The Greatest Heiress in England

by Mrs. Oliphant

“There is no saying, if you consult me a great deal, and give me a great many interesting subjects to think about how long I may linger on my way.”

“Oh, as for that!” said Lucy, “there is one thing—very interesting; but then I am not sure if I should tell it to any one, though it would be a great, a very great comfort. I tried to tell Lady Randolph once, and ask her—and I have wanted so much to tell you—to ask you—”

“Well, I am a sort of an uncle, you know; that was the relationship we decided upon,” Sir Thomas said.

Lucy did not say anything. She laughed, looking at him with a very winning confidence and trust in her eyes. They were quite unabashed in their modest gaze, conscious of no timidity, but there was a gentle affection in them which touched him. However, they were now drawing very near Farafield, and even her composed heart began to beat. She called Jock, very reluctant to be roused from his book, to look at the church-tower, the spire of the town hall, the big roofs of the market. “I don’t want to see them,” Jock said; all he wanted was his story. Perhaps it was her story that made Lucy so animated, one not yet written in any book.

Sir Thomas had intended to take Lucy home, to see her in her old-new habitation, and make himself acquainted with her surroundings; and to this end he had telegraphed to his servants to send a carriage to meet the train. But Sir Thomas had formed no idea in his mind of the real aspect of the other side of Lucy’s life; and it had not occurred to him that the people with whom she was going to stay had a right to guide her, equal to that which his aunt exercised. It was a shock to him to see that respectable couple who stood on the very edge of the station waiting for the train, and moved along by its side, panting yet beaming, as it gradually came to a standstill. “Welcome back, my darlings! welcome home, Lucy and Jock!” the woman said. She had not the least pretension to the title of lady. She was enveloped in a large shawl, though it was summer, and she was red and hot. She seized Lucy in her arms, pushing him away as he helped the girl out of the carriage. “Oh, my pet! we have been counting the days, Ford and I; and a’n’t you thankful to get home after being banished among strangers?” Sir Thomas was confounded. He had thought Lucy was to be pitied for the fantastic arrangement which transferred her from his aunt’s house to the care of the old servants, or poor relations, where her position and surroundings would be so different; but the suggestion that she had been banished among strangers took him altogether by surprise. He had been about to take Lucy to the carriage which was waiting; but in a moment she was separated from him, surrounded by these strange people, and drawn in the midst of them toward a fly which was standing near. It was a curious lesson for Sir Tom. He stood aside and looked on while she was taken out of his hands and deposited in the shabbier vehicle, with a sense of the ludicrous which struggled with a less agreeable feeling. There was another group on the platform to whom Lucy’s arrival was very interesting. This was the Rushton family, the lawyer himself, with his wife on his arm, and a tall youth, clad in a light summer suit, with his hands in his pockets, who lounged up and down the railway station after his parents, looking very much out of place, and somewhat ashamed of himself. Mrs. Rushton dashed boldly in, into the midst of the salutations of the Fords. “I must say a word to Lucy,” she cried. “We have just come in for a moment to welcome you home. Here, is your guardian, Lucy, and Raymond, your old playfellow.” It was all that Sir Tom could do not to laugh out. But the laugh was not pleasurable. He thought that anything more artless than this presentation of the old playfellow at the very earliest moment could not be; but yet what was he himself doing, and what were his inducements to give so much time and attention to this little girl? It was like a scene in the theater, but so much more dramatic than scenes in the theater often are. Lucy, in the midst, so eagerly secured by Mrs. Ford, so effusively embraced by the other lady, the leader of the opposition forces; while old Ford stood jealously on one side, and Mr. Rushton, with his hand held out, looked genial and affectionate on the other. The Fords were gloomy, concentrating their whole attention on the opposing band, whereas the Rushtons, who were the assailants, were directing all their smiles and caresses to Lucy, ignoring her relations. “Ray— Ray— I know you are dying to shake hands with Lucy—come quick and say, how d’ye do. There is no time for any more just now; but I felt I must come just to give you a kiss, and bid you welcome,” said Mrs. Rushton. The lawyer for his part, shook a finger at her. “Fine stories Chervil has had to tell about you, my young lady,” he said.

“Lucy,” cried Mrs. Ford in sharp tones, “the fly is waiting, and I am ready to drop. Whoever wishes to see you can come and see you at the Terrace.”

As for Lucy herself, she was so anxious to be civil to everybody, and so unaccustomed to the conflict that had thus suddenly sprung up around her, that she could not tell what to do. She looked round wistfully toward Sir Tom, who, for his part, stood quite outside the immediate circle round her, smiling to himself with that quick perception of the “fun” of the situation, which was, Lucy thought with vexation, the chief thing he thought of. She felt wounded that he should laugh at her; but then he was always laughing. Little Jock, on the other side, was a spectator too; but a scene has a very different aspect according as you look upon it from above or from below. Jock was low down among the feet of all these people. Mrs. Rushton nearly brushed him away with her ample gown; Ray all but knocked him down as he came forward sheepishly to shake hands with Lucy. There was something savage in the energy with which little Jock clutched at his sister’s dress. “I say, can’t they let us alone? I want to get home— I want to get home,” cried the little fellow. Nobody took the slightest notice of little Jock. Sir Tom, in the distance, laughed more and more in his mustache, but ruefully. He came forward at last and lifted Jock out from among the other people’s legs. “Come and stand here with me, old fellow; you and I are left out in the cold,” said Sir Tom. The tall man and the tiny boy stood out of the crowd and watched while Lucy was hustled into the fly, Sir Tom laughing, Jock alarmed and gloomy. “She’s going away without me,” Jock said with a naïf consternation. Sir Thomas laughed. “Your day and mine is over, old man,” he said.

But Jock at least was not to be forgotten. “Jock, Jock! where are you?” Lucy cried, anxiously looking out. The child pulled his hand out of Sir Tom’s and rushed away; then the whole party were packed inside the fly, Ford with his knees up to his chin bolt upright, Mrs. Ford sunk back into a corner, loosening her bonnet-strings, and “worrited” beyond all description, while Mrs. Rushton stood kissing her hand on the platform. “If you please, Sir Thomas, what am I to do?” said a troubled voice as he looked after them. Then Sir Tom laughed out. It was Lucy’s maid, who had been left behind with a number of small matters. He put her into the carriage with secret glee, and sent her off after her mistress. Old Trevor himself could not have made a more grotesque contrast between the old life and the new; how the old man would have chuckled had he seen it! the great heiress shut up in the close fly—the somewhat frightened maid ensconced in the luxurious corner of the open carriage glittering along with a pair of fine horses, and all the prance and dance with which the coachman of a county family thinks it right to maintain the credit of his house in a country town—following the dustiest and stuffiest of flies. This was carrying out his principles on their broadest basis. Sir Thomas chuckled too; it was a piece of malice after his own heart. “If that’s so, let’s show fight,” he said to himself.

CHAPTER XXIX.
THE TERRACE.

Four persons in a fly on a hot August day, one of them large, and warm, and “worrited,” another very tall, with knees up to his chin, do not make a very agreeable party. Lucy, unaccustomed to traveling, had the whirl of the railway still in her head, and its dust oppressing her lungs and spirits; and she had the sensation of rush, and hurry, and crowding, which was peculiarly disagreeable to her orderly mind, and the uncomfortable consciousness of having abandoned her kind companion without a word. Indeed she seemed suddenly to have ceased to be a free agent. She had lost her independence, and even her personality, and had been carried off like a bale of goods, like a boy long-lost and suddenly found again, but no way consulted as to what was to be done with it. Was it this, or was it the mere vulgarity and discomfort of her surroundings, that made her heart sick? The fly had been the only vehicle she had known until six months ago, and the Fords her constant companions, and friendly notice from Mrs. Rushton, a thing highly prized and thought of. And she had only been six months away! But as Lucy drove in at the gloomy gateway of the little inclosure, which separated the Terrace from the road, and saw the well-known door open, and looked up wistfully at the well-known windows, there was no revulsion of happier feeling. “Here we are at home, Jock,” she said faintly, trying to feel as happy as she ought to do. “Is it?” said Jock indifferently. His little face was blank too; they had both fallen out of the clouds, down from the heights, and the contact with mother earth was hard. Lucy felt ashamed of herself that this should be, but she could not help it. It was all so different. Was it possible that the “Aunty Ford” of old was like this? Mrs. Ford was still wearing her mourning. She had crape flowers upon her bonnet, awful counterfeits of nature, corn flowers with stamens of prickly jet. Her shawl was huddled up about her neck, she had taken off her black gloves, as it was so warm, and her face was of a fine crimson. As for Ford, on the contrary, he was neatness itself. He wore a little checked tie very stiffly starched, and his waistcoat, and the thin legs which were so prominent, were of checked black and white in a large pattern. Mourning is not so necessary for a man as for a woman. Mrs. Ford’s crape flowers, with which her bonnet bristled, were intended for the highest respect. Lucy’s depressed sensations were enlivened by a wondering doubt whether she could prevail upon the good woman to abandon these unearthly flowers. Mrs. Ford was talking all the way. “Did you see those Rushtons,” she said, “making a dead set at Lucy the very first moment? one would have thought they would have had more pride, and that Raymond, that son of theirs! as if Lucy, with the best in London at her feet, would look twice at a Raymond? Oh, yes, you’ll see, they’ll be all down upon you like locusts, Lucy; not a young man in the town that won’t be thrown at your head. It is your money they’re after—only your money. What is that carriage following behind us? It is coming here, I declare; it’s somebody that has got scent of you already—that’s what it is to be an heiress; but it can’t be so bad as what you’ve gone through in London.”