"Give her what then?" said my Grandmother, wishing to humour her.
"Five poundsh, my dear, and a new shuit of clothes!"
The Aunt Jael that rose months later from her sick bed was not the demented wretch of that tipsy summer; rather the old one I knew, but with memory and will and voice and authority all weaker. The great domineerer had passed into her dotage; was but the valiant wreck of an autocrat.
CHAPTER XXIV: PROSPECTS
I left the Misses Primps' at the end of the summer term of 1865; I was in my eighteenth year.
My Grandmother told me that Lord Tawborough was looking around for "a good opening" for me. The interval of waiting was to be spent perfecting my French and music, and I was to begin Italian with Miss le Mesurier. Uncertainty sent my fancies and ambitions in disorderly riot through the whole gamut of possibilities and impossibilities; transported me to every county in turn, from Cornwall to Caithness, to every manner of dwelling, from palaces to pagodas. Sometimes I saw myself with a tyrant for taskmistress—Aunt Jael to the nth—sometimes employed by Fairy Godmother or Lady Bountiful.
Somewhere about New Year of 1866, Lord Tawborough wrote. He had obtained, he thought, an excellent opening for me, and would visit us at once to communicate it. This news brought me to a high pitch of excitement, which culminated on the day he came.
I was to go to France!—as companion rather than governess to a French girl a year or two younger than myself; to perfect her English, and talk English also with an elder sister who was about my own age. The two girls lived with their widowed mother in a big château in Normandy, though part of the year was spent in the family house in Paris. Lord Tawborough and his father before him had had friendly relations with the family, which was old, illustrious and wealthy. I should meet the best type of French people, and have the opportunity of perfecting my own French. I should be kept, of course, and receive a salary of four hundred francs (sixteen pounds) a year.