“Just so,” said Dr. Marjoribanks, who was rather relieved to have got through the announcement so easily. “You will see that her room is ready, and everything comfortable; and, of course, tomorrow she and I will dine alone.”
“Yes, sir,” said Nancy; but this assent was not given in the decisive tone of a woman whose audience was over; and then she was seized with a desire to arrange in a more satisfactory manner the cold beef on the sideboard. When she had secured this little interval for thought, she returned again to the table, where her master ate his breakfast, with a presentiment. “If you please, sir,” said Nancy, “not to give you no vexation nor trouble, which everyone knows as it has been the aim o’ my life to spare you, as has so much on your mind. But it’s best to settle afore commencing, and then we needn’t have no heartburning. If you please, am I to take my orders of Miss Lucilla, or of you, as I’ve always been used to? In the missus’s time,” said Nancy, with modest confidence, “as was a good missus, and never gave no trouble as long as she had her soup and her jelly comfortable, it was always you as said what there was to be for dinner. I don’t make no objection to doing up a nice little luncheon for Miss Lucilla, and giving a little more thought now and again to the sweets; but it ain’t my part to tell you, sir, as a lady’s taste, and more special a young lady’s, ain’t to be expected to be the same as yours and mine as has been cultivated like. I’m not one as likes contention,” continued the domestic oracle, “but I couldn’t abear to see a good master put upon; and if it should be as Miss Lucilla sets her mind upon messes as ain’t got no taste in them, and milk-puddings and stuff, like the most of the ladies, I’d just like to know out of your own mouth, afore the commencement, what I’m to do?”
Dr. Marjoribanks was so moved by this appeal that he laid down his knife and contemplated the alarming future with some dismay. “It is to be hoped Miss Lucilla will know better,” he said. “She has a great deal of good sense, and it is to be hoped that she will be wise enough to consult the tastes of the house.”
But the Doctor was not to be let off so easily. “As you say, sir, everything’s to be hoped,” said Nancy steadily; “but there’s a-many ladies as don’t seem to me to have got no taste to their mouths; and it ain’t as if it was a thing that could be left to hopes. Supposin’ as it comes to that, sir, what am I to do?”
“Well,” said the Doctor, who was himself a little puzzled, “you know Miss Lucilla is nineteen, Nancy, and my only child, and the natural mistress of the house.”
“Sir,” said Nancy austerely, “them is things as it ain’t needful to name; that ain’t the question as I was asking. Supposin’ as things come to such a point, what am I to do?”
“Bless me! it’s half-past nine,” said the Doctor, “and I have an appointment. You can come just as usual when we are at breakfast, that will be the best way,” he said as he went out at the door, and chuckled a little to himself when he felt he had escaped. “Lucilla is her mother’s daughter, it is true,” he said to himself when he had got into the safe seclusion of his brougham, with a degree of doubt in his tone which was startling, to say the least of it, from the lips of a medical man; “but she is my child all the same,” he added briskly, with returning confidence; and in this conviction there was something which reassured the Doctor. He rubbed his hands as he bowled along to his appointment, and thought within himself that if she turned out a girl of spirit, as he expected, it would be good fun to see Lucilla’s struggle with Nancy for the veritable reins of government. If Dr. Marjoribanks had entertained any positive apprehensions that his dinners would be spoiled in consequence, his amusement would have come to an abrupt conclusion; but he trusted entirely in Nancy and a little in Lucilla, and suffered his long upper-lip to relax at the thought without much fear.
Her father had not returned from the labours of his long day when Lucilla arrived, but he made his last visits on foot in order to be able to send the brougham for her, which was a great thing for the Doctor to do. There was, indeed, a mutual respect between the two, who were not necessary to each other’s comfort, it is true, as such near relations sometimes are; but who, at the same time, except on the sole occasion of Mrs. Marjoribanks’s death, had never misunderstood each other, as sometimes happens. This time Miss Marjoribanks was rather pleased, on the whole, that the Doctor did not come to meet her. At other times she had been a visitor; now she had come into her kingdom, and had no desire to be received like a guest. A sense of coming home, warmer than she remembered to have felt before, came into Lucilla’s active mind as she stepped into the brougham. Not that the words bore any special tender meaning, notwithstanding that it was the desire of her heart, well known to all her friends, to live henceforward as a comfort to dear papa, but that now at last
