FOOTNOTES:
[2] Flower garden, kitchen garden, and orchard.
[CHAPTER XIV]
The Baron de St. Alpin was a venerable soldier, near sixty, in whom the natural roughness of his country was polished by a long residence among the French. He was extremely good humoured and chearful, and passionately fond of the Chevalier de Bellozane, who was the youngest of three sons, the two elder of whom had fallen in the field. The military ardour however of the Baron had not been buried with them; and he still entrusted the sole survivor of his house, and the last support of his hopes, in the same service.
With infinite satisfaction he embraced this beloved son on his return from Martinique, and with exultation presented him to his nephew, to Lady Westhaven, and Miss Mowbray. The Baron was indeed persuaded that he was the most accomplished young man in France, and had no notion that every body did not behold him with the same eyes.
Bellozane was tall, well made, and handsome; his face, and yet more, his figure, bore some resemblance to the Godolphin family; his manners were elegant, his air military, his vivacity excessive, and he was something of a coxcomb, but not more than is thought becoming to men of his profession in France at two and twenty.
Having lived always in the army or in fashionable circles at Paris, he had conceived no advantageous ideas of his own country, where he had not been since his childhood. His father now retiring thither himself, had obtained a long leave of absence for him that he might go also; but Bellozane would willingly have dispensed with the journey, which the Baron pressed with so much vehemence, that he had hardly time to modernize his appearance after his American campaigns; a point which was to him of serious importance.
He had therefore with reluctance looked forward to their journey over the Alps. But as soon as his father (who had met him at Port L'Orient on his landing) introduced him at Paris to his English relations and to Emmeline, the journey seemed not only to have lost it's horrors, but to become a delightful party of pleasure, and he was happy to make the fourth in the post-coach in which Lady Westhaven, Emmeline, and her Ladyship's woman, travelled; Lord Westhaven and the Baron following in a post-chaise.
Nothing could exceed the happiness of the Baron, nor the gaiety of his son. Lord Westhaven and his wife, tho' they talked about it less, were not less pleased with their friends and their expedition; while Emmeline appeared restored to her former chearfulness, because she saw that they wished to see her chearful: but whenever she was a moment alone, involuntary sighs fled towards England; and when she remembered how far she must be from Lady Adelina, from little William, in short, from Godolphin, how could she help thinking of them with concern.