“What I should like,” Lady Randolph said, “would be that you should come with me, my dear. It would be a great matter for me. The Hall belongs to Sir Thomas now, my nephew, you know. He is very kind to me, and I look upon him almost as a son, and his house is always open to me; but when you remember that I was once mistress there, and spent a happy life in it, and that now I am all alone, meeting ghosts in every room—”
Lucy’s heart came to her eyes. It was all true that Lady Randolph said, but perhaps no such statement, made for the purpose of calling forth sympathy, ever achieves its end without leaving a certain sense of half-aroused shame in the mind of the successful schemer. Lady Randolph was touched by the warmth of feeling in the girl’s eyes, and she was half ashamed of herself for the conscious exaggeration which had called it forth. Mrs. Ford was very sympathetic.
“I have never been so bad as that,” she said, “I have always had company; I have never lost an ’usband, like you, my lady; but I feel for your ladyship all the same.”
“And I shrink from going back,” said Lady Randolph, “and going all alone. I think if Lucy could come with me, it would be a great thing for me; and we should have time to make acquaintance with each other; and Mrs. Ford, I am sure, would look after all the things, and bring them and the little brother to meet us at the station to-morrow. Will you begin our life together by being kind to me, Lucy?” she said, with a smile.
There were difficulties, great difficulties, to be apprehended from Jock; but Lucy could not refuse such an appeal; and this was how it happened, that, to the great surprise of Farafield, she was seen in her little crape bonnet and veil (much too old for her, Lady Randolph at once decided) driving in the gray of the wintery afternoon, through the chilly streets—the day her father was buried! there were some people who thought it very unfeeling. When it was mentioned at dinner in the big house in the market-place inhabited by the town clerk, Mrs. Rushton was very much scandalized.
“The very day of the funeral!” she cried; “they might have let her keep quiet one day; for I don’t blame the girl—how was she to know any better? I always said it was a fatal thing for Lucy when that old fool of a father chose a fashionable fine old lady for her guardian. Oh, don’t speak to me, I have no patience with him. I think, from beginning to end, them never was such a ridiculous will. If it had been me, I should have taken it into court; I should have had it broke—”
“You might have found it difficult to do that. How would you have had it broke, I should like to know?” her husband said.
“Ladies’ law,” said Mr. Chevril, who was very busy with his dinner, and did not care to waste words.
“It is not my trade,” said Mrs. Rushton, “that’s your business. I can tell you I should have done it had it been in my hands. But it’s not in my hands; a woman never has a chance. You may talk of ladies’ law, but this I know, that if we had the law to make it would not be so silly. A woman would have known what was for the girl’s true advantage; we would have said to old Mr. Trevor, Don’t be such an old fool. We should have told him boldly, such and such a thing is not for your girl’s advantage. Had any of you men the courage to do that? And the result is, Lucy is in the hands of a fashionable lady who can’t live without excitement, and takes her out to drive on the day of her father’s funeral. I never heard anything like it, for my part.”
This indignation, however, was scarcely called for by the facts of the case; and yet, the event was very important for Lucy. There was not much excitement, from Mrs. Rushton’s point of view, in the afternoon drive along the wintery roads to the Hall, which was nearly five miles out of Farafield. The days were still short, and February afternoon was rainy and gloomy, and the latter part of the way was between two lines of bare and dusky hedge-rows, with here and there a spectral tree waving darkly against the unseen sky; not a cheerful moment, nor was the landscape cheerful; an expanse of damp and darkening fields, long lines of vague road, no light anywhere, save the glimpses of reflection in wet ditches or pools of muddy water. Lady Randolph shivered, wrapping herself close in her furs; but for Lucy all was full of intense sensation and consciousness, which might be called excitement, though its effect upon her was to make her quieter and more outwardly serious than usual. From the moment when she stepped into the carriage, Lucy felt herself in a new world. The life she had been used to lead wanted no comforts, so far as she was aware, but the rooms at the Terrace had possessed no charm, and the best vehicle with which Lucy was acquainted was the shabby fly of the neighborhood, which lived at the livery-stables round the corner, and served all the inhabitants of the Terrace for all their expeditions. Lucy felt the difference when she suddenly found herself in the soft atmosphere of luxury which surrounded her for the first time in Lady Randolph’s carriage, a little sphere by itself, a little moving world of wealth and refinement, where the very air was different from the muggy air of the commonplace world; and as they drove up the fine avenue, with all its tall trees rustling and waving against the faint grayness of the sky, and saw the great outline of the Hall dimly indicated by irregular specks of light, Lucy felt as if she were in a dream, but a dream that was more real than any waking certainty. She followed Lady Randolph into the great hall and up the wide spacious staircase, with these mingled sensations growing more and more strongly upon her. It was a dream: the noiseless servants, the luxurious carpets in which her foot sunk, the great pictures, the space and largeness everywhere, no single feature of the place escaped her observation. It was a dream, yet it was more real than all the circumstances of the past existence, which now had become dreams and shadows, things which were over. She stepped not into a strange house only, but into a new life, when she crossed the threshold. This was the life her father had always told her of; he had told her it would begin when he died, and had prepared her to take her place in it, always holding before her an ideal sketch of the position which was to be hers; and now it had come. The very fact that her entrance into this new world was made on his funeral day gave to the new life that aspect of springing out of the old which he had always impressed upon her. She had lost no time, not a day, and transition was natural, in being so sudden and so strange.