She said it with a certain satisfaction, and Mrs Derwent smiled as she looked at them. Blanche, though fair, gave one the impression of unusual strength and vigour. Stasy was slighter and somewhat darker. Both were pretty, and promising to grow still prettier. And from their adopted country they had unconsciously imbibed a certain “finish” in both bearing and appearance, which as a rule comes to Englishwomen, when it comes at all, somewhat later in life.
“We are not French-looking, mamma; now, are we?” chimed in the younger girl.
“Well, no, not in yourselves, certainly,” said Mrs Derwent. “But still, there cannot but be a little something, of tone and air, not quite English. How could it be otherwise, considering that your whole lives have been spent in France? But you need not distress yourselves about it. You will feel yourselves quite English once we are in England.”
“We do that already,” said Blanche. “You know, mamma, how constantly our friends here reproach us with being so English. One thing, I must say I am glad of – we have no French accent in speaking English.”
“No, I really do not think you have,” Mrs Derwent replied. “It is one of the things I have been the most anxious about. For it always sets one a little at a disadvantage to speak the language of any country with a foreign accent, if one’s home is to be in the place. How delightful it is to think of really settling in England! I wonder if I shall find Blissmore much changed. How I wish I could describe my old home, Fotherley, better to you – how I wish I could make you see it! I can fancy I feel the breeze on the top of the knoll just behind the vicarage garden; I can hear the church bells sometimes – the dear, dear old home that it was.”
“I think you describe it beautifully, mamma,” said Stasy. “I often lie awake at night making pictures of it to myself.”
“And we shall see it for ourselves soon,” added Blanche; “that is to say, mamma,” she went on with a little hesitation, “if you quite decide that – ”
“What, my dear?” said her mother.
“Oh – that Blissmore will be the best place for us to settle at,” said Blanche, rather abruptly, as if she had been anxious to get the words said, and yet half fearful of their effect.
Mrs Derwent’s face clouded over a little.
“What an odd thing for you to say, my dear?” she replied. “You cannot have any prejudice against my dear old home, and where else could we go which would be so sure to be home, where we should at once be known and welcomed? Besides, the place itself is charming – so very pretty, and a delightful neighbourhood, and not very far from London either. We could at any time run up for a day or two.”
“Ye-es,” said Blanche; “the only thing is, dear mamma, I have heard so much of English society being stiff and exclusive – ”
“It’s not as stiff and exclusive as French,” Mrs Derwent interrupted; “only you cannot judge of that, having lived here all your life, and knowing every one there was to know within a good large radius, just as I knew everybody round about Blissmore when I was a girl.”
“But all these years! Will they not have brought immense changes?” still objected Blanche. “And it is not as if we were very rich or important people. If we were going to buy some fine château in England and entertain a great deal, it would be different. But, judged by English ideas, we shall not be rich or important. Not that I should wish to be either. I should like to live modestly, and have our own poor people to look after, and just a few friends – the life one reads about in some of our charming English tales, mamma.”
“And why should we not have it, my dear? We shall be able to have a very pretty house, I hope. I only wish one of those I remember were likely to be vacant; and why, therefore, should you be afraid of Blissmore? Surely my old home is the most natural place for us to go to: I cannot be quite forgotten there.” Blanche said no more, and indeed it would have been difficult to put into more definite form her vague misgivings about Blissmore. Her knowledge of English social life was of course principally derived from books, and from her mother’s reminiscences, which it was easy to see were coloured by the glamour of the past, and drawn from a short and youthful experience under the happiest auspices. And Blanche was by no means inclined to prejudice; there was no doubt, even by Mrs Derwent’s own account, that her old home had been in a peculiarly “exclusive” part of the country.
“I should not mind so much for ourselves,” she said to Stasy, that same afternoon, as they were walking up and down the stiff gravelled terrace in the garden at the back of their house – their “town house,” in Bordeaux itself, where eight months of the year had been spent by the Derwent family for three generations. “But I do feel so afraid of poor mamma’s being disappointed.”
Stasy was inclined to take the other view of it.
“Why should we get on less well at Blissmore than anywhere else?” she said. “Of course, wherever we go, it will be strange at first, but surely there is more likelihood of our feeling at home there than at a totally new place. I cannot understand you quite, Blanchie.”
“I don’t know that I quite understand myself,” Blanche replied. “It is more an instinct. I suppose I dread mamma’s old home, because she would go there with more expectation. It will be curious, Stasy, very curious, to find ourselves really in England. There cannot be many English girls who have reached our age without having even seen their own country.”
“And to have been so near it all these years,” said Stasy, “Oh, it is too delightful to think we are really going to live in England – dear, dear England! Of course I shall always love France; we have been very happy in many ways, except for our great sorrows,” and her bright, sparkling face sobered, as, at April-like sixteen, a face can sober, to beam all the more sunnily the next moment – “we have been very happy, but we are going to be still happier, aren’t we, Blanchie?”
“I hope so, darling. But you will have to go on working for a good while once we are settled again, you know. And I too. We are both very ignorant of much English literature, though, thanks to papa’s library and grandfather’s advice, I think we know some of the older authors better than some English girls do. I wonder what sort of teaching we can get at Blissmore; we are rather too old for a governess.”
“Oh dear, yes. Of course we can’t have a governess,” said Stasy. “We must go to cours– ‘classes,’ or whatever they are called. I suppose there is something of the kind at Blissmore.”
“I don’t know that there is. I don’t know what will be done about Herty,” said Blanche. “I’m afraid he may have to go to school, and we should miss him so, shouldn’t we?”
“There may be a school near enough for him to come home every evening,” said Stasy, who was incapable of seeing anything to do with their new projects in other than the brightest colours. “There he is – coming to call us in. – Well, Herty, what is it?” as a pretty, fair-haired boy came racing along the straight paths to meet them.
“The post has come, and mamma has a letter from England, and dinner will be ready directly, and – and – my guinea-pigs’ salad is all done, and there is no more of the right kind in the garden,” said the little boy. “What shall I do?”
“After dinner you shall go with Aline to the vegetable shop near the market place and buy some lettuce – that is the proper word – not ‘salad,’ when it is a guinea-pig’s affair,” said Stasy.
For it was early summer-time, and the evenings were long and light.
Blanche smiled.
“My dear Stasy, your English is a little open to correction as well as Herty,” she said. “You must not speak of a vegetable shop – ‘greengrocers’ is the right name, and – there was something rather odd about the last sentence, ‘a guinea-pig’s affair.’”
“Well,