work! How well I remember the contriving that crozier upon it! How well it has worn! Sweet Honey must be in London; it was the sight she most grudged missing!’
So thought Lucilla Sandbrook as a cab conveyed her through the Whittingtonian intricacies.
Her residence with Mrs. Willis Beaumont was not a passage in her life on which she loved to dwell. Neither party had been well content with the other, though deference to Mrs. Prendergast had held them together. The lady herself was worthy and kind-hearted, but dull and tedious; and Lucilla, used to animation and intellect, had wearied excessively of the platitudes which were meant as friendly conversation, while her keen remarks and power of drollery and repartee were just sufficiently perceived to be dreaded and disliked. The children were like their mother, and were frightened and distressed by her quickness and unreasonable expectations. Their meek, demure heaviness and complacency, even at their sports, made her positively dislike them, all but one scapegrace boy, in favour with no one, and whom she liked more from perverseness and compassion than from any merits of his own. Lady Acton’s good offices gave the widow a tangible cause, such as was an absolute satisfaction, for her antipathy, and shook the implicit trust in Mrs. Prendergast’s recommendation that had hitherto overridden her private sentiments; yet still, habitual awe of her sister-in-law, and her own easiness and dread of change, left things in the same state until a crisis caused by a grand disturbance among the children. In the nice matter of meting out blame, mamma’s partiality and the children’s ungenerosity left an undue share upon the scapegrace; his indignant partisan fought his battles ‘not wisely but too well,’ lost temper, and uttered sarcastic home truths which startled and stung the lady into the request for which she could hardly have nerved herself in cooler moments, namely, that they might part.
This settled, each secretly felt that there was something to be regretted, and both equally wished that a new engagement should be made before the termination of the present should be made known at Southminster. For this purpose, every facility had been given for Miss Sandbrook’s coming to town personally to answer two ladies to whom she had been mentioned. A family in the neighbourhood had already been tried, but had declined her, and Mrs. Beaumont had shown her the note; ‘so stylish, such strange stories afloat.’ Lucilla felt it best to break upon new ground, and wounded and depressed, had yet resentment enough to bear her through boldly. She wished to inspect Owen’s child, and wrote to ask Mrs. Murrell to give her a bed for a couple of nights, venturing on this measure because, in the old woman’s monthly report, she had mentioned that Mr. Fulmort had gone abroad for a fortnight.
It had not been an exhilarating evening. Small children
were not much to Lucilla’s taste, and her nephew was not a flattering specimen. He had the whitened drawn-up appearance of a child who had spent most of his life in a London cellar, with a pinched little visage and preternatural-looking black eyes, a squeaky little fretful voice, and all the language he had yet acquired decidedly cockney. Moreover, he had the habits of a spoilt child, and that a vulgar one, and his grandmother expected his aunt to think him a prodigy. There was a vacant room where Lucilla passed as much of her time as she could without an assumption of superiority, but she was obliged to spend the evening in the small furniture-encumbered parlour, and hear by turns of her nephew’s traits of genius, of the merits of the preachers in Cat-alley, and the histories of the lodgers. The motherly Mrs. Murrell had invited any of the young men whose ‘hearts might be touched’ to attend her ‘simple family worship;’ and to Lucilla’s discomfiture and her triumph, a youth appeared in the evening, and the young lady had her doubts whether the expounding were the attraction.
It was a relief to quit the close, underground atmosphere even for a cab; and ‘an inspecting lady must be better than that old woman,’ thought poor Lucy, as, heartily weary of Mrs. Murrell’s tongue and her own graciousness, she rattled through the streets. Those long ranks of charity children renewed many an association of old. The festival which had been the annual event of Honor Charlecote’s youth, she had made the same to her children, and Cilla had not despised it till recently. Thoughts of better days, of home-feelings, of tenderness, began to soften her. She had spent nearly two years without the touch of a kindred hand, and for many months past had been learning what it was to be looked at by no loving eye. She was on her way to still greater strangers! No wonder her heart yearned to the gentle voice that she had once spurned, and well-nigh in spite of herself, she muttered,
‘Really I do think a kiss of poor Honor’s would do me good! I have a great mind to go to her when I come back from Kensington. If I have taken a situation she cannot suppose that I want anything from her. It would be very comfortable; I should hear of Owen! I will go! Even if she be not in town, I could talk to Mrs. Jones, and sit a quarter of an hour in the cedar room! It would be like meeting Owen; it would be rest and home!’
She felt quite happy and pleased with herself under this resolution, but it was late before she could put it in practice. The lady at Kensington rather started on entering the room where she had been waiting nearly an hour. ‘I thought—’ she said, apologetically, ‘Did my servant say Miss Sandbrook?’
Lucilla assented, and the lady, a little discomposed, asked a few questions, furtively surveying her all the time, seemed confused, then begged her to take some luncheon. It was so long since Mrs. Murrell’s not very tempting breakfast, that the