Under these circumstances, where any other young girl might have grown languid and sorrowful, Sybil became excitable and violent. She had always had the fiery temper of her race, but it had very seldom been kindled by a breath of provocation. Now, however, it frequently broke out without the slightest apparent cause. No one in the house could account for this accession of ill-temper—not her anxious father, nor Miss Tabitha Winterose, the housekeeper, not Joseph Joy, the house steward, nor any of the maids or men-servants under them.
“She’s possessed of the devil,” said Miss Winterose, to her confidant, the house steward.
“That’s nothing new. All the Berners is possessed of that possession. It’s entailed family property, and can’t be got rid of,” grimly responded Joe.
“Something has crossed her; something has crossed her very much,” muttered her old father to himself, as he sat alone in his arm-chair in the warm chimney-corner of his favorite sitting-room.
Yes, indeed, everything crossed her. She was unhappy for the first time in her life, and she thought it was clearly the duty of her father or some other one of her slaves to make her happy. She was kept waiting, and it was everybody’s fault, and everybody should be made to suffer for it. It was no use to reason with Sybil Berners. One might as well have reasoned with a conflagration.
It was about this time, too, that her aged father began to feel symptoms that warned him of the approach of that sudden death by congestion of the brain, which had terminated the existence of so many of his ancestors.
More than ever he desired to see his motherless daughter well married before he should be called away from her. So, one evening, he sent for Sybil to come into his sitting-room, and when she obeyed his summons, and came and sat down on a low ottoman beside his arm-chair, he said, laying his hand lovingly on her black, curly head:
“My darling, I am very old, and may be taken from you any day, any hour, and I would like to see you well married before I go.”
“Dear father, don’t talk so. You may live twenty years yet,” answered the daughter, with a blending of affectionate solicitude and angry impatience in her tones and looks, for Sybil was very fond of the old man, and also very intolerant of unpleasant subjects.
“Well, well, my dear, since you prefer it, I will live twenty years longer to please you—if I can. But whether I live or die, my daughter, I wish to see you well married.”