2The Small Parlour

I dressed for supper with the particular care of a woman who has learned that her whole fortune lives in first impressions, and went down at ten minutes to eight, so as to be neither eager nor late, and found the small parlour by following the only warmth in the house that a person was permitted to walk toward.

For it was warm — warm as the kept room on the landing had been warm, though I did not let myself think of that yet — a low, gold, comfortable warmth of candles and a good coal fire and a table laid with more silver than three people could want. It was the first kind room I had entered in that house, and after the graveyard gallery I came into it the way a cold thing comes to a hearth, without dignity, and the two people already standing there turned to look at me, and I saw at once that being looked at was to be the price of the warmth.

“Miss Thorne.” The gentleman came forward and took my hand in both of his, which no employer had done in ten years of my being employed. He was perhaps five-and-forty, grave and handsome in a worn, careful way, with the kind of courtesy that has been practised so long it has stopped being manners and become character. “I am Ravenscar. You have had a wretched journey and a colder welcome than we intended, and I mean to make up for both. You are very welcome here. I hope you will let us make you welcome.”

I said what one says. But I will confess that the warmth of it went into me further than the warmth of the fire, for there is a hunger in the paid and the unbelonging that no wage has ever fed, and Mr Ravenscar, in that first minute, fed it, and I was grateful, and being grateful I was already, a little, his.

“My sister,” he said. “Miss Ravenscar. Charlotte.”

She was younger than her brother and brighter than the house had any right to contain, a quick, warm, brittle woman of perhaps forty who took both my hands as he had done and held them a moment as though we were already friends of long standing. “Oh, but you’re frozen,” she said. “Aldous, is she frozen? Come to the fire, Miss Thorne, come, we don’t stand on ceremony here, we can’t afford to, there are so few of us.” And she laughed, and drew me to the hearth, and I stood between the two of them in the gold light and felt, God forgive me, that I had come home.

We sat to supper. And it was here, over a good plain meal in that one warm room, that I first saw the thing I would spend a great many weeks teaching myself not to see, and saw, too, how the seeing of it was to be managed — not by my hosts, who never once referred to it, but by myself, who wished so badly to be kept that I did the hiding for them.

The table was laid for four.

There was Mr Ravenscar at the head, and Miss Ravenscar at his right, and I at his left, which was more honour than a companion is given and I felt it and was warmed by it; and there was a fourth place, at the foot, laid as fully as the rest — the silver, the glass, the folded linen, the chair drawn a little out as though its occupant had risen a moment and would presently return. No one sat there. No one looked at it. When the girl brought the dishes she served that place as she served the rest, a spoonful set upon the cold plate and left to cool, and took it away untouched at the end as though this were the most ordinary transaction in the world, which, in that house, I would learn, it was.

I looked at the empty place once, and Miss Ravenscar’s bright eye caught me looking, and something crossed her face — not quite a warning, not quite a plea, gone before I could name it — and she said, warmly, easily, “You’ll take a little more of the mutton, Miss Thorne, you must, you’re all bones and weather,” and passed me the dish herself, and the moment closed over as the great door had closed over the night, and I understood that I had been offered a choice and had, by taking the mutton, already made it.

“You will wish to know your duties,” said Mr Ravenscar, when the girl had gone.

“I should be glad to, sir. I understood I am to be companion to Mrs Ravenscar.”

I had said the name. I felt the room take it — a small settling, a stillness, the way a pond takes a dropped stone and closes white over it — and Mr Ravenscar set down his glass with great gentleness, and Miss Ravenscar’s hands went quiet in her lap, and for the length of one breath no one in that warm room breathed at all.

“To my mother,” said Mr Ravenscar at last, kindly. “Yes. When she is well enough to receive you. She keeps to her room — you will have felt it kept, coming up; she cannot bear the cold, and we keep the one room warm for her against the day she is strong enough to come down to us. That day has been long in coming.” He smiled, and the smile was the saddest thing I had yet seen in that house, sadder than the dead hearths, sadder than the wind. “Until it comes, you will help us keep her room. You will see it aired and its fire fed and its little comforts about it, so that when she is ready there will be nothing wanting. It is not arduous work. It is, I think, a kind of love. I hope you can find it in you to do it kindly.”

And here was the moment, and I knew it even then, sitting in the gold warmth with the good food in me and these two lonely, courteous people turned to me like plants to a light of their own — here was the moment when a woman of sense, a woman with the cold clear part of her still unfolded, would have asked the plain question that any child would ask. When did she last come down? When did you last see her? Whose fire have I felt these ten years, and whose place is laid tonight at the foot of this table?

I did not ask it. I looked at the fourth place, laid and served and cleared, and I looked at the kind, sad man who had held my hand in both of his, and at the bright, frightened woman who had called me frozen and fed me from her own dish, and I wanted so much to be kept by them that I folded the cold clear part of me away, as I had folded it a thousand times in other women’s houses, and I said:

“I should be glad to help you keep her room, sir. It would be an honour.”

Miss Ravenscar reached across the cleared cloth and pressed my hand, and her eyes were wet and shining in the candlelight, and “There,” she said, to her brother, not to me — “there, I told you. I told you she was the one.” And I took the warmth of that into me too, and did not ask what I was the one for, and went up at last to my cold room past the warm and firelit door, and heard, behind it, quite distinctly, the small domestic settling of a fire being tended by a hand I could not see, and told myself it was the wind.