Hopes and Fears Part 100

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 _bonne_.

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 const.i.tuted as she was, without the long solitary evenings, and the total want of companions.h.i.+p. The first shock had been borne by the help of bustle and change, and it was only as weeks pa.s.sed 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 apprentices.h.i.+p 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 _ego_, and she observed and enjoyed with all the force of her acute intelligence and spirit of inquiry, while Phoebe was happy in doing her duty by profiting by all opportunities of observation, in taking care of Maria and listening to Mervyn, and Miss Charlecote enjoyed scenery, poetry, art, and natural objects with relish keener than even that of her young friends, who were less impressible to beauty in every shape.

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 mult.i.tude 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, 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 _Hotel des Isles d'Or_, which rose behind them, in light coloured stone, of a kind of Italian-looking architecture, commanding a lovely prospect, the mountains on the Toulon side, though near, melting into vivid blue, and white cloud wreaths hanging on their slopes. In front lay the plain, covered with the peculiar gray-tinted olive foliage, overtopped by date palms, and sloping up into rounded hills covered with dark pines, the nearest to the sea bearing on its crest the Church _de l'Ermitage_. The sea itself was visible beyond the olives, bordered by a line of _etangs_ or pools, and white heaps of salt, and broken by a peninsula and the three Isles d'Or.

It was a view of which Bertha seemed never able to have enough, and she was always to be found gazing at it when the first ready for a walk.

'What are you going to sketch, Phoebe?' she said, as the sisters joined her. 'How can you, on such a day as this, with the air, as it were, loaded with cheiranthus smell? It makes one lazy to think of it!'

'It seems to be a duty to preserve some remembrance of this beautiful place.'

'It may be a pity to miss it, but as for the duty!'

'What, not to give pleasure at home, and profit by opportunities?'

'It is too hard to carry about an embodiment of Miss Fennimore's rules!

Why, have you no individuality, Phoebe?'

'Must I not sketch, then?' said Phoebe, smiling.

'You are very welcome, if you would do it for your pleasure, not as an act of bondage.'

'Not as bondage,' said Phoebe; 'it is only because I ought that I care to do so at all.'

'And that's the reason you only make maps of the landscape.'

It was quite true that Phoebe had no accomplished turn, and what had been taught her she only practised as a duty to the care and cost expended on it, and these were things where 'all her might' was no equivalent for a spark of talent. 'Ought' alone gave her the zest that Bertha would still have found in 'ought not.'

'It is all I can do,' she said, 'and Miss Fennimore may like to see them; so, Bertha, I shall continue to carry the sketchbook by which the English woman is known like the man by his "Murray." Miss Charlecote has letters to write, so we must go out by ourselves.'

The Provencal natives of Hyeres had little liking for the foreigners who thronged their town, but did not molest them, and ladies walked about freely in the lovely neighbourhood, so that Honor had no scruple in sending out her charges, unaccompanied except by Lieschen, in case the two others might wish to dispose of Maria, while they engaged in some pursuit beyond her powers.

Poor Lieschen, a plump Prussian, grown portly on Beauchamp good living, had little sympathy with the mountain tastes of her frauleins, and would have wished all Hyeres like the shelf on the side of the hill where stood their hotel, whence the party set forth for the Place des Palmiers, so called from six actual palms bearing, but not often ripening, dates. Two sides were enclosed by houses, on a third an orange garden sloped down the descent; the fourth, where the old town climbed straight up the hill, was regarded by poor Lieschen with dread, and she vainly persuaded Maria at least to content herself with joining the collection of natives resting on the benches beneath the palms. How willingly would the good German have produced her knitting, and sought a compatriot among the nurses who sat gossiping and embroidering, while Maria might have played among their charges, who were shovelling about, or pelting each other with the tiny white sea-washed pebbles that thickly strewed the place.

But Maria, with the little Maltese dog in her arms, to guard him from a hailstorm of the pebbles, was inexorably bent on following her sisters; and Bertha had hurried nervously across from the strangers, so that Lieschen must pursue those light steps through the winding staircase streets, sometimes consisting of broad shallow steps, sometimes of actual flights of steep stairs hewn out in the rock, leading to a length of level terrace, where, through garden gates, orange trees looked out, dividing the vantage ground with houses and rocks--up farther, past the almost desolate old church of St. Paul--farther again--till, beyond all the houses, they came forth on the open mountainside, with a crest of rock far above, surmounted by the ruins of a castle, said to have been fortified by the Saracens, and taken from them by Charles Martel. It was to this castle that Phoebe's sketching duty was to be paid, and Maria and Bertha expressed their determination of climbing up to it, in hopes, as the latter said, of finding Charles Martel's original hammer. Lieschen, puffing and panting already, looked horrified, and laughingly they bade her sit down and knit, whilst they set out on their adventure. Phoebe smiled as she looked up, and uttered a prognostic that made Bertha the more defiant, exhilarated as she was by the delicious compound of sea and mountain breeze, and by the exquisite view, the roofs of the town sloping rapidly down, and the hills stretching round, clothed in pine woods, into which the gray olivettes came stealing up, while beyond lay the sea, intensely blue, and bearing on its bosom the three Isles d'Or flushed with radiant colour.

The sisters bravely set themselves to scramble among the rocks, each surface turned to the sea-breeze exquisitely and fantastically tinted by coloured lichens, and all interspersed with the cla.s.sical acanthus' n.o.ble leaves, the juniper, and the wormwood. On they went, winding upwards as Bertha hoped, but also sideways, and their circuit had lasted a weary while, and made them exhausted and breathless, when looking round for their bearings, they found themselves in an enchanted maze of gray rocks, half hidden in myrtle, beset by the bristly battledores of p.r.i.c.kly pear, and shaded by cork trees. Above was the castle, perched up, and apparently as high above them as when they began their enterprise; below was a steep descent, clothed with pines and adorned with white heaths.

The place was altogether strange; they had lost themselves; Bertha began to repent of her adventure, and Maria was much disposed to cry.

'Never mind, Maria,' said Bertha, 'we will not try to go any higher.

See, here is the dry bed of a torrent that will make a famous path down.

There, that's right. What a picture it is! what an exquisite peep of the sea between the boughs! What now, what frightens you?'

'The old woman, she looks so horrid.'

'The witch for the lost children? No, no, Maria, she is only gathering fir cones, and completing the picture in her red _basquine_, brown jacket, and great hat. I would ask her the way, but that we could not understand her Provencal.'

'Oh, dear! I wish Phoebe was here! I wish we were safe!'

'If I ever come mountain-climbing again with you at my heels! Take care, there's no danger if you mind your feet, and we must come out somewhere.'

The somewhere, when the slope became less violent, was among vineyards and olivettes, no vestige of a path through them, only a very small cottage, picturesquely planted among the rocks, whence proceeded the sounds of a _cornet-a-piston_. As Bertha stood considering which way to take, a dog flew out of the house and began barking. This brought out a man, who rudely shouted to the terrified pair that they were trespa.s.sing.

They would have fled at once up the torrent-bed, bad as it was for ascent, but there was a derisive exclamation and laugh, and half-a-dozen men, half-tipsy, came pouring out of the cottage, bawling to Colibri, the rough, s.h.a.ggy white dog, that seemed disposed to spring at the Maltese in Bertha's arms.

The foremost, shouting in French for the sisters to stop, pointed to what he called the way, and Bertha drew Maria in that direction, trusting that they should escape by submission, but after going a little distance, she found herself at the edge of a bare, deep, dry ravine, steep on each side, almost so as to be impa.s.sable. The path only ran on the other side. There was another shout of exultation and laughter at the English girls' consternation. At this evident trick of the surly peasants, Maria shook all over, and burst into tears, and Bertha, gathering courage, turned to expostulate and offer a reward, but her horrible stammer coming on worse than ever, produced nothing but inarticulate sounds.

'Monsieur, there is surely some mistake,' said a clear voice in good French from the path on the other side, and looking across, the sisters were cheered by an unmistakable English brown hat. The peasants drew back a little, believing that the young ladies were not so unprotected as they had supposed, and the first speaker, with something like apology, declared that this was really the path, and descending where the sides were least steep, held out his hand to help Bertha. The lady, whose bank was more practicable, came down to meet them, saying in French, with much emphasis, that she would summon 'those gentlemen' to their a.s.sistance if desired; words that had considerable effect upon the enemy.

Poor Maria was in such terror that she could hardly keep her footing, and the hands both of Bertha and the unknown friend were needed to keep her from affording still more diversion to the peasants by falling prostrate.

The lady seemed intuitively to understand what was best for both, and between them they contrived to hush her sobs, and repress her inclination to scream for Phoebe, and thus to lead her on, each holding a hand till they were at a safe distance; and Bertha, whose terror had been far greater than at the robbery at home, felt that she could let herself speak, when she quivered out an agony of trembling thanks. 'I am glad you are safe from these vile men,' said the lady, kindly, 'though they could hardly have done anything really to hurt you!'

'Frenchmen should not laugh at English girls,' cried Bertha. 'Oh, I wish my brothers were here,' and she turned round with a fierce gesture.

'Phoebe, Phoebe; I want Phoebe and Lieschen!' was Maria's cry.

'Can I help you find your party?' was the next question; and the voice had a gentle, winning tone that rea.s.sured Maria, who clung tight to her hand, exclaiming, 'Don't go away;' and though for months past the bare proposal of encountering a stranger would have made Bertha almost speechless, she felt a soothing influence that enabled her to reply with scarcely a hesitation. On comparing notes, it was discovered that the girls had wandered so far away from their sister that they could only rejoin her by re-entering the town and mounting again; and their new friend, seeing how nervous and agitated both still were, offered to escort them, only giving notice to her own party what had become of her.

She had come up with some sketching acquaintance, and not drawing herself, had, like the sisters, been exploring among the rocks, when she had suddenly come on them in the distress which had so much shaken them, that, reluctant to lose sight of their guardian, they accompanied her till she saw one of her friends, and then waited while she ran down with the announcement. 'How ridiculous it is in me,' muttered Bertha to herself, discontentedly; 'she will think us wild creatures. I wish we were not both so tall.'

And embarra.s.sment, together with the desire to explain, deprived her so entirely of utterance, that Maria volunteered, 'Bertha always speaks so funnily since she was ill.' Rather a perplexing speech for the lady to hear; but instead of replying, she asked which was their hotel; and Bertha answering, she turned with a start of surprise and interest, as if to see their faces better, adding, 'I have not seen you at the _table d'hote_;' and under the strange influence of her voice and face, Bertha was able to answer, 'No. As Maria says, I have been very silly since my illness in the winter, and--and they have given way to me, and let me see no one.'

'But we shall see _you_; you are in our hotel,' cried Maria. 'Do come and let me show you all my Swiss costumes.'

'Thank you; if--' and she paused, perhaps a little perplexed by Maria; and Bertha added, in the most womanly voice that she could muster, 'My sister and Miss Charlecote will be very glad to see you--very much obliged to you.'

Then Maria, who was unusually demonstrative, put another question--

'Are you ill? Bertha says everybody here is ill. I hope you are not.'