Miss Berwick's attitude to certain disagreeable and sordid facts of human life had been early fixed by herself as one of disdainful aloofness. She did not permit herself to judge those about her, and far preferred not to know of their transgressions. When such knowledge was thrust upon her--as had necessarily been the case with her uncle, Lord Bosworth, and Madame Sampiero--she judged narrowly and hardly the woman, contemptuously and leniently the man.
"Crois-tu donc que l'on peut commander à son coeur? On aime malgré soi, car l'Amour est un hôte Qui vient à son caprice, et toujours en vainqueur."
During the ten days which followed that on which Mrs. Boringdon had held a certain conversation with her son, Lucy Kemp gradually became aware of two things. The first, which seemed to blot out and exclude everything else, was that she loved--in the old-fashioned pathetic sense of the abused word--Oliver Boringdon.
Hitherto she had been able to call the deep feeling which knit her to him "friendship," but that kindly hypocrisy would serve no longer: she was now aware what name to call it by. She had known it since the evening she had noticed that his manner had altered, that he had become more reserved, less really at ease. The second thing of which Lucy became aware, during those long dragging empty days, was the fact of her keen unhappiness, and of her determination to conceal it from those about her--especially from the father and mother who, she knew, were so strangely sensitive to all that concerned her.
Major-General and Mrs. Kemp had been settled at Chancton Grange for some years, and the Mutiny hero, the man whose gallant deed had once thrilled England, Mrs. Kemp, and their young daughter, had come to be regarded by the village folk with that kindly contempt which is bred, we are told, by familiarity.
The General's incisive, dry manner was rather resented by those of his neighbours who had hoped to make of him a local tea-party celebrity, and his constructive interest in local politics won him but tepid praise from the villagers, while the fact that Mrs. Kemp's large-minded charity and goodness of heart was tempered by a good deal of shrewd common-sense, did not make her the more loved by those, both gentle and simple, whom she was unwearying in helping in time of trouble.