And she had retained much of her old, quaint, and amusing manner of telling things, and had much to tell still left of her wandering life, although there were so many strange lapses in her powers of memory—gaps—which, if they could only have been filled up, would have been full of such surpassing interest!
Then she was never tired of talking and hearing of Little Billee; and that was a subject of which Mrs. Bagot could never tire either!
Then there were the recollections of her childhood. One day, in a drawer, Mrs. Bagot came upon a faded daguerreotype of a woman in a Tam o' Shanter, with a face so sweet and beautiful and saint-like that it almost took her breath away. It was Trilby's mother.
"Who and what was your mother, Trilby?"
"Ah, poor mamma!" said Trilby, and she looked at the portrait a long time. "Ah, she was ever so much prettier than that! Mamma was once a demoiselle de comptoir—that's a bar-maid, you know—at the Montagnards Écossais, in the Rue du Paradis Poissonnière—a place where men used to drink and smoke without sitting down. That was unfortunate, wasn't it?
"Papa loved her with all his heart, although, of course, she wasn't his equal. They were married at the Embassy, in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré.
"Her parents weren't married at all. Her mother was the daughter of a boatman on Loch Ness, near a place called Drumnadrockit; but her father was the Honorable Colonel Desmond. He was related to all sorts of great people in England and Ireland. He behaved very badly to my grandmother and to poor mamma—his own daughter! deserted them both! Not very honorable of him, was it? And that's all I know about him."
And then she went on to tell of the home in Paris that might have been so happy but for her father's passion for drink; of her parents' deaths, and little Jeannot, and so forth. And Mrs. Bagot was much moved and interested by these naïve revelations, which accounted in a measure for so much that seemed unaccountable in this extraordinary woman; who thus turned out to be a kind of cousin (though on the wrong side of the blanket) to no less a person than the famous Duchess of Towers.