Free The Abandoned Bride by Edith Layton Page A

heaved a small sigh of relief when the matter was m a de clear by the lady’s finally declaring, “Yez, I sink leedle Lucille and younk Villie shall be hoppy wiz you.”
    Julia dared not breathe lest her indrawn breath should be expelled too hard and make the lady aware of how thrilled she was to secure the position. It would not do for an employer to think her overeager. It was a sad fact of human nature that Julia had learned in difficult ways, that the more one seemed to be in need of kindness, the less one actually received.
    “Then,” Julia ventured to say, since she realized that her comprehension of the lady’s speech was inexact, “I am to take it that I am being offered the position?”
    “Of courz,” Lady Cunningham said with some exasperation. Before Julia could think that she had aroused the lady’s ire, she went on, “Eef you c ould see ze vimen I haff had to endure zis week! Old and fat vuns, skeeny and ugly vuns. Pah. Everyzing in a householt should be luffly. Everyzing should be in harmony. Beautchiful furnishings, beautchiful peectures, beautchiful peeples,” she rhapsodized.
    Julia did not know whether to be flattered or annoyed that she had evidently been picked as a governess in much the same manner that a carpet or settee might be chosen. She remembered that the butler who had taken her card had been, in fact, quite handsome and dignified, but before she could begin to wonder what it might be like to work in a household where all the employees were chosen solely for their supposed bodily perfection, the lady went on,
    “ Zo! You vill begin zen?”
    “Certainly, ma’am,” Julia replied quickly.
    “Goot,” the lady sighed, lying back again. “Zen you must go and get your zings. Ve leaf in ze momink.”
    “I shall be here early, so that there will be time to take your instructions as to the children before you leave,” Julia said as she rose to her feet.
    “Vot?” the lady cried, sitting bolt upright. “Teck my instructzions? No, no. Vot are you sinking uff? You are to kom wiz us. How could I leaf my darlinks behind? Zey haff not seen zere fazzer in yearsr You are to kome wiz us,” she insisted, as Julia sank to her seat again.
    “With you?” Julia asked faintly.
    “Yez. To Pariz, of courz,” the lady said, looking at Julia curiously, for the young woman’s spirits seemed to have sunk as low as her voice.
    “Oh no, ma’am,” Julia said with honest sadness, “I did not understand that the position called for foreign travel. I’m sorry, but it is out of the question. No,” she said, shaking her head mournfully as her briefest period of employment yet came to its end, “but it is quite out of the question.”
    The sun seemed to be rising from a different direction. But then, Julia thought, she had never seen the sun rising over the sea before, and so she stood at the boat’s railing and watched the sunlight erase the puffy dark morning clouds and saw the outline of the coast of France come clear. In her excitement, Julia had been unable to even feign sleep and had stood guard through the night, waiting for the dawn.
    Only a week previously, she had vowed that she would not be standing where she now was. She had been polite, but quite firm with the distracted Lady Cunningham. That lady had been unable to understand her reluctance to take such an exciting position, as had the Misses Parkinson when she had returned with the news. While Lady Cunningham had gone on in her rambling and garbled fashion about the excitement and adventure of such an opportunity, the Misses Parkinson had stressed the fact that the foreign lady had even upped her offering price. “For you’ve got her in a bind,” Miss Lavinia had said gleefully. “She’s dragged her feet on it and now she’s in a pickle. She knows her husband don’t want a foreign governess, for she’s not bird-witted enough not to know that he don’t want ’em to grow up talking as she does, and she’s got to leave on the