Blanche: A Story for Girls

Blanche: A Story for Girls
Mrs. Molesworth

Molesworth Mrs.

Blanche: A Story for Girls

Chapter One

The Sunny South

About a quarter of a century ago, a young English girl – Anastasia Fenning by name – went to pay a visit of a few weeks to friends of her family, whose home was a comfortable old house in the pleasantest part of France. She had been somewhat delicate, and it was thought that the milder climate during a part of the winter might be advantageous to her. It proved so. A month or two saw her completely restored to her usual health and beauty, for she was a very pretty girl; and, strange to say, the visit of a few weeks ended in a sojourn of fully twenty years in what came to be her adopted country, without any return during that long stretch of time to her own home, or indeed to England at all.

This was how it came about. The eldest son – or rather grandson of her hosts, for he was an orphan – Henry Derwent, fell in love with the pretty and attractive girl, and she returned his affection. There was no objection to the marriage, for the Derwents and Fennings were friends of more than a generation’s standing. And Henry’s prospects were good, as he was already second in command to old Mr Derwent himself, the head of the large and well-established firm of Derwent and Paulmier, wine merchants and vine-growers; and Anastasia, the only daughter of a widowed country parson of fair private means, would have a “dot” which the Derwents, even taking into account their semi-French ideas on such subjects, thought satisfactory.

Mr Fenning gave his consent, more readily than his friends and his daughter had expected, for he was a devoted, almost an adoring father, and the separation from him was the one drawback in Anastasia’s eyes.

“I thought papa would have been broken-hearted at the thought of parting with me,” she said half poutingly, for she was a trifle spoilt, when the anxiously looked for letter had been received and read. “He takes it very philosophically.”

“Very unselfishly, let us say,” her fiancé replied, though in his secret heart the same thought had struck him.

But the enigma was only too speedily explained. Within a day or two of the arrival of her father’s almost perplexingly glad consent came a telegram to Mr Derwent, as speedily as possible followed by a letter written at his request by the friend and neighbour who had been with Mr Fenning at the last. For Anastasia’s father was dead – had died after but an hour or two’s acute illness, though he had known for long that in some such guise the end must come.

He was glad for his “little girl” to be spared the shock in its near appallingness, wrote Sir Adam Nigel; he was thankful to know that her future was secured and safe. For he had no very near relations, and Sir Adam himself, though Anastasia’s godfather, was an old bachelor, living alone. The question of a home in England would have been a difficult one. And in his last moments Mr Fenning had decided that if the Derwents could without inconvenience keep the young girl with them till her marriage, which he earnestly begged might not be long deferred, such an arrangement would be the wisest and best.

His wishes were carried out. The tears were scarcely dried on the newly orphaned girl’s face, ere she realised that for her husband’s sake she must try again to meet life cheerfully. And in her case it was not difficult to do so, for her marriage proved a very happy one. Henry Derwent was an excellent and a charming man, an unselfish and considerate husband, a devoted though wise father. For twelve years Anastasia’s life was almost cloudless. Then, when her youngest child, a boy, was barely a year old, the blow fell. Again, for the second time in her life, a few hours’ sharp illness deprived her of her natural protector, and she was left alone. Much more alone than at the epoch of her father’s sudden death, for she had then Henry to turn to. Now, though old Mr Derwent was still living, the only close sympathy and affection she could count upon was that of her little girls, Blanche and Anastasia, eleven and nine years of age respectively, when this first and grievous sorrow overtook them.

For some months Mrs Derwent was almost totally crushed by her loss. Then by degrees her spirits revived. Her nature was not a very remarkable one, but it was eminently healthy and therefore elastic. And in her sorrow, severe as it was, there was nothing to sour or embitter, nothing to destroy her faith in her fellow-creatures or render her suspicious and distrustful. And her life, both as her father’s daughter and her husband’s wife, had been a peculiarly bright and sheltered one.

“Too bright to last,” she thought sometimes, and perhaps it was true.

For trouble must come. There are those indeed from whom, though in less conspicuous form than that of death, it seems never absent – their journey is “uphill all the way.” There are those again, more like Anastasia Derwent, whose path lies for long amid the flowers and pleasant places, till suddenly a thunderbolt from heaven devastates the whole. Yet these are not, to my mind, the most to be pitied. The happiness of the past is a possession even in the present, and an earnest for the future. In the years of sunshine the nature has had time to grow and develop, to gather strength against the coming of the storm. Not so with those who have known nothing but wintry weather, whose faith in aught else has but the scantiest nourishment to feed upon.

And the new phase of life to which her husband’s death introduced Mrs Derwent called for qualities hitherto little if at all required in her. Her father-in-law, already old and enfeebled, grew querulous and exacting. He had leant upon his son more than had been realised; his powers could not rally after so tremendous a shock. He turned to his daughter-in-law, in unconscious selfishness, demanding of her more than the poor woman found it possible to give him, though she rose to the occasion by honestly doing her best. And though this “best” was but little appreciated, and ungraciously enough received, she never complained or lost patience.

As the years went on and in some ways her task grew heavier, there were not wanting those who urged her to give it up.

“He is not your own father,” they said. “He is a tiresome, tyrannical old man. You should return to England with your children; there must still be many friends there who knew you as a girl. And this living in France, while not French, out of sympathy with your surroundings in many ways, is not the best school for your daughters. You don’t want them to marry Frenchmen?”

This advice, repeatedly volunteered by one friend in particular, the aged Marquise de Caillemont, herself an Englishwoman, whose own marriage had not disposed her to take a rose-coloured view of so-called “mixed alliances,” was only received by Mrs Derwent with a shake of the head. True, her eyes sparkled at the suggestion of a return to England, but the time for that had not come. Blanche and Stasy were too young for their future as yet to cause her any consideration. They were being well educated, and if the care of their grandfather fell rather heavily on them – on Blanche especially – “Well, after all,” she said, “we are not sent into this world merely to please ourselves. I had too little of such training myself, I fear; my children are far less selfish than I was. Still, I will not let it go too far, dear madame. I do not want their young lives to be clouded. I cannot see my way to leaving the grandfather, but time will show what is right to do.”

Time did show it. When Blanche, on whose strong and buoyant nature Mr Derwent learned more and more to rely, till by degrees she came almost to replace to him the son he missed so sorely, and whom she much resembled – when Blanche was seventeen, the old man died, peacefully and gently, blessing the girl with his last breath.

They missed him, after all, for he had grown less exacting with failing health. And while he was there, there was still the sense of protectorship, of a masculine head of the house. Blanche missed him most of all, naturally, because she had done the most for him, and she was one of those who love to give, of their best, of themselves.

But after a while happy youth reasserted itself. She turned with fresh zest and interest to the consideration of the plans for the future which the little family was now free to make.

“We shall go back to England, of course, shan’t we, mamma?” said Stasy eagerly, as if the England she had never seen were the land of all her associations.

“Of course,” Mrs Derwent agreed. “The thought of it has been the brightest spot in my mind all through these last years. How your father and I used to talk of the home we would have there one day! Though I now feel that anywhere would have been home with him,” and she sighed a little. “He was really more English than poor grandfather, for he had a regular public school education.”

“But grandfather only came to France as a grown-up man, and papa was born here,” said Blanche. “Of the two, one would have expected papa to be the more French, yet he certainly was not. Perhaps it was just that dear old gran was a more clinging nature, and took the colour of his surroundings more easily. We are just the opposite: neither Stasy nor I could be called at all French, could we, mamma?”

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.