Stanch in his love of church and country, we, his daughters, were all three christened, and "brought up," as it is termed, in the Episcopal Church, and early taught devotion to its rites and ceremonies. Yet, had we chosen for ourselves, perhaps our different temperaments might, even in this thing, have asserted themselves, and we might have embraced sects as diverse as our tastes were several. I shall come to this third sister presently, of whom I make but passing mention here. She was our flower, our pearl, our little ewe-lamb—the loveliest and the last—and I must not trust myself to linger with her memory now, or I shall lose the thread of my story, and tangle it with digression.
With my Oriental blood there came strange, passionate affection for all things sharing it, unknown to colder organizations—an affection in whose very vitality were the seeds of suffering, in whose very strength was weakness, perhaps in whose very enjoyment, sorrow. I have said my mother died of an insidious and inscrutable malady, which baffled friend and physician, when I was five years old. She had been so long ill, so often alienated from her household for days together, that her death was a less terrible evil, less suddenly so, at least, than if each morning had found her at her board, each evening at the family hearth, and every hour, as would have been the case in health, occupied with her children.
My father's grief was stern, quiet, solitary; ours, unreasonable and noisy, but soon over as to manifestation. Yet I must have suffered more than I knew of, I think, for then occurred the first of those strange lethargies or seizures that afterward returned at very unequal intervals during my childhood and early youth, and which roused my father's fears about my life and intellect itself, and gave me into the hands of a physician for many years thereof, vigorous, and healthy, and intelligent otherwise as I felt, and seemed, and was.
It was soon after the first settling down of tribulation in our household to that flat and almost unendurable calm or level that succeeds affliction, when a void is felt rather than expressed, and when all outward observances return to their olden habit, as a car backs slowly from a switch to its accustomed grooves, that a new face appeared among us, destined to influence, in no slight degree, the happiness of all who composed the family of Reginald Monfort.
It was summer. The house in which we lived was partly finished in the rear by wide and extensive galleries above and below, shaded by movable jalousies; and, on the upper one of these, that on which our apartments opened, my father had caused a hammock to be swung, for the comfort and pleasure of his children. With one foot listlessly dragging on the floor of the portico so as to propel the hammock, and lying partly on my face while I soothed my wide-eyed doll to sleep, I lay swaying in childish fashion when I heard Evelyn's soft step beside me, accompanied by another, firmer, slower, but as gentle if not as light. I looked up: a sweet face was bending over me, framed in a simple cottage bonnet of white straw, and braids of shining brown hair.
The eyes, large, lustrous, tender, of deepest blue, with their black dilated pupils, I shall never forget as they first met my own, nor the slow, sad smile that seemed to entreat my affectionate acquaintance. The effect was immediate and electric. I sat up in the hammock, I stretched out my hands to receive the proffered greeting, and then remained silently, child-fashion, surveying the new-comer.
"Kiss me," she said, "little Miriam. Have they not told you of me? I am Constance Glen—soon to be your teacher."
"Then I think I shall learn," I made grave reply, putting away the thick curls from my eyes and fixing them once more steadily on the face of the new-comer. "Yes, I will kiss you, for you look good and pretty. Did my mother send you here?"
"She is a strange child, Miss Glen," I heard Evelyn whisper. "Don't mind her—she often asks such questions."
"Very natural and affecting ones," Miss Glen observed, quietly, and the tears sprang to her violet eyes, at which I wondered. Yet, understanding not her words, I remembered them for later comprehension; a habit of childhood too little appreciated or considered, I think, by older people.