We ascended the stairs, and entered a bare white-washed passage, with drab-colored doors in it, leading, as I presumed, into the sleeping chambers of the house.
Every door opened as we passed; children peeped out at me, screamed at me, and banged the door to again. "What family has the present Mrs.
Finch?" I asked. The decent elderly woman was obliged to stop, and consider. "Including the baby, ma'am, and two sets of twins, and one seven months' child of deficient intellect--fourteen in all." Hearing this, I began--though I consider priests, kings, and capitalists to be the enemies of the human race--to feel a certain exceptional interest in Reverend Finch. Did he never wish that he had been a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, mercifully forbidden to marry at all? While the question passed through my mind, my guide took out a key, and opened a heavy oaken door at the further end of the passage.
"We are obliged to keep the door locked, ma'am," she explained, "or the children would be in and out of our part of the house all day long."
After my experience of the children, I own I looked at the oaken door with mingled sentiments of gratitude and respect.
We turned a corner, and found ourselves in the vaulted corridor of the ancient portion of the house.
The casement windows, on one side--sunk deep in recesses--looked into the garden. Each recess was filled with groups of flowers in pots. On the other side, the old wall was gaily decorated with hangings of bright chintz. The doors were colored of a creamy white, with gilt moldings. The brightly ornamented matting under our feet I at once recognized as of South American origin. The ceiling above was decorated in delicate pale blue, with borderings of flowers. Nowhere down the whole extent of the place was so much as a single morsel of dark color to be seen anywhere.
At the lower end of the corridor, a solitary figure in a pure white robe was bending over the flowers in the window. This was the blind girl whose dark hours I had come to cheer. In the scattered villages of the South Downs, the simple people added their word of pity to her name, and called her compassionately--"Poor Miss Finch." As for me, I can only think of her by her pretty Christian name. She is "Lucilla" when my memory dwells on her. Let me call her "Lucilla" here.