“I scarcely know when they died,” she answered; “I know that I can remember nothing about them; the first thing I recollect is being with a lady, far down in Devonshire—a lady who took the charge of several little girls. I stayed with her till I was ten years old, and then I was sent to a fashionable school at Bayswater, and I stayed there till I was fifteen, and then I came here, and I’ve been here two years and a half. Mr. Monckton is my guardian, you know, and he says I am a very lucky girl, and will have plenty of money by-and-by; but what’s the use of money if one has no relations in all the wide world? and he tells me to attend to my education, and not to be frivolous, or care for dress and jewellery, but to try and become a good woman. He talks to me very seriously, and almost frightens me sometimes with his grave manner; but for all that, he’s very kind, and lets me have almost everything I ask him for. He’s tremendously rich himself, you know, though he’s only a professional man, and he lives at a beautiful place four miles from here, called Tolldale Priory. I used to ask him questions about papa and mamma, but he would never tell me anything. So now I never speak to him about them.”
She sighed as she finished speaking, and was silent for some few minutes; but she very quickly recovered her spirits, and conducted Eleanor to a pretty rustic chamber with a lattice window looking on to the lawn.
“Mrs. Darrell’s man is gone to fetch your luggage,” Miss Mason said, “so you must have my brushes and combs, please, for your hair, and then we’ll go down to tea.”
She led Eleanor into the adjoining apartment, where the dressing-table was littered with all manner of womanly frivolities, and here Miss Vane re-arranged her luxuriant golden-brown hair, which no longer was allowed to fall about her shoulders in rippling curls, but was drawn simply away from her forehead, and rolled in a knot at the back of her head. She was a woman now, and had begun the battle of life.
A pony-carriage drove up to the gate while Eleanor was standing at the glass by the open window, and Mrs. Darrell got out and walked across the lawn towards the house.
She was a tall woman, unusually tall for a woman, and she was dressed in black silk, which hung about her angular limbs in heavy, lustreless folds. Eleanor could see that her face was pale and her eyes black and flashing.
The two girls went down stairs hand-in-hand. Tea was prepared in the dining-room, a long wainscoted apartment, older than the rest of the house, and rather gloomy-looking. Three narrow windows upon one side of this room looked towards the shrubbery and grove at the back of the house, and the trunks of the trees looked gaunt and black in the spring twilight. A fire was burning upon the low hearth, and a maid-servant was lighting a lamp in the centre of the table as the two girls went in.
Mrs. Darrell welcomed her dependant very politely; but there was a harshness and a stiffness in her politeness which reminded Eleanor of her half-sister, Mrs. Bannister. The two women seemed to belong to the same school, Miss Vane thought.
The lamplight shone full upon Mrs. Darrell’s face, and Eleanor could see now that the face was a handsome one, though faded and careworn. The widow’s hair was grey, but her eyes retained the flashing brightness of youth. They were very dark and lustrous, but their expression was scarcely pleasant. There was too much of the hawk or eagle in their penetrating glance.
But Laura Mason did not seem at all afraid of her protectress.