A Woman of Consequence Read Online Free PDF Page A

the ruins! I should never have taken my poor friend there. Indeed I should not.’ She put a hand to her brow and arranged herself upon the hard sofa of Margaret’s parlour with all the grace that her stout little form would allow.
    ‘I am sure you have nothing to reproach yourself for,’ said Dido briskly. ‘Penelope lost her footing …’
    ‘Oh Dido!’ exclaimed Lucy so slowly that there seemed to be an eternity of pity in the words. ‘You do not understand.’ And she sat for a moment sorrowfully shaking her head, too much overcome to continue.
    She had a plump, freckled face which was, in truth, ill-suited to sensibility: the eyes were too small and sharp, and there were ill-natured little lines between her brows betraying the peevishness which broke out all too easily when her languishing sentiments passed unheeded. She wore her brown hair pushed back in a careless tumble of curls. Lucy professed to be indifferent to her appearance; but Harriet had once confided to Dido that the careless curls were sustained only by the constant use of papers – and the freckles received generous, but unavailing, applications of Gowland’s Lotion.
    ‘It is all so very awful,’ she continued in a slow, thrilled voice, ‘for, you know, there must be some kind of trouble coming to the family of Harman-Foote. The ghost would not otherwise have appeared. She only comes as a warning.’
    ‘I do not think,’ said Dido firmly, ‘that we need concern ourselves with imagined woes. We have trouble enough with poor Penelope lying sick …’
    ‘Oh! But it cannot have been Pen’s fall the ghost came to warn of. Because …’ she paused a moment to add weight to the announcement of her great insight, ‘ Penelope is not a part of the Madderstone family .’
    ‘No, of course she is not, but …’
    ‘No, Dido,’ Lucy shook her head. ‘I am afraid it isindisputable. There is some other disaster yet to come.’
    ‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Dido, tried beyond endurance. ‘We do not even know that Penelope saw a ghost!’
    Lucy sat up sharply, her small mouth contracted, her brow furrowed. ‘I declare,’ she cried in a quick, peevish voice, ‘you are quite determined to find out that there is no ghost in the ruins, are you not?’
    ‘I am determined to come at the truth.’
    ‘But the truth is that there is a ghost. Everyone in the place has seen her now.’
    ‘Have they?’ cried Dido in amazement. Then, immediately suspecting the information, she asked, ‘And who, precisely is “everyone”?’
    ‘Oh, all the housemaids – well, I believe that two of them have. And Jones, who is Mrs Harman-Foote’s maid.’
    ‘They have seen the Grey Nun?’
    ‘Oh yes! Did you not know? – Well, they have not quite seen the nun herself. But they have seen a light – late at night, on the gallery – moving about . Which is as good as seeing the nun.’
    ‘Is it?’
    ‘So you see it is proved.’
    ‘I cannot at all agree that it is proved.’
    ‘You are determined to ignore the evidence.’
    ‘No, I am determined to consider all the evidence – not only that which supports my prejudice.’
    ‘And what, pray, is all this other evidence?’
    ‘Well … I do not yet quite know.’
    Lucy smiled with insufferable satisfaction and resumedher languid accents. ‘Oh! My dear friend!’ she said pityingly, ‘I fear you listen too much to your head and too little to your heart. If you would only allow yourself to feel a little more. You would instinctively know, as I do, that there is something dark and terrible in the ruins …’
    Dido promised herself that, come what may, she would prove there was no ghost.
     
    As she passed through the little side gate which led from the park into the gardens of Madderstone Abbey, Dido paused a moment to catch her breath and gaze across the muddy lawns and felled trees to the house. A pleasant, rather rambling building standing on slightly rising ground, it had been built and added to and