Nurse Heatherdale's Story

Writing down that talk with good Mrs. Brent made me put aside the account of our arrival at Treluan, clearly though I remember it. Even to this day I never go up the great staircase -- of course it is not often that I pass that way -- without recalling the feelings with which I stepped up it for the first time -- Mrs. Brent in front, carrying a small hand-lamp, the passages being so dark, though it was still early in the evening; the children running on before me, except Miss Baby, who was rather sleepy and very cross, poor dear, so that half way up I had to lift her in my arms. All up the dark wainscoted walls, dead and gone Penroses looked down upon us, in every sort of ancient costume. They used to give me a half eerie feeling till I got to know them better and to take a certain pride in them, feeling myself, as I came to do, almost like one of the family, though in a humble way.

At the top of the great staircase we passed along the gallery, which runs right across one side of the hall below; then through a door on the right and down a long passage ending in a small landing, from which a back staircase ran down again to the ground floor. The nurseries in those days were the two large rooms beyond, now turned into a billiard-room, my present lady thinking them scarcely warm enough for the winter. It is handy too to have the billiard-room near the tower, where the smoking-room now is, and the spare rooms for gentlemen-visitors. A door close beside the nurseries opened on to the tower stair; some little way up this stair another door leads into the two or three big attics over the nurseries, which the children used as playrooms in the wet weather. Master Francis's room was the lowest door on the tower staircase, half way as it were, as to level, between the nurseries and the attics. The ground-floor rooms of the tower were entered from below, as the separate staircase only began from the nursery floor. All these particulars, of course, I learnt by degrees, having but a very general idea of things that first night; but plans of houses and buildings have always had an interest for me, and as a girl I think I had a quick eye for sizes and proportions. I do remember the first time I saw the ground-floor room of the tower, under Master Francis's, so to say, wondering to myself how it came to be so low in the ceiling, seeing that the floor of his room was several feet higher than that of the nurseries. No doubt others would have been struck by this also, had the lowest room in the tower been one in regular use, but as long as any one could remember it had only been a sort of lumber-room. It was only by accident that I went into it one day, months after I had come to Treluan.