THE next day Cameron came up stairs to Cosmo’s room, where the lad was writing by the window, with an open letter in his hand and rather a comical expression on his face.
“Here is for you, Cosmo,” said Cameron. “The like of me does not captivate ladies. Macgregor and I must make you our reverence. We never would have got this invitation but for your sake.”
“What is it?” cried Cosmo, rising eagerly, with a sudden blush, and already more than guessing, as he leaned forward to see it, what the communication was. It was a note from Madame Roche, oddly, yet prettily, worded, with a fragrance of French idiom in its English, which made it quite captivating to Cosmo, who was highly fantastical, and would not have been quite contented to find his beautiful old lady writing a matter-of-fact epistle like other people. It was an invitation to “her countrymen” to take a cup of tea with her on the following evening. She had heard from Baptiste and his wife that they were English travelers, and loved to hear the speech of her own country, though she had grown unfamiliar with it, and therewith she signed her name, “Mary Roche de St. Martin,” in a hand which was somewhat stiff and old-fashioned, yet refined. Cosmo was greatly pleased. His face glowed with surprised gratification; he was glad to have his old heroine come up so entirely to his fancy, and delighted to think of seeing and knowing her, close at hand in her own home.
“You will go?” he said, eagerly.
Cameron laughed—even, if truth must be told, the grave Highlander blushed a little. He was totally unused to the society of women; he was a little excited by the idea of making friends in this little foreign town, and already looked forward with no small amount of expectation to Madame Roche’s modest tea-drinking. But he did not like to betray his pleasure; he turned half away, as he answered:—
“For your sake, you know, laddie—Macgregor and I would have had little chance by ourselves—yes, we’ll go,” and went off to write a very stiff and elaborate reply, in the concoction of which Cameron found it more difficult to satisfy himself than he had ever been before all his life. It was finished, how ever, and dispatched at last. That day ended, the fated evening came. The Highland student never made nor attempted so careful a toilette—he, too, had found time to catch a glimpse of Cosmo’s beautiful old lady, and of the pale, fragile daughter, who went out once a week to drive in the little carriage. Mademoiselle Marie, whom Cosmo had scarcely noticed, looked to Cameron like one of the tender virgin martyrs of those old pictures which had impressed his uncommunicative imagination without much increasing his knowledge. He had watched her, half lifted, half helped into the little carriage, with pity and interest greater than any one knew of. He was a strong man, unconscious in his own person of what illness was—a reserved, solitary, self-contained hermit, totally ignorant of womankind, save such as his old mother in her Highland cottage, or the kind, homely landlady in the High Street whose anxiety for his comfort sometimes offended him as curiosity. A lady, young, tender, and gentle—a woman of romance, appealing unconsciously to all the protecting and supporting impulses of his manhood, had never once been placed before in Cameron’s way.
So Cosmo and his friend, with an interest and excitement almost equal, crossed the little street of St. Ouen, towards Madame Roche’s second floor, in the early darkness of the February night, feeling more reverence, respect, and enthusiasm than young courtiers going to be presented to a queen. As for their companion, Cameron’s pupil, he was the only unconcerned individual of the little party. He was not unaccustomed to the society of ladies—Madame Roche and her daughter had no influence on his imagination; he went over the way with the most entire complacency, and not a romantical sentiment within a hundred miles of him; he was pleased enough to see new faces, and share his own agreeable society with some one else for the evening, and he meant to talk of Italy and pictures and astonish these humble people, by way of practice when he should reach home—Macgregor was not going to any enchanted palace—he only picked his steps over the causeway of the little street of St. Ouen, directing his way towards Madame Roche’s second floor.
This chamber of audience was a small room, partly French and party English in its aspect; the gilded clock and mirror over the mantel-piece—the marble table at the side of the room—the cold polished edge of floor on which Cameron’s unwary footsteps almost slid—the pretty lamp on the table, and the white maze of curtains artistically disposed at the window, and looped with pink ribbons, were all indigenous to the soil; but the square of thick Turkey carpet—the little open fire-place, where a wood fire burned and crackled merrily, the warm-colored cover on the table, where stood Madame Roche’s pretty tea equipage, were home-like and “comfortable” as insular heart could wish to see. On a sofa, drawn close to the fire-place, half sat, half reclined, the invalid daughter. She was very pale, with eyes so blue, and mild, and tender, that it was impossible to meet their gentle glance without a rising sympathy, even though it might be impossible to tell what that sympathy was for. She was dressed—the young men, of course, could not tell how—in some invalid dress, so soft, so flowing, so seemly, that Cameron, who was as ignorant as a savage of all the graces of the toilette, could not sufficiently admire the perfect gracefulness of those most delicate womanly robes, which seemed somehow to belong to, and form part of, this fair, pale, fragile creature, whose whole existence seemed to be one of patience and suffering. Madame Roche herself sat on the other side of the table. She was not in widow’s dress, though she had not been many years a widow. She wore a white lace cap, with spotless, filmy white ribbons, under which her fair hair, largely mixed with silver, was braided in soft bands, which had lost nothing of their gloss or luxuriance. Her dress was black satin, soft and glistening—there was no color at all about her habiliments, nothing but soft white and black. She did not look younger than she was, nor like any thing but herself. She was not a well-preserved, carefully got-up beauty. There were wrinkles in her sweet old face, as well as silver in her hair. Notwithstanding, she sat there triumphant, in the real loveliness which she could not help and for which she made no effort, with her beautiful blue eyes, her soft lips, her rose cheek, which through its wrinkles was as sweet and velvety as an infant’s, her pretty white hands and rosy finger tips. She was not unconscious either of her rare gift—but bore it with a familiar grace as she had borne it for fifty years. Madame Roche had been beautiful all her life—she did not wonder nor feel confused to know that she was beautiful now.
And she received them, singular to say, in a manner which did not in the slightest degree detract from Cosmo’s poetic admiration, asking familiar questions about their names, and where, and how, and why they traveled, with the kindly interest of an old lady, and with the same delightful junction of English speech with an occasional French idiom, which had charmed the lad in her note. Cameron dropped shyly into a chair by the side of the couch, and inclined his ear, with a conscious color on his face, to the low voice of the invalid, who, though a little surprised, took polite pains to talk to him, while Cosmo as shyly, but not with quite so much awkwardness, took up his position by the side of Madame Roche. She made no remark, except a kindly smile and bow, when she heard the names of Cameron and Macgregor, but when Cosmo’s was named to her she turned round to him with a special and particular kindness of regard.
“Ah! Livingstone!” she said; “I had a friend once called by that name,” and Madame Roche made a little pause of remembrance, with a smile and a half sigh, and that look of mingled amusement, complacence, gratitude, and regret, with which an old lady like herself remembers the name of an old lover. Then she returned quietly to her tea-making. She did not notice Macgregor much, save as needful politeness demanded, and she looked with a little smiling surprise into the shadow where Cameron had placed himself by the side of her daughter, but her own attention was principally given to Cosmo, who brightened under it, and grew shyly confidential, as was to be looked for at his age.
“I have seen you at your window,” said Madame Roche. “I said to Marie, this young man, so modest, so ingenuous, who steals back when we come to the window, I think he must be my countryman. I knew it by your looks—all of you, and this gentleman, your tutor—ah, he is not at all like a Frenchman. He has a little forest on his cheeks and none on his chin, my child—that is not like what we see at St. Ouen.”
The old lady’s laugh was so merry that Cosmo could not help joining in it—“He is my dear friend,” said Cosmo, blushing to find himself use the adjective, yet using it with shy enthusiasm; “but he is only Macgregor’s tutor not mine.”
“Indeed! and who then takes care of you?” said the old lady. “Ah, you are old enough—you can guard yourself—is it so? Yet I know you have a good mother at home.”
“I have indeed; but, madame, how do you know?” cried Cosmo, in amazement.
“Because her son’s face tells me so,” cried Madame Roche, with her beautiful smile. “I know a mother’s son, my child. I know you would not have looked down upon an old woman and her poor daughter so kindly but for your mother at home; and your good friend, who goes to talk to my poor Marie—has he then a sick sister, whom he thinks upon when he sees my poor wounded dove?”
Cosmo was a little puzzled; he did not know what answer to make—he could not quite understand, himself, this entirely new aspect of his friend’s character. “Cameron is a very good fellow,” he said, with perplexity; but Cosmo did not himself perceive how, to prove himself a good fellow, it was needful for Cameron to pay such close reverential regard to the invalid on her sofa, whom he seemed now endeavoring to amuse by an account of their travels. The reserved and grave Highlander warmed as he spoke. He was talking of Venice on her seas, and Rome on her hills, while Marie leaned back on her pillows, with a faint flush upon her delicate cheek, following his narrative with little assenting gestures of her thin white hand, and motions of her head. She was not beautiful like her mother, but she was so fragile, so tender, so delicate, with a shadowy white vail on her head like a cap, fastened with a soft pink ribbon, which somehow made her invalid delicacy of complexion all the more noticeable, that Cosmo could not help smiling and wondering at the contrast between her and the black, dark, strong-featured face which bent towards her. No—Cameron had no sick sister—perhaps the grave undemonstrative student might even have smiled at Madame Roche’s pretty French sentiment about her wounded dove; yet Cameron, who knew nothing about women, and had confessed to Cosmo long ago how little of the universal benevolence of love he found himself capable of, was exerting himself entirely out of his usual fashion, with an awkward earnestness of sympathy which touched Cosmo’s heart, for the amusement of the poor sick Marie.
“We, too, have wandered far, but not where you have been,” said Madame Roche. “We do not know your beautiful Rome and Venice—we know only the wilderness, I and my Marie. Ah, you would not suppose it, to find us safe in St. Ouen; but we have been at—what do you call it?—the other side of the world—down, down below here, where summer comes at Christmas—ah! in the Antipodes.”
“And I would we were there now, mamma,” said Marie, with a sigh.
“Ah, my poor child!—yes, we were there, gentlemen,” said Madame Roche. “We have been great travelers—we have been in America—we were savages for a long time—we were lost to all the world; no one knew of us—they forgot me in my country altogether; and even my poor Jean—they scarce remembered him in St. Ouen. When we came back, we were like people who drop from the skies. Ah, it was strange! His father and his friends were dead, and me—it was never but a place of strangers to me—this town. I have not been in my country—not for twenty years; yet I sometimes think I should wish to look at it ere I die, but for Marie.”
“But the change might be of use to her health,” said Cameron, eagerly. “It often is so. Motion, and air, and novelty, of themselves do a great deal. Should you not try?”
“Ah, I should travel with joy,” said Marie, clasping her white, thin hand, “but not to Scotland, monsieur. Your fogs and your rains would steal my little life that I have. I should go to the woods—to the great plains—to the country that you call savage and a wilderness; and there, mamma, if you would but go you should no longer have to say—‘Poor Marie!’”
“And that is—where?” said Cameron, bending forward to the bright sick eyes, with an extraordinary emotion and earnestness. His look startled Cosmo. It was as if he had said, “Tell me but where, and I will carry you away whosoever opposes!” The Highlandman almost turned his back upon Madame Roche. This sick and weak Marie was oppressed and thwarted in her fancy. Cameron looked at her in his strong, independent manhood, with an unspeakable compassion and tenderness. It was in his heart to have lifted her up with his strong arms and carried her to the place she longed for, wherever it was—that was the immediate impulse upon him, and it was so new and so strange that it seemed to refresh and expand his whole heart. But Marie sank back upon her pillows with a little movement of fatigue, perhaps of momentary pettishness, and only her mother spoke in quite another strain.
“You do not know my country, my child,” said Madame Roche. “I have another little daughter who loves it. Ah, I think some day we shall go to see the old hills and the old trees; but every one forgets me there, and to say truth, I also forget,” said the old lady, smiling. “I think I shall scarcely know my own tongue presently. Will you come and teach me English over again?”
“You should say Scotch, madam—it is all he knows,” said Cameron, smiling at Cosmo, to whom she had turned. It was an affectionate look on both sides, and the boy blushed as he met first the beautiful eyes of his lovely old lady, and then the kind glance of his friend. He stammered something about the pleasure of seeing them in Scotland, and then blushed for the common-place. He was too young to remain unmoved between two pair of eyes, both turned so kindly upon him.
“He is his mother’s son, is he not?” said Madame Roche, patting Cosmo’s arm lightly with her pretty fingers. “I knew his name when I was young. I had a friend called by it. You shall come and talk to me of all you love—and you and I together, we will persuade Marie.”
Cameron glanced as she spoke, with a keen momentary jealous pang, from the handsome lad opposite to him, to the invalid on the sofa. But Marie was older than Cosmo—a whole world apart, out of his way, uninteresting to the boy as she lay back on her cushions, with her half-shut eyes and her delicate face. It was strange to think how strong and personal was this compassion, the growth of a day, in the Highlander’s stern nature and uncommunicating heart.