arrived in Apsley Terrace, which simplified her unhappiness by making her feel like an unhappy child.

Laura had heard the others agreeing that the move to London would make her feel very differently. She had thought them stupid to suppose that any outward change could alter her mood. She now found that they had judged better than she. In Somerset she had grieved over her father's death. In London her grief was retracted into sudden realisations of her loss. She had thought that sorrow would be her companion for many years, and had planned for its entertainment. Now it visited her like sudden snow-storms, a hastening darkness across the sky, a transient whiteness and rigour cast upon her. She tried to recover the sentiment of renunciation which she had worn like a veil. It was gone, and gone with it was her sense of the dignity of bereavement.

Henry and Caroline did all they could to prevent her feeling unhappy. If they had been overlooking some shame of hers they could not have been more tactful, more modulatory.

The first winter passed by like a half-frozen stream. At the turn of the year it grew extremely cold. Red cotton sandbags were laid along the window-sashes, and Fancy and Marion skated on the Round Pond with small astrakhan muffs. Laura did not skate, but she walked briskly along the path with Caroline, listening to the rock and jar of the skates grinding upon the ice and to the cries of the gulls overhead. She found London much colder than the country, though Henry assured her that this was impossible. She developed chilblains, and this annoyed her, for she had not had chilblains since she was a child. Then Nannie Quantrell would send her out in the early morning to run barefoot over the rimy lawn. There was a small garden at Apsley Terrace, but it had been gravelled over because Henry disliked the quality of London grass; and in any case it was not the sort of garden in which she could run barefoot.

She was also annoyed by the hardness of the London water. Her hands were so thin that they were always a little red; now they were rough also. If they could have remained idle, she would not have minded this so much. But Caroline never sat with idle hands; she would knit, or darn, or do useful needlework. Laura could not sit opposite her and do nothing. There was no useful needlework for her to do, Caroline did it all, so Laura was driven to embroidery. Each time that a strand of silk rasped against her fingers she shuddered inwardly.

Time went fester than the embroidery did. She had actually a sensation that she was stitching herself into a piece of embroidery with a good deal of background. But, as Caroline said, it was not possible to feel dull when there was so much to do. Indeed, it was surprising how much there was to do, and for everybody in the house. Even Laura, introduced as a sort of extra wheel, soon found herself part of the mechanism, and, interworking with the other wheels, went round as busily as they.

When she awoke, the day was already begun. She could hear iron noises from the kitchen, the sound of yesterday's ashes being probed out. Then came a smell of wood smoke--the kitchen fire had been laid anew and kindled in the cleansed grate. This was followed by the automatic noise of the carpet-sweeper and, breaking in upon it, the irregular knocking of the staircase brush against the banisters. The maid who brought her morning tea and laid the folded towel across the hot-water can had an experienced look; when she drew back the curtains she looked out upon the day with no curiosity. She had seen it already.

Every Tuesday the books were changed at the library.

They were dull children, though their dullness did not prevent them having a penetrating flow of conversation. Their ways and thoughts were governed by a sort of zodiacal procession of other little girls, and when they came down to the drawing-room after tea it seemed to Laura that they brought the Wardours, or the Wilkinsons, or the de la Bottes with them.

Dinner was at half-past seven. It was a sensible rule of Caroline's that at dinner only general topics should be discussed. The difficulties of the day were laid aside. To this rule Caroline attributed the excellence of Henry's digestion. Henry's digestion was further safe-guarded by being left to itself in the smoking-room for an hour after dinner. If he was busy, this hour of meditation would be followed by some law-work. If not, he would join them in the drawing-room, or go to his club. When they were thus left by themselves Laura and Caroline went off to bed early, for they were pleasantly fatigued by their regular days and regular meals. Later on Laura, half asleep, would hear Henry's return from his club. The thud of the front door pulled to after him drove through the silent house, and this was followed by the noise of bolts and chains. Then the house, emptied of another day, creaked once or twice, and fell into repose, its silence and security barred up within it like a kind of moral family plate. The remainder of the night was left at the disposal of the grandfather's clock in the hall, equitably dealing out minutes and quarters and hours.

On Sunday mornings Henry would wind the clock. First one and then the other the quivering chains were wound up, till only the snouts of the leaden weights were visible, drooping sullenly over the abyss of time wherein they were to make their descent during the seven days following. After that the family went to church, and there were wound up for the week in much the same manner. They went to evening service too, but evening service was less austere. The vindictive sentiments sounded less vindictive; if an umbrella fell down with a crash the ensuing silence was less affronted; the sermon was shorter, or seemed so, and swung more robustly into 'And now to God the Father.'

After evening service came cold supper. Fancy and Marion sat up for this, and it was rather a cheerful meal, with extra trivialities such as sardines and celery. The leaden weights had already started upon their downward course.

Caroline was a religious woman. Resolute, orderly and unromantic, she would have made an admirable Mother Superior. In her housekeeping and her scrupulous account-books she expressed an almost mystical sense of the validity of small things. But like most true mystics, she was unsympathetic and difficult of approach. Once only did she speak her spiritual mind to Laura. Laura was nursing her when she had influenza; Caroline wished to put on a clean nightdress, and Laura, opening the third drawer of the large mahogany wardrobe, had commented upon the beautiful orderliness with which Caroline's body linen was arranged therein. 'We have our example,' said Caroline. 'The graveclothes were folded in the tomb.'

Looking into the large shadowy drawer, where nightgowns and chemises lay folded exactly upon each other in a purity that disdained even lavender, Laura shuddered a little at this revelation of her sister-in-law's private thoughts. She made no answer, and never again did Caroline open her mind to her upon such matters.

Laura never forgot this. Caroline seemed affectionately disposed towards her; she was full of practical good sense, her advice was excellent, and pleasantly bestowed. Laura saw her a good wife, a fond and discreet mother, a kind mistress, a most conscientious sister-in-law. She was also rather gluttonous. But for none of these qualities could Laura feel at ease with her. Compared to Caroline she knew herself to be unpractical, unmethodical, lacking in initiative. The tasks that Caroline delegated to her she performed eagerly and carefully, but she performed them with the hampering consciousness that Caroline could do them better than she, and in less time. Even in so simple a matter as holding a skein of wool for Caroline to wind off into a ball, Caroline's large white fingers worked so swiftly that it was she who twitched the next length off Laura's thumb before Laura, watching the diminishing thread, remembered to dip her hand. But all this--for Laura was humble and Caroline kind--could have been overcome. It was in the things that never appeared that Laura felt her inadequacy.

Laura was bored by the church which they attended. She would have liked, now that she was come to London, to see the world, to adventure in churches. She was darkly, adventurously drawn to see what services were like amongst Roman Catholics, amongst Huguenots, amongst Unitarians and Swedenborgians, feeling about this rather as she felt about the East End. She expressed her wish to Caroline, and Caroline, rather unexpectedly, had been inclined to further it. But Henry banned the project. It would not do for Laura to go elsewhere than to the family place of worship, he said. For Henry, the family place of worship was the pew upon whose ledge rested great-great-aunt Salome's prayer-book. He felt this less explicitly than the straying Laura did, for he was a man and had less time to think of such things. But he felt it strongly.

Laura believed that she would like Caroline if she could only understand her. She had no difficulty in understanding Henry, but for no amount of understanding could she much like him. After some years in his house she came to the conclusion that Caroline had been very bad for his character. Caroline was a good woman and a good wife. She was slightly self-righteous, and fairly rightly so, but she yielded to Henry's judgment in every dispute, she bowed her good sense to his will and blinkered her wider views in obedience to his prejudices. Henry had a high opinion of her merits, but thinking her to be so admirable and finding her to be so acquiescent had encouraged him to have an even higher opinion of his own. However good a wife Caroline might choose to be, she could not quite make Henry a bad husband or a bad man--he was too much of a Willowes for that: but she fed his vanity, and ministered to his imperiousness.

Laura also thought that the law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating indifference to other people's point of view. He seemed to consider himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a base motive to every one who supported a better case than he. This did not often appear in his private life, Henry was kindly disposed to those who did not thwart him by word or deed. His household had been well schooled by Caroline in yielding gracefully, and she was careful not to invite guests who were not of her husband's way of thinking.

Most of their acquaintance were people connected with the law. Laura grew familiar with the legal manner, but she did not grow fond of it. She felt that these clean-shaven men with bristling eyebrows were suavely concealing their doubts of her intelligence and her probity. Their jaws were like so many mouse-traps, baited with commonplaces. They made her feel shy and behave stiffly.

This was unfortunate, as Henry and Caroline had hoped that some one of them would fall sufficiently in love with Laura to marry her. Mr. Fortescue, Mr. Parker, Mr. Jermyn, Mr. Danby, Mr. Thrush, were in turn selected as suitable and likely undertakers. Every decent effort was made by Henry and Caroline, and a certain number of efforts were made by the chosen. But Laura would make no efforts at all. Henry and Caroline had lost heart when they invited Mr. Arbuthnot to tea on Sunday. They invited him for pity's sake, and but to tea at that, for he was very shy and stammered. To their surprise they saw Laura taking special pains to be nice to him. Equally to their surprise they saw Mr. Arbuthnot laying aside his special pains to observe a legal manner and stammering away quite enthusiastically about climbing Welsh mountains and gathering parsley fern. They scarcely dared to hope, for they felt the time for hope was gone by. However, they invited him to dinner, and did their best to be on friendly terms with him.

Mr. Arbuthnot received their advances without surprise, for he had a very good opinion of himself. He felt that being thirty-five he owed himself a wife, and he also felt that Laura would do very nicely. His aunt, Lady Ross-Price, always tried to get servants from the Willowes establishment, for Mrs. Willowes trained them so well. Mr. Arbuthnot supposed that Mrs. Willowes would be equally good at training wives. He began to think of Laura quite tenderly, and Caroline began to read the Stores' catalogue quite seriously. This was the moment when Laura, who had been behaving nicely for years, chose to indulge her fantasy, and to wreck in five minutes the good intentions of as many months.

She had come more and more to look on Mr. Arbuthnot as an indulgence. His stammer had endeared him to her; it seemed, after so much legal manner, quite sympathetic. Though nothing would have induced her to marry him, she was very ready to talk to him, and even to talk naturally of what came uppermost in her thoughts. Laura's thoughts ranged over a wide field, even now. Sometimes she said rather amusing things, and displayed unexpected stores of knowledge. But her remarks were as a rule so disconnected from the conversation that no one paid much attention to them. Mr. Arbuthnot certainly was not prepared for her response to his statement that February was a dangerous month. 'It is,' answered Laura with almost violent agreement. 'If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.'

Henry and Caroline glanced at each other in horror. Mr. Arbuthnot said: 'How very interesting! But I really don't think I am likely to do such a thing.' Laura made no answer. She did not think so either. But she was amusing herself with a surprisingly vivid and terrible picture of Mr. Arbuthnot cloaked in a shaggy hide and going with heavy devouring swiftness upon all-fours with a lamb dangling from his mouth.

Caroline resigned herself to spending the rest of her evenings with Laura beside her. The perpetual company of a sister-in-law was rather more than she had bargained for. Still, there she was, and Henry was right--they had been the proper people to make a home for Laura when her father died, and she was too old now to begin living by herself. It was not as if she had had any experience of life; she had passed from one guardianship to another: it was impossible to imagine Laura fending for herself. A kind of pity for the unused virgin beside her spread through Caroline's thoughts. She did not attach an inordinate value to her wifehood and maternity; they were her duties, rather than her glories. But for all that she felt emotionally plumper than Laura. It was well to be loved, to be necessary to other people. But Laura too was loved, and Laura was necessary. Caroline did not know what the children would do without their Aunt Lolly.

Every one spoke of her as Aunt Lolly, till in the course of time she had almost forgotten her baptismal name.

'Say How-do to Auntie Laura,' said Caroline to Fancy. This was long ago in the re-furbished nursery at Lady Place where Laura knelt timidly before her first niece, while the London nurse bustled round them unpacking soft hairbrushes and pots of cold cream, and hanging linen to air upon the tall nursery fender.

'How-do, Auntie Lolly,' said Fancy, graciously thrusting forward a fur monkey.

'She's taken to you at once, Laura,' said Caroline. 'I was afraid this journey would upset her, but she's borne it better than any of us.'

'Journeys are nothing to them at that age, ma'am,' said the nurse. 'Now suppose you tell your new auntie what you call Monkey.'

'Auntie Lolly, Auntie Lolly,' repeated Fancy, rhythmically banging the monkey against the table-leg.

Twice a year, in spring and in summer, the Willowes family went into the country for a holiday. For the first three years of Laura's London life they went as a matter of course to Lady Place. There once more arose the problem of how two children of one sex can play nicely with a much younger child of the other. Fancy and Marion played at tea-parties under the weeping ash, and Titus was the butler with a tin tray. Titus would presently run off and play by himself at soldiers, beating martial tattoos upon the tray. But now there was no danger of the youngest member of the party falling into the pond, for Aunt Lolly was always on guard.

Laura enjoyed the visits to Lady Place, but her enjoyment did not go very deep. The knowledge that she was now a visitor where she had formerly been at home seemed to place a clear sheet of glass between her and her surroundings. She felt none of the grudge of the dispossessed; she scarcely gave a thought to the old days. It was as if in the agony of leaving Lady Place after her father's death she had said good-bye so irremediably that she could never really come there again.

But the visits to Lady Place came to a sad end, for in 1905 James died suddenly of heartfailure. Sibyl decided that she could not go on living alone in the country. A manager was found for the brewery, Lady Place was let unfurnished upon a long lease, and Sibyl and the four-years-old heir of the Willowes name and traditions moved to a small house in Hampstead. Sibyl had proposed to sell some of the furniture, for there was a great deal more of it than she needed, and most of it was too large to fit into her new dwelling. This project was opposed by Henry, and with considerable heat. The family establishment must, he admitted, be broken up, but he would allow no part of it to be alienated. All the furniture that could not be found room for at Hampstead or at Apsley Terrace must be stored till Titus should be of an age to resume the tenure of Lady Place.

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