Mr. Monckton scarcely spoke to his companion half-a-dozen times during the brief journey to Slough. He sat with a newspaper before him, but Eleanor noticed that he never turned its leaves, and once, when she caught a glimpse of the lawyer’s face, she saw that it wore the same gloomy and abstracted expression that she had observed upon it as Mr. Monckton stood in the window of the waiting-room.
“He must be very fond of his ward,” she thought, “or he could never be so sorry because she has no mother. I thought lawyers were hard, cruel men, who cared for nothing in the world. I always used to fancy my sister Hortensia ought to have been a lawyer.”
By-and-by, as they drew very near to the station, Mr. Monckton dropped his newspaper with another sigh, and turning to Eleanor, said, in a low, confidential voice:
“I hope you will be very good to Laura Mason, Miss Vincent. Remember that she stands quite alone in the world: and that however friendless, however desolate you may be—I say this because you tell me you are an orphan—you can never be so friendless or so desolate as she is.”
CHAPTER XIII.
HAZLEWOOD.
A phaeton and pair was in waiting for Mr. Monckton outside the Slough station. The vehicle was very plain, but had a certain quiet elegance of its own, and the horses had been sold at Tattersall’s for something over five hundred pounds.
Eleanor Vane’s spirits rose in spite of herself as she sat by the lawyer’s side, driving at a rapid rate through the pretty pastoral country. They crossed the river almost immediately after leaving Slough, and dashed into Berkshire. They skirted Windsor Park and Forest, leaving the black outline of the castle keep behind them; and then turned into a quiet country road, where the green banks were dotted by clumps of early primroses, and the white-thorns were bursting into flower.
Eleanor looked rapturously at all this rural beauty. She was a Cockney, poor child, and her experience of the country was confined to rambles in Greenwich Park, or on Richmond Terrace; happy rambles with her father, prior to expensive dinners at the Crown and Sceptre, or the Star and Garter, as the case might be.
But the country, the genuine country, the long roads and patches of common, the glimpses of wood and water, the great deserts of arable land, the scattered farm-houses, and noisy farm-yards; all these were strange and new to her, and her soul expanded in the unfamiliar atmosphere.
If that drive could have lasted for ever, it would have been very delightful; but she knew that those splendid chestnut horses were carrying her at a terrible rate to her new home. Her new home! What right had she to call Hazlewood by that name? She was not going home. She was going to her first situation.