Every morning Joséphine came down with Mademoiselle’s compliments, and her desire to be informed if I had slept well. Every afternoon I mounted to drink a cup of English tea with her, and listen to her last pages on the great Misunderstood, and sometimes maliciously spur her into passion by some sceptical raillery, which always brought pained reproach to her sad eyes and a slight flush to her pale face. She took everything in earnest, even my feeble jokes, which after a while, when she began to understand them, she would proceed to discuss in her own quaint, slow way.
‘I suppose it must be a matter of temperament, or perhaps it is an Irish peculiarity,’ she would say, and inspect me very seriously.
I assured her that the Irishman was not born who could not change his opinion at a moment’s notice for the fun of the thing, and in the midst of comedy fall foul upon tragedy for pure diversion’s sake. She shook her head despondently, and decided at once that there could be found no earnest scholars, no born leaders of men, in a band of amiable buffoons.
My moments of recreation and distraction were enjoyed with Gabrielle, when we walked round the desert island in search of adventures, or with elaborate care, tried to make each other understand the caprices of our wandering fancies in the alleys of the sad, mysterious garden. It was pure joy to feel the little hand clinging to my arm or lost in my palm like a soft, small bird, and hear the pretty patter of running steps alongside of my brisk strides. For, to atone for its late appearance, the winter was mortally cold, and there was no dallying with frozen toes and frost-bitten ears. But to make up for this foolish superiority of mine in the matter of steps, Gabrielle was indulgence itself to my decided inferiority upon imaginative ground. I certainly could not imagine so many things out of nothing, and it was clear that I could not make up so many charming adventures for Minette and Monsieur Con. But in my gross grown-up way, I was not an unsympathetic confidante for the grievances and perplexities of solitary childhood. Indeed, Gabrielle admitted, with off-hand majesty of look and deportment, that I was rather a nice and entertaining person for a little girl to talk to, not above the simple pleasures of play, and not beneath the romantic joys of story-telling. Now she loved her aunt; oh, yes, she certainly loved her aunt above and beyond all the world. But her aunt, you see, was so very solemn, and then she read so many books, she was quite entichée of those big, hard-looking books. Entichée, she admitted, in answer to my amused and not altogether edified surprise, was an expression she had caught from my servant Marie. It was Marie, she repeated imperiously, who said her aunt was entichée of books, and she was pleased to find it a very good word. She was the quaintest and drollest little philosopher and playmate melancholy middle-age could desire, and I am not without shrewd suspicion that I learnt more from her than she from me.
Of an evening, as I sat alone downstairs over my coffee, and snoozed comfortably over one of Mademoiselle’s books, or puffed a meditative cigarette in front of the bright wood fire, Joséphine would come down for a chat on her own account. It amused me to draw her out upon the subject of Mademoiselle, and bit by bit I pieced her story together.
Monsieur Lenormant, the father of two girls, had had a serious political difference with his family, who were all staunch Bonapartists, while he stood by the republic, and flung his hat into the air whenever they played the Marseillaise. With no desire to parade this difference, and being a shy and sensitive man, despite his republican sympathies, he chose evasion by the road of retreat. He left Beaufort, where his family were an influence, and bought the old house on the island. Here few were likely to disturb him, and political temptation could not be expected to pursue him.
His ostensible excuse was the possession of scholarly tastes and indifference to the present. The death of his wife upon the birth of a second girl, Adèle, was seemingly a further inducement to seek the soothing shade of solitude. So the widower, accompanied by his wife’s confidential servant, Joséphine, and an old gardener, Marcel, drove out of Beaufort, with his children, his books, and his cats. In a little while he was settled and hard at work among the ancients, and the current world of republicans and Bonapartists alike forgot him.
There was a difference of five years between the children, and soon, too soon, little Henriette was established upon the semi-maternal, wholly self-sacrificing pedestal of la grande sœur. All she had known of spontaneous childhood was before her mother’s death. Henceforth she was ‘mother’ herself, with Adèle for an adored and adorable small tyrant. While still in short frocks, her father, too, had got to rely on her, and cling to her as to a grown-up woman. He would gravely debate with her upon matters it was but humane to suppose she could understand nothing of. This may be an excellent school for training in abnegation and patient endurance, but it is a hard one. Henriette slipped into maturity without any of the sunshine of childhood across her backward path. She was an uncomplaining, studious little girl, and it is not surprising that Monsieur Lenormant should have gone to the grave without the remotest suspicion of the wrong he had done her. Did she not love her father devotedly? Did she not worship the pretty Adèle? And what more can any sane and reasonable young woman demand of life than ample opportunities for the practice of self-abnegation and the worshipping of others?
When Henriette was a slip of a girl and Adèle a child of ten, young Dr. Vermont, the only son of Monsieur Lenormant’s comrade of youth, came down to Beaufort from Paris, in the full blaze of university honours, and not without promise of future scientific renown, backed by a substantial income and solid provincial influence. This young man looked surprisingly well upon horseback, and found it good exercise to ride frequently from the town to the house of his father’s old friend upon the island. Arrived there, it amused him to notice Adèle, who was free of anything like bashfulness, and in return, thought him the nicest person she had ever seen. Meanwhile, a grave, tall girl, too thin for her ungraceful age, looked on with very different eyes. To her Dr. Vermont was the traditional Phœbus Apollo of girlhood. She knew nothing of romance, or novels, or poetry, but she felt the dawn of womanhood upon sight of him, and blushed in divine self-consciousness. She was a plain girl then—unfinished, unformed, and painfully reserved; and it was not to be expected that such an elegant article of semi-Parisian make, as Dr. Vermont, should have an eye for material so crude and undeveloped. Had Dr. Vermont been thirty instead of twenty, he might have thought differently, but we all know how grandly exacting and dramatic twenty is. Whereas his conquest was not in the least astonishing. He was a fine-looking lad, with plenty of pluck and grace and worldly wisdom. He carried himself with a noble self-consciousness, was sufficiently attentive to his moustache to convince mankind of its supreme importance, and already his handsome dark eyes wore that look of mild scrutiny that never left them. Altogether a youth with justifiable pretensions and fascinations of an intellectual and bodily nature, and one by no means likely to learn to abate them by experience.