The Queen of Hearts | Page 7

sister did not share them, had grown that condition

in his will which removed his daughter from the influence of her aunt
for six consec utive weeks in every year. Lady Westwick was the most
light-hearted, the most generous, the most impulsive of women;
capable, when any serious occasion called it forth, of all that was
devoted and self-sacrificing, but, at other and ordinary times,
constitutionally restless, frivolous, and eager for perpetual gayety.
Distrusting the sort of life which he knew his daughter would lead
under her aunt's roof, and at the same time gratefully remembering his
sister's affectionate devotion toward his dying wife and her helpless
infant, Major Yelverton had attempted to make a compromise, which,
while it allowed Lady Westwick the close domestic intercourse with
her niece that she had earned by innumerable kind offices, should, at
the same time, place the young girl for a fixed period of every year of
her minority under the corrective care of two such quiet old-fashioned
guardians as his brother and myself. Such is the history of the clause in
the will. My friend little thought, when he dictated it, of the
extraordinary result to which it was one day to lead.
For some years, however, events ran on smoothly enough. Little Jessie
was sent to an excellent school, with strict instructions to the mistress
to make a good girl of her, and not a fashionable young lady. Although
she was reported to be anything but a pattern pupil in respect of
attention to her lessons, she became from the first the chosen favorite of
every one about her. The very offenses which she committed against
the discipline of the school were of the sort which provoke a smile even
on the stern countenance of authority itself. One of these quaint freaks
of mischief may not inappropriately be mentioned here, inasmuch as it
gained her the pretty nickname under which she will be found to appear
occasionally in these pages.
On a certain autumn night shortly after the Midsummer vacation, the
mistress of the school fancied she saw a light under the door of the
bedroom occupied by Jessie and three other girls. It was then close on
midnight; and, fearing that some case of sudden illness might have
happened, she hastened into the room. On opening the door, she
discovered, to her horror and amazement, that all four girls were out of
bed--were dressed in brilliantly-fantastic costumes, representing the

four grotesque "Queens" of Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, and Clubs,
familiar to us all on the pack of cards--and were dancing a quadrille, in
which Jessie sustained the character of The Queen of Hearts. The next
morning's investigation disclosed that Miss Yelverton had smuggled
the dresses into the school, and had amused herself by giving an
impromptu fancy ball to her companions, in imitation of an
entertainment of the same kind at which she had figured in a
"court-card" quadrille at her aunt's country house.
The dresses were instantly confiscated and the necessary punishment
promptly administered; but the remembrance of Jessie's extraordinary
outrage on bedroom discipline lasted long enough to become one of the
traditions of the school, and she and her sister-culprits were thenceforth
hailed as the "queens" of the four "suites" by their class-companions
whenever the mistress's back was turned, Whatever might have become
of the nicknames thus employed in relation to the other three girls, such
a mock title as The Queen of Hearts was too appropriately descriptive
of the natural charm of Jessie's character, as well as of the adventure in
which she had taken the lead, not to rise naturally to the lips of every
one who knew her. It followed her to her aunt's house--it came to be as
habitually and familiarly connected with her, among her friends of all
ages, as if it had been formally inscribed on her baptismal register; and
it has stolen its way into these pages because it falls from my pen
naturally and inevitably, exactly as it often falls from my lips in real
life.
When Jessie left school the first difficulty presented itself--in other
words, the necessity arose of fulfilling the conditions of the will. At
that time I was already settled at The Glen Tower, and her living six
weeks in our dismal solitude and our humdrum society was, as she
herself frankly wrote me word, quite out of the question. Fortunately,
she had always got on well with her uncle and his family; so she
exerted her liberty of choice, and, much to her own relief and to mine
also, passed her regular six weeks of probation, year after year, under
Mr. Richard Yelverton's roof.
During this period I heard of her regularly, sometimes from my

fellow-guardian, sometimes from my son George, who, whenever his
military duties allowed him the