Lady Lucy's secret

by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

Lucy took in her own little fingers the broad hand the doctor laid upon her head and kissed it.

"I love you dearly," she whispered. "You will pray for my dear father, and for me, too?"

"Indeed, I will," said the doctor; "and so will we all. Farewell, and be a good girl, and do not stir far from home while your good cousin is away. Home is the safest place for little maids, gentle or simple."

"I am going up to my room, Anne," said Lucy, as she entered the door. "Please to call me when my supper is ready."

"What has got into that child?" said Anne to herself, gazing after Lucy as she ascended the broad staircase. "She looks the very moral of my lord, her father. I never thought of it before."

And Anne, who, like others of her class, delighted in prophecies of evil, pursed up her mouth, and talked so mysteriously and dolefully in the kitchen, that the little scullion maid was not a little perplexed.

When Anne went up to call Lady Lucy to supper, she found her reading her Bible—her own mother's velvet-bound and golden-clasped Bible—which her father had given her before she went away.

"This Bible," he said, "cost your dear mother her home and friends, and many a tear besides; and yet it was the greatest treasure of her heart. Be sure you prize it as she did, and make it the rule of your life."

Afterwards Cousin Deborah told Lucy the outline of her mother's story. She had belonged to a Protestant family in the south of France, on the border of Italy; but her own father and mother dying when she was eight or nine years old, she had been adopted by an aunt. This aunt had abandoned the Protestant principles, for which so many of her ancestors had perished upon the wheel and at the stake, and had become a Roman Catholic of the strictest school. She had done her best to bring up the little Lucille in the same way. But Lucille always remembered, and secretly clung to, the faith she had learned at her dead mother's knee. Perhaps, too, the strictness and gloom of her aunt did not tend to make the young girl in love with her religion.

At any rate, when she was eighteen, she fell in with one of the Protestant preachers, who had been a friend of her parents; was instructed by him more fully in their faith, and more than once attended their secret meetings. And being finally threatened with lifelong imprisonment in a convent, she had joined herself to one of the families of the Huguenot refugees, who were leaving France by hundreds at that time. And, after many perils, arrived safely in London, where Lord Stanton, then a young soldier, met, fell in love with, and married her. This English Bible had been his first gift to his bride, and dearly did Lucy love it for her mother's sake. For her sake, too, she had read it every day since her father put it into her hands; but now she was studying it for her own.