It was a piteous enough spectacle. She had a little girl not three, another not two, and a three-months-old baby which she was nursing. We thought of the poor distracted husband and father; and the forlorn struggle on the crowded boat; and the dreadful landing on unknown soil, herded together as they were, poor creatures! like a huddled flock of sheep; and our hearts bled.
Towards evening, however, when calm settled down again on the astonished Villino, and Madame Koelen, having left her children asleep, was able to enjoy Mrs. MacComfort’s choice little dinner, she became confidential to the young daughter of the house. She began by telling us that we must not imagine that because a name had a German sound that her husband’s family had the remotest connection with the land of the Bosch. On the contrary, he was of Italian extraction; descended, in fact, from no less a race than the Colonnas! Having thus established her credentials, she embarked on long rambling tales of the flight, copiously interlaced with the name of an Italian gentleman; “a friend of my husband”; a certain Monsieur Mérino.
“When my husband was putting us on the remorqueur at Flushing, we saw him standing on the quay, vous savez, and then he said, n’est-ce pas: ‘Ah, Mérino, are you going to England? Then look after my wife!’”
And Monsieur Mérino had been so good, and Monsieur Mérino had amused the children, and Monsieur Mérino was so anxious to know how they were established, and Monsieur Mérino would probably come down to see for himself, and Monsieur Mérino was so droll!
We are very innocent people, and we accepted Monsieur Mérino in all good faith. We announced ourselves as happy to receive him; we were touched by his solicitude. Madame Koelen had surprisingly cheered, but there was yet a cloud upon her brow.
“Still,” she said, “I do not think it was right of my cousin to have accepted to dine alone with Monsieur Mérino, and to have passed the night in London in the same hotel with only her little brother to chaperon her—a child of eight, n’est-ce pas?—and she only eighteen, vous savez, and expected in Brighton.”
We quite concurred. Monsieur Mérino’s halo grew slightly paler in our eyes. Monsieur Mérino ought not to have asked her, we said, with great propriety.
Madame Koelen exploded.
“Ah, if you had seen the way she went on with him on the boat! She was all the time trying to have a flirt with him. Poor Monsieur Mérino! and God knows what blague she has told him, for he was never at the station to see us off, and he had promised to be there, n’est-ce pas? Oh, I was so angry! Cette Jeanne, she prevented him! I cried all the way down in the train.”
Certainly she had been crying when we first beheld her; and we who had thought!——