lurking somewhere in their calm depths, Eleanor thought.
The girl’s mind rambled on thus while she stood by the stranger’s side in the sunlit window. Already the blankness of her new life was broken by this prominent figure standing boldly out upon its very threshold. Already she was learning to be interested in new people.
“He isn’t a bit like a lawyer,” she thought; “I fancied lawyers were always shabby old men, with blue bags. The men who used to come to Chelsea after papa were always nasty disagreeable men, with papers about the Queen and Richard Roe.”
Mr. Monckton looked thoughtfully down at the girl by his side. There was a vein of silent poetry, and there were dim glimpses of artistic feeling hidden somewhere in the nature of this man, very far below the hard, business-like exterior which he presented to the world. He felt a quiet pleasure in looking at Eleanor’s young beauty. It was her youthfulness, perhaps, her almost childlike innocence, which made her greatest charm. Her face was not that of a common beauty: her aquiline nose, gray eyes, and firmly-moulded mouth had a certain air of queenliness very rarely to be seen; but the youth of the soul shining out of the clear eyes was visible in every glance, in every change of expression.
“Do you know much of Berkshire, Miss Vincent?” the lawyer asked, presently.
“Oh, no, I have never been there.”
“You are very young, and I daresay have never left home before?” Mr. Monckton said. He was wondering that no relative or friend had accompanied the girl to the station.
“I have been at school,” Eleanor answered; “but I have never been away from home before—to—to get my own living.”
“I thought not. Your papa and mamma must be very sorry to lose you.”
“I have neither father nor mother.”
“Indeed!” said Mr. Monckton; “that’s strange.”
Then after a pause he said, in a low voice:
“I think the young lady you are going to will like you all the better for that.”
“Why?” Eleanor asked involuntarily.
“Because she has never known either father or mother.”
“Poor girl!” murmured Eleanor, “they are both dead, then?”
The lawyer did not answer this question. He was so far professional, even in his conversation with Miss Vane, that he asked a great many more questions than he answered.
“Do you like going to Hazlewood, Miss Vincent?” he said, by-and-bye, rather abruptly.
“Not very much.”
“Why not?”
“Because I am leaving very dear friends to go to—”
“Strangers, who may illtreat you, eh?” muttered Mr. Monckton. “You need have no apprehension of that sort of thing, I assure you, Miss Vincent. Mrs. Darrell is rather rigid in her ideas of life; she has had her disappointments, poor soul, and you must be patient with her: but Laura Mason, the young lady who is to be your companion, is the gentlest and most affectionate girl in Christendom, I should think. She is a sort of ward of mine, and her future life is in my hands; a very heavy responsibility, Miss Vincent; she will have plenty of money by-and-bye—houses, and horses, and carriages, and servants, and all the outer paraphernalia of happiness: but Heaven knows if she will be happy, poor girl. She has never known either mother or father. She has lived with all manner of respectable matrons, who have promised to do a mother’s duty to her, and have tried to do it, I daresay; but she has never had a mother, Miss Vincent. I am always sorry for her when I think of that.”
The lawyer sighed heavily, and his thoughts seemed to wander away from the young lady in his charge. He still stood at the window, looking out at the bustle on the platform, but not seeing it, I think, and took no further notice of Eleanor until the bell rang for the starting of the train.
“Come, Miss Vincent,” he said, rousing himself suddenly from his reverie; “I have forgotten all about your ticket. I’ll put you into a carriage, and then send a porter for it.”
Mr. Monckton scarcely spoke to his companion half a dozen times during the brief journey to Slough. He sat with a newspaper before him, but Eleanor noticed that he never turned its leaves, and once, when she caught a glimpse of the lawyer’s face, she saw that it wore the same gloomy and abstracted expression that she had observed upon it as Mr. Monckton stood in the window of the waiting-room.
“He must be very fond of his ward,” she thought, “or he could never be so sorry because she has no mother. I thought lawyers were hard, cruel men, who cared for nothing in the world. I always used to fancy my sister Hortensia ought to have been a lawyer.”
By-and-bye, as they drew very near to the station, Mr. Monckton dropped his newspaper with another sigh, and turning to Eleanor, said, in a low, confidential voice:
“I hope you will be very good to Laura Mason, Miss Vincent. Remember that she stands quite alone in the world; and that however friendless, however desolate you may be—I say this because you tell me you are an orphan—you can never be so friendless or so desolate as she is.”
A CONSTANTINE CZAROWICZ IN WARSAW.
PART III.
The Catholic Church in Poland was always exceptional in character. It was rather Polish Catholic than Roman Catholic in its instincts and tendencies. It was never disgraced by the Smithfield fires of England, the autos-da-fé of Spain, or the St. Bartholomew of France. Once only in its annals do we find a trace of those terrible phases of by-gone ages, the murder of the Protestants at Thorn; but that was contrived and carried out by French and Italian Jesuits, brought thither in the train of a Duke of Anjou.
Religion to the Pole is not so much a creed—a thing to be brought into formulas, a subject for
