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Title: The Duke's Daughter; and, The Fugitives; vol. 3/3

Author: Mrs. Oliphant

Release date: November 28, 2020 [eBook #63903]

Language: English

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
        at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
        available at The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DUKE'S DAUGHTER; AND, THE FUGITIVES; VOL. 3/3 ***




                          THE DUKE’S DAUGHTER

                                  AND

                             THE FUGITIVES

    “Lady, you come hither to be married to this count?”
    “I do.”
        --_Much Ado about Nothing._





                          THE DUKE’S DAUGHTER

                                  AND

                             THE FUGITIVES

                                  BY

                             MRS OLIPHANT


                           IN THREE VOLUMES

                               VOL. III.


                      WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
                         EDINBURGH AND LONDON
                                MDCCCXC




                             THE FUGITIVES

                             (_CONTINUED_)




                            THE FUGITIVES.




CHAPTER VI.


Next morning Latour was more cheerful than usual. The men who had come
to inspect the woods were not indeed picturesque figures, nor of a very
elevated class, but still they made the village street lively, which was
delightful to Janey, and cheered Helen in spite of herself. Everything
looks a little more cheerful, more comfortable, in the morning. The sun
shone down the village street, catching here and there upon a little
window in a thatched roof, upon the weather-cock on the tower of the
_château_, and on the church spire--and shedding a ruddy glow, touched
with frost, over all the country. The woods looked as if they had been
crimsoned permanently by the red tint in the sunshine, so harmonious
were their hues. The road was flecked by yellow bars looking like rays
of gold; everything was mellow and warm in colour, notwithstanding the
chill of coming winter in the air. Little groups of men took their way
in a broken stream towards the woods. Some of them burly French farmers,
of the better sort, with close-cropped heads, and overcoats of
picturesque green-blue, that favoured tint which is “the fashion”; some
in blouses, not so ambitious; with one or two wood merchants from the
neighbouring towns, prim and well-shaven, in the frock-coat of
respectability. There had been a great deal of drinking and bargaining
in all the _cabarets_ about, the evening before. The villagers had given
their advice, especially those among them who were the least creditable
members of society, the poachers of the _commune_, who knew every tree.
Some of them, the idlest, the least satisfactory of all, to whom the
loss of a day’s work was rather a pleasure than a misfortune,
accompanied the intending purchasers to the woods.

“Keep up by the pond, monsieur,” said one of these fellows, attaching
himself to Mr Goulburn. “There is some oak that might build ships of
war----”

“The best trees are on the Côte du Midi,” said another. “If monsieur
will confide himself to me----”

“I don’t mean to confide myself to any one, my good fellow,” Mr Goulburn
said. He walked along a little in advance of the two, with an air alert
and vigorous, restored by the new possibility of traffic.

Janey ran by her father’s side, clinging to his finger, and chattering
all the way. “What are they saying, papa? They speak so funny. Why don’t
they speak English? Couldn’t they speak English if they liked?”

Mr Goulburn was a man who liked to be popular. He was of the class which
servants declare to be “not the least proud.” “My little girl thinks you
could speak English if you liked,” he said, turning to Antoine, the most
noted poacher in the district.

“Ah! je voudrais bien! I should then have the pleasure of talking to
these demoiselles,” the man said, taking off his hat.

“I don’t like him,” said little Janey. “He has a big cut on his head; he
has eyes like the ogre in ‘Jack the Giant-killer.’ What does he want
with you, papa? He will take you into a cave, and he will eat you up. I
like the other one best.”

The other was Baptiste, who was the son of the landlady at the Lion
d’Or. It was he who advised the Côte du Midi. He knew all the coverts as
well as the partridges did, or the old wolf that lurked in the darkest
shades of the forest. And his woodland likings had brought him woe; but
he was bent upon defending _l’Anglais_, who was his private property for
the moment, his mother’s lodger, from the clutches of Antoine.

When they came as far as the _château_, Janey consented to give up her
father’s finger, and to withdraw from the procession of the wood
merchants. The _château_ was not one of those deserted grey houses they
had passed on their way from Montdard, but a fine medieval building,
surrounded by a moat, and modernised under Louis Quatorze. It occupied
three sides of a square, and at the end nearest the village was
distinguished by a noble tower, covered with a pointed roof, from the
windows of which the lights always shone at night, like a sort of
lighthouse to the village. Helen stopped to look at it with a little
quickening of natural interest. There was nothing about it of the luxury
of the English home. It stood close to the road, no privacy of exquisite
lawns or wealthy foliage withdrawing it from the humblest of its
neighbours, a poor little plot of shrubs occupying the centre of the
square within the gravelled drive. The long row of large white windows,
very close to each other, which ran round two sides of the square, were
undraped and unornamented, not a curtain, not a piece of furniture,
showing from the outside. The great door underneath them stood open,
and showed only a narrow corridor, and a bare stone staircase, mounting
between two white walls. Helen stood and looked at it wistfully. She
scarcely seemed to remember her own past life--it was a life which had
no sort of connection with the cottages of Latour, the women in their
white caps, the strange existence of the Lion d’Or; but here there was a
kind of link of connection. If there were girls in the _château_, theirs
might be a French version of her old life. They would be in the
neighbourhood, in the village, something like what she had been. If they
but knew! “But I hope,” she said to herself with a sigh, realising
vividly the imagination that had presented itself to her, as if the
fancied daughters of this house were certainly existing, “I hope that
nothing will ever happen to _them_!” As the thought passed through her
mind, the very creatures of her fancy appeared at the open door, two
girls, she thought about her own age, though they were both older than
Helen, dressed in the gloomy mourning of France, without an edge of
white anywhere. They came out with a little clamour of talk, their
voices louder than Helen was used to, though finely modulated and
sweetly toned. Their French gave her that sense of giddiness, as if her
head was turning round, which a new language imperfectly understood is
apt to give. She went on, thinking it rude to stand and stare after they
appeared; but the attraction was strong, and she turned when they had
gone a few steps farther, to go back again, almost meeting the two girls
as they came out of the gate. Their pleasant voices seemed to make a
difference in the air. When they perceived her their lively talk broke
off suddenly. Helen felt sure they were asking each other in
undertones, “Who is that? Where has she come from? Do you think she
looks nice?” though all in their French. She scarcely liked to look at
them, but her heart beat; for they seemed to make a pause and consult
each other. She wondered would they speak to her? It went to her heart
when, after that consultation, they went on, though with a momentary
hesitation. “They do not like the looks of us, Janey,” she said.

“Where are they doing to?” said Janey. “What are they thinking about? I
wonder if there are any little children in that big funny castle. Little
children are everywhere,” said the little girl mournfully, “but you
tan’t play with them. Helen, don’t you want to do home?”

“I don’t know; perhaps it would not be home now--not like what it used
to be. But you are too little,” said Helen, with a sigh; “if I were to
tell you, you wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand more better than you,” said Janey, promptly, “for papa
tells me everything. I know,” she said, clapping her hands, “I am not to
be called the old name any more. I am little Janey Harford. Papa told me
so. It is because of naughty, wicked men. Is it not funny, Helen? And
you are Helen Harford too. I sing it to myself, over and over, not to
forget. Nursey wouldn’t know who we were, if she were to hear. We are
all different people now. Dolly, that I put in my little bed is me, and
I’m little Janey Harford.” The child made a little chant of it as she
frisked along the road. “I’m little Janey Harford, I am little Janey
Haar-ford!” It was a piece of delightful fun to Janey. What child can
resist the pleasure of being not me, but somebody else? The spirit of
an adventurer was in the little girl. She did not cling to the
superstitions of propriety and an honest life as Helen did. The
mystification charmed her. “It will not be you and me, but it will be
two other girls,” Janey said. Perhaps the profound gravity of this new
step was lessened to Helen also by its effect upon her little sister.
“It is I who am silly,” poor Helen said to herself. She reminded herself
how common it was for people to travel _incognito_. “That means out of
their right name. The Queen does it!” Helen said suddenly to herself,
with a sense of relief and consolation unspeakable. She knew that august
lady could do no wrong.

They went back slowly through the village, following at a long interval
the young ladies from the _château_, in whom Helen felt so great an
interest, and who stopped to speak to M. le Curé, and turned round,
plainly indicating to him the two figures in the distance. M. le Curé
looked very closely at Helen and Janey when he passed them a little
afterwards. He was an active, spare, tall man, in his long black
_soutane_ and his three-cornered hat of fluffy beaver on his head. He
let his eyes rest with a lingering look of pleasure and interest upon
the child. Most likely he took Helen, who looked older than her eighteen
years, for a young mother with her child, and the Curé knew how to win
the hearts of parents. Now that all the intending purchasers had passed,
there were very few people about. The cottages did not stand open, as at
Fareham; here and there a woman washing her vegetables outside the door,
or chopping her wood into small pieces, would break the monotony, but
there was no lively coming and going of gossips and neighbours. At one
of the two larger houses an old man had come out, and was standing at
the door. He had a handkerchief tied round his head, and a long coat,
half a dressing-gown, folded across his long legs, and was looking out
with the keenest malignant eyes, as if in search of some one. The Curé
passed this personage with a stiff nod, but the other only grinned in
reply. He grinned also at the young strangers as they came along, and at
a lady who suddenly appeared from the door of the other house, dressed
in the simple morning dress, fitting the figure behind, but falling
straight and loose in front, which is common in France. There was a
little conversation between these two, in the high-pitched voices which
made every word audible.

“Madame goes out early,” said the old man. “M. le Précepteur perhaps
has gone to the forest to lay in wood for the winter?”

“No; Monsieur le Précepteur has his public duties to think of. Persons
in the public service have not time to consider their own advantage,”
said the lady.

“Ah, how right madame is! how fine is devotion to one’s country!” cried
the old man, with a grin which divided his long face into two halves,
shrivelling up both. He laughed when his neighbour had passed, and went
on laughing sardonically under his breath. Then his eyes fell upon Helen
and the child. “Tiens! des Anglaises,” he said.

Even Janey knew now that _des Anglaises_ had something to do with her
small self. She drew up her little person with conscious dignity,
averting her head as she walked past.

“Bonjour, mes demoiselles,” he said, and straightway addressed the
alarmed Helen in a speech which drove all idea of amusement out of her
head, comical though his grimaces were. To be addressed in so much
French bewildered the girl, especially as he seemed to be asking
something of her which she could not fathom. “Belle appartement, beau
jardin, pension si on le veut.”

What was it he was offering her? She blushed to the roots of her hair,
and faltered in her English-French, “Pardonnez-moi, s’il vous plaît. Mon
père n’est pas ici. Je ne sais pas. Mon père est----”

Helen’s words failed her. She pointed with much embarrassment along the
road by which her father had gone.

“Ah! monsieur est là-bas? in the woods? Bien, bien, bien! I will wait
for monsieur,” said the old man.

The girls quickened their steps as they got away from him.

“What does he want, Helen?” Janey said in great alarm.

“Oh, I think he wants us to lodge there,” said the elder sister,
scarcely less uncomfortable.

The little girl looked up in her face with a dismayed and frightened
countenance. “Are we doing to stay here--always?” little Janey said.

The question appalled them both, but the one knew as little as the other
how to answer it. They went on softly in the sudden gloom which this
idea spread round them. To drop suddenly from the skies from one new
place into another, might be amusing enough for a little while; but to
remain--always, as Janey said! Helen’s imagination was scarcely less
young than her little sister’s. To-day and always were the only
alternatives. They held each other fast by the hand, and walked along
the village street, feeling a sudden dreariness steal over the whole
scene. It had relapsed into its usual quiet, though there were ranges of
tables outside the Lion d’Or, and the rival _auberge_ on the other side
of the street, to accommodate the thirsty visitors when they should
return from the woods. In the distance the young ladies from the
_château_ were disappearing round the corner. The woman who had been
washing her vegetables had also disappeared, but another had come out to
help her who was chopping the wood. And the old man still stood at his
door, peering up and down the village. It was strange to go on
disturbing the silence, interrupting the sunshine, in a place so quiet;
their steps seemed to send echoes through all the tranquil place.

“Is it always so quiet?” Helen asked timidly when they reached the Lion
d’Or. The mistress of the house stood at the door, shading her eyes with
her hand, and looking out for the return of the expected purchasers.
She was a buxom woman, in a white cap, with long, heavy ear-rings and
bright eyes.

“Does mademoiselle think it so quiet?” she said. “Wait till they begin
to come back. _Ma foi!_ it is a crowd, a tumult. In half an hour we
shall not know where to turn to find a seat that is unoccupied. Ah! the
‘_vente des bois_’ is a great day. There is nothing like it out of
Paris. But in Paris it lasts continually, that is the difference.
Mademoiselle has been in Paris?”

“Only for a day.”

“Aha! that is nothing at all. Paris cannot be seen in so little time.
The English go too quickly, if you will pardon me for saying so. Paris!
Figure to yourself that I was there, mademoiselle, effectively there,
for all of a month. I know Paris at my fingers’ ends.”

“Are the young ladies very nice,” said Helen, hesitating--(she did not
know how to say nice, that accommodating word. “Les jeunes dames,
sont-elles très-agréables”--which, even to her English ear, did not
sound right--was what she said)--“at the _château_?”

“_Comment?_--ah! you would say the demoiselles who passed just now. Yes,
not amiss. We do not find fault with them,” said Madame Dupré, with a
slight shrug of the shoulders; “but speaking of Paris, mademoiselle. Ah!
if I could but have sent my Baptiste there, what a happiness! He might
have been clerk in one of the best _magasins_ on the Boulevard. But boys
are obstinate beyond all things, beyond the very mules. He prefers his
village, and the woods, and the _chasse_. He gives me a great deal of
inquietude, my boy. Should he draw a bad number it will be an evil day
for the Lion d’Or. There is always that hanging over us. When a poor
woman has several sons, instead of being a help to her it is but opening
the gates to evil. She who has only one may keep him safe. And what does
it matter, when they are helpless children, how many sons you have,
mademoiselle? Till the _tirage_ is over, I shall never know a day’s
ease. Sometimes I think it is better to have no children at all, as old
M. Goudron says.”

“Is that old M. Goudron?” said Helen, pointing to the old man who still
stood at his door and watched, with his red and yellow handkerchief tied
round his head.

“He is what we call a _richard_, mademoiselle, the most rich person in
the village. He has so much that he thinks it is a crime to be poor; he
thinks it is your fault, not circumstances. His poor little
granddaughter lives with him in that big house, and he leads her a life!
Fancy, mademoiselle, the poor girl loves my Baptiste! they have always
had a fancy for each other; and if the old man would give her a _dot_ as
he promised, and Baptiste drew a good number----”

“What is a good number?” said Helen, in her ignorance. She did not know
what it meant. That the young man’s fate should depend on the very
insignificant fact whether he drew five or fifty, was incomprehensible
to Helen.

Madame Dupré on her side was equally incapable of understanding how any
one could be ignorant on the subject of the conscription. It did not
require a very strong inducement to make her talk. And she launched
forthwith into an eloquent denunciation of the evils of the system. “A
low number is a good number,” she said; “but figure to yourself,
mademoiselle, what will happen to me if it comes otherwise. Either my
Baptiste marched away to the life of the _caserne_,--such a life, such a
life, _mon Dieu!_ and though he is a good son, he is idle, I do not deny
it--he loves to wander; it would be his destruction,--or all that we
have taken from us to buy a substitute. Often it is a thousand francs,
no less. Think of that, mademoiselle, a thousand francs! and I but a
poor widow with four children. When I think of it in the night my sleep
goes from me. Certainly M. Goudron has reason. Children are the chief
pleasures in our existence, but it is true that they are at the same
time our torment--they are our cross that we must bear.”

She lifted up the corner of her apron to her eye, but seeing under its
shadow the first person of the crowd coming into sight, she returned at
once to her business.

“Quick, Jeanne!” she said--“the soup! they come.” And sure enough, the
one figure was soon followed by others. Madame Dupré lost not another
moment. She took the long rolls out of the basket and put them by every
plate. She set upon the table, at equal distances, the _vin du pays_,
which was given with the meal. Her long ear-rings swung in her ears with
the vehemence of her movements, her cap-strings floated in the air. She
sent little Auguste, the waiter, in three directions at once, and,
wonderful to relate, he went. Auguste was ubiquitous; he could carry any
number of plates, full or empty, and a laden tray on four fingers of his
extended hand. His feet, in their low shoes, twinkled over the floor
like lightning. He was never still for a moment. The two girls stood
looking on at all these arrangements till Madame Dupré ran against them.
“Pardon me, mes demoiselles,” she said, “you will be better up-stairs.
When monsieur your father comes back he will like to find you in your
own apartment. The Lion d’Or is very well regulated, but there are
_mauvais sujets_ that will take more wine than is good for them. When
the bustle is over, Auguste shall mount up-stairs with the young ladies’
breakfast.”

This speech, delivered without one pause for breath, was very puzzling
to Helen, who had only understood approximately. But she understood
enough to lead Janey, very reluctant, up-stairs. And here they watched
the return of the buyers, which went on for the next two hours, one
group and another coming in till the whole village was overflowing. The
most important among them had maps of the property, to which they
referred, perpetually pointing out to one another the different lots,
and quarrelling about the position of their bits of timber. Mr Goulburn
returned as he had gone away, with young Baptiste and Antoine
discoursing to him on either side. He had the air, radiant and
satisfied, of a man who had done a good morning’s work. He listened to
all they said to him with a smile, but he did not accept Antoine’s
offers of guidance in the matter of cutting up the wood he had bought,
or getting the best price for it. “We will talk of that afterwards, my
good friends,” he said. He was willing to hear what they said to him,
but he did not pledge himself to follow either. Meanwhile it was quite a
gay scene from the windows of the Lion d’Or. The old man still stood at
his door, exchanging a word here and there, and asking eager questions
about the buyers. He had nothing to do with the old Count’s wood, but to
have something happening was a godsend to him. As for little Janey, the
bustle in the street was delightful to her. She leaned out of the
window, keeping Helen in terror. She called “Papa,” making a pretty
babyish grimace as she looked down upon him, watching her opportunity to
drop something upon his head or his plate. However impatient of others,
he was always tolerant of Janey’s freaks. Her countenance was as gay as
that of the happiest child in Christendom; and his was bright with
satisfaction and pleasure. It was not possible to Helen to change so
easily. She gazed upon the happiness in both their faces with an envy
that perhaps had a little disdain in it. How easily they threw over
their burdens, while she---- And once more it became apparent to Helen
that they were very likely to remain a long time at Latour.




CHAPTER VII.


“I have bought a corner of the wood; I could not resist the temptation.
So far as I can see, I must be able to make my own out of it. Well,
perhaps it was foolish; but I must do something, and there is no
likelihood of loss at least.”

Thus he explained himself somewhat lamely, with a consciousness that
what he was saying must sound very strange to her. What did Helen know
about his plans, or whether it was foolish or not, and why should he
have explained it to her? It alarmed her as much as everything else in
the strange and terrible imbroglio through which she could see no
light.

“Papa, I---- You said you were poor----”

“Poor! And you think it is inconsistent with poverty that I should buy a
few miserable bits of wood? You have made great progress lately, Helen,
to permit yourself to sit in judgment on your father.”

She looked at him piteously, with an appeal in her face. “I don’t know
about it, papa; how can I know, or how can I sit in judgment? Will you
please not tell me anything? Because I don’t understand, and then it
looks as if I understood.”

“It seems to me you are no better than a fool, Helen.” But when he had
said this he went away, and relieved her from the pressure of the new
burden to which she was so unaccustomed. The excuse, the apology
conveyed in his explanations, gave her a sense of confused misery,
incongruity, impossibility, which was almost the worst of all. Oh, why
had he ever told her anything? Why had he raised her against her will
into that position in which she was forced more or less to judge against
her will? She sat, when he had gone, at the window of the little room
up-stairs, which was the best room in the Lion d’Or. The white curtains,
it need not be said, were fixed fast as if they were glued to the
window. To draw them aside would have been more terrible to Madame Dupré
than to break a moral law; the one might have been condoned by public
opinion, but the other! Helen sat within the primly fixed muslin which
veiled all the world without, and sometimes shed a few tears quietly,
while she made an attempt to mend Janey’s frock. It was not a
handicraft she understood, but at least she could fasten the two gaping
sides of a rent together, and that was always some good.

But Janey was enchanted with the corner of the wood which her father had
bought. He took them to see it in the afternoon, Antoine and Baptiste
both following--Antoine as the possible wood-cutter for the removal of
the trees, Baptiste as the host and natural care-taker of the strangers.
With the latter, Janey had already made great friends in her fashion.
The means of communication between them was limited, but that has little
to do with real amity. When there had been something in the conversation
which pleased Janey, she left her father’s hand, and came up running and
smiling to this new ally. “N’est-ce pas, Monsieur Baptiste?” Janey
cried; and the young fellow replied with a broad grin, “Oui,
mademoiselle.” Janey’s little laugh rang through the trees after every
interpellation of this kind. It was an admirable joke, which pleased
everybody. As for Antoine, he did his best to attract a similar
confidence, but without any success. He was not young and smiling like
his rival. He was a tall and powerful man, with the head of a brigand,
black-eyed and black-bearded, and his smile was uneasy and unreal; but
Baptiste was brown and curly, his hair all hyacinthine, his boyish
moustache curling over a perpetual smile. And the road into the woods
was so cheerful and bright, that no wonder Janey was delighted. The oaks
had begun to blaze in red and brown; the feathery larches drooped their
delicate branches against an illuminated background of autumn tints; big
green laurels and hollies made solid towers of green among the varied
copse. A few magnificent foxgloves still remaining threw up their shafts
of flowers, and there was not a bit of brushwood that had not some
cluster of scarlet haws or trailing russet of a bramble to make it
bright. The corner which Mr Goulburn had bought was like a little
pine-forest in itself--a regiment of tall and even firs. The sun was
slanting in upon the red and golden columns upon which the dense yet
varied roof of green was supported. Underneath, the brown carpet of
fallen foliage, years upon years of growth, made slippery elastic
cushions, which, with here and there a bank of emerald moss breaking
through, were warm and soft. There were projections of twisted roots to
make thrones of, and a tinkle of an unseen rivulet close by filled the
air with music, when it could be heard for the sighing and murmuring
overhead as the wind swept through the boughs. “Oh, let us never do away
again! let us stay here for ever and ever!” cried little Janey; and then
her little voice rang off into peals of laughter as she called out,
“N’est-ce pas, Monsieur Baptiste?” “Oui, ma bonne petite demoiselle,”
said Baptiste, with his genial grin. He did not understand a word, but
what did that matter? Mr Goulburn was touched by his child’s enthusiasm.
“We shall not stay for ever and ever, but we may stay a good long time,
my little Janey,” he said; “it is a pretty place and quiet. Even Helen
thinks so, who is never pleased.”

The same night, when they were rising from the table in the little
_salle à manger_ where they had just dined, the old man whom Helen and
her little sister had seen in the village street came in with his hat in
his hand. He came up to their father with elaborate politeness.
“Monsieur will pardon me,” he said. “I know what is required by persons
_comme il faut_, and though I have nothing to say against my good
neighbour Madame Dupré, yet it cannot be denied that the arrangements of
the house leave much to be desired. Would monsieur do me the favour to
look at my apartment which is to let? I have already had the honour of
mentioning it to mademoiselle. My house is the best house in Latour.
There is a garden, which is laid out after the best models. If monsieur
will permit me to show it to him, he will make me happy.”

Mr Goulburn had been puzzled by the preamble about the wants of persons
_comme il faut_. Everything that was unknown was a little alarming to
him; but he recovered his placidity when the word _appartement_ met his
ear. “It is true,” he said, “the arrangements of the Lion d’Or leave
much to be desired, as this gentleman says. Shall we go and inspect his
house as he proposes? It would not be a bad thing to do.

“Oh no, no, no!” cried little Janey, like a little fury. This time her
father was not so much touched by her opinion. He told her she was a
little goose, and finally he went out himself with old M. Goudron,
desiring severely that the heroine of the afternoon should be put to
bed. The day is over early in October, and when the two girls went up to
their room, and lighted their solitary candle, it was a great deal less
cheerful than in the ruddy woods, with the sunshine penetrating between
the tall columns of the pines. The rush-bottomed chairs groaned at every
movement upon the wooden floor. There was no fire, though the evening
was cold, and the candle threw but a miserable light upon the two
little wooden beds and the humble furniture, of which there was so
little. “I want to do home,” sobbed little Janey as she went weeping to
bed. And Helen sat down again, and put the two gaping mouths of the rent
together; or, rather, finished the joining of them which she had begun
in the morning. She felt that it was not very well done. The daughter of
a millionaire, with all kinds of servants at her call, how was she to
know how to mend her little sister’s frock? If that had been all! Helen
felt herself able to learn; but how to arrange into something that was
comprehensible this jarred and broken thread of life she did not know.
By-and-by the nightly noise began below, which had ceased to disturb
little Janey’s sleep. Madame Dupré kept good wine, and Baptiste was a
favourite in the village. The men came in, in their heavy boots, and
talked in voices louder than the clodhoppers of an English village.
Often Helen sprang to her feet and ran to the door, thinking there was
some deadly quarrel. It was only Jean or Pierre more eloquent than
usual. Opposite, at the Cheval Blanc, there was the same tumult; but the
village round about these two noisy places was as silent as a sleeping
city. It was too cold for the women to stand about the doors and have
their evening gossip. Helen went to her window and peeped out by the
side of the blind when she had finished her mending. She could see M.
Goudron’s house opposite, and her father standing in the moonlight
outside the door. A little superstitious thrill ran through her, she
could not tell why; and just then Antoine came up, and stood and talked.
They came back to the inn together, the big hulking figure of the
villager, in his blue blouse, towering over Mr Goulburn. Helen did not
like the man, but her dislike of him did not seem enough to account for
the sense of alarm with which she saw them cross the street together.
She was relieved when her father came into the light under the window
and entered the Lion d’Or.

Old Goudron was one of those born fortune-makers whose gift is as little
capable of being crushed by circumstances as is the genius of a poet. He
would have amassed wealth on a desert island. He had dealt in every kind
of merchandise in his day, and it was believed that the manner of his
traffic had not been always blameless. He had gone through all the
possible industries of the village: he had dealt in ship stores at
Marseilles, in wine-casks at Dijon; he had pounced on a hundred small
gainful speculations which only a keen microscopic eye, always intent
on profit, could see. He had neglected nothing, overlooked nothing, by
which a penny could be made. Even now that he was old, and the _richard_
of the village, supposed to possess unbounded wealth, his eyes were as
keenly open as ever to all the possibilities of adding to his store.
When he stood at his door with the handkerchief tied about his head
nothing escaped him. If a child dropped a _sou_ on the road it was
supposed that old Goudron picked it up. Money stuck to his fingers, the
people said; they were half afraid of him, yet almost reverential of his
genius. M. Goudron, however, to this one faculty, which is cosmopolitan,
added others which belong more exclusively to his country. He scoffed at
religion in all its forms, and he was republican of the republicans. He
scoffed at most things, it is well to add. His long countenance, cut in
two by the mockery of his characteristic grin, was that of a vulgar and
mean Voltaire, always on the watch for an opportunity of reviling.
Naturally such remains of his family as were left to him did everything
that in them lay to thwart all the objects of his life. His children
were dead, and he had but three grandchildren remaining to him in the
world. Of these, two girls lived with him in his house, suffered all his
caprices, and crossed him in every instinct of his nature; and the
remaining one, his son’s son, his natural representative, was a
spendthrift and good-for-nothing, abroad somewhere in the world, of whom
the old man knew nothing, except that he was sure to turn up some time
to reclaim his part of the succession, from which, according to French
law, he could not be shut out.

Thus M. Goudron knew that his cherished money, when he left it behind
him, would go to Blanchette, the girl who wanted to marry Baptiste Dupré
without a _sou_; and to Ursule, who had a _vocation_, and was bent on
becoming a nun; and to Léon, who was a good-for-nothing, and spent every
penny he could get before he earned it. This was not a pleasant prospect
for the old _richard_. Perhaps it embittered him against the world. It
certainly made life so much the harder for the two poor girls who were
his descendants, but who had no sympathy with him. Though he was so
rich, they were exactly like the other cottage girls of Latour. Margot,
the good woman who lived in the next cottage, came in, before she
attended to her own household, to do what was wanted for M. Goudron’s
lodgers; but Blanchette and Ursule, though they were heiresses, did all
the household work in their own apartment up-stairs. Margot’s children
chopped the wood and drew the water; but it was Ursule who kept the
house in that chill and waxy cleanliness which is the French ideal, and
Blanchette who cooked, and washed, and served the table. Work, indeed,
is reduced to its easiest proportions in a house where there are only as
many rooms as are absolutely wanted, and no carpets in these rooms; and
where the kitchen fire is a little pan of charcoal, capable of being
lighted or extinguished in a moment. Margot, with her smiling brown face
and her white cap, did all this for the lodgers down-stairs. She swept
their bare _salon_ at an unusually early hour in the morning, waking the
girls by the vigorous sounds of her broom, and dusted the long formal
candelabra and large bronze clock which half covered the old mirror over
the chimney-piece. When they came in on the first morning there was a
log blazing in the wide chimney, sending its ruddy sparks and almost
all the warmth it produced up that vast aperture. Janey coming in, flew
to the fire with delight, putting her little hands out to the ruddy
glow. “It is as nice as the forest,” Janey said; “I am so glad we came
here!” Margot let her brush of feathers drop, and folded her arms, and
looked on with a broad smile.

“The little one is charming,” she said. “She is not so tranquil,
mademoiselle, saving your respect, as most of you other English. Do you
never talk, what we call _causer_, among yourselves?”

“I do not know what is the difference between _parler_ and _causer_,”
said Helen.

“Ah, mademoiselle, such a difference! I am too ignorant to explain; one
feels it, one does not know how to describe. _Tenez_! if mademoiselle
knew the young persons up-stairs--Ursule, who is as good as a little
saint; she has her mind full of religion, she is always serious.
Mademoiselle knows that she has a _vocation_, and but for that old Père
Goudron, who is Voltairian, who is--hush! he has ears that go over all
the house. _Bien!_ Ursule talks, _elle parle_; but her sister, little
Blanchette, who is the little merry one, she who is always singing, she
who chatters, chatters all day long, and never is quiet--_elle cause_.
Now mademoiselle will see the difference. And perhaps the English, too,
_causent_, though we never hear them, when they are at home, as we are
here.”

“It is because we only know a few words,” said Helen. “I should like to
_causer_ like Mademoiselle Blanchette, but----”

“Ah!” cried Margot, “here is a beginning! Mademoiselle is ten times more
pretty when her face lights up. When we allow ourselves to criticise,
this is what we say of the English--‘They are too serious; they have
what we call _figures de bois_.’ When one chatters, when one smiles, all
is changed. She is charming, _la petite_.”

“What is she saying about _la petite_?” said Janey. “_La petite_, that
is me! I want to know what she says.”

“Je dis que vous êtes charmante, mademoiselle,” cried Margot, with a
laugh. “You see I understand the English. If the little demoiselle will
condescend to amuse herself with my little Marion and Petit-Jean, she
will soon learn to chatter like the rest. Monsieur your father speaks
very good French, and I hear that he knows himself in affairs to
perfection, mademoiselle. They say he had the best bargain of all in the
‘_vente des bois_,’ and that he will make enormously by it. Ah, the
English, they are the people for affairs!” said Margot, admiringly.
“But to imagine that one like monsieur should have taken the trouble to
come all this way to little Latour for the ‘_vente des bois_!’ That
shows how the English always have their wits about them, while we, who
are on the spot, and who ought to know, we are so _bête_, we let those
good bargains slip out of our hands.”

“We did not hear of it in England,” said Helen; “we were travelling----”

“Ah! and one knows how to join affairs to one’s pleasure when one is
English. It is extraordinary; they never forget themselves,” Margot
said. “But monsieur is rich?” she added interrogatively. “It makes
nothing to him to gain a little, to take the profits out of another’s
hands. It is _pour s’amuser_, to distract himself, to forget the _ennui_
which is peculiar to the English.”

“We were once rich,” said Helen, “but we are not rich now; papa says
so. And we have no _ennui_, as you call it, in England,” she cried
indignantly.

Margot smiled; she could forgive the patriotic denial, but she was aware
that she knew better. “All the same,” she said, “it must be sad to live
in a perpetual fog and never to see the sun. For that I could never
support your England, notwithstanding all that you have there. Of what
use is wealth when you cannot see the sky?” said Margot. Helen was too
indignant to reply.

But in the course of the first day she got a great deal of information
from Margot, who told her all about the young ladies at the _château_,
who talked English _comme deux diablesses_, the woman said--and who were
indeed English-mad, and betrothed, one of them, to an Englishman. When
Helen asked once more in her halting French, whether they were
_très-agréables_, meaning “very nice,” Margot answered with a shrug of
her shoulders--

“I do not know anything to the contrary. What does that matter to us
others if the aristocrats are _agréable_ or not? They are not as we are,
they are not of us. They have got their _château_ and their _bois_, and
all that, though many people think they have no right, and should not be
allowed to retain it. But I say to my man, ‘What is that to us? We have
not the money to buy it. Let them stay. Madame la Comtesse is better
than old Père Goudron, who would buy it all if it were taken away from
them. So why should we interfere?’ That is what I always say----”

“Interfere!” said Helen, not knowing what to think.

“Jacques, who is my man, is not always of my opinion, mademoiselle. He
says, why should there be a _château_ for one and a little cabin for
another? But I say, ‘Hold thy tongue, _mon homme_. How would it
advantage thee?’ It is hard, nevertheless,” said Margot, “that we should
have to go and buy our own woods to warm us in the winter. The trees
were not made by M. le Comte; they are there for all the world. Yet we
must spend our little money, and go to the _vente_, and pay for what has
grown out of the earth! This is an injustice. When anything passes
through a _fabrique_, and is manufactured, I allow that it should be
paid for; but that which grows by itself, which comes out of the ground,
that is different. Figure to yourself that I am talking politics to the
English young lady. _Va_, Margot, thou art a fool for thy pains!
Naturally mademoiselle is Conservative--she loves the aristocrats, like
all her nation?”

“I don’t know,” said Helen, surprised. She had heard her father rail
against aristocrats, but she had understood that it was because the
great people round Fareham had been uncivil. She had never supposed the
existence of such a feeling in a cottage, and it puzzled her too much to
make any reply possible. “But surely----” she began, then stopped, for
she was not very sure of anything in French, and even in English could
not venture upon a political argument. She returned with some difficulty
and discomfort to the original question.

“The young ladies at the _château_, are they not good to the poor?”

“Oh, _les pauvres_! Yes, yes; they are kind enough. When one is ill they
will come and demand, ‘What can one do for you?’ It is true,
mademoiselle; but one does not like to have it thus forced upon one
brutally that others are better off than one’s self. That humbles you.
I prefer, for my part, that they should not interfere. _Assez!_ let us
talk of something else,” said Margot, taking up her _plumet_, which in
her fervour she had allowed to drop from her hand. This was the worst of
Margot’s ministrations. When she became interested in the conversation,
the feather-brush always dropped and the dusting was suspended. As for
Helen, she felt her world widening around her. She forgot the strange
sentiments she had been hearing, and the strange position in which she
found herself. On one hand, there was little Blanchette with her story;
and on the other, the young ladies at the _château_, who spoke English.
Her heart filled with excitement and hope. They were nothing to her, but
they opened once more the ordinary world, and delivered her from her own
tribulations and thoughts.




CHAPTER VIII.


Helen and her little sister were left very much to themselves for some
time after they settled in M. Goudron’s house, and the village life
going on round them soon became interesting and important to the
strangers. Little Janey played all day long with Marie and Petit-Jean,
and acquired a Burgundian accent, and an ease of speech much beyond that
of Helen, who still talked as with a shadow behind her of her governess,
and was tremulous about her genders, and afraid of the subjunctive mood.
It was wonderful how soon they came to know the stories which hid under
each little thatched roof. Though Helen did not dare in the face of
public opinion to unfasten the closely strained curtain that covered her
windows, she managed to draw its fulness towards the centre, leaving a
little corner by which she could see what was going on. The chief thing
she saw, it must be allowed, was old Goudron standing at the door
watching everything that went on with his hungry old eyes, and grinning
with malicious pleasure at every mishap. Nothing escaped the old man,
and his grin was the chief thing in Latour which soured the milk of
human kindness, made the good wives cross, they could not tell why, and
exasperated the men. He was always there with malignant and mocking
words whatever happened, to say that “I told you so”--which makes every
misfortune a little more unbearable;--“if you had listened to me.” The
house next door was the only house in the village which made any
pretensions to gentility. M. le Précepteur who lived in it was not a
schoolmaster, as the English reader may suppose, but the collector of
taxes, a Government _employé_, who held on with a very stern clutch to
the skirts of the aristocracy, as a man well born, with a wife who found
herself sadly out of place in this desert. When madame went by in her
pretty toilets, M. Goudron had always a gibe. The public virtue of M. le
Précepteur, and his devotion to the country, was his favourite subject.
“_Quoi_, madame! it is too much to have an old Roman for a husband.
Again you go out alone,” he would say. Madame knew that her
irreproachable husband was playing billiards at the moment, thinking
very little of public duty, and still less of the enormity of leaving
her to go out alone, but she held up her head and smiled disdainfully.
“In our class, monsieur,” she said, “we are trained from our cradles to
recognise that each has their share of duty--society for the women, but
for the men the country. It is difficult, I am aware, to make it
comprehensible among the _bourgeois_,” she added, sweeping past with the
sweetest smile. Old Goudron grinned, but he had his match. Helen watched
their passages of arms daily. The _employé’s_ wife was a good mother and
an excellent housewife, but neither for home nor children would she have
relinquished the grandeur of her caste. She paid visits at the
_château_; she patronised the Curé; and visited the good Sisters, who
kept their little school at the other end of the village; and maintained
her little social circle with the stateliness of a duchess. Once a-week
she had her little reception, which was attended by M. le Curé, M. le
Vicaire (for it was a large parish), and the notary. Once a-week she and
her husband dined at the _château_. Regularly as the weeks came round
were these social rules observed, for, as she justly remarked, “Without
society one vegetates, one does not live.” It was much in the mind of
this one representative of high life in Latour, to open her doors to the
strangers. The father’s appearance was perfectly _comme il faut_; and
though Helen was shy, she had still the air of a young person who had
been instructed, and might have been _né_, like madame herself.

Nobody else in Latour had a _salon_ or the ghost of a _salon_. But
Helen, peeping from her corner, soon got to know which of the cottage
wives looked out anxiously for the return of their husbands, and which
reposed with pride and calm upon the certainty of Jean or Jacques’
sobriety and good behaviour. She began to know the different clank of
the _sabots_--from the little patter of the children, in their dark-blue
homespun frocks and close little caps, to the heavy resounding tread of
the big boys and men. She knew M. le Curé’s measured step, and the pause
he made to leave his wooden overshoes behind when he went in to see a
sick man; and the brisker little trot of M. le Vicaire, who had been in
the war, and who was a fiery little martyr, tramping leagues off to the
edge of the parish to see the sick, or any one who called for his aid.
On Monday every week M. le Curé went to the _château_ to say a mass for
the old Count in the little chapel, and stayed afterwards to take his
_déjeûner_, the second breakfast, which, till all these masses were
over, was the first meal for the good Curé. It was on Thursday that the
priest and the Précepteur and his wife dined at the Château of Latour,
and on Sunday was the reception of madame next door. On Sunday all the
village was astir. There was a great deal going on in the church in the
morning, and a tolerable amount of people there--a far larger number
than was justified by the professions of the villagers, who disowned all
the habits of piety, and made themselves out much less Christian than
they were. It is the fashion to be religious in the upper classes, and
all who would aspire to belong to them in France: and it is the fashion
among the peasantry to hate the Church; yet notwithstanding, there were
a great many people at High Mass, wherever they came from. M. le
Précepteur was there with his wife in her prettiest toilet, and their
little girl as fine as a little girl could be; and M. le Maire and the
adjoint both thought it expedient to set a good example to the
community. But it was only the morning that the best of Catholics
thought it necessary to devote to the services of religion. Even Madame
la Comtesse at the _château_, though orthodox to the fingers’ tips, took
care to assure her guests that vespers were not a duty, _pas
obligatoire_, and in the afternoon and evening all the merriment of the
village, such as it was, was in full swing. The Lion d’Or and the Cheval
Blanc were both full; and in a large loft belonging to the former there
was dancing, which Helen and Janey watched with a fearful joy through
the open window. To be able to see this, even at a distance, was an
amusement they had not hoped for; yet Helen was very uneasy as to
whether it was justifiable on Sunday even to look on at a dance. But it
was not very riotous dancing, or even very gay, as we are led to suppose
the amusements of our gayer neighbours are. They took their pleasure
very seriously, these Burgundian peasants, just as our own country folks
do. The violinist of the village had no great variety of music in his
_répertoire_, and the peasant couples, solemnly circling round and round
with their hands on each others’ shoulders, displayed little of that
characteristic gaiety of France which we hear so much about.

Down below, in front of the windows on the benches outside, the men
drank steadily and talked, till it became too cold, while the women
sitting by, knitting their stockings, sometimes threw in a word. They
made a great deal more noise than similar assemblies do in England, but
there was not much more mirth. Very often a passing show, a travelling
establishment of pedlar’s wares--a “Cheap Jack,” or at the worst, a
dentist in a triumphal car, making their last rounds before the winter
set in, would arrive at Latour, and this made Sunday very piquant,
before everything succumbed under the chills of the declining season.
Madame Dupré at the Lion d’Or, in her whitest cap, with her long
ear-rings, occupied the large chair on these Sundays, leaving the
waiting to Auguste, and Baptiste, and Jeanne from the kitchen, whose
holiday it was to emerge from that hot and stifling place, putting also
long ear-rings in her ears, and a cap that might have been starched in
Paris, it was so _comme il faut_. Jeanne liked to show herself in the
_salle_ among all the people on these Sunday nights. But Baptiste for
his part was always seeking to get away. He stole up to the dancing-room
to have one waltz with his Blanchette, then rushed down to get a
_chope_ for Jean Pierre, or a new bottle of _piquette_ for Père Roussel,
or the absinthe which the little city clerk, who had come to help M. le
Notaire, thought it fine to call for. And thus the Sunday evenings went
on. Madame la Comtesse would have liked to shut up the _auberges_ and
have Sunday kept as in England, if she could; and Madame Vincent, the
Précepteur’s wife, had fixed her reception for Sunday in order to
prevent her husband and the notary from patronising the vulgar popular
meeting in the Lion d’Or. But neither of these great ladies influenced
the village. The first it regarded as a hostile power, whom to thwart
was one of the first of its duties, the other as a laughing-stock.

Mr Goulburn walked about the village for the first Sunday evening, and
amused himself, while his daughters at the window saw all the rude
little frolicking at a distance--the dancing-room with its open windows,
the oil-lamps burning hot and smoky in the gloom, the dancers gyrating,
not always in time, to the squeak of the village fiddle; and down below,
the light in the windows of the _salle_ at the Lion d’Or broken by the
figures of the people who sat outside. The girls were not so soon bored
as he was. He was a man who liked to be popular, as has been said. He
went in to pay his respects to Madame Dupré and made her his little
compliments.

“All the world is here,” he said, “to-night. I find you on your throne,
madame, the queen of the village.”

Madame Dupré was so pleased that she accorded him a civility shown to
few. She got up to offer him a seat, and called to Baptiste to bring her
a certain precious little bottle.

“Monsieur must taste it--it is genuine,” she said; “it was brought me
from the hands of the monks who have the secret.”

“Ah, the monks!” some one said; “they like to keep all the good things
to themselves.”

“And with good reason,” said Mr Goulburn. “Could I make anything so good
as this, certainly I should keep it to myself.”

This _mot_ had a little _succès_ in the company which pleased its
author. It is hard to say how far down we will go for applause without
any sense of lowering ourselves. Praise is always pleasant.

“Monsieur has reason,” said Madame Dupré. “I am not _dévote_, but now
and then I like to hear one who will say a good word for the clergy.”

Old M. Goudron, who was sitting by, took his cigar out of his mouth.

“Madame is too good,” said the old man; “she would say a good word for
the devil, if there is such a person, and if he were a customer at the
Lion d’Or.”

“The clergy are no customers of mine, nor do I hold with them any more
than you do,” Madame Dupré began, with rising colour, when the
Englishman poured oil on the waves.

“In my country,” he said, “the clergy are not a separate class as in
yours. They marry and live like other men; but no one in England speaks
of them as you do here in France. They do a great deal of good among us.
They take care of the poor.”

“Pah! a married priest!” cried Madame Dupré, with an expression of
disgust. “I am no bigot, but I could not put up with that.”

“And as for what monsieur says about the poor,” cried M. Goudron, “there
ought not to be any poor. A man who wants help, who cannot keep himself
alive, there is no place for him in the world.”

At this a little murmur rose, and one of the silent spectators spoke.
“We are all poor,” he said; “and when there is a bad harvest, or a bad
winter, or illness in the house, how are we to live without the help of
a kind hand?”

“Ah, it is you, Paul le Roux; every one knows why you speak. There is
solidarity between the enemies of mankind,--the priest and the
aristocrat; they have but one end. It is for this they wander about the
village to take persons at a disadvantage who may happen to be badly
off. You do not see how their charity is an impudence. What! give you
their crumbs, and their fragments! ‘Take what falls from my table, I am
better than thou.’ It is an insult--such an insult,” old Goudron said
suddenly, with the grin that divided his face in two, “as I never would
venture to offer to any neighbours of mine.”

At this there was a general laugh. “Père Goudron,” said some one from
the window, “will never fail in respect to his neighbours in that way.”

“Never!” cried the old man, with his malignant grin.

In the meantime young Baptiste had escaped from the table and the
drinking, and had gone back to the dancers, who were now beginning to
disperse. He went across the street with his Blanchette and her friends,
and secure in the occupation of both their parents, talked for half a
happy hour with her at the door. When he bade her good night at last,
and little Blanchette went in with the blush on her cheeks, Helen,
somewhat pale from her vigil, was standing at the door of the
sitting-room. “Will you come in?” she said. She had been sitting there
a long time alone, since Janey went to bed, watching the dancers, and
listening to the squeak of the fiddle and the hum of all the voices. It
was not a kind of merrymaking which Helen could have shared; yet to see
people enjoying themselves, and to sit alone and look from a distance at
their pleasure, is sad when one is young. She was glad to see the bright
countenance of the other girl, who was in the midst of all that little
agitation of youthful life from which she was herself shut out. There
was but one candle in the bare little _salon_, and that was put away in
a corner not to interrupt the sight of the village gaiety outside.
Blanchette came in, proud of the invitation, and looked out with great
sympathy upon the scene she had herself left, where now the dancing
figures were fewer and more irregular, and the lights more smoky and
lurid than ever.

“Was mademoiselle looking at us all the time?” she said; and then she
suddenly took and kissed with fervour, to Helen’s great surprise, her
unwilling hand. “_Mon dieu_!” said little Blanchette, “but how sad for
mademoiselle!”

“Oh, thanks,” cried Helen, much confused and not knowing what to do. She
would have liked to kiss the little girl who felt for her, but she was
too shy to do this. “It amused me very much,” she said with a little
sigh--perhaps she had scarcely thought that her amusement was sad till
Blanchette suggested it. “I think I saw you dancing with Baptiste.”

“Oh yes, mademoiselle. He came as often as he could. Mademoiselle knows
that we are _fiancés_.”

“Yes; but you are too young to be married,” Helen said.

“Does mademoiselle think so? Baptiste is almost twenty. Provided that
he draws a good number, that is all we have to hope for. Will
mademoiselle say a little prayer for us when the moment comes? Ursule
has promised a candle to St Hubert if all goes well. Ursule has no
wishes for herself. She is a saint upon earth. All that she asks from
heaven is for me.”

“But she is only a very little older than you are. Why should she have
no wishes for herself?”

“Mademoiselle, she has a vocation,” said Blanchette with awe; the candle
shone back, doubled and reflected in those twin mirrors, from her eyes.
The gravity on her face brought out all its sweetness--a little face,
all alive with love, and hope, and reverential admiration, and faith.
Helen felt her own passiveness all the more from the contrast. She felt
half ashamed of her ignorance, and of standing, as she did, outside of
all this world so full of life.

“What is a vocation?” she said.

“Does not mademoiselle know? A vocation is something one does not talk
of carelessly, as we are talking; it is too sacred, when it is a true
vocation. She would have been at the Sacré Cœur now, had not grandpapa
been so----Figure to yourself, mademoiselle, that grandpapa is very
violent against the Church. He hates even the good Sisters, who are so
kind. When M. le Curé passes he spits on the ground. It is terrible,”
cried Blanchette, with tears in her eyes, “to be so old and to be like
that. If Baptiste draws a good number, he will not be able to refuse
that we should marry,” she added very seriously, too grave for blushing,
“and then perhaps my poor Ursule---- The holy mother will take her
without _dot_, they have such faith in her; but she would not leave me
alone with the grandfather. Provided only that Baptiste draws a good
number!” the girl said, clasping her hands.

“Surely, surely he will!” Helen said fervently.

Little Blanchette shook her head. “If things would happen because we
wish them to happen!” she said--and then she added, “Baptiste, perhaps,
has been a little idle, mademoiselle; but all Latour wishes him well,
and the ladies of the Sacré Cœur have promised to make a _neuvaine_ for
us. They would do anything for Ursule’s sister. I wish I had a little
more faith, mademoiselle,” she said, shaking her head once more.

Helen had that vague confidence that what is desired must happen, which
is common to the very young, when their own feelings are not so deeply
concerned as to make them despondent; and though she could not possibly
know anything about it, and her assurances that all would be well were
absolutely worthless, still they consoled Blanchette, who was very
grateful for the interest shown in her, and cried, and smiled, and
declared mademoiselle to be an angel. This was not unpleasant, on the
other hand, to the lonely little Englishwoman. To be sure Blanchette was
not a lady, but she was a girl, and the freemasonry of youth is warm.
Helen got quite excited as she speculated upon the chances which
involved the happiness of this young pair. She herself knew nothing of
such agitations. She felt to herself like a very pale little shadow
standing by looking on, while the others were involved in all those
hopes and fears. She, too, had been plunged into a stormy sea, but it
was very different from this one; Helen did not understand the change in
her own life, and notwithstanding all that her father had said, could
not feel at all sure that this mysterious chapter might not end as it
began, and Fareham and its splendours reappear again in her existence.
But as she sat down in the semi-darkness after Blanchette had left her,
her mind followed an altogether different line of thinking. Blanchette
was the perennial heroine of human story. All the romances, all the
poetry were occupied with troubles like hers. None of them took any
interest in the fate of a girl whose father was the cause of her
misfortunes, and with whose griefs no warmer thought of possible
happiness was twisted. She was altogether in the shadow, and sympathy
was not for her. She had not even a chance of sympathy without a
complaint, without, perhaps, betraying her father, which was impossible.
But with Blanchette everybody sympathised, even the ladies of the Sacré
Cœur, who might be expected to be not too favourable to marriage. Helen
knew nothing of this phase of life. She wondered, with a shy alarm at
her own thoughts, if, as the novels said, something of the kind happened
in everybody’s experience? The thought made her laugh faintly by
herself, and made her blush, though without the slightest reason; and
then suddenly there came before her, like a scene in a theatre, the
_table d’hôte_ at Sainte-Barbe, and the young stranger who had startled
her by his recognition, and who had been so glad to see her. Why had he
been so glad to see her? A little tremble ran over Helen, a flush to her
face, and she laughed again, this time more faintly than ever, then
sprang up and took down the candle from the oldfashioned marble-topped
sideboard in the corner, and put it on the table, and got her book. She
had been reading a pious French book which she had found in her room,
because it was Sunday; it was not very engrossing. Her thoughts strayed
away from it in spite of herself. But she tried her best to hold them
fast and read very steadily. By-and-by the sounds outside lessened and
withdrew, and steps could be heard passing, one group after another,
taking their way home. The day of leisure was over, and to-morrow the
work would begin once more. Helen had begun to watch for her father’s
step among the heavier ones outside, when Blanchette suddenly put her
head within the door.

“Mademoiselle!” she cried, breathless, “here is monsieur coming home,
and Antoine Roussel. Baptiste told me that I ought to warn you. One does
not like to say ill of one’s neighbours, but Antoine is a _mauvais
sujet_. All the village says so. One cannot trust him. If mademoiselle
were to say as much to monsieur _son père_?--and good night--good
night--and a thousand times thanks, _ma bonne et chère demoiselle_.”

Her head disappeared as quickly as it had come. Helen was a little
confused by the sudden warning, by the complications of the language
with which she was still so unfamiliar. To be addressed in the third
person still mystified her a little, and so did monsieur _son père_. But
she had a strong youthful prejudice against Antoine, who followed her
father about everywhere, and whom Janey could not bear. “But what will
papa care?” she said to herself, though indeed it was possible that he
might care for the altogether causeless prejudice of little Janey, if
not for any remonstrance of hers.




CHAPTER IX.


It is curious with what ease we adapt ourselves to the completest change
in the very foundations of life; a little difference is vexatious and
irritating, while a revolution which carries us away from our own
identity, substituting a new routine, an entirely altered existence, is
comparatively easy. Mr Goulburn, whose affairs had been of the vastest,
who had been in the full turmoil of life, in the midst of society and
excitement, held at the highest strain, and running the most tremendous
risks, fell into the life of the village with an ease which bewildered
himself. He could not comprehend the soothing influences of the calm
and good order, the silence and dulness which all at once enveloped him
like a cloud. Even Montdard was farther off from Latour than any part of
the civilised world is from London. Amid the woods of the Haute
Bourgogne it was more difficult to realise what went on ten leagues off,
than it was in England to understand how all the great affairs of the
world were going. He had bought that clump of pine-trees in a momentary
sympathy with the excitement of the country, and with a notion brought
from the old life which he had abandoned, that it was a good thing to
have something to occupy him. But he was not so keen even about his
fir-trees as he had expected to be. The leisurely habits of the country
got possession of him. He walked to the woods and looked at them, then
came home to breakfast, then amused himself with calculating the profit
to be made of them, and all that could be done.

Never before in his active life had he been out of the world. He was so
now, and the distance confused all his faculties. He had lost sight of
everything he knew, of all that he had calculated upon, of all the
influences which had affected him before. The people about, in the
_cabarets_, by the roadside, talked politics indeed, but their
discussions seemed so fantastic and unreal to the constitutional
Englishman, that they rather increased than lessened his sense that he
was out of the world altogether, drifted into some other life. Those
wild theories of universal right, broken lights of communism, all the
more lurid because of the passion of proprietorship with which they were
mixed; the hatred of the aristocrats; the fear of the Church; all those
prejudices which were so extraordinary to his mind, looked to him like
something got up for his admiration and bewilderment,--scenes at the
theatre, which not even the players themselves could believe in. They
amused him greatly, being all sham as he thought, dramatic exhibitions
natural to the French character; he for one was not taken in by them;
but they convinced him more and more of the unreality of this life. He
had got into some enchanter’s cave, some lotus island; he did not know
at all what was going on outside. Was he a man for whom there was search
being made, and with a price upon his head? Or had he dropped out of all
agitations whatsoever, out of knowledge of the world? He could not tell;
he had not seen a ‘Times’ since he had left London. One terrible fit of
alarm he had gone through at Sainte-Barbe. But Charley Ashton certainly
could not have known anything, or he would have let it somehow appear
in his looks, even if he had taken no ulterior steps. And how could any
one, however great an offender, however well known to the world, be
found in this place, which was not in the world? The idea seemed absurd.
Then Mr Goulburn amused himself with his calculations about the wood. He
was not in any danger from Antoine. A peasant and poacher of the rudest
French type was not very likely to take in a man of the world; and he
had no more intention of leaving the wood-cutting in Antoine’s hands
than of doing it himself.

As for little Janey, she was as happy as the day was long, with little
Marie from the cottage next door, and Petit-Jean. Her French bubbled up
like a little fountain, all mingled with laughter. It was so funny to
talk like the little French children, Janey thought; and no doubt they
too could talk English like her if they would take the trouble. Helen,
too, settled down as if she had been to the manner born. She, who had
scarcely ever threaded a needle for herself, mended the rents in Janey’s
frocks, and took pleasure in it. She learned from Blanchette how to
knit, and began to make warm stockings for her little sister. She taught
Janey her letters every morning. She had a great deal to do, to
supplement Margot’s exertions with the featherbrush, and arrange
everything as well as she could, the meals and all the details of the
house. And by-and-by Helen began to forget the strange way in which this
change had been accomplished. She forgot that midnight flight, the
dismal journey, the fugitives’ career from place to place. She could
scarcely have told any one what it was that had brought them to Latour.
Had they meant to come to Latour when they left England? Helen could
not tell. She was embarrassed, bewildered by the question, though it was
she who put it to herself. She had lived a life so retired and quiet at
home, that she had nobody to regret except Miss Temple, who had married
Mr Ashton; but this marriage had happened nearly a year ago, and Helen
had spent all the summer alone. The time we spend alone goes so slowly.
She had lived like a young hermit in the great house; even Janey she had
only seen when Nurse thought proper. She had nothing to do, nothing to
live by, nobody to think of. She had been awoke all at once from that
feeble dream of existence by the thunder-clap of the sudden flight. And
now she found herself like one who has fallen from a great height, or
recovered from a severe illness, or been picked up out of the
sea--living, and thankful to be living, accustoming herself to this
surprising reality of existence, so true after so much that was not
true. Helen’s intellect had not very many requirements, and such as it
had could be supplied by that perennial fountain of dreams which makes
up for so much that is lacking in youth. She had no books to read, but
she told herself a long and endless fable through all the silent hours,
so much the more enthralling that she was always in it, the doer, or the
cause of the doing, present in all its succeeding scenes.

The ruddy October weather had come to an end, and November had begun to
close in, dark and heavy, when the next incident occurred in Helen’s
life. This was when she made the acquaintance of the young ladies at the
_château_, who had looked very wistfully at her for a long time when
they met her, before they finally broke the ice. Helen herself had
thought it was “her place” to await overtures, not to make any attempt
at a beginning, which ought to come from the other side. It was the
morning after the first snow, when everything was white around Latour,
the trees hanging heavy with a load of crystals, the path sparkling
underneath their feet. Very few, indeed, were the people who were out to
brave it. Most of the villagers had got in their stock of wood, and
collected their potatoes, their winter supply of vegetables: no
improvident buying from day to day, except by the poorest and least
respectable of the population, was known at Latour. Those who had
gardens, or little farms, had stored up all their treasures for the
severe season. A great number of the men were busy in the woods; the
women kept indoors. Till evening, when the men came home, there was
scarcely a soul visible in the village; then there was a little stir, a
sound of heavy feet, and all was quiet again. Blanchette shivered when
she saw that Helen had prepared to go out--“Mademoiselle will die of the
cold,” she said; “and _la petite_! it is to kill her.”

“But Ursule has been at Mass as usual,” said Helen, with a little
triumph, seeing the prints of a little pair of _sabots_ in the snow.

“That is a different thing, that is _obligatoire_,” Blanchette said,
with great gravity. “Mademoiselle knows that my sister is almost a
religious; and when it is so, what does it matter? cold or wet, is there
not the _bon Dieu_ to take care of you?”

“The _bon Dieu_ takes care of us all,” said Helen.

She was a Protestant, which, though no one knew what it was, was
certainly not a Christian, and therefore had no particular right to be
cared for by God. Still Blanchette did not object to this supernatural
shield for Helen. She only shook her head as they left the door. These
uncovenanted mercies, though always to be hoped for, are risky; whereas
in the case of Ursule, there could be no doubt, on all sides, of the
perfect security of the guarantees. Janey was delighted to feel the
crisp and dazzling snow under her little feet; she ran and danced upon
it, stamping on the hard shining surface. “It is like a big, big cake,”
said Janey, “and me the little lady on it. Don’t you know, Helen, the
little lady with the stick?”

It was a Twelfth-Day cake of which Janey was thinking, and Helen could
not help recollecting the very cake which had kept a tender place in her
little sister’s thoughts. It was one which had figured at the school
treat organised by Miss Temple, before she went away and married.

“Do you remember the little lady, Janey?”

“She turned round and round,” said the child; “she had a stick and
pointed. Let me get a stick and point too.”

What a different scene came before Helen’s eyes! the schoolroom at
Fareham all decked with holly, the great white cake sparkling like the
snow, the eager children drawing their characters,--and in the midst of
the party a splendid, shy little person wrapped in furs, who was the
giver of the feast, and to whom everybody looked with so much desire
that she should be pleased. She thought she could hear the horses pawing
with impatience at the door, and see little Janey flushed with
excitement, wrapped in the softest satin-quilted mantle, carried out by
the biggest of footmen to the most luxurious of carriages. Helen laughed
softly to herself--was it a dream? She thought of it as Cinderella
might have thought of her ball had there been no young prince in it,
nothing to make the episode of special importance. Was it really true?
And it was at this moment, while Janey was pirouetting round and round
with the wand in her hand, and when Helen had just laughed to herself at
the strange recollection of the past, which was so unlike the
present--that the two Demoiselles de Vieux-bois came suddenly round the
corner and met them. There was a little pause on both sides. An “Oh!” of
startled expectation came to Helen’s Britannic lips, and the two young
Frenchwomen swerved for a moment, then stopped and held a hurried
consultation. Then one of them advanced with pretty hesitation, a blush
and a smile.

“Pardon, mademoiselle,” she said; then added in very passable English,
“we have wished to call, but our mamma has been sick, and we were
doubtful to come alone. Perhaps you will let us make friends now?”

“Oh, I shall be so glad!” cried Helen, putting out her hands shyly, with
a sudden flash of light and colour coming to her face. They had thought
the English miss, like all English misses, pale and cold.

“I told you so,” said the one to the other. “I am Cécile de Vieux-bois,
and my sister is Thérèse. We have wanted so much to speak to you. You
are English, and we have such dear friends in England.”

“She has her _fiancé_ there,” said the other, laughing. “She is going to
be English herself.”

“Et peut-être toi aussi,” said Cécile, half reproachfully, in an
undertone.

“_Crois pas_,” said the younger, shaking her head. She caught Janey up
and gave her a sudden kiss. “This little one is delicious,” she said,
translating her native idiom into English. “We have so much remarked
her in church, everywhere; and you too, Miss----” she added anxiously,
lest Helen’s feelings should be hurt. “How shall we call you? Miss----”

Helen’s face grew scarlet. She had never been brought face to face
before with this terrible difficulty. Her name had been of no importance
in Latour. If her father called himself by one name or another, she knew
nothing of it. Mademoiselle was enough for everything.

“Please do not say Miss at all,” she said, the tears (and how sharp they
were, like fire more than water!) coming to her eyes. “I am Helen, and
she is little Janey. Will you call us so?”

“But it will not be _comme il faut_ to call you Helen the first time we
see you, without either Miss or Mademoiselle.”

“We don’t say Miss in England,” said Helen stoutly; “no one says it who
is _comme il faut_,--only the servants.”

The two French girls looked at each other with a little
surprise--perhaps they did not like to be supposed ignorant on this
point; or perhaps the fervour of Helen’s protest struck them, though
they could not tell what it meant. But they were too well bred to make
any further difficulty. “Do you like our poor little Latour?” said
Cécile. “It is so strange to us to see any new faces here. We shall be
so happy to have you all the long winter--that is, if you are going to
stay.”

It was Cécile who spoke the best English. The younger one was playing
with Janey, and chattering in a mixture of languages which amused and
suited them both. Cécile and Helen walked on demurely side by side.

“We shall stay if--if papa likes it,” she said.

“Monsieur your father is not strong?” said Cécile, with a sympathetic
look. “I said so when I saw him first. I told mamma that there was
something here----” She put her hand to her lips, and the tears filled
her eyes. “We lost our dear father all in one moment,” she said; “thus
we know what it is to be unquiet. But at least you are warned. You can
watch over him, and if there is no _crise_ that goes on for a long
time.”

“Oh, there is nothing the matter--I mean, papa is not ill,” cried Helen,
half alarmed, half amazed. “At least, it is only----”

“That is what we said,” said Cécile, gently; “it is only--a little want
of breath, a little palpitation. And we might have taken more care
perhaps to avoid emotion--to avoid danger; but who can say? _Le bon
Dieu_ knows best.”

“I assure you,” said Helen, “I am not alarmed at all about papa. We are
not so well off as we were, and he wishes to be quiet, that is all. I
think he likes Latour, and I like it. Yes, I think we shall stay all the
winter. Perhaps we shall stay always. Janey will not remember any other
place.”

“But you--were you not sorry to leave your home?”

“Sorry?” said Helen, meditating. “I ought to have been. I do not quite
know, it was so strange. Before I knew that we had left home we were
here, or, at all events, at Sainte-Barbe,” she said, with a smile.

“Sainte-Barbe? that is a long way off, beyond Dijon. But tell me, is it
not very gloomy in England, more gloomy than here? Thérèse was quite
right, I am _fiancé_, and I shall live in England. Tell me a little
about your home.”

“I was thinking of it when I saw you,” said Helen. “Little Janey said
the snow was like a great white cake--like the cake we had on Twelfth
Night, and that made me think. I thought I saw the room all dressed with
holly--we do that in England at Christmas; and all the children from all
the parish--they came from miles round--and the great huge cake. The
children all came and curtseyed to us when they had their slice of cake,
and stared at Janey. She looked like a little fairy princess,” said
Helen, with a smile and a sigh. Her new acquaintance looked at her very
closely, then gave a glance at the child, who was very simply dressed,
not like a princess at all.

“The people loved you very much?” said Cécile; “they do so in England;
they do not hate you as aristocrats. I shall be very glad of that. Why
should they hate us in France? We try to do what good we can, but there
is always suspicion. They think we have no right to differ from them.
But how can we help it? It is so, it is not our doing. They have not
that feeling in England. They loved you, the people? Oh, how happy I
shall be!”

“They were always very nice,” said Helen. “Loved--I don’t know that they
loved us. We do not say that word in England except when--except when it
is very strong indeed;--but they were always very nice. Though Miss
Temple used to say papa was too good--a great deal too liberal, giving
them too much--almost everything they wanted.”

“Miss Temple was----?”

“My governess,” said Helen--“my very dear friend; she went away from me
and married. I never had a mother, nor Janey either,” she said, in a low
tone.

“But it was very good, very kind of monsieur your father to be so good
to the poor.”

“I thought so too; but Miss Temple said it was wrong to give so much,”
said Helen, simply. She did not understand the wonder that was rising in
the mind of her new acquaintance. What Helen innocently revealed seemed
to Cécile the condition of a grand seigneur in the old days when a grand
seigneur was a prince in rural France. And it was very extraordinary to
think of a great English nobleman or gentleman--words of which she
partially understood the meaning--living in Latour! She looked at Helen
again, examining her very closely; and Cécile knew that her dress, which
was the dress she had brought from Fareham, was costly and fine, though
so simple. They had wondered, gazed at the English family in church, and
wherever they met them. But it was still more extraordinary now. The
only thing was that they were English. That accounts for so much! for
every kind of eccentricity, Cécile thought.

“Some friends, some people whom we know--indeed,” said Cécile with
pretty dignity, “why should I not say it?--the gentleman who is my
_fiancé_ is coming soon to see us. You will like to meet your
compatriots? But I hope you will come before that time--oh, long before!
as soon as you will--to-morrow! I should like to show you the _château_.
It is very old and curious. You will forgive us for not going sooner to
see you. We hoped mamma would have been well; but now they tell us that
she must not go out all the winter. She who loves the air so much and to
be active. She will like to see you, Miss----”

“You promised to call me Helen.” Helen had forgotten her own horror
about the name, and said this with a mischievous sense of amusement, her
pleasure in her new friend and in the prospect thus offered to her
opening up all the closed doors in her heart. She laughed as she spoke.
It had gone out of her mind that for the moment she had no name.

“It seems too familiar,” said Cécile, gravely, “for the first time; but
if it is so that in England one does not say Miss--but they do say it,
or why should the word exist?--I will willingly call you Helen. Do you
thus pronounce the ‘h’? In France we say (H)élène.”

“Is it that mademoiselle will come to the _château_ to-morrow?” said
Thérèse, coming up. “The little one will come. She has told me a great
many things. Oh, how it is pleasant to have some one new to talk to! She
is delicious,” cried the young Frenchwoman. “And mademoiselle, I hope
she too finds it pleasant to have friends.”

“We are to say Helen,” said Cécile, with her air of dignity. They had
reached M. Goudron’s house as she spoke, where he was standing with an
old shawl wrapped about his shoulders. He was not susceptible about his
personal appearance. But the sight of Helen’s companions made a change
in his looks. He grinned, but he scowled as well. His countenance became
diabolical between hatred and mockery. Thérèse caught her sister by the
arm.

“He is like the demons in the pictures. I dare not go any nearer.
Cécile, come! he will do thee some harm. Me, I am not _fiancé_, nothing
is going to happen to me; but he will bewitch thee, he will do thee
harm.”

“I am not afraid,” said Cécile, though she trembled a little; “there
are no people in England who hate you because you are aristocrats, that
makes me very happy. And you will come to-morrow to the _château_? At
one o’clock, after the _déjeuner_, will that do? and we will come to
meet you. Then good-bye, _à demain, au revoir_,” both the girls cried,
turning hastily away. M. Goudron had put them to flight. The frown
disappeared from his face as they turned, and the grin became more
diabolical than ever.

“What a pity,” he said, “mesdemoiselles, that your fine friends, those
magnificent young ladies from the _château_, the young princesses, the
great personages, should run away from a poor old man.”

Little Janey had no restraints of politeness upon her. She pulled at the
end of his eccentric old tartan shawl. “C’est parce que vous êtes si
méchant,” she cried. “C’est parce que you are a fright--a horrible,
nasty, old man. I hate you too,” cried Janey--“vous êtes méchant,
méchant! Personne vous aime; vous êtes an old, old, wicked! a horror! a
fright! all wrapped in a shawl like an old vieille fille; nobody loves
you--they all hate you,” she cried.

M. Goudron was dismayed by this sudden attack: he had a weakness--he
loved children. He cried in a querulous tone, “Petite, vous n’en savez
rien,” loudly, as if defying the world. At the window up-stairs
Blanchette and Ursule were secretly kissing the tips of their fingers,
waving anxious salutations to the departing ladies of the _château_. As
for Helen, she held her dress close to her, not to touch him as she
brushed past into her own room. She was not so outspoken as Janey,
neither did she think, like her father, that these extraordinary
antipathies and political extravagances were fictitious like the
politics of a _vaudeville_. But the horror was evanescent, and how
delightful was the reflection that she had found a pair of friends!




CHAPTER X.


After this a new life began for Helen. Cécile and Thérèse de Vieux-bois
were much more highly educated than she was; they were far more fluent
in conversation; they knew a great deal more than Helen. She, poor,
solitary child, in her luxurious rural palace, had read nothing but
novels; whereas they had read scarcely any novels at all, but a great
many better things, and still continued their studies with a
conscientiousness and energy at which she gazed with wonder. Nothing
could have been more different from their carefully guarded and
sedulously instructed life than the secluded existence of the
millionaire’s daughter, broken sometimes by the noisy brilliancy of a
great dinner-party, at which, perhaps, she and her governess were the
only ladies present, or by the arrival of the huge box of light
literature which her father substituted when she was seventeen for the
cakes and toys, and dainties of all kinds, with which he had overwhelmed
her at an earlier age. This was Mr Goulburn’s idea of what was best for
girls--cakes and sweetmeats, then novels, with as many balls and
amusements as could be procured. He had intended that Helen should be
fully supplied with these later pleasures; but he had not succeeded, as
has been said, in introducing her to the county, and all his plans for
town had been mysteriously cut short.

But the Count de Vieux-bois had gone upon a very different plan; and it
is quite possible that just as Helen found it much more lifelike and
real to mend Janey’s frocks and teach her her letters, so the
demoiselles Cécile and Thérèse might have found more satisfaction in the
abortive balls and dinner-parties, which might not have come to nothing
in their hands. But the life of which Helen became a spectator at the
_château_ filled her with admiration and awe. She could only look with
respectful alarm at the volumes which the others worked steadily
through, morning after morning, with the most noble devotion. No one so
much as saw the young ladies at the _château_ till twelve o’clock, when
the big bell rang, and they all came out of their rooms to the first
common meal. “When do you work?” Cécile had said almost severely when
Helen told her of the breakfasts in England. “If it is so, I shall not
like that at all. When can one work?--and if one does not read, and
read much, how shall one be a companion to one’s husband?” the young
lady asked with great gravity. We have already said that domestic virtue
and duty is, in France, for the time being, the highest fashion, the
finest _cachet_ of supreme aristocracy. Helen made the most simple, but,
to this highly educated young Frenchwoman, the most bewildering reply.

“Oh! perhaps he will not read very much either. Gentlemen never do; they
read the ‘Times’ and the ‘Field’--and; have I said anything wrong?”

(“Elle est folle donc,” said Thérèse to Cécile. “C’est que son père est
un homme de _sport_,” said Cécile in an undertone to Thérèse.)

“You deceive yourself, _chère_ Hélène,” said the elder sister with a
smile. “The journals are nothing; one must know what is going on. But if
you knew how difficult it is to keep up with the reading of
gentlemen--our dear father, for example. Mamma did not try. She said,
‘It is useless at my age. I cannot do it; my daughters, I leave it to
you.’ And we tried, but never succeeded. Nevertheless, papa was very
kind. He always recognised that there were difficulties. But I am
resolved to be a companion to my husband. I will not leave it to my
daughters,” said Cécile. “I have read your great writers, and a great
deal of the constitutional history. And now I shall be ready to take up
anything that John is doing.”

“Is his name John?” said Helen, with rising interest.

“It is a very pretty name,” said Cécile; “there are a great many in
England. It is something like our Jean in France, but more _distingué_.”

“Oh, much, much more distinguished,” said Thérèse.

“He had not any title at first,” Cécile continued. “They say that in
England that, too, is more distinguished. I thought I should be called
Mistress. It is droll.”

“We do not say Mistress in England,” said Helen. “Is he in the law, or
in the Church, or a merchant, or only a gentleman? Papa was a very
great, great merchant,” she continued, her cheeks colouring warmly.
Though she was very quiet and gentle, yet in some things Helen had her
pride too.

“And what is it to be only a djentleman?” Thérèse said.

“That is when you _quite_ belong to the county,” said Helen--“when you
have been always there, when the estate goes from father to son. There
was a gentleman near Fareham, where we lived, a gentleman called
Rashleigh----”

“I have heard those names,” said Cécile with a little cry. “John has
talked to me--I am sure I have heard them.”

A mischievous light glanced over Thérèse’s face. She made a sign to her
sister. “All the names in England resemble each other. _Tu te trompes_,
Cécile. And here is mamma.”

The entrance of Madame la Comtesse put a stop to all the chatter. She
herself talked steadily without intermission. She was a handsome,
middle-aged woman, threatened, as she told everybody, with a
_bronchite_. “I who never had so much as a cold in my life!” The talk of
the girls was extinguished, as tapers are extinguished in the light of
the day, by the conversation of their mother. She spoke a little English
badly, but a great deal of French very well.

“So monsieur your father is ill, mademoiselle. I am grieved to hear it.
Where there is but one parent, it is then that life becomes precious;
though even _sans cela_---- Do not send for the doctor here; it is a
good-for-nothing; in medicine _bien entendu_, not in life. For his life,
_mon Dieu!_ I know nothing of it,” the Comtesse said, shrugging her
shoulders. “He is not of our _monde_. But monsieur your father,
mademoiselle, you can do the most for him yourself. You can keep him
from emotion; that is the great thing--from emotion. To do that, one
must take a great deal of trouble, one must be always watchful; but for
so dear a father one does not think of trouble. Were I allowed to go out
I should see him; you should have the benefit of my experience; and
indeed, when he does me the honour to come here I shall spare no
trouble; I shall observe him closely. It is my duty. I should be
barbarous, I should not be Christian, did I not endeavour to be of use
to you, so young, and a stranger.”

“But indeed, madame!” cried Helen in despair, “my father----”

“I know what you would say,” said the too sympathetic lady. “He will not
allow that he is ill; it is what they all do. Ah me! to whom do you tell
it? Have we not made the experience, my children and I? They are made
like that; they will not be advised, they will not take care. Then the
only thing, my child, is for you to take so much the more care. Let
there be no emotion. That is the chief thing--no emotion. It would be
well, perhaps, that you see his letters before they are given to him,
and if any is of a character to cause excitement, keep it back. Ah, how
much do I regret that I neglected some of these precautions! But, _mon
enfant_, you must profit by our sorrow,” said the Comtesse, with tears
in her eyes.

These advices were addressed to her continually, altogether unaltered by
the fact that Helen protested, whenever she had a moment given her in
which she could do so, against the supposed illness they had attributed
to her father. She protested that he was not ill; but it made no
difference. The Comtesse paid no attention, but entered with enthusiasm
into the minutiæ of care-taking, recollecting now one thing, now
another, that Helen could do--_surtout point a’émotion!_ They were so
sure they were right that she came at last to listen without any
protestation. The _château_ gave Helen an altogether enlarged and
widened life. She was there almost every day, leading them into the
wintry woods, at which they shivered, but which Cécile boldly braved now
and then, on the strong argument that in England, whether it was winter
or summer, everybody went out; or sitting with them near the ugly stove
which kept their rooms so warm, discoursing now and then in her turn
about the English life which, to them, was so unknown. Helen, to tell
the truth, did not know very much more about it than the two admiring
girls who, on this point, believed all that she said. But she collected
all her broken reminiscences, and all that she had heard from Miss
Temple, and even, it must be added, some things which she had found in
her novels, to instruct the eager mind of Cécile in her new duties. That
she would have to walk out every day, whether it rained or snowed or
blew a tempest; that she would have to be fully dressed by nine o’clock,
in no _robe de chambre_, however pretty, or _négligé_ of loosely knotted
hair, _point device_, and ready to receive visitors; that she would have
to carry puddings to the cottagers, and take a class in the
Sunday-school; and that the people would adore her. All this Cécile
received with unbounded faith; though she was much disturbed by the
Sunday-school, which had not been in her programme.

“But they will know I am a Catholic,” she said.

“All the ladies do it,” said Helen, with steady dogmatism; and the two
girls looked at each other with a gasp of dismay, but could not doubt
what was so unhesitatingly given forth. There was great trembling about
these Sunday-schools, so unnecessarily and boldly introduced, and the
Curé was consulted, and even the Vicaire, and Cécile herself wrote to
the superior of the convent in which she had been brought up. The
Comtesse was of opinion that John should be written to at once, and the
thing declared impossible; but Cécile would not consent to this. He
would not wish her to do anything against her conscience, she knew; but,
nevertheless, her dutiful soul was troubled. Thus Helen had her
revenge.

And thus the winter stole on. Mr Goulburn was with difficulty persuaded
to pay a visit at the _château_, where he was very silent, and bowed and
listened to all that Madame la Comtesse had to say. He did not protest
at all, as Helen did. But he excused himself when it was proposed that
he should go again. Excitement was bad for him, he said, with a gravity
that filled Helen with the utmost amazement; and when the evening of the
weekly dinner-party came, Helen went with M. le Précepteur and his wife,
making apologies for her father, which were received in very good part.

“He is right,” said Madame la Comtesse; “excitement is the worst thing
in the world for him. I am glad he perceives that it is necessary to
guard against it.”

All this confounded Helen, who did not know what to think. Was it true
that her father was ill? Was there really anything to fear?

But he did not appear ill, or at all different from his usual condition.
He began to get his pines cut at last, confiding the business to the
husband of Margot, not to Antoine, with whom, nevertheless, he did not
quarrel, employing him in various odd jobs with an impulse of liberality
which was very unlike anything to be found in Latour. Mr Goulburn could
not forget the habits of a man through whose hands money had streamed in
large floods, and who had never had time to be economical. He gave
employment with a freedom unknown in the locality, where everybody
looked a great many times even at a _sou_ before spending it. He was a
new species to the thrifty villagers. He went daily and superintended
the wood-cutting, and enjoyed the walk, however cold it was, a thing
equally incomprehensible to them; but he would not carry even his own
overcoat, calling the first idle lad he could find to do it for him, and
throwing him fifty centimes for work which was not worth one _sou_. He
saw everything done to the long straight pine-trunks; and at last, early
in the spring, concluded the whole little enterprise, which had given
him much satisfaction. They had been sold to an agent who had been at
Latour during the winter, and who was as much pleased with his bargain
as Mr Goulburn was with his. He came home one day holding in his hand
the letter which had contained this agent’s remittances. It was the
first letter he had received for months--the first sign of communication
with the world which lay outside of Latour. “I have set up in business,”
he said; “there is no saying what it may come to. It is a pity there
are no shops; I should have bought something for you girls. I have been
making money even out here. By the by, it makes my heart beat. I am not
framed for excitement, as your old Comtesse says.”

“Do you always make money, papa?” said little Janey. “What do you do it
with? I should like to make some nice new money, like the new _sous_
Cécile gave me.” She had forgotten all about other coinage, and now knew
nothing but the _sous_.

“This time, you know, I made it in the wood,” he said. “Don’t you
recollect the gold among the trees?”

“That was only sunshine,” said Janey. “I see that often; but you cannot
put it in your pocket. Did you dig till you came to it, papa? Was it in
a big box or in a jar deep down under the trees? Margot says there is
some there, if we knew where to find it. Will you show me how you got
yours, papa?”

“No, no, my little girl,” he said; “you shall never soil your pretty
fingers with it. There will be plenty for my Janey when I am dead.”

“I don’t want to have plenty when you are dead!” cried the child. “I
don’t want to have anything when you are dead. I should like then to be
dead too.”

“No, no, my little love. No, no, my Janey; you will live long, and you
will be happy, and you will be kind to the poor, and think sometimes of
your old father.” He had taken her on his knee, and now leaned his head
upon hers. “You will never believe any harm of your father, my little
girl. Whatever they say of him, you will always remember that he was
very fond of you.”

“You do not feel ill, papa?” cried Helen, alarmed; while Janey, not
understanding, but frightened too, peered up in his face with a pair of
widely opened eyes.

“I believe it is that old witch at the _château_,” he said, and laughed.
“I must beware of excitement, you know. To dine in her company being too
much for me, how should I be able to bear the maddening delight of
making a few francs in Latour? It will go off presently,” he added,
setting Janey down from his knee. And so it did, to all appearance;
there was nothing wonderful in it. But the profit he had made amused him
beyond description. It did him good--or harm. It set him thinking of the
outside world, and wondering what was going on there. A thirst for a
newspaper suddenly came upon him. What were they doing in the world? And
he himself, what had been done about him? Had he been allowed to drop
without any attempt at pursuit? Had things not turned out so badly as
he thought? When a man feels himself pursued, the sense of getting into
a place of safety, a close cover, is sweet; but after the pleasure of
the security has penetrated into every vein, what man is there who can
refrain from poking his head out of the cover to look for his pursuers,
and from feeling a kind of disappointment at their total disappearance?
To hear them strutting about, poking at every bush, calling to each
other, now here, now there, foiled yet pursuing, is more flattering,
more consolatory to the fugitive. But there had been nothing of this in
Mr Goulburn’s case; he had slipped through their fingers; and after he
had been pleased for a long time, now he began to be almost
disappointed--he wanted the excitement. He was tired of the too complete
safety of his life.

That night there was great news at the _château_. John was coming. The
wedding was to be at Easter; but he could not remain so long without
visiting his bride; and with him was coming a relation, a gentleman.
“Listen, Hélène,” said Cécile--“we have no secrets for you. This
gentleman, Monsieur Charles, is _très comme il faut_. I cannot say it in
English. What words are there in English that say all that? He is not
very rich; but mamma seeks to marry Thérèse, and in every other respect
he is everything we could desire. John has often spoken of it. He has
been in India, like so many of your young Englishmen. But if Thérèse and
he please to each other, why should he go back? John says that if some
one who is clever, a true man of affairs, an Englishman, were to manage
our woods, we should be twice more rich; and if he pleases to Thérèse!
Hush! it is a little family arrangement; nothing is to be said of it.
But we watch for the eventualities. You will open your English eyes,
_chère petite_, and you will give me your opinion upon him for Thérèse.”

Helen felt a little chill at her heart; she could not tell why. A
Monsieur Charles who had been in India! No doubt there were hundreds of
them in England. “But,” she said--and probably in any case she would
have objected, for she had begun to be very British since she lived in
France--“but an Englishman does not understand family arrangements like
this. Does he know that he is coming for Thérèse?”

“That is what we cannot tell. We know that the English are very
peculiar--very strange in their ideas.”

“I think it is the French who are strange in their ideas,” said Helen,
with all the fervour of English prejudice. She was almost pleased to
think that if M. Charles was a party to any such arrangement he was not
at all so _comme il faut_ as Cécile thought. “A _right_ Englishman would
not do it. Come to be looked at, as if he were applying for a situation
as a servant!” Helen said to herself indignantly, that these were not
English ways. She did not enjoy the evening. She was not herself. She
contradicted everybody, even Madame la Comtesse. What was the matter
with her?

“_Tiens_” said the Comtesse, “these English are so droll; it does not
please them to meet each other. We others, we love our compatriots. When
you are in England it is a _fête_ to see a Frenchman. But the English
are different; they will not encounter each other if they can help it.
You will see that Djohn will be equally discontented to hear that there
is an English family at Latour.” This appeared both to Cécile and
Thérèse a very likely solution of the question.

But Helen went home displeased and uncomfortable--displeased with
herself: for what did it matter to her if some Englishman, whose very
name she had never heard, should adapt himself to the special point in
which French domestic arrangements are repugnant to the English mind? It
was nothing to her. If he pleased Thérèse and Thérèse pleased him, and
everybody else was pleased, what had Helen to do with it? But it is
astonishing how determined we often are to annoy ourselves about things
with which we have nothing to do. “No doubt it would be a most excellent
arrangement,” she said to herself with a smile, which she felt must be
very much like a sneer. In England people would be very much surprised;
but Latour was not England, and probably Monsieur Charles had learned
different fashions in India, which was not England either. She wondered
what sort of person he could be, impatiently disengaging from her mind
the shadow that would thrust itself forward of the Monsieur Charles who
had been in India, and who had also been in Sainte-Barbe. Whoever it
might be, it could certainly not be he. And yet how he would thrust
himself into her imagination, poke himself forward, with his light hair
and sun-burned countenance! She wondered--if it should happen to be he
after all--would Thérèse like him? and what would he think, to find her,
Helen, established there? and would he look in the same way and speak in
the same way as he had done at the Lion d’Or? “In what way?” she said to
herself sternly, and herself replied, “Oh, in no way at all!” with an
impatient fling of the head. It was lucky that her companions chattered
all the way, for Helen made no addition to the conversation. And it was
not a very long way. The _château_ had no lengthened avenue, no
seclusion of lawns and trees between it and the village, but stood close
to the road with patriarchal bareness and simplicity. It was a moonlight
night, and the softening of spring was in the air. There was a little
commotion, too, unusual to it, in Latour. The young men of the village
were about in groups, the _cabarets_ were more full than was usual,
except on Sundays. Helen recalled to herself with a little effort a
thing which in her preoccupation she had forgotten. The next day was the
day on which the lots were to be drawn for the conscription. Poor little
Blanchette’s heart was full of trembling, and there was many an ache of
anxiety in the village. With all her homely neighbours in such suspense,
to think that she should be able to make herself almost unhappy about
this Monsieur Charles from beyond the sea!




CHAPTER XI.


Helen had meant to go to Mass on the morning of the day when the young
men of the village were to draw for the conscription, but she was late,
as the interested and distressed young spectator so often is at the
critical moment. Ursule had gone to the early Mass before break of day,
and had stayed in church till the numbers were drawn, and the young
_conscrits_ coming out of the Mairie with their number, bad or good, in
their caps. Madame Dupré would have liked to do the same, but she was
afraid of the ridicule of her neighbours, who certainly would have
taunted her with trying to curry favour with the _bon Dieu_ at the
moment when she was in need of His help. Not being able to do this, she
began a special “cleaning out,” such as, in all regions, is soothing to
the female mind perturbed. As the moment approached, the poor woman grew
more and more cross, snapping at every one who approached her. M.
Goudron, who liked to watch a dramatic situation, came in about ten
minutes before the _tirage_ began. “My house is all upside-down!” he
said with keen enjoyment. “Nobody can pay any attention. One is praying
and the other weeping, instead of awaiting with placidity whatever may
have happened. I say to myself, Madame Dupré is an _esprit fort_. She
will consider that a man must have his coffee, were the skies to fall.
That is a thing that girls cannot be taught. I tell that little fool
Blanchette, ‘If thou wilt take an example, look at his mother, our good
neighbour of the Lion d’Or!’”

“If I were thou, Jean Goudron, I would hold my peace. I would not meddle
with what concerns thee not,” said Madame Dupré, pushing against him
with her great broom in her hand.

“_Comment!_ my coffee? Does not that concern me?” cried old Goudron,
with his grin.

Madame Dupré made no reply. Her round face was red as the embers on the
hearth. She swept the dust out of all the corners, knocking her brush
against the wall, making a great noise, and sweeping everything towards
him. He got a mouthful of this dust, which, as it had not been stirred
for some time, was of a piquant kind, and coughed.

“Suffocate me not, _ma bonne femme_,” he said. “I have done thee no
harm!”

“How can I tell that?” cried the poor mother, in a frenzy of suspense
and passion. “How do I know that thou hast not thrown an ill lot on my
boy? That little saint Ursule, thou hast done thy best to keep her from
praying for us; and it is thou, and such as thou, that make us ashamed
to pray for ourselves! Get thee out of my sight, with thy devil’s grin!
Thou shalt have no coffee here.”

“Bravo!” cried old Goudron. “Because thy son has gone to _tirer_, the
whole world must stand still. There must be some one, _n’est-ce pas_, to
cheat the others, to put the good number into his hands? Yes, yes; there
must be a _bon Dieu_ wherever there’s a woman!” said the old man. But he
did not go much further, for suddenly, before he was aware, Madame Dupré
and her vigorous broom were upon him. She did not condescend to strike
or push, but taking the lean old sceptic at unawares, swept him forth
like a piece of rubbish. “_Va, canaille!_” she said. Old Goudron
sprawled and stumbled forth, saving himself only from a prostration on
the threshold by grasping at the first prop that presented itself. The
_conscrits_ were beginning to appear in the street with cockades in
their caps, singing and shouting. They stopped to give him a rude
salutation. They were all safe; they had drawn good numbers; they were
wild with joy. “Look at old Jean Goudron! he is _ivre-mort_! The _bonne
mère_ has swept him out of the house!” “Pauvre Mère Dupré!” said one
among them, with a sob of excitement. Madame Dupré recognised the
meaning of his tone. She came out, her broom in her hand, a paleness
stealing over the red in her cheeks, and leant against the lintel of her
door. She did not see the old man scowling and grinning at her, though
he stood close by, waiting for the event. All was mist and darkness to
her, save one thing. In the middle of the street was a figure alone,
walking down slowly, looking at no one. His step, the sight of his
folded arms and bent head, the stumble he made now and then, as he came
over the rough stones, were enough, without words. Her eyes, too, were
full of the giddiness of the calamity. She could see nothing but figures
moving confusedly; faces looking out of the houses on the different
sides of the village street all peering at him. It was Baptiste, with
the ribbons of the _conscrit_ hanging sadly over his ear, and a big 3 in
the front of his cap.

Helen looked out from her window just as this sad sight appeared. She
felt a pang of guilt, as if it had been her fault. Oh! why had she not
gone to the early Mass to pray that he might have a good number? It did
not occur to Helen that some one else must then have got a bad one. She
heard a rush down the stairs, and saw Blanchette rush out across the
street and fling herself upon him. Poor little Blanchette! poor dumb
mother, not able even to cry! Their arms met about him, one on each
side, as if to tear him out of the hold of fate.

It is terrible when a great calamity happens in the morning; there is
such an endless day to realise it in, to turn it over, to see it in
every possible light. Ursule came back almost immediately, following
Baptiste, with her head bowed upon her breast. “You have heard,
mademoiselle?” she said with a sob. “The _bon Dieu_ has not thought fit
to hear our prayers. There has been a want of faith on our part, or some
other has prayed more strongly than we. We must not complain,
mademoiselle, for if the _bon Dieu_ heard us always, it would be very
easy to be Christian. But only for my Blanchette it breaks my heart. Oh!
if I were one of the saints in heaven--God forgive me for making so
bold--I could not, I would not refuse any one! I would not take a
denial! But when you are praying and praying, and there is no answer,
heaven seems so far away, mademoiselle.”

“And there is nothing more that can be done?” Helen said, dropping a few
tears of sympathy.

“Yes, mademoiselle, there is my coffee to make,” said old Goudron, who
made his appearance just then; “which is their duty, what they are put
into this world for, these girls--not to say incantations nor make a
fuss about young good-for-nothings like the _conscrit_ yonder. My
coffee, _petite hypocrite_!” he cried, pushing before him the little
shrinking figure. Helen felt her countenance flame.

“You are a wicked, horrible old man,” she cried in English, to relieve
her mind, “and I hate you! Come in, M. Goudron,” she added, with an
effort; “the coffee is made; come in and take it here.”

“Mademoiselle is too good,” said the old man, surprised; but he let
Ursule go. Helen had been too late to help in the praying, but perhaps
there might be something left which she could do. Mr Goulburn was late.
He had not yet come down-stairs; and Margot, though she too had run out
to take part in the melancholy excitement, could be brought back more
easily than poor little Blanchette. Helen heroically poured out a large
basin of coffee for the odious old man, whose sneer made her shiver; and
he was so little prepared for this attention that for the moment he was
entirely subdued.

“Mademoiselle is very good to take so much trouble,” he said. “The
coffee is excellent. I have always been told that no one understood how
to be comfortable like Messieurs the English. Comfort! it is even an
English word!”

“We try to be good to each other--that is what makes us comfortable,”
said Helen, with youthful severity. The coffee was served in little
round basins of thick and heavy white crockery ware, and M. Goudron
broke down his bread into it, and ate it with a spoon, which disgusted
the English girl much, chiefly because it was not her way of taking the
morning meal.

“I perceive,” said M. Goudron, “you think I am not good to my
grandchildren, mademoiselle--notwithstanding that I feed them and lodge
them, and allow them to give me a great deal of trouble. They cost me
more than any one would think. They are not young ladies like
mademoiselle. Why should not they go out into the world and gain their
living like others? It is because I have a soft heart,” the old man said
with a grin. “They are old enough to gain their living, yet I keep them
at home. Is not that much? What would you have me do more?”

Helen did not know what to say. “You will not let them do anything they
want to do,” she cried, with hot partisanship; but she was aware that
there was not much reasonableness in the complaint, and this took away
precision from her tone.

“One of them wants--to marry M. Baptiste, who is not what I approve, who
is not _rangé_ nor serious, but a young good-for-nothing,” said M.
Goudron. “Fortunately, mademoiselle, that is put out of the question by
this morning’s luck.”

“Fortunately!” (“Janey,” said Helen in English, “I cannot bear him much
longer. He is horrible; he is disgusting; he is like the ogre in your
fairy tale.”) “Fortunately, M. Goudron! when they love one another! when
they will break their hearts! when----”

“Ah, bah! Excuse me, mademoiselle; you are young and romantic, like all
the English ladies; but I am prudent. I think of Blanchette’s real
welfare; and mademoiselle, who is Protestant, a religion of good sense,
does not desire me, I hope, to bury Ursule alive in a convent. Pah!”
said M. Goudron, spitting on the floor in sign of his disgust, a
proceeding which elicited a restrained shriek from his young hostess.

“Janey, call Margot, call Margot! I cannot put up with him any longer.
No one ever does that in England,” she said, turning away with a face of
horror.

“Shut a girl up in a convent?” said M. Goudron. “No, you are prudent
people; you have too much good sense. A girl who can do all that is
necessary in a little _ménage_--who can make the kitchen very well, and
mend my clothes, and do all that is needed, and is cheaper than a
servant;--to shut her up in a convent, where she will no longer be of
use to any one--and with a _dot_, if you please! Were they to take her
with nothing, we might think of it. That is what mademoiselle would wish
me to do--to give one, with her _dot_ to the nuns and priests, whom I
abhor, and to give another to Baptiste Dupré; and for myself to hire a
servant, who would gad about from morning to night, and cost me as much
as both put together! Is that what mademoiselle would have me do?”

Helen made no reply, for just then a hurried step had come in at the
door, and a new tumult of anxiety, of emotion, seemed to pervade the
house. There was a little pause and whispering outside, and then the
door was thrown hurriedly open, and Blanchette came in, a fountain of
tears.

“Oh, pardon, pardon, _chère_ mademoiselle! It is because I am so
unhappy. I think I shall die of grief. Grandpapa! I am come to ask you
upon my knees to have a little pity upon us. Oh, _ma bonne, douce,
gentille demoiselle_, help me! perhaps he will hear you. He is so rich,
it would be so easy for him to do it. Grandpapa, if you will help us, I
will be your slave, I will never complain any more; I will do anything;
I will never ask to go out, nor for any toilet, nor for pleasure. _Mon
Dieu!_ he turns away his head! he will not even listen. Oh, _mes chères
demoiselles_, help me! He is so rich--what would it do to him? He would
never feel it. We should all be happy and pray to God for him--and he,
he would never feel it at all!”

“How dare you say I am rich! Do not believe her, mademoiselle; she is
talking of things she knows nothing about. _Petite sotte!_ you had
better get up and go home, and think of your duty a little.”

“Here is my duty, _grandpère_,” said poor Blanchette, on her knees. “Oh,
help me, _mes bonnes demoiselles!_ He does not care for God, nor for his
children; but he cares for his _locataires_. If Baptiste goes away, his
mother will be ruined, and he will be lost to me, and I shall die. Oh,
my poor Baptiste! he never was wicked, only foolish a little, like all
the young men; and he knows better, a great deal better now. Grandpapa,
if you will only be kind, if you will do what we ask you, we will pray
God for you on our knees every day, as Ursule does. Oh, mademoiselle,
Ursule is a saint! she prays for him just the same as if he were the
kindest; and so will I. And when you die, which cannot be long, for you
are old, you will find the advantage--God will listen to you because you
have listened to us. He will not remember the wicked things you have
done, nor how hard you have been, nor----”

“This is something which is admirable,” said the old man, grinning more
horribly than ever. “Mademoiselle, my granddaughter is of opinion that I
am wicked, that I am hard, that I am old and will shortly die. _Bien,
très-bien!_ It is to please me she says all these pretty things. _Va,
petite imbécile!_” He put out his foot furiously to push the kneeling
girl away.

But Janey, who had been standing by listening all this time in unwonted
silence, looking on with very curious eyes, investigating the strange
chapter in human affairs thus exhibited to her, stepped in to the
rescue.

“You _are_ old, M. Goudron,” she said, “and you are not good. Papa is
good, though he is old, but not you. He would do whatever I ask him. If
you will not give Blanchette what she wants, I will ask papa, and he
will do it for Janey; and then what Ursule gets from God will be for
papa, and not for you; and all the village will say, ‘Down with that old
Père Goudron and _vive l’Anglais_!’ Nobody loves you, M. Goudron,”
continued Janey, “not one. You are a very bad old man; you never do
anything that is kind. It would be better to be a wolf in the wood than
you, for the wolf would not understand, and you hear me talking to you.
And when you die, which can’t be long, you will be made into an old
cinder” (Janey said _tison_). “You are very like one now; I think you
must feel the fire burning you already,” cried Janey, vindictively; “you
are so dried up and withered and wrinkled and wicked. _Tiens_,
Blanchette, do not ask him any more; I will get it from papa.”

Janey put out her hand majestically, interposing her small person
between the old man whom she had denounced and poor Blanchette, who had
risen to her feet and turned her large astonished eyes, full of tears,
upon the child. Janey, in her four feet of stature, towered over them
all, her pretty hair streaming back as on a breeze of indignation, her
eyes blazing. No consideration of circumstances or possibilities
affected Janey. She was sublime, for she was absolute, above all
reasoning. And while Blanchette started to her feet, half in fear of her
grandfather, half in wondering hope at the impulse of this little
heroine, the old man, on his side, cowered and shrank before her. He had
one humanity in him, he was fond of little children; and Janey, the
strange little foreign creature, exercised a kind of fascination over
him. He tried to change his grin into a conciliatory smile.

“_Tenez, tenez, ma petite demoiselle_,” he said, with a broken sort of
whimper in his voice; “do not speak to an old man so. When you ask me
for something in your pretty little voice, I will do it. I am not
wicked, as you say; it is they who are wicked, robbing me of everything.
But you are a little angel. Naturally your papa will do whatever you ask
him. He is a _milord_; he is rich, very rich, like all the English; and
I too will do what you ask me, though I am not rich, but poor. But you
must not say ‘_À bas le père Goudron!_’” cried the old man again with a
whimper. He twisted all his lean person into a grimace of deprecating
amiability, drawing his long legs under him, clasping his bony hands,
putting his grotesque head on one side, while Janey stood impassive,
disapproving, majestic, stretching out one small arm as a shield over
Blanchette, who for her part, arrested in the very act of weeping, stood
with her pretty lips apart, her eyes very widely opened, and the tears
dropping down her cheeks.

Just then Mr Goulburn was heard coming down-stairs. He was in good
spirits this morning: first he was heard whistling a favourite tune,
then he began to talk to Margot, who had come in and was sweeping
loudly, knocking her broom into all the corners by way of blowing off
her emotion, as poor Madame Dupré had done. “So poor Baptiste has drawn
a bad number,” they heard him say, and at the words Blanchette’s half
arrested tears burst violently forth again.

“Oh, monsieur,” cried Margot, outside, “what good one can do when one is
rich! If the Père Goudron would but be charitable one time in his life,
and give the money for a substitute! Otherwise their hearts will be
broken, and it will be ruin to the Mère Dupré.”

“Ah, a substitute!” he said, while the little company within listened
with breathless attention. Then there followed a bar or two of Mr
Goulburn’s favourite air, and the renewed knocks against the wainscot of
Margot’s broom, and the step of the Englishman, lighter than usual, his
daughter thought. Had he got good news? He pushed the door open, then
stood surprised at the group he saw. “Ah!” he cried, “it is early to
receive visitors, Helen.” They all turned their eyes upon him,
Blanchette putting her hands together instinctively. Two pairs of
entreating feminine eyes caught Mr Goulburn’s first glance; then his own
fixed upon the little central figure, whose looks were less entreating
than commanding. “Why, little Janey, what have you got to do with this?”
he said.

“Papa,” said Janey, speaking in French--on the whole, she now spoke in
French with more dignity than in English, her utterance in her native
tongue being still made sweet to foolish parental ears by a few
cherished baby errors--“papa, I have promised that you will give what
old M. Goudron is too wicked to give--the money that Blanchette wants
for Baptiste. She will tell you how much it is. I have said,” said
Janey, with a falter in her small voice, for she began to feel the need
of crying, being only six after all--“I have said that my papa would
give the money for Janey. I know, I know,” she added, bursting into her
native speech, “that you will dive it for Janey, papa.”

Mr Goulburn stood, looking much astonished, while this appeal was
addressed to him. He looked at old Goudron, crumpled up in his chair
with his deprecating look, and little Blanchette dissolved in tears,
turning dim, imploring eyes upon him; and at Helen, who was old enough
to know better, who ought to have put a stop to it. But he had not the
habit of economy in money, and it did not occur to him, as it might have
done to, alas! a better man, to consider a demand of this kind for a
considerable sum out of mere kindness, to be at once out of the
question. It was not out of the question to Mr Goulburn. When a man’s
first quality is to be honourable and just above all things, he has to
assume a sternness of self-restraint which sometimes makes him appear
less amiable to superficial eyes; but one who is less decided upon such
points is free of that bondage. He had spent money largely all his
life, and he was not startled when he was asked for it, as most of us
are who have to gain it by the sweat of our brow. He had never done much
more than turn it over in his hands, gaining, yet sometimes losing, by
chance, by luck, by hair-breadth hazards, but never by the strain of
daily toil; and he had been in the habit of giving it away freely,
whether it was his own or others’, all his life. But he was somewhat
annoyed by this demand. Helen should have known better. She knew that he
was not now a millionaire, that his resources were limited. These
hesitations made a cloud over his face when little Janey began to make
her little speech. But suddenly the cloud rolled off in a moment, the
light broke out. He had not a noble face; a physiognomist would not have
trusted it, an artist would have thought nothing of it; there were
ignoble lines in it, something which told of cunning, a furtive
look--but all at once it was transfigured. He broke out into a half
laugh, half sob--

“I oughtn’t to do it; I’ve no right to do it! But I can’t refuse to dive
it to Janey!” he cried, with that clamour of mingled feeling in his
voice, and drew the child triumphant into his arms.

How hoarse and broken the sound was! Helen took fright. “Papa, you are
ill!” she cried.

He went on laughing, not able to stop himself. “Not a bit,” he said,
sitting down and panting for breath. “_Bonjour_, M. Goudron; you are a
wise man, you are not led by the nose like me. Janey, my pet, tell your
Blanchette to dry her eyes. We can’t have any crying such a bright
morning; and let her send this _conscrit_ to me.”

“It would be better, a great deal better, for him to accept the lot he
has drawn, and serve as be ought, and give up all follies,” said old
Goudron, gathering himself up out of his chair. He stood for a moment
balancing himself on his long legs, somewhat crest-fallen, yet
recovering his grin. “I have to thank mademoiselle for her excellent
coffee,” he said, “and her hospitality, truly English. _Tenez,
mademoiselle la petite_; you will say _au revoir_ before I go?”

Janey put her two hands behind her, and fixed him with two glittering
eyes. “I am afraid I shall see you again, but I wish I never might,” she
cried. “You are a bad, bad, _horrible_ old man!”

“And you, you are a _charmante petite demoiselle_,” said M. Goudron,
grinning at her till his old face seemed cut in two.




CHAPTER XII.


The day of the _tirage au sort_ was not one which could be spent like
other days, after the supreme excitement of the morning. There was a
great deal of wine consumed in Latour, and a perfect babel of talk. It
soon became known in the village, after a great many excited
communications between the Lion d’Or and M. Goudron’s house, that
_l’Anglais_ had offered to procure a substitute for Baptiste. At first
the little eager world was incredulous of such an extraordinary
announcement. _L’Anglais!_ a stranger, one who had nothing to do with
the Duprés or the Goudrons, or even with the district, or any interest
in the Lion d’Or! but it was very evident that something was going on in
which the stranger and Baptiste and Blanchette and all their respective
families were involved. Madame Dupré, who had been assisted to her room
by a whole assembly of weeping and sympathetic neighbours, had been
disinterred from the midst of them and conducted across the street by
Baptiste, very solemn and pale, yet with an expression quite different
from the despair on his face when he had come home from the Mairie with
his fatal number. It was Blanchette who, laughing, crying, with the
tears on her cheeks and a voice broken with sobs, yet an extraordinary
gleam of happiness about her, had flown across the street, light as a
bird, to call them. They had all disappeared into the rooms on the
ground-floor, where there had been a tumult of talking and crying, two
or three voices audible together, a thing never heard before since the
English family, who spoke, the Latourois thought, almost in whispers,
had taken possession. And then the Curé had been sent for; and M. le
Maire himself, coming home after presiding officially over the business
of the day, still with his scarf on, and in all the pride of office, had
stepped in. This diverted the attention of many from the noisy youths
who had escaped, and who were celebrating their freedom--and from those
who had been drawn, and who were trying to forget it and drown their
despair. And when Madame Dupré came back, a changed woman, her head
high, her countenance radiant, the whole community was stirred. It was
true then? Many were the wistful women who crossed the road after, and
hung about the door, and cast anxious looks at the window. Why should
Baptiste Dupré be the only one to be delivered? _L’Anglais_ probably
did it out of mere eccentricity, they thought, not out of regard to
Baptiste, and no doubt he was enormously rich, and did not know what to
do with his money; and if he bought back Baptiste, why not Jean and
Pierre? The mothers of Jean and Pierre, who had drawn the numbers 2 and
4, could not see the difference. They hung about the door all the day,
thinking if he would but appear they might find courage to speak to him.
The lucky Baptiste to have caught his attention! M. Goudron himself was
not visible. He did not stand at the door and grin as he was in the
habit of doing. The commotion had subdued him at least, and if there had
been nothing else for which to thank _l’Anglais_, this was something,
for these poor women, with their hearts full, felt that they could not
have borne Père Goudron’s grin. And soon it became whispered in the
crowd that it was Antoine who was going to accept Baptiste’s place. He
had served already, being so much older, and most people were very glad
to hear that he was going out of Latour. It would be so much the better
for the other young men. Antoine had announced himself as ready to be
any one’s _remplaçant_; things had been going badly with him all the
winter, and the money tempted him. There had been great bargainings in
the room where so much unusual talking had been going on and so many
people crowded together; and at last, by the help of the Maire and
Curé and old Père Goudron himself--who, now that nobody expected
him to supply the funds, could not keep himself out of the
negotiations--Antoine consented to take fifteen hundred francs as the
price of his service. He was giving himself, as he declared,
“dirt-cheap”; but as Mr Goulburn, though he was so liberal, had his
wits about him, and old Goudron was the keenest at a bargain in all
Burgundy, the whole preliminaries were arranged the same morning, and
the money was to be paid as soon as possible.

“For we are birds of passage,” the Englishman said, “there is no knowing
how long we may stay.” That same night, no later, all guarantees having
been given, Antoine was to get his price; and thus, after thanks and
blessings innumerable, the scene ended. It was a relief to them all when
the outpourings of gratitude were over and all those effusive people
gone. “In England they would have felt it just as much, but they would
not have made such a fuss,” Mr Goulburn said with a sigh of relief.

“You could not have done it in England,” said Helen. “I think it is very
good of you to do it, papa.”

He looked at her with a smile on his face. “Do you know, I think so
too--it was very good of me. But it was all for Janey,” he said; “it
will come off her fortune. I have got her fortune laid by all safe. I
don’t speak of yours, Helen, for you know you have something from your
mother. You have a hundred a-year, and as it has always been left
untouched to accumulate, there should be a good deal more than a hundred
a-year now. It is as well you should know, in case of----”

“In case of what, papa? You said we were birds of passage. Did you mean
anything? Did you--think we might have to go away?”

“Not I! I don’t know why I said it. The fact is we _are_ birds of
passage. What have we to do here? I am very comfortable; I don’t want to
change; but as a matter of fact, things might happen----”

“Papa, perhaps I ought to have told you; they are expecting
visitors--English visitors--at the _château_.”

She looked at him after a moment, and gave a sudden cry of alarm. He had
become not pale, which is one thing, but white to the very lips. “Do you
know who they are?” he said.

“Only their Christian names: one is John and the other Monsieur Charles,
who has been in India.”

She said this with an uneasy feeling once more that M. Charles who had
been in India could be but one person, and looked up with some anxiety
to see if her father would take the same view.

“That does not tell very much,” he said with a laugh; “most men who are
not called John are called Charles. Are they brothers? It is annoying. I
daresay you wonder why I should care; but the fact is, Helen,” he said,
with an uneasy attempt at a careless manner, “I don’t want to come in
contact with Englishmen. Take care not to mention my name at all; ignore
me, that is the best thing to do. I won’t meet any Englishman. I’d
rather, a great deal rather, notwithstanding that things suit me very
well here, go away at once than have English visitors prying upon me.”

“I am afraid you are not well, papa.”

“It is that old Comtesse that has put it into my head. There never was
anything so absurd. I have been quite breathless and queer ever since
she told me I ought to be so. It is the most droll sympathetic
sensation--nothing more. I know I am not ill, not a bit ill--but I feel
it; in the face of my own reason and all the facts of the case. Never
mind, that will all blow over. And Helen, recollect what I say: be on
your guard if you see any Englishmen. Stop; if it should by any chance
be some one we know----”

“That is so unlikely, papa,” said Helen, forcing herself to smile. But
she did not think it was improbable, in her heart.

“It is very improbable; still we must be prepared for all that can
happen. Should it be any one we know, say that we have come here--for a
day or two. Say that we are--just leaving--or better, say that you are
alone, and that where I am you do not know.”

It was Helen’s turn now to be pale. “Papa, how can I say all these
things?” she cried. “If I could, if the truth did not matter, the
Vieux-bois would know I was lying. And, papa! oh, if you would but tell
me! If it was only that you were ruined, why should you be afraid of
English visitors? I think I could bear it better if you would tell me
the truth. Is it only--what you call ruin, papa? meaning that you have
lost your money?” she said.

“It is only--ruin. That is a tolerably big word. I don’t know what you
could wish more.”

“But meaning that you have lost your money? You have not lost all your
money,” she said with some vehemence. “You have given--a great deal, to
poor Baptiste. We are in no want of anything. You cannot have lost it
all--that is not true.”

A dull sort of smile came upon his face. “Such things happen every day,”
he said. “A man may lose all his money and may yet have what will do to
go on with. Besides, it is Janey’s, not mine.”

Helen looked at him with such wistful wonder, with such a pained
entreaty in her face, that he went on with an embarrassed laugh, “The
short and the long of it, if you will know, is this--Ruin means not
starvation, as you may suppose, but owing money which you cannot pay.”

A hopeful gleam flew across her face. “But then, so long as there is any
we can always go on paying. Ah, poor Baptiste! it would be hard to take
it from him now; but we could save a great deal, papa; and you shall
have mine if you like, and welcome. And perhaps they would take it in
instalments, as the poor people used to do at the Fareham Club.”

“Hush!” he said; “you don’t understand anything about it. I want no more
conversation on this subject.”

“But, papa, I do understand: what can be more simple? Take the money we
have, and pay as far as it will go, and then we could go home.”

“You are a little fool,” Mr Goulburn said.

Helen was pained. Did she not understand? and yet it seemed so entirely
simple. She did not insist any more, feeling that her father looked
ill; that it was unkind to press him for the moment. “If any of the
people to whom he owes money should come here,” she said to herself, “I
should know what to do.” It was with this feeling that she set out to
see his friends. Janey was in the garden with Margot’s children,
perfectly happy; her sister was not sorry on this day of emotion to be
alone. She walked away quickly to the _château_, and her story about the
_tirage_ and those upon whom the bad numbers had fallen, was full of
interest for the ladies; they wanted to hear every name, and how the
unfortunates had borne it.

“Pierre Courvoye! Oh, it will not do any harm to Pierre; and I think a
few years’ steady service and discipline will be of use to Jean too.”

“But poor old Elisabeth!” cried Cécile.

“She will be better without him; at least she will not see him going
wrong; and perhaps he will do better in the regiment.”

“But Baptiste? it will ruin Baptiste and poor Mère Dupré, and break
little Blanchette’s heart,” the girls cried.

When they heard that Mr Goulburn had bought him a substitute there were
no bounds to their enthusiasm. “Your papa, then, is a saint, he is a
benefactor, he has a heart of gold!” they cried.

“But, _mon enfant_,” said the Comtesse, “I fear you must have allowed
him to be exposed to emotion. Never forget that there must be no
emotion; you must avoid it as you would avoid poison.”

This flutter of interest and kind, pleasant talk and praise sent all
that was melancholy out of Helen’s head. She was to return home early,
but this was the evening of Madame la Comtesse’s dinner, and they were
then to meet again. “Shall I tell her?” whispered Cécile.

“Oh no, no; let it be a surprise!” cried the more mischievous Thérèse.
They went out with her to show her how all the young larches were
pushing out their tassels, and the crocuses coming up by hundreds in the
grass. Helen returned to the village by the longer way. There was a
grand entrance to the _château_ which was scarcely ever used; a short
avenue with two curious tall bits of building on either side of the
gate, half towers, half houses, three storeys high, giving a
half-ludicrous air of defence in the midst of a line of low and innocent
hedges. When important visitors came this was how they went in; and, as
it happened, she had scarcely emerged from between the two obelisks of
houses which blocked the gateway, when she saw the Comtesse’s great
lumbering old family coach, the _berline_, as they called it, swaying
along the road, drawn by the two long-tailed horses from the farm, with
old Léon on the box, who was called Monsieur l’Intendant in the village
when the people wanted to please him. Helen’s heart began to beat. She
felt sure that the occupants of the _berline_ must be the English
strangers whom she looked for with so much expectation, yet fear. She
gave a hurried glance at them as they lumbered past. She saw two heads,
but her eyes were hazy with over-anxiety, and her excitement confused
her. She could not tell who they were, or if she had seen them before.
The carriage passed her. She breathed more freely. How foolish! she said
to herself. Was she disappointed that after all it was not Charley
Ashton? or was she relieved? or what was it? She could not tell. Her
life had been full of a vague expectation, which had gone to her head,
which had kept her amused, excited, disturbed, alive to everything. And
now it had failed. Was not she glad? She ought to have been; it would
keep safe her father’s secret, and save him from all disturbance. But
Helen’s first sensation was as if she had fallen out of the clouds. The
earth is a very steady, very satisfactory thing to come down upon, and
by far the safest footing; but still, when you drop from a height there
is apt to be a momentary jar.

She was so full of this really involuntary, unwilling sensation, and so
anxious to feel glad that all cause for apprehension on her father’s
part was over, that she did not hear the much louder jarring and
grinding of the wheels with which the big _berline_, as soon as it had
passed her, was stopped. Helen felt slightly unsteady so far as she
herself was concerned. Her steps wavered; there was a ringing in her
ears. It had been, she said to herself, something to look forward to,
and it was over; and she was very glad it was over, and papa happily
escaped from all annoyance. Things were getting steadier before her eyes
every moment, her step was getting more assured. Then all at once she
heard voices in the air. “I certainly will not wait for you,” in a
somewhat severe tone, and in familiar English accents.

“Never mind, you will just have time for your own salutations, and I
will follow directly,” some one said.

Helen’s feet, in spite of her, swerved, stumbled, took her half-way
across the road, like feet that were drunken and beyond guidance. She
had not been mistaken after all. Whatever was to come of it, had she not
known it all from the very first? She was not surprised now, though the
discovery set her heart beating once more as if it would break out of
her breast. Of course it was he. Could anything be more precise than
the description, M. Charles who had been in India? She had been quite
sure of it all along.

“Once more I have to ask, is it you, Miss Goulburn? I am sure it can be
no one but you.”

“Yes, it is me,” said Helen, simply (but nobody pretends that grammar
and nature are the same in respect to this pronoun. She was much
disturbed, and she could no more have said I than she could have flown);
“and I thought it must be you they meant,” she added, with more
simplicity still, “though I heard nothing but your Christian name.”

“Who was it that spoke of me? It is only by accident I have come here. I
was going to Sainte-Barbe to find out if anything had been heard of
you--if I could find any trace of you.”

“Sainte-Barbe! we left that, Mr Ashton, immediately----”

“I know: after you had seen me.”

Helen sighed. It seemed impossible to her to lie as her father had told
her--to say anything to him that was not true. It was very hard even to
say what she did falteringly, “We did not mean to stay there, anyhow.”

“Miss Goulburn,” he said, “I have heard a great deal since I have been
home. When I saw you last I knew nothing. Miss Temple--I mean my
stepmother--is very, very anxious about you. She wants you to go and
live with her, and my father wishes it too.”

“Mr Charles, that is very, very kind,” said Helen, shaking her head.

“Miss Goulburn, nobody in the world can take more interest in you, can
have thought more of you than I, since you were a little girl at the
school feasts. And in India I always wondered how you had grown up--if I
should still find you when I got back. I don’t know if you are aware of
all that has happened?”

“Papa is ruined,” said Helen in a very low voice.

“Ruined! Ah, yes; and something more.”

Helen trembled, tottering along by his side. “I asked him to tell me,
but he wouldn’t. Don’t tell me, I had rather not know. Most likely,” she
said, with a thrill of much pain in her voice, “when he knows you are
here he will go away.”

“I am almost sure he will. And you have friends here?”

“Oh yes; all the people are our friends, every one. But what does that
matter?” cried Helen, with a smile of desperation. “It need not make any
difference. We shall go all the same. We shall not mind. But why you or
any one should want to harm us, Mr Charles, I cannot tell. We never did
harm to any one. Why should we have to fly from one place to another?
We have done nobody any harm.”

Young Ashton looked at her with the tenderest pity in his face. “I
came,” he said, “to take you home, if you would come, if I could find
you, to Mrs Ashton. Every effort has been made to find you. We did not
know what to wish--that he might not be found, or that you might. Pardon
me, it was for this I came.”

“Oh no; for a very, very different purpose, Mr Ashton! I know that quite
well--I know exactly,” said Helen, with a little heat. Then she stopped
confused. What had she to do with it? Whatever he came for, what was it
to Helen? Angry! was she angry? But for what, in the name of heaven?
Then she was angry with herself for her irritation. The tears gathered
thick in her eyes. “It will be better, much better, to let us alone,”
she said; “what does it matter to any one where we go or where we stay?
Never mind us, please. Go the _château_, where they expect you. You can
say I will not come this evening; you need not say why. And let us
alone, Mr Ashton. What can it matter to you if we are here or anywhere
else? We have done no harm to you.”

“Miss Goulburn, you don’t know John; but he has been a sufferer; he is
very bitter, he will not let things alone. If I could have formed the
least idea that you were here--but even if I had known, what could I do
to keep him from the place where his bride is living? And if he has any
suspicion he will not be silenced. When I saw you--you with your open,
candid face--walking so quietly along the road, and he by my side with
the spirit of a bloodhound in him---- And yet how glad I am that you are
here! But your father; good heavens!” cried the young man; “what a
position for you to be in! you, so young, so innocent, knowing nothing!”

Just then they were met by a party of country people going home. “_Bon
soir_, mademoiselle,” they cried with a little acclamation of kindness,
the men taking off their hats; and one old woman paused to say, “You
should be happy to-night if any one should, _ma bonne demoiselle_.”

“You have been doing something kind,” said young Ashton, looking at her,
his face full of tender admiration and sympathy.

“Not I, not I!” Helen cried. The tears came down her cheeks in a
torrent. “It is papa, poor papa, that has been kind. You don’t know how
good he is. He has made some of the poor people very happy; and his
reward,” she cried, “will be to be driven away. Oh, why should that be?
Papa, who used to be so rich, who had everything; and now that he is
quiet here, in a little wretched village, you come and drive him away!”

Young Ashton’s countenance changed. It grew grave, almost severe. “I do
not drive him away,” he said. “If there was anything I could do to make
him safe, I would do it; but he will know better than you do that I
cannot. Tell him that Sir John Harvey is here. He will understand that
better than anything. Not in search of him--not knowingly, but still he
is here. Do they know at the _château_? Can they give any information?
Will they put John on the scent? Pardon me for using such words--he is
my cousin, but he is a hard man. Do they know who you are?”

Helen drooped her head with a bitter sense of shame. Even now she did
not know what the real stigma was; but the shame of a false name bowed
her to the ground. “They do not know us,” she said almost inaudibly, “by
our true name.”

And as she stood before him with her head bent down and that flush of
humiliation on her face, Ashton’s heart was too full to keep silence. A
cry of painful sympathy came from his lips. He took her hand and kissed
it with passionate sympathy and anguish. “My poor child, my poor child!”
he cried. “You, you! to have this burden to bear. Leave him, for God’s
sake, and let me take you home.”

“Leave him! now, when he is badly off and in trouble?” This idea brought
a kind of smile to Helen’s lips. “But, Mr Ashton, I think you mean very
kindly. I will tell him, and you can say to them at the _château_ that
he was not very well, that the excitement had told upon him, and that I
could not leave him to-night. They will understand that. And don’t make
them think any harm of us, not more harm than you can help. They have
been very sweet to me,” Helen said after a pause, her tears dropping
again; “such friends! and Thérèse, Mr Ashton, Thérèse, remember! She is
not Cécile, but she is nearly as good as Cécile.”

“I know nothing about Thérèse or Cécile!” he cried. “Helen, oh, forgive
me, I am almost mad! Are you to be swept away from me once more? Am I to
lose you again?”

She shook her head sadly. “What does it matter? We never did know each
much,” she said.

“I will come to the village after it is dark. I will wait about on the
chance of seeing you; perhaps even I might be of use. Don’t refuse me
this,” he cried; “don’t refuse me so much as this! If it is I that must
drive my own happiness away, at least let me see you once again.”

“Yes; it is true, if you are a friend, you might be of use. You might
help me, perhaps,” Helen said simply, “if you will be so kind. That is
the house, that tall one with the green shutters. It will be very kind
if you will come.”

She turned away, making a gesture to him to go back. They were opposite
the Lion d’Or, where still the _conscrits_ were hanging about with their
coloured ribbons, and Baptiste receiving once again perpetual
congratulation. Antoine, with his hands in his pockets, strolled along
in the middle of the street, biting a straw which he held in his mouth.
He was looking at M. Goudron’s windows with bended brows. Amid all the
peaceful surroundings, he alone caught Charley Ashton’s eyes as a
sinister figure meaning mischief; but he was far too much occupied with
other thoughts to waste any upon the village bully at a moment so full
of heavier trouble and pain.




CHAPTER XIII.


Helen went home with slow steps and a heavy heart.

A heavy heart, indeed; it had beaten wildly enough within the last
hour--now it lay in her breast like a lump of lead. This morning, though
there was nothing happy in her position--though she knew that some great
cloud of misery and doubt hung between them and everything they had
hitherto known, and that even the tranquillity of the moment, such as it
was, might be interrupted in a second, in the twinkling of an eye,--yet
the triumphant light-heartedness of youth had been able to triumph over
all these things. And there had been so warm an atmosphere of life
about them, so much interchange of feeling, keen sympathy, and the
profound happiness of making others happy, that very little sense of
being there as a stranger had remained in Helen’s mind. They were not
strangers--they were more at home in Latour than they had ever been in
Fareham. Here everybody knew them, everybody had a friendly word for
them; more than that, the English family, with its careless, liberal
ways, had now secured the affection of the village. She herself had
never known before what it was to have friends like Cécile and Thérèse,
or to be interested with such familiar kindness in any poor girl as she
had been in the fortunes of little Blanchette. At Fareham the love of
the village publican’s son with the retired tradesman’s daughter would
have been nothing to the great young lady, secluded among her woods and
parks. But here they were more interesting, and concerned her more than
any romance. She had a share in the lives of so many people, and her own
life was full of tranquil occupations, of sympathies, of friendships;
every cottage round about contained something or somebody that
interested her. But what of that? They must all be left behind, as all
her other habits of living, all her previous existence had been. She
would have to give up those first personal friends, not knowing if she
should ever see them more, not hoping to do so--and go away from the
homely little life which had given her her first lively sense of
individual existence--for what? to go where? Helen could not tell. The
world was all dark beyond this one clear spot in which the afternoon sun
had just sunk behind the cottage roofs, and the whole sky overhead was
red with gorgeous reflection. To-morrow, the fine spring morning which
these ruddy lights prophesied, would rise serenely over the same roofs,
and Margot would light her fire, and little Blanchette, out of her
dreams, would awake joyfully to recollect that her troubles were all
over. But where would Helen be? She did not know, but surely away from
Latour, away from everything she knew, out into the world, which always
figured itself before her as darkness--the gloom of night, the clanging
of a great train, pursuing its noisy precipitate way through an unseen
country, to the unknown out of the known. She stood for a moment at the
door, looking wistfully round her at the familiar scene. The houses with
their thatched roofs rose dark against the great glow of redness in the
west. In the distance the homely spire of the church rose up protecting
over them; voices were in the air, all cheerful, confused, half heard,
with now and then one distincter note striking in, as by turns one
figure would start up and separate itself from the little company still
lingering in front of the Lion d’Or.

Somewhere near a woman was singing a baby to sleep, in a sweet drowsy
voice, broken by the rock of her chair upon the wooden floor. On the
other hand a group of little truants, pattering in their _sabots_, were
being pursued homewards to bed by the half-laughing, half-angry mother.
Helen looked round her with wistful eyes, casting a last glance along
the road which led to the _château_, the most dear of all. Along this
road Antoine was sauntering slowly, his hands in his pockets, looking
back as he went, with his eyes always fixed on M. Goudron’s house. His
was the only non-sympathetic figure in all the scene. It broke the
spell. Helen turned from him and breathed her farewell to the village in
one long sigh.

The prattle of Janey was the first thing she heard when she went in. The
child was seated on her father’s knee. She had been telling him a story
about Margot’s children, with whom she had been playing.

“Petit-Jean does not know what a big city is, papa; he thinks Paris is
like Laroche” (Laroche was the next village, and had a street twice as
long as that of Latour, and was looked upon as almost a _chef-lieu_).
“He said, was England like the little island in the pond at the
_château_? Margot’s little children they are very ignorant, they don’t
know anything, papa.”

“And my little Janey knows a great deal?” he said laughing, yet with a
thrill of another sentiment in his voice; “but everybody, my pet, has
not travelled like you.”

“No,” said Janey, complacently. “Only think, I came from India when I
was a little tiny baby--if I could only recollect I should know India
too, and then London, and then that place on the sea where we bought our
things, and then Sainte-Barbe, and then---- Papa, after all this, when
are we doing home?”

“Should you like to do home, Janey?” This time the laugh was so broken
that it was more like a sob.

“Oh yes, papa. I should like to have my big doll Marianna, that I put in
my bed when we came away. Will she always be in my little bed all this
time, staring with her big eyes? I forgot to shut her eyes when I put
her in. Fancy a little girl lying for years and years with open eyes!”

“It is not years and years, Janey.”

“Yes, papa, it is longer, longer than any one can remember--far longer
than _that_,” cried the child, stretching her arms to the widest. “I
want to do home.”

“Here is Helen coming to put you to bed,” he said. She was in his arms
as she sat there, but he strained her closer, kissing her little
upturned face again and again. “My little Janey, my little darling,” he
said, “wherever you are you will not forget your poor father, who was so
fond of you?”

She did not take much notice of this address, being used, more or less,
to speeches of the sort, but slid down from his knee. Helen had to
postpone her explanation till the ceremony of putting the child to bed
was over. Should she be obliged to wake her up again in the dark as had
been done before? And how would it be possible here, thirty miles from
the railway, to fly as they had done from Fareham? Janey chattered
while Helen went over all those miserable calculations. It was almost
dark when she went back to the room in which her father sat alone.

“Have you not gone, Helen? I thought I heard the Précepteur asking for
you at the door.”

“I am not going, papa.” She came and sat down by him in the dark, which
hid her countenance from him. She laid her hand softly upon his. “Papa,
they have come.”

“How you startle me, Helen!” he cried querulously. “Oh, I remember: the
English visitors. Well! I hope you were discreet and did as I said?”

“You were right,” she said, “and I was wrong. I thought it so unlikely;
but don’t they say here that it is the unlikely things that happen?
Papa, one of them is Charley Ashton, whom we met at Sainte-Barbe.”

“Good Lord!” he cried, starting from his chair; then after a pause
reseated himself. “I will keep out of the way,” he said. “I regretted
afterwards that I left Sainte-Barbe when I did. Charley Ashton is not
the sort of fellow to betray any one: and I think,” he said with a half
laugh, “that he was very, very much struck with you. I should not wonder
if that was why he has come back to this neighbourhood--although
Sainte-Barbe is a good way from here.”

These words scarcely conveyed any meaning to Helen’s ear. All she made
out was that her father was not so much alarmed, not so thoroughly
roused to think of his own welfare as he ought to be.

“Papa, he got out of the carriage to talk to me. He spoke of you; he
said I was to warn you, and that this would be enough: I was to tell you
his cousin is with him, Sir John Harvey----”

“My God!” cried Mr Goulburn. This time he got up, pale as ashes, but
soon fell back, not out of carelessness but weakness. His hands resting
upon the table shook it with their trembling. He dropped back again into
his chair, his under lip falling, his face like that of a dead man.

“He has been a sufferer, and he is very bitter. If he gets any suspicion
he will not be silenced. This is what Mr Ashton said. I don’t know what
it means, papa,” said Helen, with a quiver of her lip, “nor why any man
who comes here, any man! should make you run away as if you were a
criminal----”

“It is because I am a criminal, Helen.”

“Papa!”

“No, no,” he said, trying to smile, “not that. God knows I never meant
any harm; but I was led on from one thing to another, and nobody can
understand another man’s temptations. I went farther than I should have
done. Some people--that could not afford it--were brought into trouble
through me; that is all, Helen. I owe a great deal of money, as I told
you. This Sir John is one of the people. It is nothing but money, money.
If I had killed their fathers and mothers, they would not have felt it
half so much. It is money, as I tell you--nothing but money. And now I
must get up and go away from here. Ill, and getting old, and tired,
tired to death----”

He put down his head into his hands, which trembled; his whole stooping
figure shook. He was certainly thinner, weaker, and far older in
appearance than when they came to Latour. Helen sat beside him, looking
at him with a wretched half-sympathy. Perhaps, up to this moment, it had
been herself she had been thinking of most, herself who had done no
harm, who did not even know why it was that she was to be driven from
the new roof where she had found refuge. Now her mind turned, but with a
languid misery, to realise what her father was feeling. He was himself
the cause of his own sufferings. But did that make them easier to bear?

“Poor papa!” she said, involuntarily touching with her hand his
trembling arm. Yes, he was ill, and getting old, and how natural if he
were tired, tired to death! All Helen’s present trouble fell into a sort
of dull and aching pity for him, who was the cause of it. She sat for a
little while in dead silence; and then she said, “What are we to do?”

It was some time before he made her any reply; he was panting for
breath; there was a hectic colour on his cheeks like fever. “If you had
but stayed in the house!” he said. “What did you want with these people
at the _château_? They were strangers--and you should avoid strangers.
It will always be like this wherever we go. You will make friends, and
then you will wonder that it is so much harder to go away. What right
have we to make friends? we cannot get any good out of them. We who must
be like this, without any place to rest the sole of our feet, till
we”--he paused a moment--“till I die.”

A faint dolorous wonder had crossed the mind of Helen. She would not
leave him, nothing would make her leave him, lonely as he was. But that
momentary pause, and the substitution of I for we, touched his
daughter’s heart. She put her hand again softly on his arm.

“Papa, we could not go away by night, all this long, dreadful way--and
Janey. If we were to go early, early in the morning, would that not do?
It is not so cold now, and the diligence goes so early. That would be
best, not to attract any attention; or if we could leave her with Margot
till we got settled----”

“Leave--my child!--do you want me to leave my child?” he cried, as if
she had suggested something cruel--“till we get settled?” and he
laughed. “The only use of that would be to give them a clue to trace us
by. We could not live without news of her, and letters are destruction.
Do you think we could have been quiet here so long, so quiet, if there
had been letters coming after us? No; we must go altogether when we go.
But suppose that I were to keep out of the way,” he said in a half
entreating tone; “suppose that I kept my room; suppose--I don’t know
what is the matter with me--I have lost my courage. This man cannot stay
very long with the Vieux-bois, Helen. Don’t you think if I were to shut
myself up, to see no one? You could say I was ill----”

“He is going to marry Cécile; they will talk of us, they will describe
you, and there will be Mr Ashton, who knows us. It might be right--I
mean not very wrong, for me; but he, why should he tell lies for us?”
said Helen, mournfully.

Her father recovered himself as by a miracle. He sat up in his chair,
and his nervous trembling ceased. He even laughed. “I will manage
Charley Ashton,” he said.

Shortly after he was summoned to see Antoine, who had come with the
notary to receive the money which had been agreed upon as the price of
his services as Baptiste’s _remplaçant_. Mr Goulburn got up quite
revived and restored, and went to his own room, where the two men
awaited him. It was his bedroom, but also his sitting-room; the small
business he had occupied himself with, since his arrival in Latour,
having been all performed there. In a large old bureau, which stood
between the window and the fireplace, were all his papers, his writing
materials, the few books he had picked up. In a drawer of this bureau he
kept his money. Probably there were none of the secondary vexations of
his ruined life which affected him so much as the necessity of keeping
his money in a drawer, and counting it out to every claimant; but the
sums that were necessary for their living were so small that as yet he
had not been much disturbed by it. This was the first occasion on which
he had taken any serious sum from the stores with which he had provided
himself. The notary sat at the table. Antoine, striding across a chair,
placed himself in front of the window, between his companion and Mr
Goulburn. He watched every movement of the Englishman, who took no heed
of his dark looks. “This is one of the worst of your French customs,” he
said pettishly. “In England I should have given him a cheque on my
bankers without any trouble.” It was not in English flesh and blood not
to say this, though, even as he said it, Mr Goulburn remembered, with a
bitter pang, what so often he managed to forget, that no English banker
would honour a cheque of his, or pay any regard save that of hostile
curiosity to his dishonoured name.

“Monsieur, it will be long before a peasant will trust to your cheques;
it is not always even that they care for bank-notes. Gold, hard gold,
that is what they like best; but Antoine has education, and is very well
content with the bank-notes.”

“Perfectly content,” said Antoine. He had his eyes fixed upon the
movements of _l’Anglais_. Mr Goulburn took out one thing after another
from the drawer. First, the morocco letter-case which he had sent Helen
to fetch on the night of the flight from Fareham, then a pocketbook
bursting with papers; then, finally, the thing he was looking for, his
chequebook, which he took out with a sigh.

“In England I should fill up one of these forms, and all would be done,”
he said, showing it.

Antoine bent curiously forward to look. “Is it money?” he said, with
some eagerness, yet suspicion; a book of bank-notes! It seemed not at
all unnatural to Antoine that an Englishman should travel with such an
article at hand.

“Not till monsieur puts his signature,” said the smiling notary. “Look!
it is a _livre à souches_. Here is the counterfoil on which monsieur
marks the cipher. It is very ingenious; but in the country in France
there is nothing we trust in like _des bons gros sous_. We like to hear
the money tinkle, _n’est-ce pas_, Antoine? Not that I say anything
against a bank-note, and an English bank-note, monsieur; that is well
known to be unimpeachable all over the world.”

“Do not be afraid,” said Mr Goulburn, putting back the cheque-book and
the morocco case, and opening the pocket-book--“these are notes of the
Bank of France.” Antoine looked at it, devouring it from under his heavy
eyebrows. What countless sums might there not be in that drawer! First,
the leather case, no doubt full of _valeurs_ of one kind or another;
then the book of English money, half as thick as a _paroissien_; then
the bursting pocket-book full of French notes. There is no end to the
wealth of those other English; and to think that all should lie almost
within reach of a man’s hand, in a drawer against Père Goudron’s outer
wall!

Mr Goulburn took out the notes one by one, three notes for five hundred
francs each--a fortune! but nothing to the riches that remained. He took
them out from a sheaf of others carelessly, closing the pocket-book
again and laying it down quite at his ease, not at all excited by the
possession of so much money, almost within reach of the dangerous eyes
that were watching him.

“Here is your money, my _brave homme_,” he said. “M. le Notaire tells me
all the formalities have been gone through. Do not put it away in a
drawer, as I have to do, but invest it, Antoine, invest it; put it
somewhere where it will bring you in good interest. That is what we call
a very pretty little nest-egg in England. If you manage it well, if you
take care of it, there is no telling to what it may grow.”

“Monsieur gives you very excellent advice,” said the notary. “I hope you
will take it, Antoine. There are a few little things against you, as
indeed there are against most young men, but I hope you will clear them
all off, and come back to the village when your service is done with
your _livret_ in the best possible order. You have helped to give peace
and comfort to one house, and that should be a pleasant thing to think
of.”

Antoine received all these good wishes and good counsels with an air of
preoccupation. Fifteen hundred francs! it was a fortune. Still, what it
was was nothing to what was in the pocket-book which lay so carelessly
on the bureau. A thirst, a hunger got into his mind. Was it his fault?
was it not rather that of the Englishman with his careless ways? Never,
never, in all his life, had he seen what he believed to be so much money
before. Instinctively his eyes glanced round under cover of his dark
brows. There was the window on one side, a window which gave upon the
street, within reach of a man of Antoine’s height; and on the other the
door. The bed was at the other side of the room. A clever person might
get through a great deal of work without even awaking the sleeper,
without doing any more harm.

Helen went out to the door an hour or two later, when her father--who
complained of fatigue and agitation, and was querulous and peevish with
her, as if the visit of the English strangers was her fault--had gone to
bed. It was still not very late. Everything was in full activity at the
Lion d’Or, and the sound of the voices, and now and then a scrap of
song, still sounded into the quiet air of the night, softened by the
distance and by the milder atmosphere, humid and soft, which had
succeeded the long frosts. It made the girl’s heart beat to see some one
standing waiting for her in the shadow of the house. The moon was
shining behind, and all in front of Père Goudron’s was in the blackest
shadow. Helen had never had a lover. It was not of that she thought now,
as she opened the door cautiously; but yet there was something in this
meeting which made her heart beat strangely. Young Ashton came close to
the door.

“I have told them I always walk at night; they think everything possible
to the eccentricity of an Englishman,” he said with a half smile, “so
that I am at your disposal whatever you may be going to do.”

“We are to do nothing,” she said. “He will keep his room; he will say he
is ill. Indeed he is not well, Mr Ashton; something is the matter with
him, I cannot tell what. He is nervous, he is not himself; he says he
has no courage to go away. Perhaps you will not stay long at the
_château_?”

“You wish us to be gone?” he said, with a tone of vexation.

“Can I help it?” said Helen. “Do you think I shall have a moment’s rest
till you are gone?--or after?” she added mournfully; “for how can I tell
who may come next?--some one not so kind as you.”

“That is what I think,” he said anxiously; “you will never feel safe. If
it were I that was the danger, whatever it might cost me, I would go;
but it is not I. It is John, and he has come to see his future wife. One
cannot expect him to go, do you think? I am not in his case.”

He said this with much marked meaning, and looked at Helen so closely,
that she could not but remark it, and wonder, with a nervous tremour,
what did he mean?

“Miss Goulburn,” he said, “this is not the time to talk of such things,
is it? I am going back to India soon; and I want to marry. I know it
sounds brutal what I am saying. If you will marry me, it would be one
way of settling all this. We could see him placed comfortably somewhere
out of the way, in Spain perhaps, and you would not need to go home to
be troubled by what is said. It is wicked that you should be dragged
about, you so innocent as you are, flying from one place to another. I
cannot bear to think of it. Even your name---- Will you take mine,
Helen? If you would do it, I cannot tell you how happy it would make
me. I never had any hope; but this has always been in my mind since that
school-feast when you were only a little girl.”

Helen did not remember anything about the school-feast. She was
perplexed by this reference to it which clouded over the sharp
distinctness of the proposal which preceded it. And when he paused she
could not speak, she was struck dumb, half by the sudden business-like
character of the proposal, and half by the wonder of it. She had never
thought (had she? she was not so sure after the first moment) of
anything of the sort. She stood bewildered, and gazed blankly at him in
the blackness of the night.

“I have been too hasty, and frightened you. I knew I should; but how can
I help it? There is no time to lose. Tell me only one thing: you are not
going to marry any one else?”

“Oh no, no,” said Helen; then she added simply, “No one has ever asked
me before.”

He came a little closer and took her hand. “I thought you must have seen
at Sainte-Barbe,” he said. “I was half out of my mind with joy to see
you, and next day miserable when I found you had gone. Helen, if you
think you could like me, there will be plenty, plenty of love on my
side. And think what a motive I should have to take care of your father.
We could settle him somewhere--you and I together--where he would be
safe, quite safe. And after a while they will give up thinking about
him. It would be for his advantage,” said the young man earnestly. “Give
me a little hope, and I will keep John off--he shall never suspect. No,”
cried Charley, vehemently, “I will not make any condition. I will keep
John off, anyhow; you may calculate upon me. I will be your watchman to
keep danger away, whether you give me hope or not.”

“Mr Ashton,” said Helen, “you are very, very kind. How can I give you
what I have not got? Hope! I have not any. Before you came I felt as if
I must give up, and let things happen as they would.”

“But you don’t feel that now?” he said eagerly; “you think it is worth
while to try again, to fight your best, however hard it may be, not to
give in? That is what you feel now?”

“Yes; it is you that have given me hope; not that I can give it you.”

“Don’t you see it is the same thing?” he cried. “It is because we are
two of us--not one poor individual standing alone, but two to do
everything together: that makes all the difference in the world.”

Helen did not speak, but she felt it, she could not tell why. Yes, there
was a difference. The burden was lighter; there was a change in the air;
the road did not seem to lead away entirely into the darkness as it had
done an hour before. Two of them!--was that the reason of the change?

“Helen! that would be all, almost all, I wanted--if you feel so too.”

She did not make any direct reply; but she said, “I could not go to
India, and leave him. It would not be possible to leave him. If he were
well, if he were safe--but how could I leave him now?”

“He would wish it,” said young Ashton very decidedly, “if he knew. He is
not a bad man, Helen.” (He paused here, and made a little mental
reservation with natural severity.) “He does not want to make you
wretched, dragging you after him. He would wish it if he knew.”

There was another pause, and then Helen abandoned this subject
altogether, and said, with a little quiver in her voice which--was it
possible?--sounded half like laughter, “You were--perhaps: they thought
it possible--to have been the _futur_ of Thérèse?”

“Folly!” he cried. “John thought it would answer; as if any Englishman
would make such a bargain: the woods to look after, and a very pretty
young lady! What would he have said, I wonder, if he had been brought in
cold blood to Cécile? But he did not know my heart was full of some one
else; that is his only excuse.”

At this moment a bell tinkled inside, and Helen started; he was standing
very near to her now, close up in the shadow of the doorway, two that
looked like one. And she did not make any objection. But now she
disengaged herself softly.

“It is papa who wants me,” she said.

“Then it is a bargain, dear. I will be on the watch; I will keep off
John. I will come and see what you think to-morrow night.”

“Good night,” she whispered. It sounded like an echo of the last word he
had said.

Mr Goulburn had raised himself half out of his bed, his eyes were
feverish and shining. “Who was that?” he said. “You were talking to some
one at the door.”

Helen stood with a candle in her hand, which threw a vivid light upon
her face, bringing out its soft brilliancy of tint, the blush that hung
over it like a faint rose-shadow, the dewy dazzlement of agitation in
the eyes amid the surrounding darkness. She said very softly, with a
little catch of her breath, “It was Mr Ashton, papa.”

Mr Goulburn lay back upon his pillows with a relieved face; he laughed.
“That is all right,” he said--“now I shall sleep in peace. I have two
guardians instead of one.”

“Papa thinks so _too_,” Helen said to herself, as she went into the room
where Janey was sleeping. It had all been very sudden, and she did not
understand it; but there was a wonderful difference. “It is because
there are two of us--not one standing alone.” Were there ever words that
meant so much? And papa thought so _too_.




CHAPTER XIV.


“Harford? No, I don’t know anybody of the name,” Sir John had said; but
while Charley was out after dinner, exercising that inalienable
privilege of an Englishman to do absurd things, which everybody
recognises in France, he heard a great deal about the English family in
the village, which made him think. Helen was said to have spoken of
Fareham, which Sir John knew very well; and Ashton had recognised this
mysterious English girl, whose presence here was so unaccountable. And
there was a father in bad health--and a child. What could such people
want at Latour? “You shall see her at dinner,” Cécile said; but she did
not come to dinner, and Sir John, who had frowned at the prospect of a
dinner-party, as he chose to call it, on the first night of his arrival,
frowned still more when Helen’s apologies were made, with great
earnestness and regrets far more eloquent than anything Helen would have
thought of expressing, by the wife of the Précepteur. If she was to
come, why didn’t she come? What was the meaning of it? Could it be some
entanglement of Charley’s? his cousin thought.

“Had they anything to do with Fareham?” he asked late that night, when
Charley had come in, glowing and radiant, from his night walk. “I don’t
understand about these English people in the village. Where did you meet
them? who are they? I don’t want any equivocal people here, in Cécile’s
very village. What could they have to do with Fareham? I never heard
the name there.”

“I met them somewhere in the parish,” said Charley, evasively. “I forget
exactly in which house. You don’t know all the people in Fareham parish.
I believe it was at a school-feast----”

Of how much service that school-feast had been! Sir John was more
satisfied, but uncertain still.

“The father is ill,” he said.

“So the Comtesse said,” said Charley, with caution. He was too much on
his guard to commit himself.

“A strange place for a sick man--not a doctor, except the parish doctor,
within thirty miles. What, in the name of wonder, could have brought
them to Latour?”

“I suppose,” said Charley, “it is a very cheap place.”

“Cheap? There is something in that,” said Sir John. Then he paused, and
fixing his eyes upon his cousin, “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I
shouldn’t wonder a bit if it was another victim of that scoundrel
Goulburn,--some poor wretch who has lost every penny, who has dragged
himself here, to die perhaps. Don’t you think it would be civil to go
and see him, as he is ill? They take no end of interest in him here.”

“There is no hurry about it,” said Charley in dismay; but Sir John was
very persistent. He spoke of it again next morning, and the proposal was
received with enthusiasm by the ladies.

“We will go together,” Cécile said, who indeed could not contain her
impatience till her friend had seen and given an opinion upon her lover.
Sir John was a fine, big, imposing Englishman, a pattern of all that a
Sir John ought to be--somewhat easily put out in temper, and therefore
affording all the excitement of dramatic uncertainty to the vivacious
Frenchwoman, who had never as yet found the uncertainty more than
piquant. She liked him the better that he was not always on the watch to
pay her little attentions like the men she was accustomed to, and prized
his approbation all the more that it was so doubtful, and that it took
so much trouble to secure it. Cécile was very anxious to exhibit her
large, important lover to Helen; and she was also eager to secure
Helen’s admiration and approval, of which she felt no doubt. That he was
not as the other frivolous young _fiancés_, or even as this cousin,
Cécile felt proudly confident. Sir John, it may be added, was a man of
thirty-five, _rangé_, serious, a public man, a personage. In all these
points of view Cécile’s young bosom swelled with pride in him. As has
been already insisted upon, virtue, seriousness, and duty are, amongst
at least one important portion of the upper classes, of the very highest
fashion in France.

Charley did all he could to change their purpose. He said, with a little
hesitation, that he had seen Miss Harford, that he had stopped to ask
for her father during his walk, and that the invalid meant to keep his
bed for a day or two. This, however, had no effect upon the party, which
set out very cheerfully in the noonday sunshine, after the second
breakfast, to show the village, and to see the English friends who had
become so important in the life of Cécile and Thérèse. It would be vain
to attempt to tell, since the arrangement, as the reader is aware, never
came to anything, with what swift and silent observation the Comtesse
and her daughters had scrutinised and decided upon Charley. At the first
glance he had succeeded in “pleasing” Thérèse, who knew very well that
it was her mother’s purpose to marry her, according to the simple
formula of her nation, and who at first believed M. Charles to have come
to the _château_ with the same ideas. In this point of view all the
ladies found him quite _convenable_, but--The Comtesse herself
questioned Sir John very closely when his cousin went out after dinner
for that walk which quite chimed in with her ideas of the English
character.

“M. Charles is aware of the situation, of course?” Madame la Comtesse
said. “It is well that there should not be any mistake on this point. He
knows my intention in respect to Thérèse, and the dispositions of the
will, &c.? So far as appearances go, I find him very suitable, and that
he will be pleasing to Thérèse is probable. There is nothing against
the arrangement. But we must know how it appears to him on his side.
There must be no step taken by us which does not meet a response. M.
Charles on his part, has he expressed his sentiments? Does he find my
daughter pleasing to him on his side? It is necessary to be more
explicit on the part of the gentleman: has he given you to
understand----”

“Oh dear no!” cried Sir John, alarmed. He had sounded Charley, but had
not got a promising response, and now thought it wisest to ignore the
plan altogether. “Oh, certainly not. I have not said a word to him, my
dear Comtesse. Fancy bringing an Englishman here with the idea that he
was on sight! Oh dear no! I brought him on the chance that they might
fancy each other, the most likely thing in the world--a pretty girl like
Thérèse, and a nice young fellow. It was the most natural thing that
they should fall in love with each other.”

“Ah, fall in lofe! that was not my idea,” said Madame de Vieux-bois--Sir
John spoke his native language, in which she was not an expert. And
after this conversation the Comtesse put her daughters on their guard.
“Mes enfans,” she said privately, “we will postpone the question. Ce
Monsieur Charles ne me plaît pas. There is something about him---- And I
find, besides, that it is too soon to think of marrying Thérèse: she is
but seventeen. It will be enough to lose thee, _ma_ Cécile--enough for
one year.”

Madame la Comtesse was far too careful a mother to permit her child’s
thoughts to dwell upon any one who might be found unresponsive. The
girls understood more or less, and they declared their mamma to have
reason, as indeed she had in the fullest sense of the word. This,
however, subdued Thérèse a little; not that she felt disappointed in
respect to Charley Ashton, but that she no longer felt herself in the
important position of being about to make the great decision of her
life. She could not take Helen aside, as she had intended to do, with
pretty airs of gravity, and ask her advice with solemn meaning. “Est-ce
qu’il te plaît?” she had intended to say, curving her young brows with
all the seriousness that became so momentous a question. She felt that
she was coming down from an anticipated elevation, when she had no such
important decision to make. And Cécile, too, was disappointed. The
crisis was _manqué_. It failed in the double seriousness, the weighty
character she had intended it to have. If they were but a little more
reasonable, these Englishmen--a little more amenable to rule! All the
time, however, Cécile piqued herself very much upon the delightful fact
that her John and she had come together by no arrangement, but had for
their part proceeded on strictly English principles, and fallen in love.

It would be difficult to describe the embarrassment of Helen, receiving
this party of visitors, meeting the friendly enthusiasm of her
companions with the knowledge of her own secret, which she could not
disclose to them, in her heart, and with the very much more dreadful
secret of which she was the guardian, pressing itself upon her,
confusing her mind and weighing heavily upon all her thoughts. She dared
not look at Charley at all. To have met him even alone after the
revelations of last night, after the strange incomprehensible change in
their position towards each other which it had brought about, would have
been confusing beyond measure. But when, added to all this, there was
the terrible figure of Sir John inspecting her with British suspicion,
asking her in every look, Who are you? what business have you here? and
the consciousness of her father lurking in his room, whom the mistaking
of a door, a wrong turning, might betray,--it may be supposed that no
inexperienced girl, standing upon the threshold of her life among things
unrealised, could have had a more terrible half-hour than had Helen,
alone with this group, having to parry all their questions and meet all
their looks without breaking down utterly or running away. She had
thought it best to send Janey out to the garden, lest the child, who
would have been of so much assistance to her, might make some unwitting
disclosure. And there she stood alone, clasping her little delicate
hands together, to meet them all, to conceal what was in her--alas! to
deceive them. The tears were trembling very near poor Helen’s eyes, her
voice wavered now and then as if it would break altogether, her little
figure swayed; but yet she stood firm, though she could not tell how she
did it. The girls put down her trouble naturally to her father’s
illness. They kissed her and whispered sympathy into her ears. “Du
courage!” they said, with tears of tender pity and fellow-feeling. “If
mamma could but come herself!” But they had no doubt that mamma could
send something that would be of use. “It is the emotion of yesterday,”
they concluded, with all the ease of spectators. And then Sir John had
to be told the incident of yesterday and the goodness of monsieur. This
was a blessed relief to Helen, whom he had begun to interrogate about
Fareham and all she knew about it.

“I suppose you did not know the last people that lived there? One of
those great _nouveaux riches_, those men that live like princes on other
people’s money. He turned out to be a swindl----”

“Helen,” whispered Cécile, drawing her apart before the sentence was
completed, “Est-ce qu’il te plaît? I want you to give me your most
honest opinion. Je veux qu’il te plaît! Tell me exactly, exactly what
you think--for you must like him,” said Sir John’s bride, with a pretty
flush of impetuous eagerness. Thérèse, who had believed that she too
would have had the same question to put, had surprised certain turns of
the head--certain looks which Charley addressed to her friend--and she
was curious beyond measure, and bursting with a thousand questions. When
the visit was over poor Helen watched them go away, waving her hand to
them from the door, keeping up her smile to the last moment. She did
not lose the last suspicious glance of Sir John, who looked
(accidentally) at her father’s window with all the force of an inquiry,
but she scarcely got the comfort of Ashton’s anxious, tender look of
sympathy which told all his story to Thérèse. She was at the end of her
strength, but nevertheless, she had to rouse herself to go to her
father, who wanted to know every particular of the interview.

“I heard Harvey’s voice,” Mr Goulburn said. “There was always something
objectionable in his voice. Big Philistine! Cécile de Vieux-bois is a
great deal too good for him. He has dined with me dozens of times, but I
think it was always in town, and at my club. He could not have any
suspicion. Did he seem to you to have any suspicion, Helen?”

“He had a great deal of suspicion, papa, but I don’t think he knew what
he suspected. He can’t understand what we are doing here. Provided,”
said Helen, with a little French idiom of which she was unconscious,
“provided he does not come another time and take us unawares.”

“He shall not take me unawares, you may trust to me, Helen; I shall not
budge till the big brute is gone.”

Her father spoke in a reassuring tone, as if promising for her sake to
abjure all imprudence. Their positions seemed to have changed, she could
not tell how. She was no longer the wistful follower in a flight, the
motive of which she was ignorant of. One would have thought rather that
it was some indiscretion of hers that had brought this danger upon him,
some rashness which he was too generous to reproach her with. “I will do
my best for you, you may trust to me,” was what he seemed to be saying;
and this brought the confusion in her mind to a climax. She went about
all the long day after like one in a dream.

“It cannot be for cheapness these people have come here,” said Sir John
to Charley. “You heard that story about the substitute? That does not
look like poverty. Besides, I don’t believe the man is ill. The girl
didn’t look as if it were true. He is keeping out of our way. Depend
upon it there is something shady about him. I think I’ve seen the girl
before.”

“Very likely; she is very young, but she has been out a little,” said
Charley hurriedly, anxious to avoid any following out of the subject.
“One meets everybody one time or another. Even I, who have spent my time
in anything but balls----”

“Yes; by the way, how is it you seem to know the girl so well?” said Sir
John.

“I wish, if it’s all the same to you,” cried Charley, out of patience,
“that you’d speak a little more civilly. I don’t see why you should call
a young lady whom you know nothing of, ‘the girl,’ in that contemptuous
way. Yes; it does matter to me. I don’t know that I ever met any one in
my life that I admired so much.”

“Whew!” Sir John gave a prolonged whistle of amazement; “why, she’s not
fit to hold the candle to Thérèse,” he said; then added drily, “the more
reason why I should find out all about them. I am a great deal older
than you are, and I don’t mean you to make a fool of yourself if I can
help it, Charley.”

“I think you had better mind your own business,” the other said, in high
revolt.

And thus Sir John acquired a double motive. He questioned Cécile at
great length, and even took her to task for giving her confidence so
easily. “If it should turn out, as is most likely to be the case, a
person entirely unworthy of your friendship!” he said.

The _château_ was all in agitation over this subject, the girls
indignantly protesting, the mother disposed to take alarm. Decidedly the
possession of a serious, _rangé_, important English lover of thirty-five
brings its penalties with it; but perhaps, indeed, a lover of any age,
however free and easy in his own relationships, would have been equally
anxious to guard the lady endowed with his valuable affections from any
connection with inappropriate acquaintances. For the moment, however,
his zeal did not increase the comfort of the house.

The day was feverish and long--how long and feverish and full of alarm
and apprehension perhaps only Helen knew. She sat at watch at her window
all the day, trembling whenever she saw any one approach from the
direction of the _château_. In the afternoon Charley came in and
consoled her, but rather with a repetition of that sentiment about two
being better than one, than with any more immediately satisfactory
information. Helen thought the day would never come to an end; and there
seemed no comfort in the fact that sooner or later it must come to an
end, for what was there to hope but that to-morrow would be like it?
After dinner, when the village was all still, her father looked
cautiously into the sitting-room. “I must get a breath of air,” he said,
half apologetically, half reproachfully. It was as if this imprisonment
to his room was Helen’s fault.

“Papa, I don’t think I can bear it another day. Let us go away, let us
go away!” she cried.

“I thought it was you who objected to going away,” he said peevishly.

Helen sat down again before her little lamp at the table. This time she
had some darning to do. She sat and listened for every step, for every
breath. Oh, to go away, to go away! she said to herself. To go where?
She could not tell. Was there safety anywhere? Was there any spot on
earth where this sickening, shameful danger, this concealment would not
come again? Was it not out of the world, away from life and its torments
altogether, where alone they could be safe? After a while Mr Goulburn
came back. He was nervous too, and shaken by the alarm that seemed in
the air.

“I don’t seem happy in the village to-night,” he said, “though it is all
as quiet as usual. I think that big bully must use up all the air for
his own breathing, I can’t get any.” He opened the _persiennes_ as he
spoke, then drew them close again. “I think I shall go into the garden,
Helen. I must get breath somewhere. I have shut the front door. Go to
bed. I shall go and sit in the summer-house to get my breath.”

“Will you take some of the Comtesse’s drops, papa? She said they were so
good.”

“Ether,” he said--“simple ether; it smells too strong. What do I want
with your old wife’s medicines? No; I’ll go and sit out in the garden
and get my breath. Poor child, you are tired, and it is no wonder. But
all is safe now for the night, Helen; go to bed.”

All was safe for the night. The dreadful day was over with all its
terrors--everything was still. The village had gone to sleep all the
earlier that it had been so late on the night before. Helen felt too
much alarmed to open the door again to look out for Charley Ashton. She
took her father’s advice passively, and went to her room, where Janey
was sleeping peacefully. Something, she could not tell what, kept her
from undressing. She lay down upon her bed to wait till her father
should come in from the garden. He might want something before he went
finally to rest. But Helen was worn out with the long trial of the day,
and lying across her bed fully dressed, she dropped to sleep.

All was safe for the night--so some one else thought who was standing
under the shadow of Père Goudron’s wall. The moon was veiled and dim,
but yet was shining and casting a shadow more dark than the ordinary
darkness of the night. It was not possible to see what it was at the
corner under the window, but something moved; it was as if a part of the
darkness detached itself slowly from the rest; where all was black, a
something blacker than the air, yet separate from the wall, rising
upward. It moved noiselessly across the front of the house. All was
quiet, so still that a breath might have been heard, but nothing was
audible. A faint glimmer showed where Mr Goulburn in his impatience had
opened the _persiennes_. He had drawn them close again, but he had not
fastened them. He had a contempt for bolts and bars in this quiet place.
They were open, and the window was open, showing a little glimmer of
light. But in the darkness even that far-away glimmer showed. The moving
thing below put up a hand and cautiously, softly opened the unfastened
_persiennes_, then climbed up noiselessly, a long, dark,
undistinguishable figure, into the room, drawing the shutters close
behind. Was all safe? There was a pause, and the empty room became full
of a living presence, a breath, a danger. Beyond the folding-doors,
which were closed, Helen slept profoundly the sleep of utter weariness.
Across the passage the faint little ray of the _veilleuse_ shone
steadily through the half-opened door. The question was--Did any one lie
there, sleeping or waking? The intruder took what was, in the
circumstances, a long time to consider. Then he advanced silently. To
himself it seemed that the whole house creaked and shivered under his
feet, but Helen, fast asleep, heard nothing; and if out in the garden a
vague sound reached her father’s ears, he imagined it was only Helen
moving about her bedroom, where her light was still burning. That
watching light seemed to make all safe, and the little _veilleuse_, on
the other hand, guarded the empty chamber. The thief trembled before it.
He paused and wiped his forehead, not daring to confront it. But he had
gone too far now not to go on. The man’s heart, which was beating
wildly with excitement, gave a great jump when, peeping in, he saw the
room vacant, the bed unoccupied. He went in and closed the door.

All were sleeping quietly in the house, except Père Goudron, who lay
quiet enough, but not asleep, thinking of the folly of _l’Anglais_, who
had given away so much money for the sake of a young man who was nothing
to him, and wondering in what way he could manage to secure some of
those same superabundant riches for himself. He could not himself
violently have robbed _l’Anglais_, or any one else. But he, too, had
seen the book with the French notes, and he longed for a share of them.
He was turning over in his mind what fable he could invent, what tale of
poverty he could tell, to beguile some more of those notes out of the
rich man’s pocket. He heard the creak, the startling sound of movement,
but thought nothing of it. His lodgers did not keep the regular hours he
did; they were like all the English, early one night, late another,
never to be relied upon. But he lay still and pondered, intent upon
inventing some story by which he, too, might get a share of the spoil.

Mr Goulburn, for his part, sat on the bench in the garden, and tried, as
he had said, to get his breath. It had never been so bad before. His
heart laboured, thumping like a steam-engine, creaking and struggling as
if the machinery was all rusty and out of gear. What was the meaning of
it? There had never been anything the matter with his heart till that
old witch at the _château_ decided that he had heart disease. She was
not an old witch; but that is how men of middle age describe their
female contemporaries who have displeased them. The moon was high in the
sky, but veiled and watery, giving a sort of milky whiteness to the
atmosphere rather than light. Under this faint pale glimmer he sat with
a small acacia waving its long leaflets over him. It must be a sultry
night--certainly there was no air to breathe; he could not get any.
Harvey with his big English lungs must have exhausted it, he thought,
with a faint joke in his mind in the midst of his bodily distress. No
air to breathe. He bethought himself by-and-by of the Comtesse’s drops,
which, after all, might do some good. At first he thought he would call
Helen to get them for him. Then a pitying recollection of her wan face
crossed his mind. He would not disturb her, poor child; he would go
himself. He rose and came in slowly, his labouring heart sounding in
the stillness, his very limbs feeble with its excited action.

A moment more and the quiet of the sleeping house was broken by a
hideous commotion. There was a sound of a door pushed open, a loud
exclamation, a momentary conflict of voices, the door dashed back
against the wall. Then a wild, long cry, a dull thud upon the floor. By
that time Père Goudron had got out of his bed, and was calling upon
Blanchette and Ursule, and scrambling for a light, and Helen waking in
wild terror out of her sleep, had sprung up and seized her candle. She
was so transported with anxiety and terror that the voices that followed
conveyed no information to her ear; but M. Goudron heard the
_persiennes_ dashed open, and a muffled leap into the street. Next
moment Helen’s cries resounded through the house and rang out into the
night.

“Papa, papa, speak to me!” she cried; “speak to me, papa!”

Madame Dupré, who had just fastened up her last shutter, heard it, and
rushed to the door--then ran back again and dragged Baptiste out of bed
in his first sleep.

“_L’Anglais!_--something has happened to _l’Anglais_,” she said.

And then by degrees one house after another woke, and eager heads peered
forth at the doors and windows. Baptiste, rushing across the road half
dressed, with Auguste at his heels, was called to from one side and
another in a dozen startled voices.

“What is it? What has happened?” they all asked breathless. He answered
only by repeating what his mother had told him.

“_L’Anglais_--something has happened to _l’Anglais_,” Baptiste said.

Two men were coming down the road from the _château_. It was not much
more than ten o’clock, and Sir John had come out with Charley, much
against the will of the latter, to smoke his cigar.

“I’ll take a turn with you,” the baronet had said. “It’s muggy to-night,
with all those trees about. If you had hit it off with Thérèse, Charley,
I’d have advised you to thin these woods. But it’s no use thinking about
that. What an odd piece of luck, however, that you should have found
this Miss--Miss----”

“Helen,” said Ashton, with a bitterness he could scarcely restrain.
Rather this familiarity than to speak of her by a false name.

“Miss--Helen--that’s it. Cécile never says the other name. You don’t say
you know the father, Charley? I’d advise you to find out what sort of
person he is, and all about him, before you go any farther, old man. It
is queer that, just at the other one’s door, so to speak, you should
have found this Miss--Helen.”

“I wish you would not speak of the other one, John. It is very
disrespectful to a very charming young lady. There has never been any
other one. You offend me when you talk so, by offending her. I have the
greatest reverence for the ladies here--both----”

“You need not be so particular. She would not be offended. She knows
very well that this marriage is _manqué_, and she is not inconsolable.
But, look here: you must not go a step further till you know all
particulars. I say, what is that? What an infernal row!” said Sir John.

The sound of the sudden cry affronting the silence, and even the fall
that followed, ringing out into the great quiet with all the intensity
of a sudden calamity, reached them both, though they were scarcely
within sight of Père Goudron’s house. They rushed on without another
word, Charley quickening his steps to a run, as they perceived where the
tumult was. By this time dark figures were coming out into the street
from the cottages near, and everything was in commotion. M. Goudron’s
door stood wide open; the _persiennes_ had been thrown open also, and
what seemed a flood of light poured out into the street. Charley rushed
in, and Sir John followed. In the midst of a group of eager spectators a
pale figure was lying on the bed. He had struck his forehead against
something as he fell, and a drop or two of blood slowly congealing upon
it showed the blow. His lips were open, hanging apart, dry and parched,
his eyes half closed, and showing a dull, inexpressive light. The two
Englishmen went forward, joining themselves to the group. The village
doctor, half dressed, stood holding a mirror to the dry lips. Old
Goudron, like a living skeleton, with a nervous quiver in his old bones,
held a candle, like Time or Death himself assisting at the deathbed. In
one corner Ursule was praying on her knees. Helen stood, pallid as the
dead face itself, supporting the pillows on which he was propped, at the
head of the bed.

Sir John was slow to take in the chief feature of the scene; he mastered
everything else before he perceived that: the doctor, with the little
mirror in his hand, upon which no stain of living breath was to be seen;
the old bony figure by the bed; the young daughter, silent and
distraught; then his eyes fixed themselves on the face of the man round
whom they had all collected. His sudden shout shook the room. He cried
out in astonishment, in consternation and horror. “My God! it is
Goulburn himself!” Sir John said.




CHAPTER XV.


Mr Goulburn was dead.

It was hard to tell how it had happened. There was the mark on his
forehead of a blow, but to all appearance it was a blow accidentally
inflicted as he fell, and not done by any hand, and it was not
sufficient to have been the cause of his death. That the state of his
heart sufficiently explained. But whether it was the sight of the thief
which had brought on the final paroxysm, or whether they had come into
actual conflict, or if the disease was so far advanced that any trifling
shock would have done it, it was more difficult to decide. All the
drawers of the bureau were found pulled out, and the one in which the
money had been kept was rifled. Even on this point, however, the _juge
de paix_ found it difficult to refrain from blaming the deceased for his
own loss. The keys had been left in the drawer--could anything be more
foolish? it was a premium upon robbery; the shutters unfastened, so that
any one could push them apart; the window open within that, the room
left vacant, protected only by the _veilleuse_, and the keys in the
drawers. It was the Englishman himself who had laid a trap for the
robber, who had invited him, actually invited him to come and help
himself; but he had fallen into the trap which he had laid. It was
difficult for the prudent Frenchman not to breathe a fervent “served him
right,” with such variety of expression as the exigencies of a more
elaborate language required; but no trace could be found of the thief
and possible murderer. He had evidently jumped from the window, leaving
the shutters open and the room fully displayed, but it was not till
after his escape that the village had been roused. Père Goudron had
heard the leap, but nothing more. In the investigation that followed,
suspicion was directed against Antoine, who had been seen by several
persons watching M. Goudron’s house; but it was conclusively proved that
Antoine had left that afternoon for the _chef-lieu_, where he had gone
to complete all the necessary arrangements for his acceptance as
Baptiste’s substitute. He had been escorted a league on his way by
several of his friends, so on that point there could be no mistake.

The affair of _l’Anglais_ made, as may be supposed, an enormous
sensation at Latour. Nothing like it, so far as was known, had ever
happened in the village. The _juge de paix sat, en permanence_, for a
number of days examining everybody. They even examined the other
Englishmen who were living at the _château_, and who declared themselves
acquainted with the victim. They were very sharply questioned indeed, so
that it occurred to Sir John that they were themselves suspected of the
deed, an idea which was the cause of endless discourses on his part, and
disquisitions upon the differences between English and French law, very
much, it need not be said, to the disadvantage of the latter. The
Comtesse for her part scoffed at the _instruction_ altogether. She would
hear nothing of a possible murder. The man, she said, had death in his
face; had she not said so, the first moment she saw him? She had seen
him but once, but she had been fully aware what was to be expected; so
fully that she had not even urged him to return home, which she would
have done had the case seemed to her less serious; for it was better
that he should die in Latour than that he should die in the railway, or
in an inn, where his daughters would have no one near them but absolute
strangers. Madame de Vieux-bois justified her own previsions on this
point by sending at once for Helen and little Janey, who, after their
father had been laid in the little burying-ground among all the little
crosses, with their blue and yellow decorations, came to the _château_
grateful, but half stupefied with all that had happened to them. Helen,
at least, was in this condition, for poor little Janey’s despair had
been brief, as was natural at her age. But the elder sister had gone
through a great many terrible experiences during those two or three
days. She had been examined at great length by the magistrate, not only
on the circumstances of the fatal night, but on all the antecedents of
her family, the reason of her father’s residence at Latour, why he had
left England, everything about him; and then she had undergone an
examination by Sir John, less solemn perhaps, but not less harassing.
Sir John was strongly opposed to the engagement, which Charley Ashton
instantly proclaimed. He declared it to be entirely out of the question,
and risked a quarrel not only with his cousin, but with his betrothed
and her family. Madame de Vieux-bois, indeed, did not hesitate to agree
with him that if the match was so extremely unsuitable as he said, it
would be well that it should be put a stop to; but she had herself no
responsibility in the matter, and her interest, she confessed, was much
more strong in Helen than in M. Charles, who, she was glad to think, _ne
la plaisait pas_ from his first appearance. But Cécile and also Thérèse
were very eager for Helen’s happiness, and very indignant that any
attempt should be made against it.

“What!” cried Cécile, beautiful in her generous wrath and wonder, “_les
Anglais!_ who believe in nothing but lofe, who blame so much all our
arrangements between parents, our ideas upon marriage! You who say there
is nothing but a _great passion_ which should bring two people together!
Look at the book of M. Taine of the Academy, he who is such an admirable
writer, who has so much observed England. That is what he says, and I
believe it, I! Lofe, that is the true bond, not a similarity of
circumstances, the _dot_ and the position, and how it will advance one’s
career. But you--you--an Englishman, so English! you,” she cried, with a
ring of disappointment in her voice,--“you, _mon D’John, mon fiancé à
moi!_ that you should try to separate them because my Helen, my poor
friend, is----

“Come, Cécile,” cried Sir John, “is---- that’s just it. It’s not that
she is poor. To be poor is bad enough, I don’t say that I approve of it;
but it is the bad connection, that is what I dislike. A bankrupt,
a--a--swin---- Well, I won’t call the dead man names. That is what I
object to. I don’t say a word against the girl; but, after all, Charley
is my cousin, and a young fellow with all his life before him, and, hang
it all! it is my duty to take care of him.”

“And Helen is my friend!” said Cécile. She was shaken in her idea of her
lover’s perfection, and she was shaken in her confidence in the English
nation, and the pre-eminence of “lofe” in all their affairs--which she
had hitherto devoutly believed in, and of which Charley Ashton’s
conduct had given her delightful assurance. As for Thérèse, she was
fully of Cécile’s opinion, but yet could not help feeling that if M.
Charles had behaved like a reasonable creature, and fulfilled the
expectations formed of him before his arrival, it would have been better
for himself. For herself, Thérèse was glad things had happened
otherwise; she was relieved that her mamma had given up all intention of
marrying her for that year. But so far as M. Charles was concerned, for
him it would have been a great deal better. With this reservation, which
on the whole quickened her zeal by mingling it with a grain of pity,
Thérèse threw herself generously and warmly into Helen’s cause.

When the _instruction_ was terminated, and all had been investigated
that could be investigated, there was a complete failure in every
attempt to trace the criminal. The French law, so suspicious and
peremptory, failed just as English criminal proceedings, so much more
halting and imperfect, so often fail. Antoine’s _alibi_ seemed complete.
There was no evidence to be found which connected him with the incidents
of the fatal night. Mr Goulburn’s English cheque-book was found indeed,
torn up and defaced, on the road by which he must have travelled to the
_chef-lieu_ of the department; but the culprit, whoever he had been,
would most likely have travelled by the same road. The only other thing
which that culprit had dropped was the morocco letter-case which Helen
had brought from her father’s room at Fareham on the night of their
flight. After all the examinations were over, this was restored to her.
She came in, carrying it in her hand, to the library where Sir John was
spending his morning. It was nearly three weeks after her father’s
death, and hostile though Sir John was, both to the dead father and the
living daughter, it was partly on their account that his visit had been
prolonged. He did not choose to leave them in possession of the field,
and he was anxious to save Charley, as he said to himself, from the
clutches of the girl, who, being Goulburn’s daughter, was no doubt an
adventuress too. A violent controversy on this subject had, indeed, been
going on between the two men, when Helen softly opened the door and went
in upon them. Sir John was seated at a writing-table with a flushed and
angry countenance, while Charley, not less excited, paced about the
library. It was a large, long room on the upper floor, with a row of
long windows looking out upon the woods and the park. The two men, whose
angry voices she had heard without paying much attention to them as she
approached, suddenly stopped with embarrassed faces as she made her
appearance at the door. Sir John, with an air half of anger, half of
surprise, pushed back his chair from the table and looked at her, while
Charley hurried to her side and took her hand to lead her forward.

“Did you want me, Helen?” he said, in a tone doubly tender, drawing her
hand within his arm. At this little exhibition Sir John uttered an angry
“humph!”

“I came to bring you this,” said Helen. “I do not know what it is best
to do with it. We brought it out of Fareham with us. Papa always said it
was Janey’s fortune. But if it is true, as you say, that he owes people
money--yes, I know it is true; he told me so himself--this ought,
perhaps, to be taken to pay some of them. As for Janey, she is very
little, she does not want much now, and I have a hundred a-year--that
will be enough for her and me.’

“Let me see it,” said Sir John, with some eagerness.

Nobody had been allowed to see the papers so long as they remained in
the magistrate’s hands. He opened them out with a great deal of
interest, shaking one after another out of the case. As he looked at
them, opening each in succession, gleams of excitement passed over his
face. He made hurried calculations under his breath; there were coupons,
vouchers of money invested, many things quite unintelligible to Helen.
Sir John’s fingers trembled with eagerness as he turned them over; there
were various kinds of excitement and pleasure combined in his
survey--pleasure in so much money recovered, for himself as well as his
fellow-sufferers, fierce satisfaction in finding the culprit as bad as
he hoped, the delight of being able to think and say “I told you so,”
all intensifying the pleasure of a new incident after long suspense. The
two others looked on with very different feelings. Helen was not alive
to the meaning of it all. She stood by even with a kind of consolation
and gentle content in the thought that whatever wrong her father might
have done would now be partially made up. She did not look at the face
with which her lover regarded these discoveries, the disgust and pain
and shame on his countenance conveyed no idea to her inexperience. She
did not like Sir John, but she thought his exclamations, his looks of
cruel elation, were only his disagreeable way of showing pleasure in the
recovery of the money. She stood looking on for some time quite calmly.
And then she said, “Will you divide it among the poorest people, please?
He would have liked that best.”

Sir John broke out with a fierce laugh. “No,” he said rudely, “I cannot
do sentimental injustice, Miss Helen. Your father had made a pretty
provision for you, I must say; you ought to be obliged to his
providence. But for this lucky chance, whoever suffered, he had very
well feathered his nest.”

“Harvey!” cried Ashton, vehemently, “how can you speak before _her_ of a
lucky chance?”

Sir John pushed back his chair farther from the table and looked at
them. “I call it so,” he said, “in every point of view. It is the best
thing that could have happened for the man himself, and it is the
highest luck for the children, and for you, if you insist like a fool in
connecting yourself with such a----”

“Silence!” thundered Charley, making a step forward--“not another word!”

“I know nothing to prevent me saying as many words as I please,” said
Sir John, eyeing him with exasperating coolness.

Helen stood between the two excited men in the quiet of her innocence,
not understanding for the first moment what their angry voices meant.
Then her pale and almost passive face became transformed; slowly,
gradually, the light rose in it, kindling her eyes, quickening the
colour on her cheeks. She turned from one to the other, listening,
entering into the meaning. At last she detached herself entirely from
her lover, drawing her hand from his arm, and stood alone, with a kind
of proud humility. She stopped till Sir John had made that last remark.
His tone, the very sound of his voice filled her with wonder and dismay.
She knew no reason for this hostility.

“My father is dead,” she said with simple dignity; “if he has done wrong
he is in God’s hands; and we are two girls, fatherless and motherless.
Is it with us you are angry, Sir John? It must be with me, for Janey is
a child. What is it that I have done? If it is anything that I can put
right, and you will tell me, I will do it. Why is it you look and speak
to me so?”

Sir John was taken entirely aback. He looked at her and faltered. She
put Charley away with her hand, with a smile and quivering lip. She
would stand alone while he spoke to her.

“No,” she said, “not you; do not come near me. Let him tell me what I
have done wrong.”

Sir John Harvey was a man of experience. He knew how to conduct himself
in most emergencies. He was not apt to be put out. But when he found
himself confronted by this young, solitary, friendless creature, who
had but one person to stand by her in all the world, and he the one whom
her powerful, prosperous enemy was endeavouring to detach from her, the
courage and the strength were taken out of him. Sir John, so big and
strong and well-to-do, faltered before the small, weak, desolate girl.
He could not meet her eyes; his voice and countenance failed him.

“I--I have nothing to say to you, Miss Goulburn,” he said. “I did not
approve of your father; he has made a great deal of mischief, and ruined
many people; but he is dead, as you say. I don’t pretend to judge him.
The only thing is,” he added, getting courage as he went on, “the only
thing is--what you must see yourself--that a connection with you cannot
do any man any good; that it must, in short, more or less, do harm.
Your giving up this,” he continued quickly, careless of Charley’s loud
interruption, “is very creditable to you. It will make everybody think
better of you. Still, notwithstanding----”

“Helen, if you listen to that man, if you stand any longer and hear me
insulted, I will think--I will believe you care for me no longer,”
Charley Ashton cried.

She looked from one to the other with tears in her eyes. “I have nobody
in the world to tell me which is right,” said Helen. She was far beyond
shedding of tears, the moisture in her eyes was a powerful concentrated
dew of suffering through which her troubled eyes looked out. At this
moment there came another knock at the door, a quiet little knock low
down, as of a creature of small stature, sounding against the lower
panels; and then a small voice called from the same altitude, “Helen,
Helen, open, Helen! I tan’t open the door.”

Sir John turned his face and his chair round towards the little voice,
and sat there attentively expecting what was to come. Charley made one
step to it and opened it, leaving the passage free. Janey appeared in
the threshold in her black frock, her fair little face rising out of it
like a flower, her little figure, so lightly poised, standing against
the background of the panelled wall. She looked round upon them with the
perfect calm of childhood. Then her eyes were caught by the pocketbook
on the table. Janey was not afraid of Sir John nor of any one in the
wide world. She went up to the table and took the precious case into her
little hands.

“This is Janey’s fortune,” she said, looking up with a smile into the
face of the man beside her. “Are you doing to keep it safe for me?”

He sat and looked at her, helpless; he would have knocked down any man
who had seized upon it--wrested it from the most powerful claimant; but
before the little child he was helpless. He gazed at her blankly,
stupidly, in the height of his dismay.

“I will not dive it to Sir John,” said Janey, “because he does not look
kind. He does not like Helen or me; he did not like papa: but I will
dive it to Charley, for he is the one that is good. Catch, Charley!”
cried the little girl, throwing the precious case like a ball across the
table. She clapped her hands when Ashton caught it, with a laugh of
childish pleasure. A ball or a fortune, what did it matter to Janey?
“And look, Helen, who is coming!” the child said. “I was sent to tell
you, but I forgot. Here she is coming! she is coming! and we are all
doing home to our own house, and never to cry any more.”

In another moment Helen’s forlorn solitude, her helpless loneliness were
over. She flew past Sir John, who rose stumbling to his feet, and
Charley, who stood bewildered with Janey’s fortune in his hand, and fell
into the outstretched arms of a smiling and weeping woman who had come
in after Janey, at the open door.

Doubt, and danger, and suspicion of herself and of everything around
her, had been closing about Helen. She had looked around her vainly into
the blackness and found no guidance, no one even to tell her what she
ought to do. She had no mother, nor any friend that absolutely belonged
to her; nevertheless, when she flew into Mrs Ashton’s arms, the world
had settled down again out of those giddy whirlings and confused
eccentricities. She did not know what she might be called upon to do or
to give up; but life had taken its natural shape again to the
bewildered girl. She was not out of the labyrinth, but she had found the
clue.

After the arrival of these strangers, Charley Ashton’s father and
step-mother, the village of Latour advanced daily in its knowledge of
the ways of the English,--a most curious and interesting study, which
gave great amusement to the cottagers. Mr and Mrs Ashton took the
apartments in M. Goudron’s house which had been so sadly vacated by
_l’Anglais_, he who had escaped from all his pursuers by a night journey
more sudden than any of his previous flights. The Latourois had been
very sorry for the man who had died among them; but they were very glad,
as was natural, to forget that tragical conclusion, and to amuse
themselves with all the difficulties about monsieur’s bath, and madame’s
tea. The Curé looked with amused tolerance, yet contempt, at the
costume of the clergyman, and at the droll pretences of that Protestant
personage to be a priest like himself; and Madame Dupré, with an effort,
for the sake of the benefactor who had liberated Baptiste, put up with
the fastidiousness of the new visitors who turned up their noses at her
_pot-au-feu_, and expected to find the refinements of the Trois Frères
in the little _auberge_. “Talk of French cookery!” the new-comers cried;
and they endeavoured to teach Margot how to “cook a joint” over her
handful of charcoal, and to make English mustard out of the
dark-complexioned powder which was all that was to be had in Latour. To
see them walking about for ever, taking perpetual constitutionals,
filled the villagers with wonder. But it would be impossible to describe
the interest of Blanchette and Baptiste when there dawned upon them a
pleasing certainty of the fate which was reserved for mademoiselle.
Little Blanchette was the one who had divined it from the first. The day
M. Charles had come to the _château_, that very day she had read it in
his face. The loves of Cécile and Sir John afforded them no such
sympathetic satisfaction. And indeed, Sir John took his departure
immediately, carrying with him the valuable case which held Janey’s
fortune. He washed his hands, he said, of the other matter. The Ashtons
were on the spot to look after it for themselves, and if the father did
not object to such a connection, of course it was no concern of his, who
was merely a cousin. A cloud, a faint veil of separation, fell between
Helen and the girls at the _château_, in consequence of Sir John’s
opposition. Perhaps it gave Cécile her first experience of the
difficulties that attend marriage with an Englishman. She did her best
to be loyal both to her friend and her future husband, but the conflict
was not without pain.

But what did any such paltry pain matter in the opening of the new day
which came to Helen out of the clouds of the morning, sweet and dazzling
in all the glories of life and spring? Her oldest friends put her hand
into her lover’s hand, and his father said the blessing over them. Let
all the Sir Johns in the world object, what harm could it do? They went
to Paris and bought the bride her Indian outfit,--she who had nothing.
Helen’s hundred a-year had accumulated as her father had said. It came
from her mother, and was honestly hers, and there was no reason why she
should not use it. And it was at Paris that the young pair were married;
and from thence that they set out to their distant home. But before
they left Latour there was a pretty ceremony, at which their presence
was indispensable. Helen and little Janey put aside their black dresses
and put on white ones to honour Blanchette’s marriage. And when the
religious ceremony took place, after the first day’s performance at the
Mairie, the bride herself, holding her husband by the hand, turned aside
and led the way among all the iron crosses on the graves to the place
where _l’Anglais_ lay under a green mound, without any name. He had
forfeited his name, his good fame, and honour. Nevertheless little
Blanchette wept over the mound, and, kneeling down in her veil and
myrtle crown, laid a white wreath upon the grass, and said a prayer for
his soul. Did it do him any good in those dark countries whither the
fugitive had taken flight “unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d”?

“Ma bonne, douce demoiselle,” said Blanchette amid her tears, “how he
was good to us, monsieur votre père! Never shall a week pass when you
are far, far away from Latour, but Baptiste and me, we will say a prayer
for the repose of his soul.”

The others said nothing, but stood silent about the nameless grave. What
harm he had done, what suffering he had caused! and yet he was but as
other men, and gratitude gave him a prayer and a tear.


THE END.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.



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