A New Home at Greymoor House

Source written for Revision Library in a classic literary style (original, copyright-free).

It was upon a raw afternoon in November that Alice Thorne first beheld the grey, forbidding facade of Greymoor House, and felt her heart sink within her like a stone dropped into a well. The carriage had jolted and creaked along lanes deep with mud for the better part of three hours, and now, as the horses drew up before the iron gates, she perceived that her new home wore an aspect no less bleak than the weather itself.

She was an orphan of twelve years, her father having succumbed but a fortnight since to a fever that had carried off half the parish, and she came to Greymoor House as a poor relation, dependent upon the charity of an uncle she had never before set eyes upon. Mr. Josiah Thorne was a merchant of some consequence in the wool trade, a man whose reputation for severity had reached even the sheltered nursery in which Alice had passed her childhood.

The door was opened, not by any liveried footman, but by a wizened housekeeper of forbidding countenance, who looked upon the child with an expression Alice could not readily interpret, whether it betokened pity or mere indifference she could not tell.

"You will be Miss Alice, I dare say," said the woman, in a voice as dry as autumn leaves. "Mr. Thorne is engaged upon business and will not see you until supper. Follow me, if you please, and do not loiter upon the stair; the master cannot abide idleness in any form."

Alice followed obediently, though her legs trembled with a fatigue she was too proud to confess. The hall through which they passed was vast and ill lit, hung about with portraits of Thornes long departed, whose painted eyes seemed to Alice to follow her with mute and melancholy reproach. She thought of her father's small, sunlit study, with its shelves of well thumbed books, and felt a lump rise in her throat which she resolved, with all the fortitude she could muster, not to permit to become tears.

Her chamber, when at last she reached it, proved to be a narrow room beneath the eaves, furnished with a single iron bedstead, a washstand, and a small window through which she might observe the bare branches of an elm tossing in the wind. It was not a room calculated to raise the spirits of any child, however resilient, yet Alice, setting down her small trunk upon the bare boards, resolved that she would not be daunted by grey walls, nor by an uncle's reputed severity.

At supper that evening she was summoned to the dining room, a chamber of such chill and formal grandeur that she scarcely dared to seat herself until bidden. Mr. Thorne sat at the head of a table that might comfortably have accommodated twenty persons, though only two places had been laid. He was a spare, upright man of perhaps five and fifty years, with iron grey whiskers and eyes of a pale, penetrating blue that seemed to appraise her as a merchant might appraise a bale of doubtful wool.

"So," said he, when the soup had been set before them and the servant had withdrawn, "you are my brother's daughter. You have his look about the eyes, though I trust you have not inherited his want of prudence in matters of business." He regarded her steadily. "I am not a sentimental man, Alice, and I will not pretend to a grief I do not feel for a brother I saw perhaps twice in twenty years. But you shall have a roof over your head and an education suited to your station, provided you give me no cause for complaint. Idleness, deceit, and extravagance are the three vices I will not countenance under this roof. Do you understand me?"

Alice, though her heart quailed within her at so cold a welcome, found within herself a small, stubborn flame of resolve. "I understand you perfectly, sir," she replied, in a voice that trembled only a very little, "and I shall endeavour to give you no cause for complaint whatsoever."

A silence followed, in which her uncle regarded her with something that might, in a less austere countenance, have been mistaken for the faint beginnings of approval. He said nothing further upon the matter, but addressed himself to his soup, and Alice, watching him covertly beneath lowered lashes, began for the first time since her father's death to entertain a small and cautious hope that Greymoor House, for all its greyness, might yet be endured.