This all helped to cheer and heal the girl greatly. The notion that this Mr. John Hanbury had gone to a great house to see the portrait of her relative, the beautiful Kate Grace, that married the man afterwards a king, opened up fields for speculation and regions of dreams so different from those possible when she was fronting decaying fortune in Miss Graham's, at Streatham, or face to face with poverty in Grimsby Street, that it was enough to pour vital strength into veins less young and naturally healthy.
She now breathed an atmosphere of refinement and wealth. Her mind was no longer tortured by the thought of having to face uncongenial duties among strange people. She had all her life denied herself friendships, because she could not hope for friends in the class of people whom she would care to know.
Now all this was changed, as by a magician's wand. If in the old days she might have had the assurance of Mrs. Hanbury's friendship, she would have allowed her heart to go out to her, for Mrs. Hanbury, although she was rich, did not think of money as those girls Edith met at Streatham. The girls she met were, first of all, the daughters of rich fathers, and then they were people of importance next. Mrs. Hanbury was, first of all, intensely human. She was a woman first of all, and a generous, kind-hearted, large-natured, sympathetic woman. As her son had said of her, the greatest-hearted woman in the world. Princes and peasants were, to her mind, men, before anything else.
This was a revelation to Dora, who had always heard men measured by the establishment they kept up, and the society in which they moved. There had been only one retreat for her from feeling belittled in the presence of these plutocrats. She would set all store by pedigree, and make no friends. A beggar may have a pedigree equal to a Hapsburg, and a peasant who has no friends, and goes into no society, cannot have his poverty impressed upon him from without, however bitterly he may suffer from within.
And this Mrs. Hanbury, who was so kind and gentle, and who had manifested such an interest in her, belonged to a class of society in which no girl she ever met at Miss Graham's moved, in which any girl she had ever met there would give anything she possessed to move. Mrs. Hanbury's father had been a baronet, and her forefathers before him as far as baronets reached back into history, and her father's family had been county people, back to the Conquest, if not beyond it.
And Mr. Hanbury, who was the son of this woman, had a pedigree more illustrious still, a pedigree going back no one knew how far. The family had been ennobled for centuries, and in the eighteenth century one of them had sat on the throne of Poland, a crowned king.
She was now under the roof of these people, not as the humble paid companion of Mrs. Hanbury, which would have been the greatest height of her hope a week ago, not as an acquaintance to whom Mrs. Hanbury had taken a liking, but as a relative, as a distant relative of this house, as one of this family!
Oh, it was such a relief, such a deliverance to be lifted out of that vulgar and squalid life, to be away from that odious necessity for going among strange and dull people as a hired servant! There was no tale in all the Arabian Nights equal to this for wonders, and all this was true, and referred to her!
Youth, and a mind to which are opening new and delightful vistas, are more help to the doctor when dealing with a patient who is only overworn than even quiet, and day by day, to the joy of all who came near her, Edith Grace gained strength. The old stateliness which had made her schoolfellows say she ought to be a queen, had faded, and left scarcely a trace behind. There was no need to wear an air of reserve, when there was nothing to be guarded against. She was Mrs. Hanbury's relative, and to be reserved now would seem to be elated or vain. There was no longer fear of anyone disputing her position. There was no longer any danger of exasperating familiarity. She was acknowledged by Mrs. Hanbury and Mr. Hanbury, who would be a nobleman in Poland, and whose forefather had been a king.
She did not try or desire to look into the future, her own future. The present was too blessed a deliverance to be put aside. Up to this there had been no delightful present in her life, and she was loath to go beyond the immediate peace.