As I remember it now, I believe the ladies lived in perpetual expectation of being turned out on the world or shut up in convents of some other order; but they did not allow their fear to hinder them in the discharge of their duties, or what they believed to be such. How many times I have wished that these poor souls could have come under the influence of such preachers and teachers as we have had of late years in England. What a difference would the doctrines of free grace and salvation have made in their lives.
[CHAPTER II.]
EARLY RECOLLECTIONS.
I WAS born in England about the year 1728 as nearly as I can find out. My mother was first cousin to Lady Leighton, and married a gentleman of her own name, who for love of her, forsook his native county and bought a small estate not far from the Scottish border in Northumberland.
My mother had twins about the time that Lady Leighton died, and as only one of the babes lived, she was easily persuaded to give the vacant place to the little motherless Amabel, the daughter of her nearest and dearest friend.
Sir Julius loved his beautiful young wife, and after she was taken away, he could at first hardly endure the sight of her child. He had been left with a large fortune and an unencumbered estate by his father, who had been a prudent gentleman and a great man of business. But Sir Julius was as I fancy very unlike the old gentlemen in every respect. He liked living in London better than in Northumberland, and spending money better than saving it. Moreover he was a hot Jacobite and soon got into trouble with the existing Government by engaging in some of the numerous plots of the time.
It was in the same year that my father was killed by a fall from his horse while helping to rescue some poor creatures from a sudden inundation. It became needful for Sir Julius to go abroad and leave his affairs in the hands of certain family connections less loyal or more prudent than himself. Nothing would serve but he must take his daughter with him, and as my mother had lost her only ties to life in England, she was easily persuaded to go along. Sir Julius lived for a year or two in the neighborhood of Toulon on a small estate owned by the Marquis de Crequi, who was some sort of a relation. Then my mother died, and Sir Julius placed us two little children in the Abbey of St. Jean de Crequi, which was at that time in a somewhat more prosperous condition than I remember it afterward.
Sir Julius entered some foreign service for a while, and then his peace was made at home and he returned to England, where he married a very rich wife and had two or three children. But he allowed his daughter and myself, her foster-sister, to remain at the convent till we were all but grown up, remitting with more or less regularity money to pay for our board and education. Why he did so I don't pretend to know unless as I think probable he was as much afraid of his second wife as he was afterward of his third. Of course, I remember nothing of all this nor did I learn much of it till after our return to England.
As I said, my first distinct recollection is of tumbling into the fountain well and being fished out by mother Prudentia. But I used to have dim and fleeting visions of a very different home—of an old timbered house and a great apple orchard loaded with fruit, and a tall, bluff man holding me up to gather a golden mellow apple with my own hands. As to our journey and the events of our short residence in France, my mind is all a blank. I seem to myself to have waked up in the old abbey at a time when I was old enough to climb up the great stairway on my hands and knees and sometimes to be carried in arms, though I think that privilege oftener belonged to Amabel who was rather a delicate child, while I was as strong as a little donkey.