“I wonder where we shall display these this year?”
How little we knew! We had made the dresses alike, to the nicety of a bow, because we thought it ladylike that the costumes of sisters should be so. How far we were from guessing that they would not be worn together after all!
CHAPTER XXVIII.
I GO BACK TO THE VINE—AFTER SUNSET—A TWILIGHT EXISTENCE—SALAD OF MONK’S-HOOD—A ROYAL SUMMONS.
The few marked events of my life have generally happened on my birthdays. It was on my fifteenth birthday that Mr. Arkwright got a letter from one of my relations on the subject of my going to live with my great-grandfather and grandmother.
They were now very old. My great-grandfather was becoming “childish,” and the little dear duchess was old and frail for such a charge alone. They had no daughter. The religious question was laid aside. My most Protestant relatives thought my duty in the matter overwhelming, and with all my clinging of heart to the moor home I felt myself that it was so.
I don’t know how I got over the parting. I wandered hopelessly about familiar spots, and wished I had made sketches of them; but how could I know I had not all life before me? The time was short, and preparations had to be made. This kept us quiet. At the last, Jack put in all my luggage, and did everything for me. Then he kissed me, and said, “God bless you, Margery,” and “linking” Eleanor by force, led her away and comforted her like the good, dear boy he is. Clement drove me so recklessly down the steep hill, and over the stones, that the momentary expectation of an upset dried my tears, and I did not see much of the villagers’ kind and too touching farewells.
And so to the bleak station again, and the familiar old porter, whom fate seems to leave long enough at his post, and on through the whirling railway panorama, by which one passes to so much joy and so much sorrow—and then I was at The Vine once more.
I wonder if I am like my great-grandmother in her youth? Some people (Elspeth among them) declare that it is so; and others that I am like my poor mother. I suppose I have some Vandaleur features, from an eerie little incident which befell me on the threshold of The Vine—an appropriate beginning to a life that always felt like a weird, shadowy dream.