“There are reasons why I do not care to talk of your mother’s family and it is quite as well that you remain in ignorance. Mrs. Hetherton was everything that a perfect lady should be. You must be satisfied with that, and never trouble me again about your mother’s antecedents.”
He had seemed very much excited, and there was a strange look on his face, as he walked the salon, which frightened Reinette a little; and still she persisted so far as to say:
“I am sure mother was an Englishwoman, by her picture.”
“Be satisfied then that you know so much, and don’t seek for more knowledge. Whatever her friends were, they are nothing to me; they can be nothing to you. So never mention them again.”
And she never did; but she almost worshiped the beautiful face, which had been painted on ivory in Paris when her mother was a bride and had rooms at the Hotel Meurice. It was a fair, lovely face, with hair of golden brown, and great tender eyes of lustrous blue, with a tinge of sadness in them, as there was also in the expression around the sweet mouth just breaking into a smile. The dress was of heavy creamy satin, with pearls upon the neck and arms, and on the wavy hair. A refined aristocratic face, Reinette thought it, and in spite of her father’s evident dislike of her mother’s friends, she never for an instant had thought of them as other than fully her equals in position and social standing. Probably there had been some quarrel which had resulted in lasting enmity, or her mother might have been the daughter of some nobleman, and eloped with the young American, thus incurring the life-long displeasure of her family. This last was Reinette’s pet theory, and she had more than once resolved that when she was her own mistress she would seek her mother’s friends, never doubting that she should find them fully equal to the Hethertons, who, her father said, had in their veins the best blood of the land.
Everything pertaining to her mother was guarded by Reinette with great fidelity, and in the box where her favorite treasures were hidden away was a long, bright tress of hair and a few faded flowers, tied together with a bit of blue ribbon, to which was attached a piece of paper, with the words, “My mother’s hair, cut from her head after she was dead, and some of the flowers she held in her hands when she lay in her coffin.”
Among Reinette’s books there was also an old copy of “The Lady of the Lake,” on the fly-leaf of which was written in a very pretty hand. “Margaret, From her sister Mary. Christmas, 18—.” This was the only link between herself and her mother’s family which Reinette possessed, and she built upon it a multitude of theories with regard to the Aunt Mary whom she meant some time to find, and whom she always saw clad in velvet, jewels, and old laces, with possibly a coronet on her brow.
Such were Reinette’s ideas of her mother’s friends, which her father had suffered her to cherish, only smiling faintly at some of her extravagant speculations, but never contradicting them. And now, in place of lords, and ladies, and English nobility, to have these people thrust upon her, this grandmother, and aunt, and cousin, with unmistakable marks of vulgarity stamped upon them, was too much, and for a time the proud, sensitive girl rebelled against it with all the fierceness of her nature, while, mingled with her bitter humiliation was a better and deeper feeling, which hurt her far more than the mortification of knowing that she was not what she had believed herself to be. Her father, whom she had so loved, and honored, and believed in, had not dealt fairly with her.
Why had he not told her the truth, especially after he knew they were coming to America, and that she must certainly know it some time?
“If he had told me, if he had said a kind word of them, I should have been prepared for it, and loved them, just because they were mother’s people. Oh, father, whatever your motive may have been, you did me a grievous wrong,” she said, and into her eyes there crept a look of resentment toward the father who had kept this secret from her.