Hope turned quickly round. A tall, pale girl stood behind, evidently endeavouring to assume a firmness and authority which she did not possess. Her deep mourning dress, and shadowy stooping figure, and singular paleness touched the girlish romance which lay dormant in the blythe spirit of Hope. Adelaide Fendie looked at the new governess hazily out of her dull blue eyes, and did not speak. The dyspeptic little tyrant Fred said “I won’t,” and the shrewish Victoria laughed.
Hope had learned the stranger’s name, and knew her own power over Adelaide when she chose to exert it.
“If you please, Miss Maxwell,” said the prompt young lady, “I’m Hope Oswald; and Adelaide was just coming in; and we’ll all go together.”
Whereupon Hope seized the arm of Adelaide, and brought her, docile and obedient, into the rear of the new governess.
A very little matter was enough to overset the composure of the orphan who held that unenviable place. Her eyes filled and her lip quivered; she had fancied it impossible that children could be anything but loveable, and in the early power and bitterness of her grief to have these petty indignities put upon her, overwhelmed her inexperienced spirit. So she went in with the elder girls, painfully repressing bitter tears, and with the gasp of young woe convulsively swelling in her breast, “to flee away, and be at rest.”
Mrs Fendie sat in her morning room, before a table covered with embroideries and patterns for the same. She was a tall, thin, chill woman of the genus clever, who had persevered so long in calling herself an excellent manager, and a person of very intellectual tastes, that public opinion had at length succumbed under the constant iteration, and with only the emphatic protest of John Brown, who in his own circle declared her “an evendown gowk wi’ a tongue like the happer of a mill,” Mrs Fendie was pronounced a very clever woman. The natural-born Fendies were all dull. The last head of the house had been fretted and chafed out of his easy life by the fatal cleverness of his yoke-fellow; and even she, their mother, had been quite unable to strike any sort of fire from the leaden natures of his children.
Beside Mrs Fendie, stretched in an easy chair, with a worked footstool supporting the worked slipper, with which her mother’s industry had endowed her, reclined the Reverend Mrs Heavieliegh, Mrs Fendie’s eldest daughter. She was like Adelaide in her soft, large, not uncomely features, and in the passive good humour of their expression; but Mrs Heavieliegh’s development of the family character was indolence, comfortable, lazy, luxurious repose; and in her gay-coloured ample draperies, and lounging attitude, and slumbrous face, she formed a good foil to the keen, sharp, steel-like mother, who worked indefatigably by her side. Mrs Heavieliegh had no admiration of work; she played with the long ears of the lap-dog on her knee, and was perfectly comfortable.
“How do you do, Hope Oswald?” said Mrs Fendie; “how’s your mamma? Sit down, children, I have something to say to you. Fred, don’t pull my frame; Victoria, be quiet. Sit down, Miss Maxwell, I wish particularly to address myself to you.”
Mrs Fendie arranged her work; she was copying a French lithograph like Maggie Irving, but she was copying it with the needle and not with the pencil, and cleared her voice oratorically. Lilias Maxwell with some apparent timidity took the chair pointed to her, and sat down to listen, the great tears gathering under her eyelids. Hope placed herself very near the new governess, in instinctive sympathy. She was not so “pretty-looking” as Adelaide had predicted. She was singularly pale, and had very dark hair, and large deep-blue eyes—blue eyes so dark that Hope, to whom blue eyes always suggested the slumbrous orbs of Adelaide Fendie, gave Miss Maxwell’s credit for being black. The dark mass of hair and the mourning dress made the young orphan look still more ethereal and shadowy. She was not like Hope’s model, Helen Buchanan; she was not nearly so life-like, and seemed to want altogether the nervous impulsive strength of Helen. Sudden flushes indeed did sometimes pass over her colourless cheek for a moment—flushes painfully deep and vivid; but there was nothing on this face like the constantly varying colour, which wavered on Helen’s cheek like the coming and going of breath. Nevertheless, there was a similarity in the age, and perhaps in the circumstances, which made Hope associate the stranger with her friend.
“You will understand, Miss Maxwell,” said Mrs Fendie, “that I consider it a very important charge which I, as a mother, give into your hands, when I delegate to you the care of these children. Such wonderful interests at stake! such extraordinary effects your humble teachings may help to produce! When I look at that boy,” and Mrs Fendie cast a sentimental glance at the dyspeptic Fred, “it quite overwhelms me. Oh, Fred! you wicked child, what have you been doing!”