"Pray, do you think I wouldn't do it as well as a man?" said the omni-competent little woman. "Never fear, monsieur, I am as good in the stable as in the pantry and the laundry; and if I didn't pay my visit to the hay-rack and the harness-room every day, that little rattle-brain jockey would never keep monsieur le comte's mare in decent condition. See how clean and fat she is, poor old Lanterne! She isn't handsome, monsieur, but she's good; she's like everything else here except my child, who is handsome and good too."
"Your child!" said Emile, suddenly remembering a fact which deprived Mademoiselle de Châteaubrun's image of something of its poetic charm. "You have a child here? I have not seen her."
"Fie, monsieur! what are you saying?" cried Janille, her pale and glistening cheeks mantling with a modest blush, while Monsieur Antoine smiled with some embarrassment. "Apparently you are not aware that I am unmarried."
"Excuse me," said Emile, "I have so recently come into this neighborhood that I am likely to make many absurd mistakes. I thought that you were married or a widow."
"It is true that at my age I might have buried several husbands," rejoined Janille; "for I have not lacked opportunities. But I have always had a dislike for marriage, because I like to do as I choose. When I say our child, it's on account of my affection for a child whom I saw born, as you might say, for I had her with me when she was being weaned, and monsieur le comte allows me to treat his daughter as if she belonged to me, which doesn't take away any of the respect I owe her. But if you had seen mademoiselle, you would have noticed that she no more looks like me than she does like you, and that she has only noble blood in her veins. Jour de Dieu! if I had such a child, where could I have got her? I should be so proud of her, that I'd tell everybody, even if it made people speak ill of me. Ha! ha! you are laughing, are you, Monsieur Antoine? laugh as much as you choose; I am fifteen years older than you, and evil tongues have nothing to say against me."
"Nonsense, Janille! nobody dreams of such a thing, so far as I know," said Monsieur Châteaubrun, affecting an air of gayety. "That would be doing me too much honor, and I am not conceited enough to boast of it. As for my daughter, you certainly have the right to call her what you please, for you have been more than a mother to her, if such a thing is possible!"
As he uttered these last words in a serious, agitated tone, there suddenly came into the châtelain's eyes and voice, as it were a cloud, and an accent of profound melancholy. But it was incompatible with his character that any depressing sentiment should be of long duration, and he soon recovered his usual serenity.
"Go and prepare breakfast, young madcap," he said playfully to his female majordomo; "I still have two trees to trim and Monsieur Emile will come and keep me company."
The garden of Châteaubrun had formerly been on a vast and magnificent scale like the rest of the domain; but a large part of it had been sold with the park, now transformed into a grain-field, and only a few acres remained. The part nearest the château was lovely in the natural disorder of its vegetation; the grass and the ornamental trees, left undisturbed in their vagabond growth, revealed here and there a step or two and a few fragments of wall, which had been summer-houses and labyrinths in the days of Louis XV. There, doubtless, mythological statues, urns, fountains and so-called rustic pavilions had repeated on a small scale the dainty and affected ornamentation of the royal palaces. But now it was all shapeless débris, covered with vines and ivy, lovelier perhaps in the eyes of an artist or a poet than it had been in the time of its magnificence.
On a higher level, surrounded with a thorn-hedge to confine the two goats that grazed at will in the former garden, was the orchard, filled with venerable trees, whose gnarled and knotty branches, escaping from the constraint of the pruning-knife and the espalier, assumed odd and fantastic shapes. There was a curious interlacing of monstrous hydras and dragons writhing under foot and over head, so that it was difficult to walk there without tripping over huge roots or leaving one's hat among the branches.