Katie Loganwas by herself in the manse parlor. Though the room was as bright as ever, the little housekeeper did not look so bright. She was darning the little stockings which filled the basket, but she was not singing her quiet song, nor thinking pleasant thoughts. Katie’s eyes werered, and her cheeks pale. She was beginning to go, dark and blindfold, into a future which it broke her heart to think of. Those children of the manse, what would become of them when they had neither guide nor guardian but Katie? This was question enough to oppress the elder sister, if every thing else had not been swallowed in the thought of her father’s growing weakness, of the pallor and the trembling which every one observed, and of the exhaustion of old age into which the active minister visibly began to fall. Katie was full of these thoughts when she heard some one come to the door; she went immediately to look at herself in the mirror over the mantel-piece, and to do her best to look like her wont; but it was alike a wonder and a relief to Katie, looking round, to find the Mistress, a most unusual visitor, entering the room.
The Mistress was not much in the custom of paying visits—it embarrassed her a little when she did so, unless she had some distinct errand. She dropped into a chair near the door, and put back her vail upon her bonnet, and looked at Katie with a little air of fatigue and past excitement.
“No, no, thank ye,” said the Mistress, “I’ve been walking, I’ll no’ come to the fire; it’s cold, but it’s a fine day outbye—I just thought I would take a walk up by Whittock’s Gate.”
“Were you at Mrs. Blackadder’s?” asked Katie.
“No,” said the Mistress, with a slightly confused expression. “I was no place, but just taking a walk. What for should I no’ walk for pleasure as well as my neighbors? but indeed, to tell the truth, I had a very foolish reason, Katie,” she added, after a little interval. “I’ve never had rest in my mind after what you said of the French lassie at Melmar. I did ken of a person that was lost and married long ago, and might just as well be in France as in ony other place. She was no friend of mine, but I kent of her, and I’ve seen her picture and heard what like she was, so, as I could not help but turn it over in my mind, I just took the gate up there, a wise errand, to see if I could get a look of this bairn. I meant to go through the Melmar footpath, though that house and them that belong to it are little pleasure to me; but as guid fortune was, I met them in the road.”
“Joanna and the governess?” said Katie.
“And mair than them,” answered the Mistress. “A ladthat I would take to be the son that’s been so long away. An antic with a muckle cloak, and a black beard, and a’ the looks of a French fiddler; but Joanna called him by his name, so he bid to be her brother; and either he’s deluding the other bit lassie, or she’s ensnaring him.”
Katie smiled, so faintly and unlike herself, that it was not difficult to perceive how little her heart was open to amusement. The Mistress, however, who apprehended every thing after her own fashion, took even this faint expression of mirth a little amiss.
“You needna laugh—there’s little laughing matter in it,” said the Mistress. “If a bairn of mine were to be led away after ony such fashion, do ye thinkIcould find in my heart to smile? Na, they’re nae friends of mine, the present family of Melmar; but I canna see a son of a decent house maybe beguiled by an artfu’ foreign woman, however great an antic he may be himself, and take ony pleasure in it. It’s aye sure to be a grief to them he belongs to, and maybe a destruction to the lad a’ his life.”
“But Desirée is only sixteen, and Oswald Huntley, if it was Oswald—is a very great deal older—he should be able to take care of himself,” said Katie, repeating the offense. “You saw her, then? Do you think she was like the lady you knew?”
“I never said I knew any lady,” said the Mistress, testily. “I kent of one that was lost mony a year ago. Na, na, this is naebody belonging toher. She was a fair, soft woman that, with blue e’en, and taller than me; but this is a bit elf of a thing, dark and little. I canna tell what put it into my head for a moment, for Melmar was the last house in the world to look for a bairn’s ofhersin; but folk canna help nonsense thoughts. Cosmo, you see, he’s a very fanciful laddie, as indeed is no’ to be wondered at, and he wrote me hame word about somebody he had seen—and then hearing of this bairn asking questions about me; but it was just havers, as I kent from the first—she is no more like her than she’s like you or me. But I’m sorry about the lad. Naething but ill and mischief can come of the like, so far as I’ve seen. If he’s deluding the bairn, he’s a villain, Katie, and if she’s leading him on—and ane can never tell what snares are in these Frenchwomen from their very cradle—I’m sorry for Melmar and his wife, though they’re no friends to me.”
“I think Oswald Huntley ought to be very well able to take care of himself,” repeated Katie—“and to know French ways, too. I like Desirée, and I don’t like him. I hope she will not have any thing to say to him. When is Cosmo coming home?”
The Mistress, however, looked a little troubled about Cosmo. She did not answer readily.
“He’s a fanciful bairn,” she said, half fondly, half angrily—“as indeed what else can you expect? He’s ane of the real auld Livingstones of Norlaw—aye some grand wild plan in his head for other folks, and no’ that care for himself that might be meet. He would have been a knight like what used to be in the ballads in my young days, if he hadna lived ower late for that.”
Pausing here, the Mistress closed her lips with a certain emphatic movement, as though she had nothing more to say upon this subject, and was about proceeding to some other, when they were both startled by the noisy opening of a door, which Katie knew to be the study. The sound was that of some feeble hand, vainly attempting to turn the handle, and shaking the whole door with the effort which was at last successful; then came a strange, incoherent, half-pronounced “Katie!” Katie flew to the door, with a face like death itself. The Mistress rose and waited, breathless, yet too conscious of her own impatience of intrusion to follow. Then a heavy, slow fall, as of some one whose limbs failed under him, a cry from Katie, and the sudden terrified scream of one of the maids from the kitchen moved the Mistress beyond all thoughts but those of help. She ran into the little hall of the manse, throwing her cloak off her shoulders with an involuntary promise that she could not leave this house to-day. There she saw a melancholy sight, the minister, with a gray ashen paleness upon his face, lying on the threshold of his study, not insensible, but powerless, moving with a dreadful impotence those poor, pale, trembling lips, from which no sound would come. Katie knelt beside him, supporting his head, almost as pallid as he, aggravating, unawares, the conscious agony of his helplessness by anxious, tender questions, imploring him to speak to her—while the maid stood behind, wringing her hands, crying, and asking whether she should bring water? whether she should get some wine? what she should do?
“Flee this moment,” cried the Mistress, pushing this latter to the door, “and bring in the first man you can meet to carry him to his bed—that’s whatyou’reto do—and, Katie, Katie, whisht, dinna vex him—he canna speak to you. Keep up your heart—we’ll get him to his bed, and we’ll get the doctor, and he’ll come round.”
Katie lifted up her woeful white face to the Mistress—the poor girl did not say a word—did not even utter a sob or shed a tear. Her eyes said only, “it has come! it has come!” The blow which she had been trembling for had fallen at last. And the Mistress, who was not given to tokens of affection, stooped down in the deep pity of her heart and kissed Katie’s forehead. There was nothing to be said. This sudden calamity was beyond the reach of speech.
They got the sufferer conveyed to his room and laid on his bed a few minutes after, and within a very short time the only medical aid which the neighborhood afforded was by the bed-side. But medical aid could do little for the minister—he was old, and had long been growing feeble, and nobody wondered to hear that he had suffered “a stroke,” and that there was very, very little hope of his recovery. The old people in Kirkbride clustered together, speaking of it with that strange, calm curiosity of age, which always seems rather to congratulate itself that some one else is the present sufferer, yet is never without the consciousness that itself may be the next. A profound sympathy, reverence, and compassion was among all the villagers—passive towards Dr. Logan, active to Katie, the guardian and mother of the little household of orphans who soon were to have no other guardian. They said to each other, “God help her!” in her youth and loneliness—what was she to do?
As for the Mistress, she was not one of those benevolent neighbors who share in the vigils of every sick room, and have a natural faculty for nursing. To her own concentrated individual temper, the presence of strangers in any household calamity was so distasteful, that she could scarcely imagine it acceptable to others; and she never offered services which she would not have accepted. But there was neither offer nor acceptance now. The Mistress sent word at once to Marget, took off her bonnet, and without a word to any one, took her place in the afflicted house. Even now she was but little in the sick chamber.
“If he kens her, he’ll like best to see Katie—and if he doesna ken her, it’ll aye be a comfort to herself,” said the Mistress. “I’ll take the charge of every thing else—- but his ain bairn’s place is there.”
“I only fear,” said the doctor, “that the poor thing will wear herself out.”
“She’s young, and she’s a good bairn,” said the Mistress, “and she’ll have but one father, if she lives ever so long a life. I’m no feared. No, doctor, dinna hinder Katie; if she wears herself out, poor bairn, she’ll have plenty of sad time to rest in. Na, I dinna grudge her watching; she doesna feel it now, and it’ll be a comfort to her a’ her life.”
It was, perhaps, a new doctrine to the country doctor; but he acknowledged the truth of it, and the Mistress, wise in this, left Katie to that mournful, silent, sick room, where the patient lay motionless and passive in the torpor of paralysis, perhaps conscious, it was hard to know—but unable to communicate a word of all that might be in his heart. The children below, hushed and terror-stricken, had never been under such strict rule, yet never had known so many indulgences all their lives before; and the Mistress tookhernight’s rest upon the sofa, wrapped in a shawl and morning gown, ready to start in an instant, should she be called; but she did not disturb the vigil of the daughter by her father’s bed-side.
And Katie, absorbed by her own sorrows, hardly noticed—hardly knew—this characteristic delicacy. She sat watching him with an observation so intent, that she almost fancied she could see his breath, watching the dull, gray eyes, half closed and lustreless, to note if, perhaps, a wandering light of expression might kindle in them; watching the nerveless, impotent hands, if perhaps, motion might be restored to them; watching the lips, lest they should move, and she might lose the chance of guessing at some word. There was something terrible, fascinating, unearthly in the task; he was there upon the bed, and yet he was not there, confined in a dismal speechless prison, to which perhaps—they could not tell—their own words and movements might penetrate, but out of which nothing could come. His daughter sat beside him, looking forward with awe into the blank solemnity of the future. No mother, no father; only the little dependent children, who had but herself to lookto. She went over and over again the very same ground. Orphans, and desolate; her thoughts stopped there, and went no further. She could not help contemplating the terrible necessity before her; but she could not make plans while her father lay there, speechless yet breathing, in her sight.
She was sitting thus, the fourth day after his seizure, gazing at him; the room was very still—the blinds were down—a little fire burned cheerfully in the grate—her eyes were fixed upon his eyes, watching them, and as she watched it seemed to Katie that her father’s look turned towards a narrow, ruddy, golden arrow of sunshine, which streamed in at the side of the window. She rose hastily and went up to the bed. Then his lips began to move—she bent down breathlessly; God help her!—he spoke, and she was close to his faltering lips; but all Katie’s strained and agonizing senses could not tell a word of what he meant to say. What matter? His eyes were not on her, but on the sunshine—the gleam of God’s boundless light coming in to the chamber of mortality—his thoughts were not with her in her sore youthful trouble. He was as calm as an angel, lying there in the death of his old age and the chill of his faculties. But she—she was young, she was desolate, she was his child—her heart cried out in intolerable anguish, and would not be satisfied. Could it be possible? Would he pass away with those moving lips, with that faint movement of a smile, and she never know what he meant to say?
With the restlessness of extreme and almost unbearable suffering, Katie rang her bell—the doctor had desired to know whenever his patient showed any signs of returning consciousness. Perhaps the sound came to the ear of the dying man, perhaps only his thoughts changed. But when she turned again, Katie found the reverent infantine calm gone from his face, and his eyes bent upon her with a terrible struggle after speech, which wrung her very heart. She cried aloud involuntarily with an echo of the agony upon that ashen face. The sound of her voice, of her hasty step and of the bell, brought the Mistress to the room, and the terrified servants to the door. Katie did not see the Mistress; she saw nothing in the world but the pitiful struggle of those palsied lips to speak to her, the anguish of uncommunicable love in those opened eyes. She bent over him,putting her very ear to his month; when that failed, she tried, Heaven help her, to look as if she had heard him, to comfort his heart in his dying. The old man’s eyes opened wider, dilating with the last effort—at last came a burst of incoherent sound—he had spoken—what was it? The Mistress turned her head away and bowed down upon her knees at the door, with an involuntary awe and pity, too deep for any expression, but Katie cried, “Yes, father, yes, I hear you!” with a cry that might have rent the skies. If she did, Heaven knows; she thought so—and so did he; the effort relaxed—the eyes closed—and word of human language the good minister uttered never more.
It was all over. Four little orphans sat below crying under their breath, unaware of what was their calamity—and Katie Logan above, at nineteen, desolate and unsupported, and with more cares than a mother, stood alone upon the threshold of the world.
Whilethe peaceful Manse of Kirkbride was turned into a house of mourning, a strange little drama was being played at Melmar. The household there seemed gradually clustering, a strange chorus of observation, round Oswald and Desirée, the two principal figures in the scene. Melmar himself watched the little Frenchwoman with cat-like stealthiness, concentrating his regard upon her. Aunt Jean sat in her chair apart, troubled and unenlightened, perpetually calling Desirée to her, and inventing excuses to draw her out of the presence and society of Oswald. Patricia, when she was present in the family circle, directed a spiteful watch upon the two, with the vigilance of an ill-fairy; while even Joanna, a little shocked and startled by the diversion of Desirée’s regard from herself, a result which she had not quite looked for, behaved very much like a jealous lover to the poor little governess, tormenting her by alternate sulks and violent outbursts of fondness. Oswald himself, though he was always at her side, though he gave her a quite undue share of his time and attention,and made quite fantastical exhibitions of devotion, was a lover, if lover he was, ill at ease, capricious and overstrained. He knew her pretty, he felt that she was full of mind, and spirit, and intelligence—but still she was a little girl to Oswald Huntley, who was not old enough to find in her fresh youth the charm which has subdued so many a man of the world—nor young enough to meet her on equal ground. Why he sought her at all, unless he had really “fallen in love” with her, it seemed very hard to find out. Aunt Jean, looking on with her sharp black eyes, could only shake her head in silent wonder, and doubt, and discomfort. He could have “nae motive"—but Aunt Jean thought that lovers looked differently in her days, and a vague suspicion disturbed the mind of the old woman. She used to call Desirée to her own side, to keep her there talking of her embroidery, or telling her old stories of which the girl began to tire, being occupied by other thoughts. The hero himself was unaware of, and totally indifferent to, Aunt Jean’s scrutiny, but Melmar himself sometimes turned his fiery eyes to her corner, with a glance of doubt and apprehension. She was the only spectator in the house of whose inspection Mr. Huntley was at all afraid.
Meanwhile Desirée herself lived in a dream—the first dream of extreme youth, of a tender heart and gentle imagination, brought for the first time into personal contact with the grand enchantress and Armida of life. Desirée was not learned in the looks of lover’s eyes—she had no “experience,” poor child! to guide her in this early experiment and trembling delight of unfamiliar emotion. She knew she was poor, young, solitary, Joanna’s little French governess, yet that it was she, the little dependent, whom Joanna’s graceful brother, everybody else’s superior, singled out for his regard. Her humble little heart responded with all a young girl’s natural flutter of pride, of gratitude, of exquisite and tremulous pleasure. There could be but one reason in the world to induce this unaccustomed homage and devotion. She could not believe that Oswald admired or found any thing remarkable in herself, only—strange mystery, not to be thought of save with the blush of that profoundest humility which is born of affection!—only, by some unexplainable, unbelievable wonder, it must be love. Desirée did not enter into any questions on the subject;she yielded to the fascination; it made her proud, it made her humble, it filled her with the tenderest gratitude, it subdued her little fiery spirit like a spell. She was very, very young, she knew nothing of life or of the world, she lived in a little world of her own, where this grand figure was the centre of every thing; and it was a grand figure in the dewy, tender light of Desirée’s young eyes—in the perfect globe of Desirée’s maiden fancy—but it was not Oswald Huntley, deeply though the poor child believed it was.
So they all grouped around her, watching her, some of them perplexed, some of them scheming; and Oswald played his part, sometimes loathing it, but, for the most part, finding it quite agreeable to his vanity, while poor little Desirée went on in her dream, thinking she had fallen upon a charmed life, seeing every thing through the glamour in her own eyes, believing every thing was true.
“Dr. Logan is ill,” said Melmar, on one of those fairy days, when they all met round the table at lunch; all but Mrs. Huntley, who had relapsed into her quiescent invalidism, and was made comfortable in her own room—“very ill—so ill that I may as well mind my promise to old Gordon of Ruchlaw for his minister-son.”
“Oh, papa, don’t be so hard-hearted!” cried Joanna—“he’ll maybe get better yet. He’s no’ such a very old man, and he preached last Sabbath-day. Oh, poor Katie! but he has not been a week ill yet, and he’ll get better again.”
“Who is Gordon of Ruchlaw? and who is his minister-son?” asked Oswald.
Joanna made a volunteer answer.
“A nasty, snuffy, disagreeable man!” cried Joanna, with enthusiasm. “I am sure I would never enter the church again if he was there; but it’s very cruel and hard-hearted, and just like papa, to speak of him. Dr. Logan is only ill. I would break my heart if I thought he was going to die.”
“Gordon would be a very useful man to us,” said Melmar—“a great deal more so than Logan ever was. I mean to write and ask him here, now that his time’s coming. Be quiet, Joan, and let’s have no more nonsense. I’ll tell Auntie Jean. If you play your cards well, you might have a good chance of him yourself, you monkey, and with Aunt Jean’s fortune to furnish the manse, you might do worse. Ha! ha! I wonder what Patricia would say?”
“Patricia would say it was quite good enough for Joanna,” said that amiable young lady. “A poor Scotch minister! I am thankfulInever had such low tastes. Nobody would speak of such a thing to me.”
“Don’t quarrel about the new man till the old man is dead, at least,” said Oswald, laughing. “Mademoiselle Desirée quite agrees with me, I know. She is shocked to hear all this. Is it not so?”
“I thought of his daughter,” said Desirée, who was very much shocked, and had tears in her eyes. “She will be an orphan now.”
“And Desirée was very fond of Katie,” said Joanna, looking half jealously, half fondly at the little governess, “and so am I too; and she has all the little ones to take care of. Oh, papa, I’ll never believe that Dr. Logan is going to die.”
“Fhat is all this, Joan? tell me,” cried Aunt Jean, who had already shown signs of curiosity and impatience. This was the signal for breaking up the party. When Joanna put her lips close to the old woman’s ear, and began to shout the required information, the others dispersed rapidly. Desirée went to her room to get her cloak and bonnet. It was her hour for walking with her pupil, and that walk was now an enchanted progress, a fairy road, leading ever further and further into her fairy land. As for Oswald, he stood in the window, looking out and shrugging his shoulders at the cold. His blood was not warm enough to bear the chill of the northern wind; the sight of the frost-bound paths and whitened branches made him shiver before he went out. He meant to attend the girls in their walk, in spite of his shiver; but the frosty path by the side of Tyne was not a fairy road to him.
Joanna had left them on some erratic expedition among the trees; they were alone together, Desirée walking by Oswald’s side, very quiet and silent, with her eyes cast down, and a tremor at her heart. The poor little girl did not expect any thing particular, for they were often enough together thus—still she became silent in spite of herself, as she wandered on in her dream by Oswald’s side, and, in spite of herself, cast down her eyes, and felt the color wavering on her cheek. Perhaps he saw it and was pleased—he liked such moments well enough. They had all the amusing,tantalizing, dramatic pleasure of moments which might be turned to admirable account, but never were so—moments full of expectation and possibility, of which nothing ever came.
At this particular moment Oswald was, as it happened, very tenderly gracious to Desirée. He was asking about her family, or rather her mother, whom, it appeared, he had heard of without hearing of any other relative, and Desirée, in answering, spoke of Marie—who was Marie? “Did I never, then, tell you of my sister?” said Desirée with a blush and smile.
“Your sister?—I was not aware—” stammered Oswald—and he looked at her so closely and coldly, and with such a scrutinizing air of suspicion, that Desirée stared at him, in return, with amazement and half-terror—“Perhaps Mademoiselle Desirée has brothers also,” he said, in the same tone, still looking at her keenly. What if she had brothers? Would it have been wrong?
“No,” said Desirée, quietly. The poor child was subdued by the dread of having wounded him. She thought it grieved him to have so little of her confidence; it could be nothing but that which made him look so cold and speak so harsh.
“Then Mademoiselle Marie is a little sister—a child?” said Oswald, softening slightly.
Desirée clapped her hands and laughed with sudden glee. “Oh, no, no,” she cried merrily, “she is my elder sister; she is not even Mademoiselle; she is married! Poor Marie!” added the little girl, softly. “I wish she were here.”
And for the moment Desirée did not see the look that regarded her. When she lifted her eyes again, she started and could not comprehend the change. Oswald’s lip was blue with cold, with dismay, with contempt, with a mixture of feelings which his companion had no clue to, and could not understand. “Mademoiselle has, no doubt, a number of little nephews and nieces,” he said, with a sinister curl of that blue lip over his white teeth. The look struck to Desirée’s heart with a pang of amazement and terror—what did it mean?
“Oh, no, no, not any,” she said, with a deep blush. She was startled and disturbed out of all her maiden fancies—was it a nervous, jealous irritation, to find that she hadfriends more than he knew. It was very strange—and when Joanna rejoined them shortly, Oswald made an excuse for himself, and left them. The girls followed him slowly, after a time, to the house; Desirée could scarcely answer Joanna’s questions, or appear interested in her pupil’s interests. What was the reason? She bewildered her poor little head asking this question; but no answer came.
Itwas a kind of twilight in Aunt Jean’s room, though it was still daylight out of doors; the sun, as it drew to the west, threw a ruddy glory upon this side of the house of Melmar, and coming in at Aunt Jean’s window, had thrown its full force upon the fire-place half an hour ago. It was the old lady’s belief that the sun put out the fire, so she had drawn down her blind, and the warm, domestic glimmer of the firelight played upon the high bed, with those heavy, dull, moreen curtains, which defied all brightness—upon the brighter toilet-glass on the table, and upon the old lofty chest of drawers, polished and black like ebony, which stood at the further side of the room. Aunt Jean herself sat in a high-backed arm-chair by the fire, where she loved to sit—and Desirée and Joanna, kneeling on the rug before her, were turning out the contents of a great basket, full of such scraps as Aunt Jean loved to accumulate, and girls have pleasure in turning over; there were bits of silk, bits of splendid old ribbon, long enough for “bows,” in some cases, but in some only fit for pin-cushions and needle-books of unbelievable splendor, bits of lace, bits of old-fashioned embroidery, bits of almost every costly material belonging to a lady’s wardrobe. It was a pretty scene; the basket on the rug, with its many-colored stores, the pretty little figure of Desirée, with the fire-light shining in her hair, the less graceful form of Joanna, which still was youthful, and honest, and eager, as she knelt opposite the fire, which flushed her face and reddened her hair at its will; and calmly seated in her elbow-chair, overseeing all, Aunt Jean, with her white neckerchief pinned over her gown, and her white apronwarm in the fire-light, and the broad black ribbon bound round her old-fashioned cap, and the vivacious sparkle of those black eyes, which were not “hard of hearing,” though their owner was. The pale daylight came in behind the old lady, faintly through the misty atmosphere and the closed blind—but the ruddier domestic light within went flickering and sparkling over the high-canopied bed, the old-fashioned furniture, and the group by the hearth. When Joanna went away, the picture was even improved perhaps, for Desirée still knelt half meditatively by the fire, turning over with one hand the things in the basket, listening to what the old lady said, and wistfully pondering upon her own thoughts.
“Some o’ the things were here when I came,” said Aunt Jean. “I was not so auld then as I am now—I laid them a’ away, Deseery, for fear the real daughter of the house should ever come hame; for this present Melmar wasna heir by nature. If right had been right, there’s ane before him in the succession to this house; but, poor misguided thing, fha was gaun to seek her; but I laid by the bits o’ things; I thought they might ’mind her some time of the days o’ her youth.”
“Who was she?” said Desirée, softly: she did not ask so as to be heard by her companion—she did not ask as if she cared for an answer—she said it quietly, in a half whisper to herself; yet Aunt Jean heard Desirée’s question with her lively eyes, which were fixed upon the girl’s pretty figure, half kneeling, half reclining at her feet.
“Fha was she? She was the daughter of this house,” said Aunt Jean, “and fhat’s mair, the mistress of this house, Deseery, if she should ever come hame.”
The little Frenchwoman looked up sharply, keenly, with an alarmed expression on her face. She did not ask any further question, but she met Aunt Jean’s black eyes with eyes still brighter in their youthful lustre, yet dimmed with an indefinable cloud of suspicion and fear.
What was in the old woman’s mind it was hard to tell. Whether she had any definite ground to go upon, or merely proceeded on an impulse of the vague anxiety in her mind.
“’Deed, ay,” said Aunt Jean, nodding her lively little head, “I’ll tell you a’ her story, my dear, and you can tell me fhat you think when I’m done. She was the only bairnand heir of that silly auld man that was Laird of Melmar before this present lad, my niece’s good-man—she was very bonnie, and muckle thought of, and she married and ran away, and that’s all the folk ken of her, Deseery; but whisht, bairn, and I’ll tell you mair.”
Desirée had sunk lower on her knees, leaning back, with her head turned anxiously towards the story-teller. She was an interested listener at least.
“It’s aye thought she was disinherited,” said Aunt Jean, “and at the first, when she ran away, maybe so she was—but nature will speak. When this silly auld man, as I’m saying, died, he left a will setting up her rights, and left it in the hand of another silly haverel of a man, that was a bit sma’ laird at Norlaw. This man was to be heir himsel’ if she never was found—but he had a sma’ spirit, Deseery, and he never could find her. She’s never been found from that day to this—but it’ll be a sore day for Melmar when she comes hame.”
“Why?” said Desirée, somewhat sharply and shrilly, with a voice which reached the old woman’s ears, distant though they were.
“Fhat for?—because they’ll have to give up all the lands, and all the siller, and all their living into her hand—that’s fhat for,” said Aunt Jean; “nae person in this country-side can tell if she’s living, or fhaur she is; she’s been away langer than you’ve been in this life, Deseery; and Melmar, the present laird—I canna blame him, he was the next of the blood after hersel’, nae doubt he thought she was dead and gane, as a’body else did when he took possession—and his heart rose doubtless against the other person that was left heir, failing her, being neither a Huntley nor nigh in blood; but if aught should befall to bring her hame—ay, Deseery, it would be a sore day for this family, and every person in this house.”
“Why?” asked Desirée again with a tremble—this time her voice did not reach the ear of Aunt Jean, but her troubled, downcast eyes, her disturbed look, touched the old woman’s heart.
“If it was a story I was telling out of a book,” said the old woman, “I would say they were a’ in misery at keeping her out of her rights—or that the man was a villain that held her place—but you’re no’ to think that. I dinnadoubt he heeds his ain business mair than he heeds her—it’s but natural, fha would do otherwise? and then he takes comfort to his mind that she must be dead, or she would have turned up before now, and then he thinks upon his ain family, and considers his first duty is for them; and then—’deed ay, my dear, memory fails—I wouldna say but he often forgets that there was another person in the world but himsel’ that had a right—that’s nature, Deseery, just nature—folk learn to think the way it’s their profit to think, and believe what suits them best, and they’re sincere, too, except maybe just at the first; you may not think it, being a bairn, yet it’s true.”
“If it were me,” cried Desirée, with a vehemence which penetrated Aunt Jean’s infirmity, “the money would burn me, would scorch me, till I could give it back to the true heir!”
“Ay,” said Aunt Jean, shaking her head, “I wouldna say I could be easy in my mind mysel’—but it’s wonderful how weel the like of you and me, my dear, can settle ither folks’ concerns. Melmar, you see, he’s no’ an ill man, he thinks otherwise, and I daur to say he’s begun to forget a’ about her, or just thinks she’s dead and gane, as most folk think. I canna help aye an expectation to see her back before I die mysel’—but that’s no’ to say Me’mar has ony thought of the kind. Folk that are away for twenty years, and never seen, nor heard tell o’, canna expect to be minded upon and waited upon. It’s very like, upon the whole, that sheisdead many a year syne—and fhat for should Melmar, that kens nothing about her—aye except that she could take his living away frae him—fhat for, I’m asking, should Melmar gang away upon his travels looking for her, like yon other haverel of a man?”
“What other man?” cried Desirée, eagerly.
“Oh, just Norlaw; he was aince a wooer himsel’, poor haverel,” said Aunt Jean; “he gaed roaming about a’ the world, seeking after her, leaving his wife and his bonny bairns at hame; but fhat good did he?—just nought ava, Deseery, except waste his ain time, and lose his siller, and gie his wife a sair heart. She’s made muckle mischief in her day, this Mary of Melmar. They say she was very bonnie, though I never saw her mysel’; and fhat for, think you, should the present lad, that kens nought about her, take uphis staff and gang traveling the world to seek for her? Oh, fie, nae!—he has mair duty to his ain house and bairns, than to a strange woman that he kens not where to seek, and that would make him a beggar if he found her; I canna see she deserves ony such thing at his hand.”
At first Desirée did not answer a word; her cheek was burning hot with excitement, her face shadowed with an angry cloud, her little hand clenched involuntarily, her brow knitted. She was thinking of something private to herself, which roused a passion of resentment within the breast of the girl. At last she started up and came close to Aunt Jean.
“But if you knew that she was living, and where she was?” cried Desirée, “what would you do?”
“Me! Oh, my bairn!” cried Aunt Jean, in sudden dismay. “Me! what have I to do with their concerns?—me! it’s nane of my business. The Lord keep that and a’ evil out of a poor auld woman’s knowledge. I havena eaten his bread—I never would be beholden that far to any mortal—but I’ve sitten under his roof tree for mony a year. Me!—if I heard a word of such awfu’ news, I would gang furth of this door this moment, that I mightna be a traitor in the man’s very dwelling;—eh, the Lord help me, the thought’s dreadful! for I behoved to let her ken!”
“And what if he knew?” asked Desirée, in a sharp whisper, gazing into Aunt Jean’s eyes with a look that pierced like an arrow. The old woman’s look fell, but it was not to escape this gaze of inquiry.
“The Lord help him!” said Aunt Jean, pitifully. “I can but hope he would do right, Deseery; but human nature’s frail; I canna tell.”
This reply softened for the moment the vehement, angry look of the little Frenchwoman. She came again to kneel before the fire, and was silent, thinking her own thoughts; then another and a new fancy seemed to rise like a mist over her face. She looked up dismayed to Aunt Jean, with an unexplained and terrified question, which the old woman could not interpret. Then she tried to command herself with an evident effort—but it was useless. She sprang up, and came close, with a shivering chill upon her, to put her lips to Aunt Jean’s ear.
“Do they all know of this story?” she asked, in the low,sharp voice, strangely intent and passionate, which even deafness itself could not refuse to hear; and Desirée fixed her gaze upon the old woman’s eyes, holding her fast with an eager scrutiny, as though she trembled to be put off with any thing less than the truth.
“Hout, no!” said Aunt Jean, disturbed a little, yet confident; “fha would tell the like of Patricia or Joan—fuils and bairns! and as for the like of my niece herself, she’s muckle taken up with her ain bits of troubles; she might hear of it at the time, but she would forget the day after; naebody minds but me.”
“And—Oswald?” cried Desirée, sharply, once again.
“Eh! ay—I wasna thinking upon him; he’s the heir,” said Aunt Jean, turning her eyes sharp and keen upon her young questioner. “I canna tell fhat for you ask me so earnest, bairn; you maunna think mair of Oswald Huntley than becomes baith him and you; ay, doubtless, you’re right, whatever learned ye—hekens.”
Desirée did not say another word, but she clasped her hands tightly together, sprang out of the room with the pace of a deer, and before Aunt Jean had roused herself from her amazement, had thrown her cloak over her shoulders, and rushed out into the gathering night.
Thesunset glory of this January evening still shone over the tops of the trees upon the high bank of Tyne, leaving a red illumination among the winter clouds; but low upon the path the evening was gathering darkly and chilly, settling down upon the ice-cold branches, which pricked the hasty passenger like thorns, in the black dryness of the frost. The Kelpie itself was scarcely recognizable in the torpid and tiny stream which trickled down its little ravine; only the sharp sound of its monotone in the tingling air made you aware of its vicinity; and frozen Tyne no longer added his voice to make the silence musical. The silence was dry, hard, and harsh, the sounds were shrill, the air cut like a knife. No creature that could find shelterwas out of doors; yet poor little Desirée, vehement, willful, and passionate, with her cloak over her shoulders, and her pretty uncovered head, exposed to all the chill of the unkindly air, went rushing out, with her light foot and little fairy figure, straight as an arrow over Tyne, and came up the frozen path, into the wood and the night.
One side of her face was still scorched and crimsoned with the fervor of Aunt Jean’s fire, before which she had been bending; the other, in comparison, was already chilled and white. She ran along up the icy, chilly road, with the night-wind cutting her delicate little ears, and her rapid footsteps sliding upon the knots of roots in the path, straight up to that height where the Kelpie trickled, and the last red cloud melted into gray behind the trees. The dubious, failing twilight was wan among those branches, where never a bird stirred. There was not a sound of life anywhere, save in the metallic tinkle of that drowsing waterfall. Desirée rushed through the silence and the darkness, and threw herself down upon the hard path, on one of the hard knots, beneath a tree. She was not sorry, in her passionateabandon, to feel the air prick her cheek, to see the darkness closing over her, to know that the cold pierced to the bone, and that she was almost unprotected from its rigor. All this desolation was in keeping with the tumult which moved the willful heart of the little stranger. The prick of the wind neutralized somewhat the fiery prick in her heart.
Poor little Desirée! She had, indeed, enough to think of—from her morning’s flush of happiness and dawning love to plunge into a cold profound of treachery, deceit, and falsehood like that which gaped at her feet, ready to swallow her up. For the moment it was anger alone, passionate and vivid as her nature, which burned within her. She, frank, child-like, and unsuspicious, had been degraded by a pretended love, a false friendship; had been warned, “for her own sake,” by the treacherous host whom Desirée hated, in her passion, to say nothing of her descent or of her mother. For her own sake! and not a syllable of acknowledgment to confess how well the wily schemer knew who that mother was. Yet, alas, if that had but been all!—if there had been nothing to do but to confound Melmar, to renounce Joanna, to shake off the dust of her indignant feet against the house where they would have kept her in bondage!—if that had but been all! But Desirée clenched her little hands with a pang of angry and bitter resentment far more overpowering. To think that she should have been insulted with a false love! Bitter shame, quick, passionate anger, even the impulse of revenge, came like a flood over the breast of the girl, as she sat shivering with cold and passion at the foot of that tree, with the dark winter night closing over her. She could almost fancy she saw the curl of Oswald Huntley’s lip as he heard to-day, on this very spot, that she had a sister; she could almost suppose, if he stood there now, that she had both strength and will to thrust him through the rustling bushes down to the crackling, frozen Tyne, to sink like a stone beneath the ice, which was less treacherous than himself. Poor little desolate, solitary stranger! She sat in the darkness and the cold, with the tears freezing in her eyes, but passion burning in her heart; she cried aloud in the silence with an irrepressible cry of fury and anguish—the voice of a young savage, the uncontrolled, unrestrained, absolute violence of a child. She was half crazed with the sudden downfall, the sudden injury; she could think of nothing but the sin that had been done against her, the vengeance, sharp and sudden as her passion, which she would inflict if she could.
But as poor little Desirée crouched beneath the tree, not even the vehemence of her resentment could preserve her from the influences of Nature. Her little feet seemed frozen to the path; her hands were numb and powerless, and ice-cold as the frozen water beneath. The chill stole to her heart with a sickening faintness, then a gradual languor crept over her passion; by degrees she felt nothing but the cold, the sharp rustle of the branches, the chill gloom of the night, the harsh wind that blew in at her uncovered ears. Her hair fell down on her neck, and her fingers were too powerless to put it up. She had no heart to return to the house from which she fled in so violent an excess of insulted feeling—it almost seemed that she had no place in the world to go to, poor child, but this desolate winter woodland, which in its summer beauty she had associated with her mother. The night blinded her, and so did the growing sickness of extreme cold. Another moment, and poor little Desirée sank against the tree, passionless and fainting—thelast thought in her heart a low outcry for her mother, who was hundreds of miles away and could not hear.
The cold was still growing sharper and keener as the last glimmer of daylight faded out of the skies. She might have slid down into the frozen Tyne, as she had imagined her enemy, or she might have perished in her favorite path, in the cold which was as sharp as an Arctic frost. But Providence does not desert those poor, suffering, wicked children who fly to death’s door at the impulse of passion as Desirée did. A laborer, hastening home by the footpath through the Melmar woods, wandered out of his way, by chance, and stumbled over the poor little figure lying in the path. When the man had got over his first alarm, he lifted her up and carried her like a child—she was not much more—to Melmar, where he went to the side door and brought her in among the servants to that great kitchen, which was the most cheerful apartment in the house. The maids were kind-hearted, and liked the poor little governess—they chafed her hands and bathed her feet, and wrapped her in blankets, and, at last, brought Desirée to her senses. When she came alive again, the poor, naughty child looked round her bewildered, and did not know where she was—the place was strange to her—and it looked so bright and homely that Desirée’s poor little heart was touched by a vague contrasting sense of misery.
“I should like to go to bed,” she said, sadly, turning her face away from the light to a kind housemaid, who stood by her, and who could not tell what ailed “the French miss,” whom all the servants had thought rather too well-used of late days, and whose look of misery seemed unaccountable.
“Eh, Missie, but ye maun wait until the fire’s kindled,” said the maid.
Desirée did not want a fire—she had no desire to be comforted and warmed, and made comfortable—she would almost rather have crept out again into the cold and the night. Notwithstanding, they carried her up stairs carefully, liking the stranger all the better for being sad and in trouble and dependent on them—and undressed her like a child, and laid her in bed in her little room, warm with firelight, and looking bright with comfort and kindness. Then the pretty housemaid, whom Patricia exercised hertempers on, brought Desirée a warm drink and exhorted her to go to sleep.
“What made ye rin out into the cauld night, Missie, without a thing on your head,” said Jenny Shaw, compassionately; “but lie still and keep yoursel’ warm—naebody kens yet but us in the kitchen, or Miss Joan would be here; but I thought you would like best to be quiet, and it would do you mair good.”
“Oh, dear Jenny, don’t let any one know—don’t tell them—promise!” cried Desirée, half starting from her bed.
The maid did not know what to make of it, but she promised, to compose the poor little sufferer; and so Desirée was left by herself in the little room, with the warm fire light flickering about the walls, and her little hands and feet, which had been so cold, burning and prickling with a feverish heat, her limbs aching, her thoughts wandering, her heart lost in an ineffable, unspeakable melancholy. She could not return to her passion, to the bitter hurry and tumult of resentful fancies which had occupied her out of doors. She lay thinking, trying to think, vainly endeavoring to confine the wandering crowd of thoughts, which made her head ache, and which seemed to float over every subject under heaven. She tried to say her prayers, poor child, but lost them in an incoherent mist of fancy. She fell asleep, and awoke in a few minutes, thinking she had slept for hours—worse than that, she fell half asleep into a painful drowse, where waking thoughts and dreams mingled with and confused each other. Years of silence and unendurable solitude seemed to pass over her before Jenny Shaw came up stairs again to ask her how she was, and the last thing clear in Desirée’s remembrance was that Jenny promised once more not to tell any one. Desirée did not know that the good-hearted Jenny half slept, half watched in her room all that night. The poor child knew nothing next day but that her limbs ached, and her head burned, and that a dull sense of pain was at her heart. She was very ill with all her exposure and suffering—she was ill for some time, making a strange commotion in the house. But no one had any idea of the cause of her illness, save perhaps Aunt Jean, who did not say a word to any one, but trotted about the sick-room, “cheering up” the little sick stranger and finding out her wants with strange skill in spite of her deafness.All the time of Desirée’s illness Aunt Jean took not the slightest notice of Oswald Huntley—she was doubly deaf when he addressed her—she lost even her sharp and lively eyesight when he encountered her on the stair. Aunt Jean did not know what ailed Desirée besides the severe cold and fever which the doctor decided on, but the old woman remembered perfectly at what point of their conversation it was that the little girl rushed from her side and fled out of the house—and she guessed at many things with a keen and lively penetration which came very near the truth. And so Desirée was very ill, and got slowly well again, bringing with her out of her sickness a thing more hard to cure than fever—a sick heart.
Whileall these new events and changes were disturbing the quiet life of the home district at Melmar, and Norlaw, and Kirkbride, Cosmo Livingstone wandered over classic ground with Cameron and his young pupil, and sent now and then, with modest pride, his contribution to theAuld Reekie Magazinewhich had now been afloat for four months, and on account of which Mr. Todhunter, in his turn, sent remittances—not remarkably liberal, yet meant to be so, in letters full of a rude, yet honest, vanity, which impressed the lad with great ideas of what the new periodical was to do for the literary world. So far, all was satisfactory with Cosmo. He was very well off also in his companions. Cameron, who had been shy of undertaking a manner of life which was so new to him, and whom all the innkeepers had fleeced unmercifully on the first commencement of their travels—for the very pride which made him starve in his garret at home, out of everybody’s ken, made him, unused and inexperienced as he was, a lavish man abroad, where everybody was looking on, and where the thought of “meanness” troubled his spirit. But by this time, even Cameron had become used to the life of inns and journeys, and was no longer awed by the idea that landlords andwaiters would suspect his former poverty, or that his pupil himself might complain of undue restraint. The said pupil, whose name was Macgregor, was good-natured and companionable, without being any thing more. They had been in Italy, in Switzerland, and in Germany. They had all acquired a traveler’s smattering of all the three tongues familiar on their road—they had looked at churches, and pictures, and palaces, till those eyes which were unguided byMurray, and knew just as much, or rather as little, of art, as the bulk of their countrymen at the time, became fairly bewildered, and no longer recollected which was which. They were now in France, in chilly February weather, on their way home. Why they pitched upon this town of St. Ouen for their halt it would have been hard to explain. It was in Normandy, for one reason, and Cosmo felt rather romantically interested in that old cradle of the conquering race. It was within reach of various places, of historic interest. Finally, young Macgregor had picked up somewhere a little archaic lore, which was not a common accomplishment in those days, and St. Ouen was rich in old architecture. Thus they lingered, slow to leave the shores of France, which was not sunny France in that February, but had been the beginning and was about to be the end of their pleasant wandering, and where accordingly they were glad to rest for a little before returning home.
Though, to tell the truth, Cosmo would a great deal rather have tarried on the very edge of the country, at the little sea-port which bowed Jaacob called “Deep,” and where that sentimental giant had seen, or fancied he had seen, the lady of his imagination. Cosmo had enjoyed his holiday heartily, as became his temperament and years, yet he was returning disappointed, and even a little chagrined and ashamed of himself. He had started with the full and strong idea that what his father could not succeed in doing, and what advertisements and legal search had failed in, he himself, by himself, could do—and he was now going home somewhat enlightened as to this first fallacy of youth. He had not succeeded, he had not had the merest gleam or prospect of success; Mary of Melmar was as far off, as totally lost, as though Cosmo Livingstone, who was to be her knight and champion, had never known the story of her wrongs, and Time was gliding away with silent, inevitablerapidity. A year and a half of the precious remaining interval was over. Huntley had been at his solitary work in Australia for nearly a whole year, and Huntley’s heart was bent on returning to claim Melmar, if he could but make money enough to assert his right to it. This Cosmo knew from his brother’s letters, those to himself, and those which his mother forwarded to him (in copy). He loved Huntley, but Cosmo thought he loved honor more—certainly he had more regard for the favorite dream of his own imagination, which was to restore the lost lady to her inheritance. But he had not found her, and now he was going home!
However, they were still in St. Ouen. Since Cameron recovered himself out of his first flutter of shy extravagance and fear lest he should be thought “mean,” they had adopted an economical method of living when they staid long in any one place. Instead of living at the inn, they had taken rooms for themselves, a proceeding which Cameron flattered himself made them acquainted with the natives. On this principle they acted at St. Ouen. Their rooms were, two on thepremier étagefor Cameron and his pupil, and oneau troisièmefor Cosmo. Cosmo’s was a little room in a corner, opening by a slim, ill-hung door upon the common stair-case—where rapid French voices, and French feet, not very light, went up the echoing flight above to themansarde, and made jokes, which Cosmo did not understand, upon the young Englishman’s boots, standing in forlorn trustfulness outside his door, to be cleaned. Though Cosmo had lived in a close in the High Street, he was quite unused to the public traffic of this stair-case, and sometimes suddenly extinguished his candle with a boy’s painful modesty, at the sudden fancy of some one looking through his keyhole, or got up in terror with the idea that a band of late revelers might pour in and find him in bed, in spite of the slender defense of lock and key. The room itself was very small, and had scarcely a feature in it, save the little clock on the mantel-piece, which always struck in direct and independent opposition to the great bell of St. Ouen. The window was in a corner, overshadowed by the deep projection of the next house, which struck off from Cosmo’s wall in a right angle, and kept him obstinately out of the sunshine. Up in the corner,au troisième, with the next door neighbor’s blank gable edging all his light away from him, youwould not have thought there was any thing very attractive in Cosmo’s window—yet it so happened that there was.
Not in the window itself, though that was near enough the clouds—but Cosmo, looking down, looked, as his good fortune was, into another window over the way, a pretty second floor, with white curtains and flowers to garnish it, and sunshine that loved to steal in for half the day. It was a pretty point of itself, with its little stand of early-blooming plants, and its white curtains looped up with ribbon. The plants were but early spring flowers, and did not at all screen the bright little window which Cosmo looked at, as though it had been a picture—and even when the evening lamp was lighted, no jealous blinds were drawn across the cheerful light. The lad was not impertinent nor curious, yet he sat in the dusk sometimes, looking down as into the heart of a little sacred picture. There were only two people ever in the room, and these were ladies, evidently a mother and daughter—one of them an invalid. That there was a sofa near the fire, on which some one nearly always lay—that once or twice in the day this recumbent figure was raised from the couch, and the two together paced slowly through the room—and that, perhaps once a week, a little carriage came to the door to take the sick lady out for a drive, was all that Cosmo knew of the second person in this interesting apartment; and the lad may have been supposed to be sufficiently disinterested in his curiosity, when we say that the only face which he ever fully saw at that bright window was the face of anoldlady—a face as old as his mother’s. It was she who watered the flowers and looped the curtains—it was she who worked within their slight shadow, always visible—and it was she who, sometimes looking up and catching his eye, smiled either at or to Cosmo, causing him to retreat precipitately for the moment, yet leaving no glance of reproach on his memory to forbid his return.
Beauty is not a common gift; it is especially rare to the fanciful, young imagination, which is very hard to please, save where it loves. This old lady, however, old though she was, caught Cosmo’s poetic eye with all the glamour, somehow tenderer than if she had been young, of real loveliness. She must have been beautiful in her youth. She had soft, liquid, dark-blue eyes, full of a motherly and tender light now-a-days, and beautiful light-brown hair, inwhich, at this distance, it was not possible to see the silvery threads. She was tall, with a natural bend in her still pliant form, which Cosmo could not help comparing to the bend of a lily. He said to himself, as he sat at his window, that he had seen many pretty girls, but never any one so beautiful as this old lady. Her sweet eyes of age captivated Cosmo; he was never weary of watching her. He could have looked down upon her for an hour at a time, as she sat working with her white hands, while the sun shone upon her white lace cap, and on the sweet old cheek, with its lovely complexion, which was turned to the window; or when she half disappeared within to minister to the other half visible figure upon the sofa. Cosmo did not like to tell Cameron of his old lady, but he sat many an hour by himself in this little room, to the extreme wonderment of his friend, who supposed it was all for the benefit of theAuld Reekie Magazine, and smiled a little within himself at the lad’s literary enthusiasm. For his part, Cosmo dreamed about his opposite neighbors, and made stories for them in his own secret imagination, wondering if he ever could come to know them, or if he left St. Ouen, whether they were ever likely to meet again. It certainly did not seem probable, and there was no photography in those days to enable Cosmo to take pictures of his beautiful old lady as she sat in the sunshine. He took them on his own mind instead, and he made them into copies of verses, which the beautiful old lady never would see, nor if she saw could read—verses for theAuld Reekie Magazineand theNorth British Courant.
Thehouse of Cosmo’s residence was not a great enough house to boast a regularportièreorconcierge. A little cobbler, who lived in an odd little ever-open room, on the ground floor, was the real renter and landlord of the much-divided dwelling place. He and his old wife lived and labored without change or extension in this one apartment, which answered for all purposes, and in which Baptiste’sscraps of leather contended for preëminence of odor over Margot’spot au feu; and it was here that the lodgers hung up the keys of their respective chambers, and where the letters and messages of the little community were left. Cameron and Cosmo were both very friendly with Baptiste. They understood him but imperfectly, and he, for his part, kept up a continual chuckle behind his sleeve over the blunders ofles Anglais. But as they laughed at each other mutually, both were contented, and kept their complacence. Cosmo had found out by guess or inference, he could not quite tell how, that madame in the second floor opposite, with the invalid daughter, was the owner of Baptiste’s house—a fact which made the cobbler’s little room very attractive to the lad, as it was easy to invent questions, direct or indirect, about the beautiful old lady. One morning, Baptiste looked up, with a smirk, from his board, as he bid good-day to his young lodger. He had news to tell.
“You shall now have your wish,” said Baptiste; “Madame has been asking Margot about the young Englishman. Madame takes interest inles Anglais. You shall go to present yourself, and make your homage when her poor daughter is better. She loves your country. Madame isAnglaisherself.”
“Is she?” cried Cosmo, eagerly; “but I am not English, unfortunately,” added the lad, with a jealous nationality. “I am a Scotsman, Baptiste; madame will no longer wish to see me.”
“Eh, bien!” said Baptiste, “I know not much of your differences, you islanders—but madame isEcossais. Yes, I know it. It was so said when Monsieur Jean brought home his bride. Ah, was she not beautiful? too pretty for the peace of the young man and the ladies; they made poor Monsieur Jean jealous, and he took her away.”
“Is that long ago?” asked Cosmo.
“It was the year that Margot’s cousin, Camille, was drawn in the conscription,” said Baptiste, smiling to himself at his own private recollections. “It is twenty years since. But madame was lovely! So poor Monsieur Jean became jealous and carried her away. They went, I know not where, to the end of the world. In the meantime the old gentleman died. He was of the oldrégime—he was of good blood—but he was poor—he had but this house hereand that other to leave to his son—fragments, monsieur, fragments, crumbs out of the hands of the Revolution; and Monsieur Jean was gay and of a great spirit. He was not abourgeoisto go to become rich. The money dropped through his fine fingers. He came back, let me see, but three years ago. He was a gentleman, he was a noble, with but a thousand francs of rent. He did not do any thing. Madame sat at the window and worked, with her pretty white hands. Eh, bien! what shall you say then? she loved him—nothing was hard to her. He was made to be loved, this poor Monsieur Jean.”
“It is easy to say so—but he could not have deserved such a wife,” cried Cosmo, with a boy’s indignation; “he ought to have toiled for her rather, night and day.”
“Ah, monsieur is young,” said Baptiste, with a half satirical smile and shrug of his stooping French shoulders. “We know better when we have been married twenty years. Monsieur Jean was not made to toil, neither night nor day; but he loved madame still, and was jealous of her—he was abeau garçonhimself to his last days.”
“Jealous!” Cosmo was horrified; “you speak very lightly, Baptiste,” said the boy, angrily, “but that is worst of all—a lady so beautiful, so good—it is enough to see her to know how good she is—the man deserved to be shot!”
“Nay, nay,” cried Baptiste, laughing, “monsieur does not understand the ways of women—it pleased madame—they love to know their power, and to hear other people know it; all the women are so. Madame loved him all the better for being a little—just a little afraid of her beauty. But he did not live long—poor Monsieur Jean!”
“I hope she was very glad to be rid of such a fellow,” cried Cosmo, who was highly indignant at the deficient husband of his beautiful old lady. Baptiste rubbed the corner of his own eye rather hard with his knuckle. The cobbler had a little sentiment lingering in his ancient bosom for the admired of his youth.
“But he had an air noble—a great spirit,” cried Baptiste. “But madame loved him! She wept—all St. Ouen wept, monsieur—and he was the last of an old race. Now there are only the women, and madame herself is a foreigner and a stranger, and knows not our traditions. Ah, it is a great change for the house of Roche de St. Martin! If youwill believe it, monsieur, madame herself is called by the common people nothing but Madame Roche!”
“And that is very sad, Baptiste,” said Cosmo, with a smile. Baptiste smiled too; the cobbler was not particularly sincere in his aristocratical regrets, but, with the mingled wit and sentiment of his country, was sufficiently ready to perceive either the ludicrous or the pathetic aspect of the decayed family.
Cosmo, however, changed his tone with the most capricious haste. Whether she was a plain Madame Roche, or a noble lady, it did not matter much to the stranger. She was at the present moment, in her lovely age and motherhood, the lady of Cosmo’s dreams, and ridicule could not come near her. She was sacred to every idea that was most reverential and full of honor.
“And she is a widow, now, and has a sick daughter to take care of,” said Cosmo, meditatively; “strange how some people in the world have always some burden upon them. Had she no one to take care ofher?”
“If monsieur meansthat,” said Baptiste, with a comical smile, “I do not doubt madame might have married again.”
“Married—she! how dare you say so, Baptiste,” cried the lad, coloring high in indignation; “it is profane!—it is sacrilege!—but she has only this invalid daughter to watch and labor for—nothing more?”
“Yes—it is but a sad life,” said Baptiste; “many a laboring woman, as I tell Margot, has less to do with her hard fingers than has madame with those pretty white hands—one and another all her life to lean upon her, and now, alas! poor Mademoiselle Marie!”
The cobbler looked as if something more than mere compassion for her illness moved this last exclamation, but Cosmo was not very much interested about Mademoiselle Marie, who lay always on the sofa, and, hidden in the dimness of the chamber, looked older than her mother, as the lad fancied. He went away from Baptiste, however, with his mind very full of Madame Roche. For a homeborn youth like himself, so long accustomed to the family roof and his mother’s rule and company, he had been a long time now totally out of domestic usages and female society—longer than he had ever been in his life before—he was flattered to think that his beautiful old lady had noticedhim, and an affectionate chivalrous sentiment touched Cosmo’s mind with unusual pleasure. He loved to imagine to himself the delicate womanly fireside, lighted up by a smile which might remind him of his mother’s, yet would be more refined and captivating than the familiar looks of the Mistress. He thought of himself as something between a son and a champion, tenderly reverent and full of affectionate admiration. No idea of Mademoiselle Marie, nor of any other younger person with whom it might be possible to fall in love, brought Cosmo’s imagination down to the vulgar level. He felt as a lad feels who has been brought up under the shadow of a mother heartily loved and honored. It was still a mother he was dreaming about; but the delicate old beauty of his old lady added an indefinable charm to the impulse of affectionate respect which animated Cosmo. It made him a great deal more pleased and proud to think she had noticed him, and to anticipate perhaps an invitation to her very presence. It made him think as much about her to-day as though she had been a girl, and he her lover. The sentiment warmed the lad’s heart.
He was wandering around the noble old cathedral later in the day, when the February sun slanted upon all the fretted work of its pinnacles and niches, and playing in, with an ineffectual effort, was lost in the glorious gloom of the sculptured porch. Cosmo pleased himself straying about this place, not that he knew any thing about it, or was at all enlightened as to its peculiar beauties—but simply because it moved him with a sense of perfectness and glory, such as, perhaps, few other human works ever impress so deeply. As he went along, he came suddenly upon the object of his thoughts. Madame Roche—as Baptiste lamented to think the common people called her—was in an animated little discussion with a market-woman, then returning home, about a certain little bundle of sweet herbs which remained in her almost empty basket. Cosmo hurried past, shyly afraid to be supposed listening; but he could hear that there was something said about an omelette for Mademoiselle Marie, which decided the inclinations of his old lady. He could not help standing at the corner of the lane to watch her when she had passed. She put the herbs into her own little light basket, and was moving away towards her house, when something called her attentionbehind, and she looked back. She could not but perceive Cosmo, lingering shy and conscious at the corner, nor could she but guess that it was herself whom the lad had been looking at. She smiled to him, and made him a little courtesy, and waved her hand with a kindly, half-amused gesture of recognition, which completed the confusion of Cosmo, who had scarcely self-possession enough left to take off his hat. Then the old lady went on, and he remained watching her. What a step she had!—so simple, so straightforward, so unconscious, full of a natural grace which no training could have given. It occurred to Cosmo for a moment, that he had seen but one person walk like Madame Roche. Was it a gift universal to French women?—but then she was not a Frenchwoman—she was English—nay—hurrah! better still—she was his own countrywoman. Cosmo had not taken time to think of this last particular before—his eye brightened with a still more affectionate sentiment, his imagination quickened with new ground to go upon. He could not help plunging into the unknown story with quite a zest and fascination. Perhaps the little romance which the lad wove incontinently, was not far from the truth. The young heir of the house of Roche de St. Martin, whom the Revolution left barely “lord of his presence and no land beside"—the stately old French father, perhaps anemigré—the young man wandering about the free British soil, captivated by the lovely Scottish face, bringing his bride here, only to carry her away again, a gay, volatile, mercurial, unreliable Frenchman. Then those wanderings over half the world, those distresses, and labors, and cares which had not been able to take the sweet bloom from her cheek, nor that elastic grace from her step—and now here she was, a poor widow with a sick daughter, bargaining under the shadow of St. Ouen for the sweet herbs for Marie’s omelette. Cosmo’s young heart rose against the incongruities of fortune. She who should have been a fairy princess, with all the world at her feet, how had she carried that beautiful face unwithered and unfaded, that smile undimmed, that step unburthened, through all the years and the sorrows of her heavy life?
It seemed very hard to tell—a wonderful special provision of Providence to keep fresh the bloom which it had made; and Cosmo went home, thinking with enthusiasm that perhapsit was wrong to grudge all the poverty and trials which doubtless she had made beautiful and lighted up by her presence among them. Cosmo was very near writing some verses on the subject. It was a very captivating subject to a poet of his years—but blushed and restrained himself with a truer feeling, and only went to rest that night wondering how poor Mademoiselle Marie liked her omelette, and whether Madame Roche, the next time they met, would recognize him again.