“Tell me, what are you doing here and what was it you were singing?” he asked with a smile.
“It was a French song that Mère Jeanne taught me,” was her reply, “and I come here often to sit by the flowers and sing to them.”
“You sing to the flowers?” he repeated, puzzled. “What leads you to do that and why to these especial ones?”
“The gardener told me that they came from our land,” she answered gravely, “and that the name men give them is ‘fair maids of France.’ So, since they are in exile as well as we, I come and sing my French songs to them, lest they grow lonely and weep as Mère Jeanne so often does.”
Stephen held out his hand and took her tiny one into it.
“You are a very little maid to be so loyal to your country, and to your fellow exiles,” he said, “and you are young indeed to know the sorrows of banishment. Suppose you lead me to that Mère Jeanne of yours, so that we may try to comfort her a little.”
That night Master Sheffield’s guests, although they were many and of high importance, had to wait in the long drawing-room, while their host, yonder across the misty field, sat on the bench before the shoemaker’s cottage and talked in French to Mother Jeanne Lamotte. She, poor soul, had learned but little English and found black Jason’s few halting words of French, very small comfort indeed. Now that she could pour her heart out to one who could understand her native speech, it seemed as though she would never have done. Stephen duly admired the neatness and strict order of her little dwelling but finally declared that it had grown too old and tumble-down for comfort and that she and Clotilde must come to abide in the great house, where, since his sisters’ marriages and the death of his parents he lived alone save for the black servants.
“There is room in abundance,” he said, “and the little maid will help to brighten a place where all of us, master and men, are growing dreary and old together. Would you like to dwell there, Mademoiselle Clotilde?”
“Indeed I would,” she cried with joy, “for there are great wide rooms to play in and here are only four walls and a smoky chimney.”
Mother Jeanne reproached her severely for this criticism of their dwelling but Stephen, laughing, insisted that she was right and that the change must be made at once. But when next day Mother Jeanne and Clotilde gathered up their few possessions and carried them to the big house, they found the master gone again and for several months they saw his face no more.