This address, which was utterly unexpected, drove Dr. Marjoribanks to despair. He said, “Get up, Lucilla;” but the devoted daughter knew better than to get up. She hid her face in her hands, and rested her hands upon her mother’s sofa, where the Doctor was sitting; and the sobs of that emotion which she meant to control henceforward, echoed through the room. “It is only for this once—I can—cannot help it,” she cried. When her father found that he could neither soothe her, nor succeed in raising her, he got up himself, which was the only thing left to him, and began to walk about the room with hasty steps. Her mother, too, had possessed this dangerous faculty of tears; and it was not wonderful if the sober-minded Doctor, roused for the first time to consider his little girl as a creature possessed of individual character, should recognise, with a thrill of dismay, the appearance of the same qualities which had wearied his life out, and brought his youthful affections to an untimely end. Lucilla was, it is true, as different from her mother as summer from winter; but Dr. Marjoribanks had no means of knowing that his daughter was only doing her duty by him in his widowhood, according to a programme of filial devotion resolved upon, in accordance with the best models, some days before.
Accordingly, when her sobs had ceased, her father returned and raised her up not unkindly, and placed her in her chair. In doing so, the Doctor put his finger by instinct upon Lucilla’s pulse, which was sufficiently calm and regulated to reassure the most anxious parent. And then a furtive momentary smile gleamed for a single instant round the corners of his mouth.
“It is very good of you to propose sacrificing yourself for me,” he said; “and if you would sacrifice your excitement in the meantime, and listen to me quietly, it would really be something—but you are only fifteen, Lucilla, and I have no wish to take you from school just now; wait till I have done. Your poor mother is gone, and it is very natural you should cry; but you were a good child to her on the whole, which will be a comfort to you. We did everything that could be thought of to prolong her days, and, when that was impossible, to lessen what she had to suffer; and we have every reason to hope,” said the Doctor, as indeed he was accustomed to say in the exercise of his profession to mourning relatives, “that she’s far better off now than if she had been with us. When that is said, I don’t know that there is anything more to add. I am not fond of sacrifices, either one way or another; and I’ve a great objection to anyone making a sacrifice for me—”
“But, oh, papa, it would be no sacrifice,” said Lucilla, “if you would only let me be a comfort to you!”
“That is just where it is, my dear,” said the steady Doctor; “I have been used to be left a great deal to myself; and I am not prepared to say that the responsibility of having you here without a mother to take care of you, and all your lessons interrupted, would not neutralise any comfort you might be. You see,” said Dr. Marjoribanks, trying to soften matters a little, “a man is what his habits make him; and I have been used to be left a great deal to myself. It answers in some cases, but I doubt if it would answer with me.”
And then there was a pause, in which Lucilla wept and stifled her tears in her handkerchief, with a warmer flood of vexation and disappointment than even her natural grief had produced. “Of course, papa, if I can’t be any comfort—I will—go back to school,” she sobbed, with a touch of sullenness which did not escape the Doctor’s ear.
“Yes, my dear, you will certainly go back to school,” said the peremptory father; “I never had any doubt on that subject. You can stay over Sunday and rest yourself. Monday or Tuesday will be time enough to go back to Mount Pleasant; and now you had better ring the bell, and get somebody to bring you something—or I’ll see to that when I go downstairs. It’s getting late, and this has been a fatiguing day. I’ll send you up some negus, and I think you had better go to bed.”
And with these commonplace words, Dr. Marjoribanks withdrew in calm possession of the field. As for Lucilla, she obeyed him, and betook herself to her own room, and swallowed her negus with a sense, not only of defeat, but of disappointment and mortification which was very unpleasant. To go back again and be an ordinary schoolgirl, after the pomp and woe in which she had come away, was naturally a painful thought; she who had ordered her mourning to be made long, and contemplated new furniture in the drawing-room, and expected to be mistress of her father’s house, not to speak of the still dearer privilege of being a comfort to him; and now, after all, her active mind was to be condemned over again to verbs and chromatic scales, though she felt within herself capacities so much more extended. Miss Marjoribanks did not by any means learn by this defeat to take the characters of the other personae in her little drama into consideration, when she rehearsed her pet scenes hereafter—for that is a knowledge slowly acquired—but she was wise enough to know when resistance was futile; and like most people of lively imagination, she had a power of submitting to circumstances
