Anne Belinda Read Free

earnest kid who had promised to be sorry if he was killed.
    He stared into the soaking rain, and strangely, suddenly, his mood darkened. He hated this place of which he was the unwanted, unwelcomed heir—hated it, and felt it draw him as if it would never let him go. It was not so much that the place was his as that he belonged to the place, and whether he loved it or hated it, it had a hold on him which no other place had ever had or could have. He swung round, and his look startled Mrs. Mossiter; it was so bleak.
    Without paying any attention to her, he walked down the room, pausing by the foot of the big four-poster bed, which still carried a heavy obsolete canopy of crimson damask. The walls of the room were of the same dark crimson, faded almost everywhere to a shade between brown and magenta. Over the mantelpiece a sharp oblong of deeper colour caught the eye. John looked at it and, still looking, spoke shortly:
    â€œThere was a picture there. What’s happened to it?”
    Mrs. Mossiter bridled. But she answered: “There’s pictures in the house that goes with the house, and there’s others that don’t.” The note of impertinence became a little clearer as the sound of her own voice heartened her.
    John turned on her.
    â€œAnd this picture?”
    â€œIt don’t go with the house”—she gave back a step—“it belongs to Lady Marr.”
    Marr—yes, one of Sir Anthony’s daughters had married Nicholas Marr. But why on earth had this Mossiter woman looked so furtive all at once?
    â€œWhat picture is it? Has it been taken away? Has Lady Marr taken it?”
    The questions followed each other so sharply that Mrs. Mossiter found herself answering quite respectfully:
    â€œNo, sir—not yet, sir.”
    â€œWhere is it?”
    John was persistent, partly because his mood was an overbearing one, partly because the woman’s sullenness had irked him from the beginning.
    â€œWhere is it?”
    â€œIt don’t go with the house.”
    â€œIs it in here? The dressing-room? Is it in the dressing-room?”
    Her face changed; she looked startled, then sullen again. John walked to the dressing-room door and threw it open.
    It was a good-sized room, but it looked small because the furniture was so large. A mahogany wardrobe covered one wall from ceiling to floor. A huge, dark tall-boy confronted the wardrobe. The very washstand was immense, holding a hideous double set of Victorian crockery. There was a boot-cupboard that would have held the shoes of a family.
    John had the oddest sense that he was intruding; the room was so evidently Sir Anthony’s room. He glanced about it, and was on the point of drawing back, when Mrs. Mossiter spoke at his elbow, breathing heavily.
    â€œThe picture don’t go with the house, and you’ve no call to meddle with it. It belongs to Lady Marr—it don’t go with the house at all.”
    â€œAh!” said John. “Yes, you said that before, didn’t you?”
    He followed the direction of her angry gaze, and saw the frame of the picture jutting out a bare inch on the far side of the tall-boy. The frame was a gilt one, and the picture leaned, face hidden, against the smooth mahogany. As he put his hand on it, he was aware of alarm as well as anger in Mrs. Mossiter’s voice:
    â€œYou’ve no call to touch it! It don’t go with the house—it belongs to Lady Marr.” And there she stopped, because John looked at her, and there was something in the look that stopped her.
    He turned the picture to the light.
    The canvas was about three feet by two. It showed a very young girl looking at herself in the glass. That was the first impression—a girl in white, with short fair hair, looking at herself in an old mirror with a walnut frame. Her head was bent a little forward, her face in profile; the light just touched her hair and showed the exquisite line of head and neck. But the