Thereby he amply expressed to his hearer his opinion that if the business deserved the adjective she had accorded it, the explanation was to be found in its unfortunate location. This opened the flood gates of Virginie’s speech. She told Mr. Egg that he was entirely right about the location, and gave him a few casual corroborative details which showed him that she knew what she was talking about. She also confided to him enough of her family affairs to account for the bitterness of her spirit and her contempt for mirthful dalliance. It was nothing but the old endless story of poverty in one of its innumerable variants. This time the father, a jobbing stone-mason, had not only broken his leg in Marseilles, but on coming out of the hospital had got drunk, assaulted a gend’arme, made a compound fracture of it, and laid himself up for several months. This time the mother had a rheumatic swelling of one arm, which hindered her in her washing. This time the eldest boy had got himself into some trouble in trying to evade the performance of his term of military duty. This time the youngest child had some torturing disease of the spine that necessitated—or rather needed—an operation. And, of course, as at all times, there were five or six hungry mouths, associated with as many pairs of comparatively helpless hands, between Virginie and that youngest. And as to business, that was certainly bad. It was particularly bad of late—although it was always bad in Drignan. Virginie told Mr. Egg that he was “rudement propre,” or “blazing clean”—clean as they were not in Drignan, she assured him. In fact, it appeared, this strange English gentleman, who had paid as high as a franc-and-a-half a week for his washing, had been accepted by Virginie’s family as designed in the mercy of Divine Providence to tide them over their period of distress. His departure at the end of two weeks was a sore disappointment in a financial point of view.
Vincent Egg was a very kind-hearted man, and he listened to this recital, and uttered sympathetic ejaculations in the right places. He was sorry about the youngest child, very sorry; he had known a case like it. Perhaps, he suggested, business might pick up. Messrs. Sculry & Co., the great English managers of Tourists’ Excursions, were going to make Drignan a stopping-place for their excursions on the way to Avignon. It was going to be a stopping-place of only a few hours, but, perhaps, it might bring some business. Who knew? Virginie brightened up when she heard this, and said that was so. Those English, she remarked, were always washing—no disrespect intended to the gentleman.
“And here,” she said, as they came abreast of a narrow gateway on the other side of the street from Mr. Egg’s lodging-house, “is where I live. It is on the ground floor. Will Monsieur come in and see the baby?” And her eyes lit up for the first time with a real interest—the interest, half-proud, and half-morbid, of a poor, simple creature who longs to exhibit to the world the affliction of monstrosity which sets her poor household apart from others of its kind.
Now, Mr. Egg had not the slightest desire to see the baby, and he had no intention whatever of going in; but, glancing through the narrow doorway, he saw a succession of arches in the courtyard beyond, and some old bits of mediæval masonry, which excited his curiosity. If this were the remains of some old monastery that had escaped his notice, it might mean a half-page more—nine-pence—in his guide-book. He strolled in by Virginie’s side, heedless of her chatter. No; it was not the ruin
of an ecclesiastical structure. The courtyard was only a part of an old stable and blacksmith-shop; old, but no older probably than the rest of that old street, which might have been standing at the time of Louis XIV—though it probably wasn’t. From its proximity to a canal that marked the line of an old moat, Mr. Egg made a safe guess that it was a small remnant of the stables and farriery attached to the barracks of the original fortifications of the town.
At any rate, it was no fish for the net of Messrs. Sculry & Co.’s guide-book compiler; and he was turning to go, when Virginie, who had supposed that he was merely following in her lead, to feast his eyes upon the sick baby, said simply, as she pushed open a door, “This way, Monsieur,” and, before he knew it, he had entered his washerwoman’s room.
Although it was a ground-floor room, damp, dark and old, it was clean with a curious sort of cleanness that seems to belong to the Latin races—a cleanness that gives one the impression of having been achieved without the use of soap and water: as if everything had been scraped clean instead of being washed clean. Virginie’s mother was clean, too, in spite of her swollen and helpless arm, and the three or four children who were playing on the stone floor were no dirtier than healthy children ought to be between washes. But Mr. Egg had hardly had time to take more than cursory note of these facts before his attention was riveted by the sick child in the French woman’s arms—so pitiful a little piece of suffering childhood that a much harder-hearted man than Mr. Vincent Egg might readily have been shocked at the sight of it. As for Mr. Egg, he simply dropped into a seated posture upon a convenient bench, and stared in the fascination of pity and horror.
Mr. Egg knew little of children and less of their diseases. In the ordinary course of things, such matters were not often brought to his attention; and, to tell the truth, had he known what he was to see there, no persuasion would have induced him to enter that poor little room. Now that he did see it, however, he could not move his eyes: the spectacle had for him a hideous attraction of novelty. Virginie and her mother exhibited the poor little misshapen thing, and rattled over the history of the case with a volubility which showed that it was no new tale. For fifteen minutes their visitor sat and stared in horrified silence; and, when at last he made his way back to the street, he found that his mind was in a more disturbed state than he had known it to be in many years.