Margaret Maliphant

								

hundred years, and it must have been nearly as long as that that they
had lived in the old stone house overlooking the Romney Marsh. For
almost all our land had been a manor of the old abbey, and had been
granted to my father's family at the dissolution of the monasteries
in 1540, and it was not much more than a century since the Maliphants
had been obliged to sell most of it to the ancestors of him who was
now squire at the big house. But they had never left the old home,
renting the land that they had once owned, and tilling the soil that
they had once been lords of. Our house was the oldest house in the
place, antiquaries testifying to the fact that it was built of the same
foreign stone that fashioned the walls of the old abbey; and our name
was the oldest name, a fact which my father, democrat as he was, never
really forgot. But we were not so well-to-do as we had once been, even
in the memory of living folk.
Family portraits of ladies in scanty gowns and high waists, and of
gallants in ruffled shirts, made pleasant pictures in my fancy,
and there were whispered stories of kegs of spirits stored at dead
of night in the old cellars beneath the house in my grandfather's
time, and of mother's old Mechlin lace having been brought, at the
risk of bold lives, in the merry little fishing-smacks that defied
the revenue-cutters. But smuggling was a dead art in our time, and
respectable folk would have been ashamed to buy smuggled goods. We
lived the uneventful life of our neighbors, and were no longer the
great people that we had been even in my grandfather's time; for
farming was not now so lucrative.
My sister Joyce was very handsome. I have not seen much of the world,
but I am sure that any one would have said so. She was tall, taller
than I am, and I am not short, and she was slight, and fair as a rose.
There was a sort of gentle Quaker-like dignity about Joyce which I have
never seen in one so young. She had it of our mother. Both women were
very tall, and both bore their height bravely. Sometimes, it is true,
when Joyce walked along the dark passages of the old Grange, her arms
full of sweet-scented linen, and bending her little head to pass under
the low door-ways, or when she made the jam in the kitchen, or pats
of butter in the dairy, she stooped just a little over her work; but
when--of a June evening--she would come across the lawn with her hands
full of guelder-roses and peonies for the parlor, no one could have
said that she was too tall, so erect and gracefully did she seem to
flit across the earth.
Of course I did not consciously notice these things when I was
nineteen; but as I think of her again now, I can see that it was not
at all to be wondered at that the country-folk used to talk of Joyce
Maliphant as a poor slip of a thing, not fit to be a countryman's
wife. There was an over-sensitiveness about her--a sort of tremulous
reserve--that marked her as belonging to a different order of beings.