Ceremony of the Innocent by Taylor Caldwell Page B

also smelled badly. It flickered on Ellen’s hair and her suddenly mournful profile as she vigorously rubbed the cutlery. It was now half past six, and the Mayor and his lady had already had their breakfast. In half an hour the visitors from Scranton would have theirs. There were sounds of movements above. The Mayor’s house and furniture were considered very “grand” in Preston, but to Ellen they were both ugly. She did not yet know the full meaning of the word “elegant”; she only knew that there was something grossly missing in these large rooms, in which huge dark furniture brooded and every corner was occupied by fringed chairs and tables, ornament cases, vases filled with pussy-willow branches or violently colored plumes; draperies were everywhere, not only at the narrow slits of windows. They curved over the fireplaces, fringed and balled, and were mostly dark red or navy blue, and dripped from the grand piano and hung at the doors. They even swathed the backs of giant sofas and festooned themselves over all the pier mirrors, which reproduced only the furniture and the dim expensive rugs and windows in the wan light that pervaded the house even on bright summer days. They glimmered like ghosts and had never reflected sunlight. The ugly flowered walls were almost covered by dingy if expensive paintings of somber mountains and darkling seas or stags at bay or a glum-faced child with a basket of flowers in her hands which resembled the asphodels, the flowers of the dead.
    “The Mayor’s house is a palace,” May Watson often said. But Ellen, though she had never seen a truly beautiful house in all her life, vaguely understood that this house was hideous, tasteless, oppressive. It never occurred to her to wonder why she knew this; there were so many things she knew without any experience of them. The house smelled of lavender, wax and strong soap, and mustiness; the lurking stairways were haunted in the gloom of a house where little outside light was permitted to enter. Hollow booms of no discernible source echoed constantly through the house and enhanced its ponderous dreariness. Suddenly Ellen believed she could not breathe here, that her chest was being weighted down by something beyond her knowledge, and she was both despondent and frightened and wanted to run out into the free air where there were no threatening crepuscular walls and stairways with polished brass balustrades and bowls of dried flowers and Meissen china figurines under glass bells on tables, and fringes and silk balls and crouching furniture of deep-stained mahogany, and thick creeping rugs that harbored dust. How terrible to have to live here, thought the girl. In contrast, the wretched little house she occupied with her aunt was cheerful and open, for all its poverty and destitution. Innately buoyant though she was, Ellen felt crushed and hopeless in this “mansion,” and could hardly hold herself back from cowardly flight. The black hall clock chimed a quarter to seven in a loud grave voice, and Ellen’s feeling of dismalness increased. The kitchen window was filling with sun, and Mrs. Jardin turned off the gaslight.
    Ellen said, “Are there many houses in Preston like this, Mrs. Jar-din?”
    Mrs. Jardin lifted her head proudly. “No. This is the grandest. But then, Mrs. Porter comes from Scranton and brought her family’s furniture with her. People love to come into this house and stare at everything. Never saw anything like it before, they didn’t.”
    Ellen was not given to irony but now she said within herself: They’re lucky. This made her feel both guilty and mirthful, and she carried a dish of stewed prunes and figs into the dining room, which resolutely rejected any daylight or starlight at all and so existed in gaslight by night and duskiness by day. Aunt May had called this room “luxury,” but Ellen flinched at it. Its four long slender windows were shrouded in blue velvet draperies and almost opaque lace; the enormous