[CHAPTER I.]
At School in London.
Two years have gone by, and it is June again.
A good, substantial house in one of the western suburbs of the metropolis--Kensington. By the well-rubbed brass plate on the iron gate of the garden, and the lady's name on it--"Miss Jupp"--it may be taken for a boarding-school. In fact, it is one: a small select school (as so many schools proclaim themselves now; but this really is such); and, kept by Miss Jupp, once of Katterley. That is, by Miss Jupp and two of her sisters, but she wisely calls it by her own name singly, avoiding the ugly style of the plural "Miss Jupp's establishment."
Fortune changes with a great many of us; every day, every hour of our lives, some are going up, others down. When death removed old Mr. Jupp (an event that occurred almost close upon poor Mrs. Lake's), then his daughters found that they had not enough to get along in the world. Wisely taking time and circumstances by the forelock, the three elder ones, Mary, Margaret, and Emma, removed to London, took a good house at Kensington, and by the help of influential friends very soon had pupils in it. Dorothy and Rose were married; Louisa remained at Katterley with her widowed mother. They professed to take ten pupils only: once or twice the number had been increased to twelve; the terms were high, but the teaching was good, and the arrangements were really first-class. It was with the Miss Jupps that Mary Anne Thornycroft had been placed. And she did not run away from them.
Quite the contrary. The summer holidays have just set in, and she is to go home for them; as she did the previous midsummer; but she is expressing a half wish, now as she stands before Miss Margaret Jupp, that she could spend them where she is, in London. Long and long ago has she grown reconciled to the regularity of a school life, and to regard Miss Jupp's as a second and happy home. She spent the first Christmas holidays with them; the second Christmas (last) at Cheltenham with her stepmother; she and her brother Cyril.
Lady Ellis (retaining still the name) is in very ill health now. Almost simultaneously with quitting the Red Court after her marriage, a grave inward disorder manifested itself. Symptoms of it indeed had been upon her for some time, even before leaving India; but--as is the case with many other symptoms--they had been entirely disregarded, their grave nature unsuspected. Instead of leading a gay life at the gay inland watering-place, flaunting her charms and her fashion in the eyes of other sojourners, Lady Ellis found herself compelled to live a very quiet one. She has a small villa, an establishment of two servants only; and she does not wish for more. In heart, in nature, she is growing altered, and the refining, holy influence that very often--God be praised!--changes the whole heart and spirit with a change which is not of this world, is coming over her. Two visits only has she paid to the Red Court Farm, staying about six weeks each time, and Mr. Thornycroft goes to Cheltenham two or three times a year. Miss Thornycroft and her stepmother are civil to each other now, not to say friendly; and when she invited the young lady and her brother Cyril for the holidays last Christmas, they went. The previous midsummer they had spent together at Coastdown, it having been one of the periods of my lady's two visits. Fortune had contrived well for Lady Ellis, and her marriage with the wealthy master of the Red Court Farm enabled her to enjoy every substantial comfort in her hour of need.
Two other young ladies connected in a degree with this history are at Miss Jupp's this evening; the rest of the pupils have left. One of the two we have met before, one not. They are in the room now, and you may look at them. All three, including Miss Thornycroft, are about the same age--between eighteen and nineteen. She, Mary Anne, is the same tall, stately, fair, handsome, and (it must be owned) haughty girl that you knew before; the fine face is resolute as ever, the cold blue eyes as honest and uncompromising. She had been allowed to dress as expensively at Miss Jupp's as her inclination leads: to-day she wears a rich pale-blue silk; blue ribbons are falling from her fair hair. She is standing doing nothing: but sitting in a chair by her side, toying with a bit of fancy-work, is a plain, dark, merry-looking girl in a good useful nut-brown silk, Susan Hunter. She is the sister of Robert Hunter, several years his junior, and has been sent up from Yorkshire by her aunt, with whom she lives, to have two years of "finish" at a London school. Accident--not their having once known something of her brother--led to the school fixed on being Miss Jupp's. And now for the last.
In a grey alpaca dress, trimmed with a little ribbon velvet of the same hue, her head bent patiently over a pile of drawings that she is touching up, sits the third. A very different footing in the school, hers, from that of the other two; they pay the high, full terms; she pays nothing, but works out her board with industry. Have you forgotten that pale, gentle face, one of the sweetest both in feature and expression ever looked upon, with the fine silky chestnut hair modestly braided round it, and the soft brown eyes that take all the best feelings of a genuine heart by storm? The weary look telling of incessant industry, the pile of work that she does not look up from, the cheap holiday-dress (her best) costing little, all proclaim sufficiently her dependent position in the house--a slight, graceful girl of middle height, with a sort of drooping look in her figure, as if she were, and had been all her life, in the habit of being pushed into the background?
It is Anna Chester. Her life since we saw her has been like that of a dray horse. Mrs. Chester placed her at an inferior school as pupil-teacher, where she had many kinds of things to do, and the mistress's own children to take care of in the holidays. For a year and a half she stayed at it, doing her best patiently, and then the Miss Jupps took her. She has to work very much still, and her health is failing. Captain and Mrs. Copp have invited her to Coastdown for a change, and she goes down to-morrow with Miss Thornycroft. Miss Hunter spends the holidays at school.