Rose Trelawney Read Online Free PDF Page B

gilt mirror gave the impression of a canary perched on an elephant’s back, hung as it was too close above the Kent commode. As to hiding that long-case clock in a corner!
    “We’ll have tea,” he said, interrupting my plans. I wanted a glass of decent wine and had hoped I might obtain one here, but then, with Sir Ludwig, I was fortunate he had not told me I would have a mug of beer. He left, to make a fresh toilette I supposed, certainly his mussed shirt collar stood in need of replacement. This gave me freedom to look around the Green Saloon. Hunter-green draperies—only a German would have such poor taste, and with no silk under-hangings to lighten the oppression. The carpet had wine-colored roses on a salmon-pink ground, also not to my taste, but mercifully so well worn it need not distress the room much longer.
    The pictures on the walls goodish, but none of them my favorites. Stubbs and one grossly inferior Gainsborough. The latter gentleman ought not to have tackled animals. He made them look so very human, a sweet little girl kitten flirting with a boy spaniel. He should have stuck to his lovely lace trees and graceful ladies. The kitten lacked only a skirt and the rearrangement of ears to qualify for a lady.
    I was standing back from the Gainsborough with these thoughts going through my head when I heard the whisper of a silken skirt at the door, and turned to find the raddled old face of a woman staring up at me, curiosity fairly leaping from blue eyes as sharp as a lynx’s. She was very old, in her seventies at least, with wrinkles to which no one but Hogarth could have done justice. She belonged at the latter end of the Rake’s Progress, this one.
    Soon Sir Ludwig lounged up behind her, making me realize how very tiny the lady was. Next to a midget. Also making me realize he had not taken time to change his shirt. No clothes-horses in the family, to judge by these two specimens.
    “Cousin, allow me to present Miss Smith,” he said, wearing a wary expression.
    “Ah good, you’ve got a gel to put a rein on Abbie at last!” the dame shouted by way of welcome. “You’ll never guess what the minx has been up to, Lud. Sneaked off into Wickey to get a look at that woman that lost her mind and is putting up with Mulliner. The creature was indisposed. They say she gives herself terrific airs.”
    “Actually it is her memory she lost, Cousin. Her temper too has the habit of going astray,” he added, with a flicker of a dark eye towards me.
    “Temper—ha, she has plenty of that I hear. They say she pulled little Tommy Green’s ear nearly off his head for giving her some sauce.”
    “Before you regale us with more second-hand tales of goings-on at the rectory, let me make you known to Miss Smith. This is my late mother’s cousin, Miss Smith. Miss Annie Enns. And Cousin, Miss Smith is the young lady who has been staying with Mulliner.”
    “You never mean you’ve brought her here!” Annie shouted. “We’ll all be murdered in our beds.” Then she turned to me. “Not to say I mean you will do it yourself, my dear, for no one has called you a murderess yet, but it is clear as a candle in the window someone was out to kill you. Can I see the bump on your head?”
    “It has gone down,” I told her, too astonished to show the degree of umbrage the occasion demanded. Never in all my life had I met anyone quite so outspoken as this.
    “ All down? What a pity. I would have liked very well to see it. But that is the way, good things never last a minute. If it had been a spot or freckles, it would hang on forever. Have you remembered who did it?” she asked with greedy interest.
    “No, I don’t think anyone tried to kill me. I fell, very likely.”
    “You don’t look that gawky a creature to me, my dear. A great ladder of a girl to be sure, but you seem well formed and agile. Lud now, he was always so ungainly he couldn’t cross a room without upsetting a chair.”
    I hadn’t moved an inch since her