If Madame van Roon, keeper of the hostel Landlust, cut her coat according to her cloth, she should have been in affluent circumstances. Daniel Lambert might have furnished her his vest, a couple of dragoons their cloaks for skirt. This, proceeding from a mighty roll of padding—a veritable stuffed bolster—that circled her unnamable waist, swayed in one piece, like a diving-bell in a current, with her every movement. Her stays, hooped with steel after the Dutch mode, would have hung slack on a kilderkin. The lobes of her fat ears stretched under the weight of a pair of positive little censers. But the finished pride of her was her cap, a wonder of stiff goffering, against the erect border of which her red face lay like a ham on a dish-paper. With so full a presence, she had only to stand in a doorway, if inclined to argument, and not so much as a minor postulate could evade her.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est doncg cette manière de moogsieur là!” she gasped at our gentleman with a choking shrillness. “Mais où est vôgtre valetaille, vôgtre équipage?”
She quarrelled gutturally, like an envious stepmother, with the speech of her adoption.
“I am in my own service, madame,” said Ned, in no small wonder; “and that is to own the best master a man can have.”
She slapped the three-partitioned money-pouch that hung at her middle.
“Oo, ay,” she gurgled truculently; “and a fine master of economy, I’ll be bound.”
Ned, for short argument, fished out a palmful of pieces. She admitted him grudgingly even then; but the young man was completely satisfied.
“This is excellent tonic,” he thought, “after an enervating experience. In Méricourt, it seems, there is food for study.”
He appeared to have struck a sort of Franco-Flemish neutral ground. He was put to wait in a little kitchen like a bright toy. The floor was ruddy brick, the walls were white tiles. Outside the window a shallow awning tinkled sleepily, in spasms of draught, with the stirring of innumerable small bells. The stove or range, a shining cold example of continence, seemed innocent of the least tradition of heat. On the polished dark dresser vessels of copper, of pewter, and of brass—stewpans, lidded flagons, and the narrow-necked, wood-stoppered, resonant jugs, in which it was the Dutch fashion to bring milk from the fields—shone with a demure sobriety of tone in the falling light.
But the meal, when it came, was served in the French manner and without stint. The traveller, seeing no preparations toward in the spick room he inhabited, was falling into a mood of gentle depression before his fears were dissipated. Then he ventured an inquiry of the solemn wench who brought in his tray. She almost dropped the load in her amazement.