“I am very tired and shall not rise early to-morrow. Do not wait breakfast for me. Good-night, daughter.”
“Good-night, father.”
Although he had said the last conventional words of the day, he still stood there as if loath to retire, then he stooped and kissed her on the lips, ruffling her black, wayward, curly hair so like his own in texture, colour, and freedom from restraint, and patting her affectionately on the shoulder.
“You will not be afraid of me from this time forward, child?” he asked. “Indeed, Frances, I grow superstitious as I become older, and I look on your strange arrival as in some measure providential. There is none of my own kind to whom I can speak freely, as I did to you in the carriage; my daughters—my other daughters—are too young. My Lady Strafford takes much interest in her garden, and dislikes this London house and this London town, for which small blame is to be imputed to her. In you, a man’s courage is added to a woman’s wit, and who knows but my daughter may prove the reinforcement I lacked in my baffling fight with the unseen. Do you speak French, my girl, or are you as ignorant of the language of that country as of its history?”
“I speak it but haltingly, sir, though I was taught its rudiments.”
“We must amend that. It is to our tongue what the thin rapier is to the broadsword. Good lack! there was a time when one language served the English, yet great deeds were done and great poems written; but that time is past now. I must get you a master. I have likely used the broadsword overmuch, but who knows? You may be the rapier by my side.”
“I hope I shall not disappoint you, sir, though I am but a country maid, with some distrust of this great city and its Court.”
“City and Court are things we get speedily accustomed to. Well, again good-night, sweetheart, and sleep soundly. I see those fine eyes are already heavy with slumber.”
But sleep came not so quickly as he surmised to the eyes he had complimented. The day had been too full of rapid change and tense excitement. The strange transformation of the present, and the dim, troubled vista of the future which opened out to her, cherished thought and discouraged slumber. Was it possible that she was thus to be transplanted, was to stand by the side of the greatest man in England, his acknowledged daughter, his welcome aid? God grant she might not fail him, if he had real need of her. And so she planned the days to come. She would be as subtle as the craftiest. She would cover all dislikes as the cloak had covered her, and her lips should smile though her heart revolted. Her tongue must measure what it said, and all rural bluntness should disappear. She slipped from these meditations into a hazy, bewildering conflict; her father, somehow, was in a danger that she could not fathom, she lacking power to get to him, restrained by invisible bonds, not knowing where he was, although he called to her. Then it seemed there was a turmoil in the street, a cry for help, a groan, and silence, and next Mrs. Jarrett was moving about the room and had drawn curtains that let in a grey, misty daylight.
“Is my father yet arisen?” she cried.