Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/50

42 It was the door of this large parlour that the housekeeper opened as she announced, "Here is Mrs. Pedvinn come to see you, sir," and followed the visitor in.

Sitting in a capacious "berceuse," stuffed and chintz-covered, was the shrunken figure of a more than seventy-year-old man. He was wrapped in a worn grey dressing-gown, with a black velvet skull-cap, napless at the seams, covering his spiritless hair, and he looked out upon his narrow world from dim eyes set in cavernous orbits. In their expression was something of the questioning timidity of a child, contrasting curiously with the querulousness of old age, shown in the thin sucked-in lips, now and again twitched by a movement in unison with the twitching of the withered hands spread out upon his knees.

The sunshine, slanting through the low windows, bathed hands and knees, lean shanks and slippered feet, in mote-flecked streams of gold. It bathed anew rafters and ceiling-beam, as it had done at the same hour and season these last three hundred years; it played over the worm-eaten furniture, and lent transitory colour to the faded samplers on the walls, bringing into prominence one particular sampler, which depicted in silks Adam and Eve seated beneath the fatal tree, and recorded the fact that Marie Hoched was seventeen in 1808 and put her "trust in God"; and the same ray kissed the cheek of that very Marie's son, who at the time her girlish fingers pricked the canvas belonged to the enviable myriads of the unthought-of and the unborn.

"Why, how cold you are, Cousin Louis," said Mrs. Poidevin, taking his passive hand between her two warm ones, and feeling a chill strike from it through the violet kid gloves; "and in spite of all this sunshine too!"

"Ah, I'm not always in the sunshine," said the old man; "not always, not always in the sunshine." She was not sure Rh