The Chevalier's daughter

by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

LONDON.

THE next day I went to Exeter, from which place we were to set out for London in a few days. I found Theo living in a noble house, with everything pleasant about her, and enjoying herself to the full. She had no fancy for the journey to London, and would, I believe, much have preferred going to the country rectory, whither Mr. Dean usually retired in summer. We rode out to see the place, and truly I did not wonder at her love for it—all about it was so beautiful. There were no gentlemen's houses very near, but my Lady Jemima, my lord's sister, lived, as I have said, in an old mansion which had once been a convent of gray nuns. The house stood on a rising ground, and was beautifully embosomed in very ancient timber and a part of this same wood reached even to the walls of the rectory itself.

We visited the little village school, taught by a charming old dame, and where Theo distributed buns, gingerbread, and comfits with a lavish hand. Then we went into the house, where all was in order, and where the old housekeeper and her blooming neat maids welcomed us with evident pleasure at seeing their mistress.

We also called upon my Lady Jemima, who was as great a contrast to my own Aunt Jem as could well be conceived. She was sitting at work among her family of maidens, who were all busy with their fingers, while one read aloud. There were six of them, all dressed alike in gray gowns and white caps with blue ribbons, and I must say they looked very bright and happy. Lady Jemima was a plain woman, with none of the family beauty of color, but she had a most sweet expression, at once benign and commanding. She sent away her young ladies to walk, and then sat down to talk with us.

"You have married off the last of your old family, have you not?" asked Theo.

"Yes, only a month ago, and the child hath done well, I think. Another has gone to be a governess in the family of a distant cousin of ours, a rich sugar refiner's wife in Bristol, and in one way or another, they are all scattered and doing well for themselves. But my house is nearly full again."

"Not quite full, I hope, for I have a petition to make for a poor maid, the eldest child of Mr. Brown, the vicar of Torton," said Theo. And she proceeded to unfold the matter, saying that the Curate was very poor, with a large family, and this daughter being lame, was not fit for service.

"Are they so very poor?" asked Lady Jemima.

"They are poorer than they need be, if the wife were a better manager," replied the dean's lady. "But she hath been a waiting-gentlewoman to my Lady Saville, and still sets herself up on her gentility, forsooth, cannot possibly work with her hands, and talks of how she hath come down in the world. The aunt, who is a good plain farmer's wife, with a small army of children, tells me that this maid's lameness hath come, she verily believes, from working beyond her strength to make up her mother's deficiencies. She is her father's greatest comfort, poor man, but he will willingly spare her for the chance of having her recover her health."

"Will you send him to see me?" asked Lady Jemima. "I would talk the matter over with him myself, for no disparagement to you, Theo," she added with a smile, "you are one of those softhearted people who think everybody ought to have everything, and as my means are limited, I must make a discrimination, and not use them to encourage idleness or improvidence."