“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.