Brooke's Daughter: A Novel

by Adeline Sergeant

The girl whose departure from the convent school was thus regretted was known amongst her English friends as Lesley Brooke. French lips, unaccustomed to a name like Lesley, had changed it into Lisa; but Lesley loved her own name, which was a heritage in her family, and had been handed down to her from her grandmother. She was always glad to hear it from friendly English lips. She was nineteen now, and had stayed with the sisters an unusually long time without exactly knowing why. Family circumstances, she was told, had hitherto prevented her mother from taking her to an English home. But now the current of her life was to be changed. She was to leave Paris: she was, she believed, even to leave France. Her mother had written that she was to go to London, and that she (Lady Alice Brooke) would come for her, in company with Lesley's grandfather, Lord Courtleroy, with whom she had been traveling abroad for some time past.

Lesley was overjoyed by the news. She had lately come to suspect something strange, something abnormal, in her own position. She had remained at school when other girls went to their homes: she never had been able to answer questions respecting her relations and their belongings. Her mother, indeed, she knew; for she sometimes spent a portion of the holidays with Lady Alice at a quiet watering-place in France or Italy. And her mother was all that could be desired. Gentle, refined, beautiful, with a slight shade of melancholy which only made her delicate face more attractive—at least in Lesley's eyes—Lady Alice Brooke gained love and admiration whithersoever she went. But she never spoke of her husband. Lesley had gradually learned that she must not mention his name. In her younger days she had been wont to ask questions about her unknown father. Was he dead?—was he in another country?—why had she never seen him? She soon found that these questions were gently but decidedly checked. Her mother did not decline in so many words to answer them, but she set them aside. Only once, when Lesley was fifteen, and made some timid, wistful reference to the father whom she had never known, did Lady Alice make her a formal answer.

"I will tell you all about your father when you are old enough to hear," she said. "Until then, Lesley, I had rather that you did not talk of him."

Lesley shrank into herself abashed, and never mentioned his name again.

All the same, as she grew older, her fancy played about this unknown father, as the fancy of young girls always plays about a mystery. Had he committed some crime?

Had he disgraced himself and his family that his name might not be breathed in Lady Alice's ear? But she could not believe that her good, beautiful mother would ever have loved and married a wicked man!—such was the phrase that she, in her girlish innocence and ignorance, used to herself. As to scandal and tittle-tattle, none of it reached the seclusion of her convent-home, or was allowed to sully her fair mind. And it was impossible for her to connect the idea of folly, guilt, or shame with the pure, sweet face of her mother, or the stately pride and dignity of her mother's father, the Earl of Courtleroy. There was evidently a mystery; but she was sure of one thing, that it was a mystery without disgrace.

And now, as she stood waiting on the stone steps, her face flushed a little, and her eyes filled at the thought that she would now, perhaps, be allowed to hear the story of her parents' lives. For she knew that she was going to leave the convent, and it had been vaguely hinted by Lady Alice in a recent letter that on leaving the convent Lesley must be prepared for a great surprise.

Lesley looked over the silent, sweet-scented garden, and half-sighed, half-smiled, to think that she should leave it so soon, and perhaps for ever. But she was excited rather than sad, and when one of the sisters appeared at the door of the study, or salle d'étude, Lesley turned towards her with a quick, eager gesture, which not all the training to which she had been subjected since her childhood would have availed to suppress.

"Oh, sister, tell me, has she come?"

The sister was a tall, spare woman, with a thin face and great dark eyes, with eyelids slightly reddened, as though by long weeping or sleeplessness. It was an austere face, but its severity softened into actual sweetness as she smiled at her pupil's eagerness.