CHAPTER VII

SABBATH AT WORSTED SKEYNES

In the white morning-room which served for her boudoir Mrs. Pendyce sat with an opened letter in her lap.  It was her practice to sit there on Sunday mornings for an hour before she went to her room adjoining to put on her hat for church.  It was her pleasure during that hour to do nothing but sit at the window, open if the weather permitted, and look over the home paddock and the squat spire of the village church rising among a group of elms.  It is not known what she thought about at those times, unless of the countless Sunday mornings she had sat there with her hands in her lap waiting to be roused at 10.45 by the Squire’s entrance and his “Now, my dear, you’ll be late!” She had sat there till her hair, once dark-brown, was turning grey; she would sit there until it was white.  One day she would sit there no longer, and, as likely as not, Mr. Pendyce, still well preserved, would enter and say, “Now, my dear, you’ll be late!” having for the moment forgotten.

But this was all to be expected, nothing out of the common; the same thing was happening in hundreds of country houses throughout the “three kingdoms,” and women were sitting waiting for their hair to turn white, who, long before, at the altar of a fashionable church, had parted with their imaginations and all the changes and chances of this mortal life.

Round her chair “the dear dogs” lay—­this was their practice too, and now and again the Skye (he was getting very old) would put out a long tongue and lick her little pointed shoe.  For Mrs. Pendyce had been a pretty woman, and her feet were as small as ever.

Beside her on a spindley table stood a china bowl filled with dried rose-leaves, whereon had been scattered an essence smelling like sweetbriar, whose secret she had learned from her mother in the old Warwickshire home of the Totteridges, long since sold to Mr. Abraham Brightman.  Mrs. Pendyce, born in the year 1840, loved sweet perfumes, and was not ashamed of using them.

The Indian summer sun was soft and bright; and wistful, soft, and bright were Mrs. Pendyce’s eyes, fixed on the letter in her lap.  She turned it over and began to read again.  A wrinkle visited her brow.  It was not often that a letter demanding decision or involving responsibility came to her hands past the kind and just censorship of Horace Pendyce.  Many matters were under her control, but were not, so to speak, connected with the outer world.  Thus ran the letter: 

                              “S.R.W.C., Hanover square,
                                   “November 1, 1891. 
“Dear Margery,