The Splendid Fairing by Constance Holme — Read

Sally led her aunt to the grand but unused parlour in which so many expensive and handsome things were doomed to spend their lives. There was a piano, of course, which none of the Blindbeck folk knew how to play, in spite of Eliza's conviction that the gift was included in the price. A Chippendale bookcase made a prison for strange books never opened and never named, and the shut doors of a cabinet kept watch and ward over some lovely china and glass. There was a satinwood table with a velvet sheen, whose polished mirror never reflected a laughing human face. There was an American rocking-chair, poised like a floating bird, with cushions filled with the finest down ever drawn from an heirloom of a featherbed. Sarah would not have taken the rocking-chair, as a rule; she would have thought herself either too humble or too proud. But today she went to it as a matter of course, because of the false pomp that she had drawn to herself like a stolen royal robe. With a sigh of relief that was half physical and half mental, she let herself gently down, dropped her rusty bonnet against the silk, and peacefully closed her eyes.

Sally stood looking at her with an expression of mingled pity, curiosity and awe. She had pitied her often enough before, but she had never before seen her through the slightest veil of romance. Sometimes, indeed, the tale of the damaged wedding-day had touched her imagination like the scent of a bruised flower, but it was so faint and far-off that it passed again like a breath. Today, however, she had that sudden sense of exquisite beauty in the old, which all must feel who see in them the fragile storehouses of life. The old woman had known so much that she would never know, looked on a different world with utterly different eyes. There was romance in the thought of the dead she had seen and spoken to and laughed with and touched and loved. And even now, with the flower of her life apparently over and withered back again to its earth, this sudden splendour of Geordie had blossomed for her at the end.