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Updated: May 2, 2025
Delightful as the new boudoir might be, they dawdled in the picture gallery, that long corridor on which all the upper rooms opened, and at one end of which was the door of Lady Maulevrier's bedroom, at right angles with that red-cloth door, which was never opened, except to give egress or ingress to James Steadman, who kept the key of it, as if the old part of Fellside House had been an enchanted castle.
The beautiful face, so perfect in line and colour, curiously recalled that other face at Fellside; the dowager's face, with its look of marble coldness, and the half-expressed pain under that, outward calm. Here was the face of one who had not yet known pain or passion. Here was the cold perfection of beauty with unawakened heart. 'I don't know; I am too busy to think of such things.
That broken heart would be whole again, no doubt, in the future, as many other broken hearts have been; but the grief, the despair, the sense of hopelessness and aimlessness in life were very real in the present. If the picturesque seclusion of Fellside had seemed dull and joyless to Lesbia in days gone by, it was much duller to her now.
At Fellside Lesbia had drunk only water; but then at Fellside she had never known that feeling of exhaustion and prostration which follows days and nights spent in society, the wear and tear of a mind forever on the alert, and brilliant spirits which are more often forced than real.
Anywhere else we should have to entertain. Fellside is out of the world. There is no one to be entertained. 'Except your neighbour, Wordsworth. I suppose you see him sometimes? 'Dear simple-minded old soul, he gives nobody any trouble, said her ladyship. 'But is not Westmoreland very cold in winter? asked her friend. Lady Maulevrier smiled benignly, as at an inoffensive ignorance.
There in the panelled drawing-room at Fellside hung Harlow's portrait of Lady Diana in her zenith, in a short-waisted, white satin frock, with large puffed gauze sleeves, through which the perfect arm showed dimly. Standing under that picture Lady Lesbia looked as if she had stepped out of the canvas. She was to be painted by Millais next year.
Although Maulevrier had assured his grandmother that John Hammond would take flight at the first warning of Lesbia's return, Lady Maulevrier's dread of any meeting between her granddaughter and that ineligible lover determined her in making such arrangements as should banish Lesbia from Fellside, so long as there seemed the slightest danger of such a meeting.
When he left the sitting-room he told the landlord to be sure and feed the post-horses well, and make them comfortable for the night, so that they might be ready for the drive to Fellside early next morning. 'Do you think his lordship will be well enough to travel? asked the landlord. 'He has made up his mind to get home ill or well, answered Steadman.
There was courtesy, but no cordiality in the reply. If Mr. Hammond was a sensitive man, touchily conscious of his own obscurity, he must have felt that he was not wanted at Fellside that he was an excrescence, matter in the wrong place. Nobody had presented the stranger to Lady Mary. It never entered into Maulevrier's mind to be ceremonious about his sister Molly.
For some reason which I cannot understand, Lady Maulevrier's life has been a prolonged sacrifice. 'She has always given us to understand that she was fond of Fellside, and that this secluded life suited her, said Mary, meditatively. 'I cannot help doubting her sincerity on that point.
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