the plainest of cap-fronts, reduced her bonnet to the severest dowdiness, hid, straightened, tightened the waving pale gold of her hair, folded her travelling-shawl old-womanishly, cast aside all the merely ornamental, and glancing at herself, muttered, 'I did not know I could be so insignificant!' Little Owen stared as if his beautiful aunt had lost her identity, and Mrs. Murrell was ready to embrace her as a convert to last night's exposition.
Perhaps the trouble was wasted, for the lady, Mrs. Bostock, did not seem to be particular. She was quite young, easily satisfied, and only eager to be rid of an embarrassing interview of a kind new to her; the terms were fixed, and before many weeks had passed Lucilla was settled at a cottage of gentility, in sight of her Thames, but on the Essex side, where he was not the same river to her, and she found herself as often thinking that those tainted waters had passed the garden in Woolstone-lane as that they had sparkled under Wrapworth Bridge.
It was the greatest change she had yet undergone. She was entirely the governess, never the companion of the elders. Her employers were mercantile, wrapped up in each other, busy, and gay. The husband was all day in London, and, when the evenings were not given to society, preferred spending them alone with his wife and children. In his absence, the nursery absorbed nearly all the time the mother could spare from her company and her household. The children, who were too old for playthings, were consigned to the first-rate governess, and only appeared in the evening. Lucilla never left her schoolroom but for a walk, or on a formal request to appear in the drawing-room at a party; a solitude which she at first thought preferable to Mrs. Willis Beaumont's continued small chatter, especially as the children were pleasant, brisk, and lovable, having been well broken in by their Swiss
Necessity had trained Cilly in self-restraint, and the want of surveillance made her generous nature the more scrupulous in her treatment of her pupils; she taught them diligently, kept good order, won their affection and gave them some of her own, but nothing could obviate her growing weariness of holding intercourse with no mind above eleven years old. Trouble and anxiety she had known before, and even the terrible heartache that she carried about with her might have failed to wear down a being constituted as she was, without the long solitary evenings, and the total want of companionship. The first shock had been borne by the help of bustle and change, and it was only as weeks passed on, that care and depression grew upon her. Lessons, walks, children's games were oppressive in turn, and though the last good-night was a welcome sound, yet the solitude that ensued was unspeakably forlorn. Reading she had never loved, even had this been a house of books; the children were too young to need exertion on her part to keep in advance of them, and their routine lessons wore out her energies too much for her to turn to her own resources. She did little but repair her wardrobe, work for the boy in Whittington-street, and let thoughts drift through her mind. That death-bed scene at Hyeres, which had so often risen unbidden to her mind as she lay on her crib, was revived again, but it was not her father whose ebbing life she watched. It was one for whom she durst not ask, save by an inquiry from her brother, who had never dropped his correspondence with Honora; but Owen was actively employed, and his locality and habits were so uncertain that his letters were often astray for long together. His third year of apprenticeship had begun, and Lucilla's sole hope of a change from her present dreary captivity was in his either returning with Mr. Currie, or finding employment and sending for her and his child to Canada. 'By that time,' she thought, 'Europe will contain nothing to me. Nay, what does it contain that I have a right to care for now? I don't delude myself. I know his look and manner. His last thought will be for his flock at St. Matthew's, not for her who drove him to the work that has been killing him. Oh, no, he won't even forgive me, for he will think it the greatest service I could have done him.' Her eyes were hot and dry; what a relief would tears have been!
CHAPTER XXIV
Enid, my early and my only love,
I thought, but that your father came between,
In former days you saw me favourably,
And if it were so, do not keep it back,
Make me a little happier, let me know it.-TENNYSON
The foreign tour proved a great success. The summer in the Alps was delightful. The complete change gave Bertha new life, bodily strength first returning, and then mental activity. The glacier system was a happy exchange for her
Mervyn behaved very well to her, knowing himself bound to make the journey agreeable to her; he was constantly kind to Bertha, and in the pleasure of her revival submitted to a wonderful amount of history and science. All his grumbling was reserved for the private ear of Phoebe, whose privilege it always was to be his murmuring block, and who was only too thankful to keep to herself his discontents whenever his route was not chosen (and often when it was), his disgusts with inns, railroads, and sights and his impatience of all pursuits save Bertha's. Many a time she was permitted to see and hear nothing but how much he was bored, but on the whole the growls were so mitigated compared with what she had known, that it was almost contentment; and that he did not absolutely dislike their habits was plain from his adherence to the ladies, though he might have been quite independent of them.
Bertha's distortion of eye and hesitation of speech, though much modified, always recurred from fatigue, excitement, or meeting with strangers, or-still worse-with acquaintance. The difficulty of utterance distressed her far more than if she had been subject thereto from infancy, and increased her exceeding repugnance to any sort of society beyond her own party. The question whether she were fit to return home for the winter was under debate, when at Geneva, early in September, tidings reached the travellers that produced such a shock as to settle the point.
Juliana Acton was dead! It had been a very short attack of actual illness, but disease had long been secretly preying on her-and her asperity of disposition might be accounted for by constant unavowed suffering. It was a great blow. Her unpleasant qualities were all forgiven in the dismay of learning what their excuse had been; for those who have so lived as to make themselves least missed, are perhaps at the first moment the more mourned by good hearts for that very cause.
Augusta was so much terrified on her own account, that she might almost have been made a hydropathist on the spot; and Robert wrote that poor Sir Bevil was perfectly overwhelmed with grief and self-reproach, giving himself no credit for his exemplary patience and forbearance, but bitterly accusing himself of hardness and neglect. These feelings were shared in some degree by all the others, and Mervyn was especially affected. There had been much to soften him since his parents' death, and the sudden loss of the sister with whom he had always been on terms of scorn and dislike, shocked him excessively, and drew him closer to the survivors, sobering him, and silencing his murmurs for the time in real grief and awe. Bertha likewise was thoroughly overcome, not so much by these feelings, as by the mere effect of the sudden tidings on her nervous temperament, and the overclouding of the cheerfulness that had hitherto surrounded her. This, added to a day of over-fatigue and exposure, brought back such a recurrence of unfavourable symptoms, that a return to an English winter was not to be thought of. The south of France was decided upon at once, and as Lucilla had truly divined, Honor Charlecote's impulse led them to Hyeres, that she might cast at least one look at the grave in the Stranger's corner of the cypress-grown burial- ground, where rested the beloved of her early days, the father of the darlings of her widowed heart-loved and lost.
She endured her absence from home far better than she had expected, so much easier was it to stay away than to set off, and so completely was she bound up with her companions, loving Phoebe like a parent, and the other two like a nurse, and really liking the brother. All took delight in the winter paradise of Hyeres, that fragment of the East set down upon the French coast, and periodically peopled with a motley multitude of visitors from all the lands of Europe, all invalids, or else attendants on invalids.
Bertha still shrank from all contact with society, and the ladies, for her sake, lived entirely apart; but Mervyn made acquaintance, and sometimes went out on short expeditions with other gentlemen, or to visit his mercantile correspondents at Marseilles, or other places on the coast.
It was while he was thus absent that the three sisters stood one afternoon on the paved terrace of the
