Mrs. Charmond was at the end of a gallery opening from the hall when
Miss Melbury was announced, and saw her through the glass doors between
them. She came forward with a smile on her face, and told the young
girl it was good of her to come.
"Ah! you have noticed those," she said, seeing that Grace's eyes were
attracted by some curious objects against the walls. "They are
man-traps. My husband was a connoisseur in man-traps and spring-guns
and such articles, collecting them from all his neighbors. He knew the
histories of all these--which gin had broken a man's leg, which gun had
killed a man. That one, I remember his saying, had been set by a
game-keeper in the track of a notorious poacher; but the keeper,
forgetting what he had done, went that way himself, received the charge
in the lower part of his body, and died of the wound. I don't like
them here, but I've never yet given directions for them to be taken
away." She added, playfully, "Man-traps are of rather ominous
significance where a person of our sex lives, are they not?"
Grace was bound to smile; but that side of womanliness was one which
her inexperience had no great zest in contemplating.
"They are interesting, no doubt, as relics of a barbarous time happily
past," she said, looking thoughtfully at the varied designs of these
instruments of torture--some with semi-circular jaws, some with
rectangular; most of them with long, sharp teeth, but a few with none,
so that their jaws looked like the blank gums of old age.
"Well, we must not take them too seriously," said Mrs. Charmond, with
an indolent turn of her head, and they moved on inward. When she had
shown her visitor different articles in cabinets that she deemed likely
to interest her, some tapestries, wood-carvings, ivories, miniatures,
and so on--always with a mien of listlessness which might either have
been constitutional, or partly owing to the situation of the
place--they sat down to an early cup of tea.
"Will you pour it out, please? Do," she said, leaning back in her
chair, and placing her hand above her forehead, while her almond
eyes--those long eyes so common to the angelic legions of early Italian
art--became longer, and her voice more languishing. She showed that
oblique-mannered softness which is perhaps most frequent in women of
darker complexion and more lymphatic temperament than Mrs. Charmond's
was; who lingeringly smile their meanings to men rather than speak
them, who inveigle rather than prompt, and take advantage of currents
rather than steer.