This was the story of Rosalie which Mrs. Flynn told Charley, as he stood at the street door of the post-office. When she had finished, Charley went back into the room where Rosalie sat beside the sick man’s couch, the hound at her feet. She came forward, surprised, for he had bade her good-bye but a few minutes before.
“May I sit and watch for an hour longer, Mademoiselle?” he said. “You will have your duties in the post-office.”
“Monsieur—it is good of you,” she answered.
For two hours Charley watched her going in and out, whispering directions to Mrs. Flynn, doing household duty, bringing warmth in with her, and leaving light behind her.
It was afternoon when he returned to his bench in the tailor-shop, and was received by old Louis Trudel in peevish silence. For an hour they worked in silence, and then the tailor said:
“A brave girl—that. We will work till nine to-night!”
CHAPTER XV. THE MARK IN THE PAPER
Chaudiere was nearing the last of its nine-days’ wonder. It had filed past the doorway of the tailor-shop; it had loitered on the other side of the street; it had been measured for more clothes than in three months past—that it might see Charley at work in the shop, cross-legged on a bench, or wielding the goose, his eye glass in his eye. Here was sensation indeed, for though old M. Rossignol, the Seigneur, had an eye-glass, it was held to his eye—a large bone-bound thing with a little gold handle; but no one in Chaudiere had ever worn a glass in his eye like that. Also, no one in Chaudiere had ever looked quite like “M’sieu’”—for so it was that, after the first few days (a real tribute to his importance and sign of the interest he created) Charley came to be called “M’sieu’,” and the Mallard was at last entirely dropped.
Presently people came and stood at the tailor’s door and talked, or listened to Louis Trudel and M’sieu’ talking. And it came to be noised abroad that the stranger talked as well as the Cure and better than the Notary. By-and-by they associated his eye-glass with his talent, so that it seemed, as it were, to be the cause of it. Yet their talk was ever of simple subjects, of everyday life about them, now and then of politics, occasionally of the events of the world filtered to them through vast tracts of country. There was one subject which, however, was barred; perhaps because there was knowledge abroad that M’sieu’ was not a Catholic, perhaps because Charley himself adroitly changed the conversation when it veered that way.