Uncle Silas J. Sheridan Le Fanu (good books to read for beginners .TXT) đ
- Author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu
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And Mr. Branston returned slowly down the long room, and halted with out-turned pumps and a grave inclination before me, and the faintest amount of interrogation in the announcementâ â
âPlease âm, she says sheâs the governess.â
âThe governess! What governess?â
Branston was too well-bred to smile, and he said thoughtfullyâ â
âPâraps, âm, Iâd best ask the master?â
To which I assented, and away strode the flat pumps of the butler to the library.
I stood breathless in the hall. Every girl at my age knows how much is involved in such an advent. I also heard Mrs. Rusk, in a minute or two more, emerge I suppose from the study. She walked quickly, and muttered sharply to herselfâ âan evil trick, in which she indulged when much âput about.â I should have been glad of a word with her; but I fancied she was vexed, and would not have talked satisfactorily. She did not, however, come my way; merely crossing the hall with her quick, energetic step.
Was it really the arrival of a governess? Was that apparition which had impressed me so unpleasantly to take the command of meâ âto sit alone with me, and haunt me perpetually with her sinister looks and shrilly gabble?
I was just making up my mind to go to Mary Quince, and learn something definite, when I heard my fatherâs step approaching from the library: so I quietly re-entered the drawing-room, but with an anxious and throbbing heart.
When he came in, as usual, he patted me on the head gently, with a kind of smile, and then began his silent walk up and down the room. I was yearning to question him on the point that just then engrossed me so disagreeably; but the awe in which I stood of him forbade.
After a time he stopped at the window, the curtain of which I had drawn, and the shutter partly opened, and he looked out, perhaps with associations of his own, on the scene I had been contemplating.
It was not for nearly an hour after, that my father suddenly, after his wont, in a few words, apprised me of the arrival of Madame de la Rougierre to be my governess, highly recommended and perfectly qualified. My heart sank with a sure presage of ill. I already disliked, distrusted, and feared her.
I had more than an apprehension of her temper and fear of possibly abused authority. The large-featured, smirking phantom, saluting me so oddly in the moonlight, retained ever after its peculiar and unpleasant hold upon my nerves.
âWell, Miss Maud, dear, I hope youâll like your new governessâ âfor itâs more than I do, just at present at least,â said Mrs. Rusk, sharplyâ âshe was awaiting me in my room. âI hate them Frenchwomen; theyâre not natural, I think. I gave her her supper in my room. She eats like a wolf, she does, the great rawboned hannimal. I wish you saw her in bed as I did. I put her next the clock-roomâ âsheâll hear the hours betimes, Iâm thinking. You never saw such a sight. The great long nose and hollow cheeks of her, and oogh! such a mouth! I felt aâmost like little Red Riding-Hoodâ âI did, Miss.â
Here honest Mary Quince, who enjoyed Mrs. Ruskâs satire, a weapon in which she was not herself strong, laughed outright.
âTurn down the bed, Mary. Sheâs very agreeableâ âshe is, just nowâ âall newcomers is; but she did not get many compliments from me, Missâ âno, I rayther think not. I wonder why honest English girls wonât answer the gentry for governesses, instead of them gaping, scheming, wicked furriners? Lord forgiâ me, I think theyâre all alike.â
Next morning I made acquaintance with Madame de la Rougierre. She was tall, masculine, a little ghastly perhaps, and draped in purple silk, with a lace cap, and great bands of black hair, too thick and black, perhaps, to correspond quite naturally with her bleached and sallow skin, her hollow jaws, and the fine but grim wrinkles traced about her brows and eyelids. She smiled, she nodded, and then for a good while she scanned me in silence with a steady cunning eye, and a stern smile.
âAnd how is she namedâ âwhat is Mademoiselleâs name?â said the tall stranger.
âMaud, Madame.â
âMaud!â âwhat pretty name! Eh! bien. I am very sure my dear Maud she will be very good little girlâ âis not so?â âand I am sure I shall love you vary moche. And what âav you been learning, Maud, my dear cheaileâ âmusic, French, German, eh?â
âYes, a little; and I had just begun the use of the globes when my governess went away.â
I nodded towards the globes, which stood near her, as I said this.
âOh! yesâ âthe globes;â and she spun one of them with her great hand. âJe vous expliquerai tout cela Ă fond.â
Madame de la Rougierre, I found, was always quite ready to explain everything âĂ fond;â but somehow her âexplications,â as she termed them, were not very intelligible, and when pressed her temper woke up; so that I preferred, after a while, accepting the expositions just as they came.
Madame was on an unusually large scale, a circumstance which made some of her traits more startling, and altogether rendered her, in her strange way, more awful in the eyes of a nervous child, I may say, such as I was. She used to look at me for a long time sometimes, with the peculiar smile I have mentioned, and a great finger upon her lip, like the Eleusinian priestess on the vase.
She would sit, too, sometimes for an hour together, looking into the fire or out of the window, plainly seeing nothing, and with an odd, fixed look of something like triumphâ âvery nearly a smileâ âon her cunning face.
She was by no means a pleasant gouvernante for a nervous girl of my years. Sometimes she had accesses of a sort of hilarity which frightened me still more than her graver moods, and I will describe these by-and-by.
V Sights and NoisesThere is not an old house in England of
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