“OH no! my dear young lady, no no; you must not be so easily discouraged. Our little friend is very fond of you, and everybody likes you. Come! you must try and put up with us a little longer. You must get back your pretty colour and throw off this nasty little fever. The will has a great deal to do with it, hasn’t it, Darrell? Come, Miss Hester! You must not make your mamma think we have been unkind to you; that would never do,” the kind old clergyman said.
“That is what I am always telling her,” said Miss Hofland. “She is too old, you know, to cry after her mother; and I tell her I used to envy the girls that had something to cry for, for I never had any mother. I might have cried my eyes out, and it wouldn’t have done me any good.”
“Dear, dear!” said the old Rector, looking at the governess with a mixture of wonder and alarm, a momentary tribute to her cleverness in getting into the world by some unknown way; and then he returned to Hetty, patting her affectionately upon the shoulder. “She’s not too old for anything,” he said soothingly. “She’s too young for anything, and never was away from her dear mother before: I feel sure she never knew what it was——”
“My dear! before the Rector and Mr. Darrell!” cried Miss Hofland. “You ought to have a little proper pride.”
For Hetty, hearing all these allusions to her mother and the talk that went on over her, and being very weak and in a paroxysm of excited feeling, had given way to a tempest of tears.
“Let her cry,” said the kind old Rector, still going on patting her with an almost mesmeric touch. “It must get vent, you know, and better here than when she is alone. Just leave her to me a little, and she will come round. You know, my dear young lady, if it should fall to your lot in this world to get your own living, as many a nice, good girl has to do, there are always difficulties to be got over at first. It’s not like home. Though you put ever so good a face upon it, it’s not like home. When you get used to it, you take the bitter with the sweet. But I have often seen at the beginning that there was a little crisis, and it was touch and go whether the poor little young heart could face the lot or not.”
“Oh yes,” cried Hetty convulsively; “it is not that; it’s only that I’m feeling—ill; it is not that I am—silly: indeed, indeed!” the poor child cried, struggling to speak steadily.
“It is only this, that she is feverish, and her nerves have received a shock,” said the young doctor. “Now that the days are brightening, and she can get out in the open air——”
The little old clergyman nodded his head and went on, “I understand all that. But all the same there’s this little crisis which has to be got over. I daresay, my dear, that Miss Hofland had it too, though she tells us that she never had what most people have. I was once a tutor in my young days, and I felt it, though I was a man. There are particular qualities that are wanted for this dependent sort of life. We are all more or less dependents here,” he said, looking round benevolently upon the group about him. The speech was very well meant, but it was not very well received: the young doctor made a hasty step apart, as if to separate himself from the others, while Miss Hofland cried, “Oh, Mr. Rector!” with suppressed indignation, “I do not consider myself a dependent. I have accepted a position for a year, and so long as I do the duties I’ve undertaken, I hope I’m as independent as any one. I don’t mix myself up with the family at all,” Miss Hofland said.
“Well, my dear young lady,” said the old clergyman, “I am, if nobody else is: for though I am called the Rector by most people, and though I have been here for a great number of years, I am only here, after all, as locum tenens, which is a name you will no doubt have heard, as a clergyman’s daughter; that means, you know, that I am here enjoying all my little comforts at the will and pleasure of somebody else. He might send me away to-morrow, or at least in three months’ time: or he might die. He has been expected to die a great many times. I think sometimes he never will. He’s an old, old fellow, much older that I am, and I, though I am an old man, am quite dependent upon him, so, you see, I know what I am talking about.”