"How will you warrant it? Every adventurer in London knows that you made a hundred thousand the other day in the South Sea Bubble, and that you had made a handsome fortune on 'Change long before that great coup, dabbling first in one stock, now in another; and they know that you have an only child, like Shylock's Jessica. Do you suppose there will be no Lorenzo to hunt after your daughter and your ducats? Perhaps among those penniless wights there may be some who have been ruined by the South Sea scheme, and who will bear no love to you who sold your stock when the madness was at its height, and when every hundred-pound share realised over a thousand to the speculator who was clever enough to profit by the craziness of the mob."
"Lorenzo shall have no chance with my daughter."
"Ay, so long as she is guarded from crafty go-betweens; but admit a governess and a fine Italian music-master, and look out for rope-ladders and post-chaises. Why cannot I teach Rena? I am a better musician than many of your Signors, and I can read and write English and French as well as any chit of a governess you can hire."
"No," answered Bosworth sternly, "that is out of the question. I will not have my dead wife's daughter taught by you."
Barbara looked at him for a moment or two, white with fury; and then she burst into a mocking laugh.
"Your dead wife's daughter! O, that is her new name, is it? Your wife's daughter. It is well you should throw your wife's name in my face—the name I once had."
"Never by any legal right, though you might have borne that name in serious earnest, my brimstone beauty, had you kept a little tighter rein on that diabolical temper of yours. Pshaw! why should we quarrel about the past? It is a sealed book for both of us. Get a room ready against this day week, Mrs. Layburne. I shall write to my sister-in-law, Lady Tredgold, to find me a governess for my daughter."
There was a certain look in Roland Bosworth's countenance which Mrs. Layburne knew meant the irrevocable. She subsided into her position of obedient housekeeper, she who had once been sovereign ruler of this man's life. It was so long ago, that golden age of beauty and power, when Barbara Layburne's singing and Barbara Layburne's face were the rage at the theatre in the Haymarket, where she had sung in English opera, and for one brief season had been almost as much admired and talked about as La Faustina or Cuzzoni were in later years. She looked back across the mist of years, and wondered if she were verily the same woman at whose feet lovers had been sighing when the century was young. The gulf betwixt youth and age, betwixt loveliness and gray hairs, is such a tremendous abyss, that it is not strange if a woman should half doubt her own identity, looking across that terrible ravine and seeing the vision of her past existence on the other side. No two women living could be more different than that woman of the past and this woman of the present.
Lady Tredgold was an energetic personage who lived at Bath for the greater part of the year, gambled moderately, and contrived to support a numerous family upon a small income, which her husband, a staunch Walpolian, had improved by his senatorial opportunities. She had seen very little of her sister's husband since his wife's death, Mr. Bosworth having done his uttermost to keep his wife's relations at a distance. She felt flattered at his application, and lost no time in providing a governess for her niece, in the person of an elderly Frenchwoman, small, shrivelled, and slightly lame, who had taught her ladyship's four daughters, and prepared her three sons for Eton. The opportunity thus afforded provided a home for Mademoiselle Latour, and saved Lord Tredgold the pension which duty would have constrained him to provide for the superannuated governess.
Rena was at first inclined to resent the introduction of a stranger into her life, with authority to control her movements; but she found Mademoiselle so thoroughly lovable and sympathetic, that her young heart soon found room for a new affection. Lessons were made light and easy by the experienced teacher, much instruction was imparted by way of amusement, the pupil gaining knowledge unconsciously; nor was her liberty severely curtailed. She still roved at will in the woodland wilderness which was only in name a park, and in summertime her studies were for the most part performed in the garden, where Mademoiselle had a favourite seat in the shadow of a clipped yew hedge, a massive wall of dense greenery ten feet high, and her rustic table on which writing and drawing were managed in despite of all the summer insects that buzz in the meridian sun. Mademoiselle was too lame to accompany her pupil in her wanderings, but it was a point of honour with Rena not to go beyond the park-fence, however temptingly those further wildernesses of pine and larch to the east, or the undulating common-land to the south, might beckon to a young explorer.