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As these were all women, and some of them delicate and refined even in their insanity, Traverse felt shocked at this necessary, if it were necessary, exposure of their sanctuary. The cells were, in fact, small bedrooms that with their white-washed walls and white-curtained beds and windows looked excessively neat, clean and cool, but also, it must be confessed, very bare, dreary and cheerless.
Anything was better than going back to the empty silence of his house and Jane Sands' expectant face, and the pretty, white-curtained room with the cot all ready for little Zoe, who was already miles away along that dark road before him, sleeping, perhaps, in some dirty gypsy van put up on some bit of waste land by the roadside, or, perhaps, surrounded by the noise and glare of the fair with its shows and roundabouts.
I remember how the solemn feeling with which at length I turned my eyes away, yielded to the sensation of gratitude and rest which the sight of the white-curtained bed and how much more the lying softly down upon it, nestling in the snow-white sheets! inspired.
A model of a vessel from which the figure-head in the front yard had been taken was over the mantel, flanked by an old print or two of Nantucket in the past. There were Windsor chairs and a winged chair; some pot-bellied silver twinkled in a corner cupboard. The windows throughout were low and square and small-paned and white-curtained. The day was cool, and there was a fire on the hearth.
She had put on a white flannel dressing-gown and moved noiselessly about in it, the very embodiment of order, of purity, of quiet energy. The little white-curtained room was bareness and neatness itself. There were a few book-shelves along the walls, holding the books which her father had given her.
A mere gleam of surprise crossed the scorn and anger of Rachel's face as she watched him, but it faded quickly, and when once it had passed her expression remained unchanged. "Good-morning, Aunt Rachel," cried Ruth's fresh voice. "You are early." Rachel turned briskly round in time to see Ruth disappear from a white-curtained upper window.
"My old lady is not in this long, plain house, but around in Fourth Street, in her own little cottage. See how quaint they are?" A narrow passage like a green lane ran through the center. Small, one-storied cottages, with a doorway and a white-curtained window; a steep roof with a window in the end to light the garret. There was a garden with each.
Whether one looked at the walls with the old-fashioned varnished oak paper, or at the glossy piano standing across the corner near the white-curtained window, at the shining oak chairs or through the open casement doors that led into the shady garden beyond, the dominating impression one received was that everything was exquisitely clean.
Eden, 'and no one is any good there now, she does not know any one. Will you walk up and see her, sir? will you walk up, Miss Lilias? Lily silently followed her cousin up the narrow stairs to the upper room, where, in the white-curtained bed, lay the little child, tossing about and moaning, her cheeks flushed with fever, and her blue eyes wide open, but unconscious.
The bundle grew larger each day, and Miss Sophie grew smaller. The damp, cold rain and mist closed the white-curtained window, but always there behind the sewing-machine drooped and bobbed the little black-robed figure. Whirr, whirr went the wheels, and the coarse jeans pants piled in great heaps at her side.
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