The Young Step-Mother Part 6

'Now you will do it to please me,' said Albinia, 'if for no better reason. Fetch your Bibles and Prayerbooks.'

'We shall never have time for our studies, I a.s.sure you, mamma,'

objected Lucy.

'That is not your concern,' said Albinia, her spirit rising at the girls' opposition. 'I wish for obedience.'

Lucy went, Sophy leant against the table like a post. Albinia regretted that the first shot should have been fired for such a cause, and sat perplexing herself whether it were worse to give way, or to force the girls to read Holy Scripture in such a mood.

Lucy came flying down with the four books in her hands, and began officiously opening them before her sister, and exhorting her not to give way to sullenness--she ought to like to read the Bible--which of course made Sophy look crosser. The desire to establish her authority conquered the scruple about reverence. Albinia set them to read, and suffered for it. Lucy road flippantly; Sophy in the hoa.r.s.e, dull, dogged voice of a naughty boy. She did not dare to expostulate, lest she should exasperate the tempers that she had roused.

'Never mind,' she thought, 'when the inst.i.tution is fixed, they will be more amenable.'

She tried a little examination afterwards, but not one answer was to be extracted from Sophy, and Lucy knew far less than the first cla.s.s at Fairmead, and made her replies wide of the mark, with an air of satisfaction that nearly overthrew the young step-mother's patience.

When Albinia took her Bible upstairs, she gave Sophy time to say what Lucy reported instantly on her entrance.

'Dear me, mamma, here is Sophy declaring that you ought to be a charity-schoolmistress. You wont be angry with her, but it is so funny!'

'If you were at my charity school, Lucy,' said Albinia, 'the first lesson I should give you would be against telling tales.'

Lucy subsided.

Albinia turned to Sophy. 'My dear,' she said, 'perhaps I pressed this on when you were not prepared for it, but I have always been used to think of it as a duty.'

Sophy made no answer, but her moody att.i.tude relaxed, and Albinia took comfort in the hope that she might have been gracious if she had known how to set about it.

'I suppose Miss Belmarche is a Roman Catholic,' she said, wishing to account for this wonderful ignorance, and addressing herself to Sophy; but Lucy, whom she thought she had effectually put down, was up again in a moment like a Jack-in-a-box.

'O yes, but not Genevieve. Her papa made it his desire that she should be brought up a Protestant. Wasn't it funny? You know Genevieve is Madame Belmarche's grand-daughter, and Mr. Durant was a dancing-master.'

'Madame Belmarche's father and brother were guillotined,' continued Sophy.

'Ah! then she is an emigrant?'

'Yes. Miss Belmarche has always kept school here. Our own mamma, and Aunt Maria went to school to her, and Miss Celeste Belmarche married Mr.

Durant, a dancing-master--she was French teacher in a school in London where he taught, and Madame Belmarche did not approve, for she and her husband were something very grand in France, so they waited and waited ever so long, and when at last they did marry, they were quite old, and she died very soon; and they say he never was happy again, and pined away till he really did die of grief, and so Genevieve came to her grandmamma to be brought up.'

'Poor child! How old is she?'

'Fifteen,' said Lucy. 'She teaches in the school. She is not at all pretty, and such a queer little thing.'

'Was her father French?'

'No,' said Sophy.

'Yes,' said Lucy. 'You know nothing about it, Sophy. He was French, but of the Protestant French sort, that came to England a great many years ago, when they ran away from the Sicilian Vespers, or the Edict of Nantes, I don't remember which; only the Spitalfields weavers have something to do with it. However, at any rate Genevieve has got something in a drawer up in her own room that she is very secret about, and wont show to anybody.'

'I think it is something that somebody was killed with,' said Sophy, in a low voice.

'Dear me, if it is, I am sure it is quite wicked to keep it. I shall be quite afraid to go into her room, and you know I slept there all the time of the fever.'

'It did not hurt you,' said Sophy.

Albinia had been strongly interested by the touching facts, so untouchingly narrated, and by the characteristic account of the Huguenot emigration, but it suddenly occurred to her that she was promoting gossip, and she returned to business. Lucy showed off her attainments with her usual self-satisfaction. They were what might be expected from a second-rate old-fashioned young ladies' school, where nothing was good but the French p.r.o.nunciation. She was evidently considered a great proficient, and her glib mediocrity was even more disheartening than the ungracious carelessness or dulness--there was no knowing which--that made her sister figure wretchedly in the examination. However, there was little time--the door-bell rang at a quarter to twelve, and Mrs. Wolfe was in the drawing-room.

'I told you so,' whispered Lucy, exultingly.

'This is unbearable,' cried Albinia. 'I shall give notice that I am always engaged in the morning.'

She desired each young lady to work a sum in her absence, and left them to murmur, if they were so disposed. Perhaps it was Lucy's speech that made her inflict the employment; at any rate, her spirit was not as serene as she could have desired.

Mr. Kendal was quite willing that she should henceforth shut her door against company in the morning; that is to say, he bowed his head a.s.sentingly. She was begging him to take a walk with her, when, at another sound of the bell, he made a precipitate retreat into his study. The visitors were the Belmarche family. The old lady was dark and withered, small, yet in look and air, with a certain n.o.bility and grandeur that carried Albinia back in a moment to the days of hoops and trains, of powder and high-heeled shoes, and made her feel that the sweeping courtesy had come straight from the days of Marie Antoinette, and that it was an honour and distinction conferred by a superior--superior, indeed, in all the dignity of age, suffering, and constancy.

Albinia blushed, and took her hand with respect very unlike the patronizing airs of Bayford Bridge towards 'poor old Madame Belmarche,'

and with downcast eyes, and pretty embarra.s.sment, heard the stately compliments of the ancien regime.

Miss Belmarche was not such a fine specimen of Sevres porcelain as her mother. She was a brown, dried, small woman, having lost, or never possessed, her country's taste in dress, and with a rusty bonnet over the tight, frizzly curls of her front, too thin and too scantily robed to have any waist, and speaking English too well for the piquant grace of her mother's speech. Poor lady! born an exile, she had toiled, and struggled for a whole lifetime to support her mother; but though care had worn her down, there was still vivacity in her quick little black eyes, and though her teeth were of a dreadful colour, her laugh was so full of life and sweetness, that Albinia felt drawn towards her in a moment.

Silent and demure, plainly dressed in an old dark merino, and a white-ribboned faded bonnet, sat a little figure almost behind her grandmother. Her face had the French want of complexion, but the eyes were of the deepest, most l.u.s.trous hue of grey, almost as dark as the pupils, and with the softness of long dark eyelashes--beautiful eyes, full of light and expression--and as she moved towards the table, there was a finish and delicacy about the whole form and movements, that made her a most pleasing object.

But Albinia could not improve her acquaintance, for in flowed another party of visitors, and Madame curtsied herself out again, Albinia volunteering that she would soon come to see her, and being answered, 'You will do me too much honour.'

Another afternoon devoured by visitors! Every one seemed to have come except the persons who would have been most welcome, Mr. Dusautoy, and Winifred's friends, the Nugents.

When, at four o'clock, she had shaken hands with the last guest, she gave a hearty yawn, jumped up and shook herself, as she exclaimed, 'There! There! that is done! I wonder whether your papa would come out now?'

'He is in his study,' said the girls.

Albinia thought of knocking and calling at the door, but somehow it seemed impossible, and she decided on promenading past his window to show that she was ready for him. But alas! those evergreens! She could not see in, and probably he could not see out.

'Ha!' cried Lucy, as they pursued their walk into the kitchen garden, 'here are some asparagus coming up. Grandmamma always has our first asparagus.'

Albinia was delighted to find such an opening. Out came her knife--they would cut the heads and take them up at once; but when the tempting white-stalked, pink-tipped bundle had been made up and put into a basket, a difficulty arose.

'I'll call the boy to take it,' said Lucy.

'What, when we are going ourselves?' said Albinia.

'Oh! but we can't.'

'Why? Do you think we shall break down under the weight?'

'O no, but people will stare.'

'Why--what should they stare at?'

'It looks _so_ to carry a basket--'