Ethel left her breakfast untasted and went out of the room: she felt that she could no longer restrain her tears. "My father!" she exclaimed, while a passionate burst of weeping choked her utterance, "my only friend! why, why did you leave me? Why, most cruel, desert your poor orphan child? Gracious God! to what am I reserved! I must not see my mother—a name so dear, so sweet, is for me a curse and a misery! O my father, why did you desert me!"
Her calm reflections were not less bitter; she did not suffer her thoughts to wander to Villiers, or rather the loss of her father was still so much the first grief of her heart, that on any new sorrow, it was to this she recurred with agony. The form of her youthful mother also flitted before her; and she asked herself, "Can she be so wicked?" Lord Lodore had never uttered her name; it was not until his death had put the fatal seal on all things, that she heard a garbled exaggerated statement from her aunt, over whose benevolent features a kind of sacred horror mantled, whenever she was mentioned. The will of Lord Lodore, and the stern injunction it contained, that the mother and daughter should never meet, satisfied Ethel of the truth of all that her aunt said; so that educated to obedience and deep reverence for the only parent she had ever known, she recoiled with terror from transgressing his commands, and holding communication with the cause of all his ills. Still it was hard, and very, very sad; nor did she cease from lamenting her fate, till Villiers's horse was heard in the street, and his knock at the door; then she tried to compose herself. "He will surely come to us at Longfield," she thought; "Longfield will be so very stupid after London."
After London! Poor Ethel! she had lived in London as in a desert; but lately it had appeared to her a city of bliss, and all places else the abode of gloom and melancholy. Villiers was shocked at the appearance of sorrow which shadowed her face; and, for a moment, thought that the rencounter with her mother was the sole occasion of the tears, whose traces he plainly discerned. His address was full of sympathetic kindness;—but when she said, "We return to-morrow to Essex—will you come to see us at Longfield?"—his soothing tones were exchanged for those of surprise and vexation.
"Longfield!—impossible! Why?"
"My aunt has determined on it. She thinks me recovered; and so, indeed, I am."
"But are you to be entombed at Longfield, except when dying? If so, do, pray, be ill again directly! But this must not be. Dear Mrs. Fitzhenry," he continued, as she came in, "I will not hear of your going to Longfield. Look; the very idea has already thrown Miss Fitzhenry into a consumption;—you will kill her. Indeed you must not think of it."
"We shall all die, if we stay in town," said Mrs. Elizabeth, with perplexity at her niece's evident suffering.
"Then why stay in town?" asked Villiers.
"You just now said, that we ought not to return to Longfield," answered the lady; "and I am sure if Ethel is to look so ill and wretched, I don't know what I am to do."
"But there are many places in the world besides either London or Longfield. You were charmed with Richmond the other day: there are plenty of houses to be had there; nothing can be prettier or more quiet."