Meantime, Lady Lucy was most warmly received at the parsonage, installed in the best room, and treated with all the care and kindness which Mrs. Burgess and her daughters had to bestow, till her father came to carry her home to Stanton Court, where he had engaged an elderly lady—a cousin of his mother—to take care of her. Lord Stanton stayed a few days with Lucy, and then went abroad once more, leaving his daughter to the care of Cousin Deborah Corbet.
[CHAPTER II.]
LUCY had been about five weeks under the charge of Cousin Deborah at the time our story begins,—weeks so quiet and happy, so free from care and fault-finding, that the little girl sometimes wondered whether she were living in the same world. Nothing seemed the same about her but Anne, who had come from the Grange to live at Stanton Court and attend upon Lady Lucy.
Cousin Deborah, for her part, would have preferred to do without Anne. She foresaw that Lucy would have formed undesirable and wrong habits under such a rule as that of Aunt Bernard, and she thought it would be more easy to break up these habits if the little girl had no one about her but such persons as she knew and could trust. But Anne's services had been too important to go unrewarded: she had lost her place from her devotion to Lady Lucy's interests, and she was devotedly attached to the child: so Cousin Deborah resolved to make the best of it.
It may easily be guessed that Anne was not at all unwilling to accompany Lady Lucy, or to exchange the close housekeeping of the Grange for the liberality of Stanton Court. Margery might have come, too, and both Lady Lucy and Anne begged her to do so; but Margery refused.
"I am not going to leave my old mistress, now that she is in trouble and disgrace," said she. "I shall stay and stand by her. She will find it hard to suit herself, with all these stories flying about the country. She is growing infirm in body and, I believe, in mind; and I will not leave her with no one about her whom she can trust but Hannah."
The stories to which Margery referred were exaggerated and distorted accounts of her mistress's treatment of Lady Lucy. The maids at the parsonage had gossiped, of course, as well as the milkmaid at the Grange. Every one in the village knew that Lady Lucy's father had found his daughter locked in an upper room alone, with nothing to eat but a crust of brown bread,—some said, not even that,—and had taken her away without seeing his sister or waiting for his child's clothes to be packed up. This was a fine nucleus for the story, which grew, like a snowball, every time it was turned over, till many people actually believed that Mrs. Bernard had gone deliberately to work to kill her niece by cruelty, that she might have the use of her property.
"I am sure it is no more than she deserves," said Anne, tossing her head.
"Perhaps so; but, Anne, if we come to talk of deserts, where should any of us be?"
"She has got Hannah," said Anne.