"Bien. It will interest you. You like him very much, don't you?" she added, suddenly, looking up and fixing the girl with her bright eyes.
"Like him? Indeed I do. I think him simply glorious," was the answer, given in a gushing voice, but for a moment the girl felt vaguely uneasy. During the last twelve weeks she had not, although seeing Joyselle's wife every day, learned to regard her as a real factor in the game. Joyselle, always tender and considerate of her, yet seemed to regard her as a kind of cross between a mother and a nurse, and she, never precisely retiring, and almost always present during Brigit's visits, appeared to be perfectly used to the rôle that he assigned her, and sat, usually silent, a kindly spectator of whatever might be going on.
This was the first time that Brigit had realised that she had a real personality, and the girl wondered at her own blindness, for every line in Madame Joyselle's face meant, she now saw, an individuality stronger rather than weaker than the average woman's, even in these days of clamorous individualism.
"Do tell me about him—when he was young," Lady Brigit Mead continued, her thick-looking white eyelids, eyelids that the hapless Mr. Babington compared in his twenty-second sonnet to magnolia-petals, drooping till her lashes made shadows on her cheeks.
And Félicité Joyselle told her story.
"He lived at St. Pol—a mile from Falaise on the way to Caen. His father was gamekeeper to M. de Cérisay. My father, Jacques Rion,—there is his picture to the right, with the beard,—was a tanner in Falaise. We were all poor, but it was very pleasant. Falaise is a beautiful city. Sometimes I used to think there was nothing so beautiful in London as the Place St. Gervais on a market-day in summer, with the fountain playing, and all the friendly people selling their wares. But that," she added simply, "was before I had seen the Albert Memorial. Victor's mother used to sell her fruit in the town, and her sister had married my uncle, anyway! and Victor used to come with her. The first time I remember seeing him, however, was at Mass. It was winter, and very cold, and he kept blowing his hands to warm them. I was twelve, and he about ten. He was a beautiful little boy. Then one day his father brought him to see his aunt—who had married Monsieur Chalumeau, my uncle, you see?—and I was there. And we went up to the castle. You have been there? It is where the Conqueror—who conquered England—was born, in a tiny little stone room high above the tower. You know the story of Arlette?" Brigit nodded, but she did not know. She wanted to hear about Joyselle.
"Bon. And then, when I was twenty, and he eighteen, he came back from Rouen where, did I tell you?—M. de Cérisay had sent him to learn to play the violin—and he told me he wanted me to marry him. He was very splendid then, with city clothes, and oil on his hair, and his hands smooth as a gentleman's.
"We were married at St. Gervais. Then he went back to Rouen and he studied again. That," she added, "was the worst time of my life."
"But why?"
The elder woman looked up. "Because—I was just getting to know him," she returned slowly, "and—he was very wild."