Under these mingled impressions of truth and error they called to pay their respects to their pastor’s daughter.
From the village there came Mrs. and the Misses Leach, the doctor’s wife and daughters; Mrs. Drum, the lawyer’s mother, and the Misses Lesmore, the draper’s sisters, and several widows and maidens living on their annuities. From the country came Lady Nutt, of Nuttwood, the widow of a civil engineer who had been knighted for some special merit by the queen; the three Misses Frobisher, “ladies of a certain age,” co-heiresses of Frobisher Frowns, a queer and gloomy mansion on the moor, which stood against a bank crowned with dark evergreen trees that bent over the roof of the house, like towering brows on a human face—thence I suppose the quaint if not forbidding name.
These were all. Others of the county gentry belonging to that neighborhood were absentees.
Jennie as well as her mother was much pleased with the hearty, homely, cordial manners of these Yorkshire country people. But the better she liked the more she dreaded them!
“Oh, mamma!” she said, “I fear they cannot know my real position here! They cannot know that I am a forsaken wife! Why, yesterday old Lady Nutt patted my head and said:
“‘I can feel for you, my dear. I had a niece in the H. E. I. C.’s service, and she had to come home with her young children and leave them here with their grandmother while she went back to him. Do you intend to stay here with your child, or leave it here with your parents and join the captain in India?’
“Yes, mamma, in all innocence the dear old lady asked me that question! And my cheeks burned like fire as I answered her the truth and said, ‘I intend to stay here with my baby, my lady.’ She said, ‘That is right,’ and kissed me and went away before you came in.”
“She is a good old soul,” was Hetty’s only comment.
“Yes, mamma, but you have missed the point I wished to make. It is so embarrassing to have people call on me and make remarks that I must either correct by telling them plainly how I am situated, or else that I must pass unnoticed, as if they were true, and so, as it were, silently indorse a false view.”
“My dear, I don’t see how you can help yourself. You cannot blow a trumpet before you proclaiming to all and sundry the wickedness of your husband in deserting you, his lawful wife, and marrying, feloniously, another woman! You cannot even tell that to your visitors in confidence. It would not become you to do so.”