“If you will leave that room as it is, with the things in it, we will make a reduction in the rent. If you will let us keep it as it is?” he repeated, with a curious pleading intensity. “You are alone. The house will be big enough for you without that room, will it not, Monsieur?”
Of course, I consented at once. If they wished to keep the room as it was, they were to do so, by all means.
“Thank you, thank you very much. My wife will be grateful to you,” he said.
For a little while longer we drove on without speaking. Presently, “You are our first tenant. We have never let the house before,” he volunteered.
“Ah? Have you had it long?” I asked.
“I built it. I built it, five, six, years ago,” said he. Then, after a pause, he added, “I built it for my daughter.”
His voice sank, as he said this. But one felt that it was only the beginning of something he wished to say.
I invited him to continue by an interested, “Oh?”
“You see what we are, my wife and I,” he broke out suddenly. “We are rough people, we are peasants. But my daughter, sir”—he put his hand on my knee, and looked earnestly into my face—“my daughter was as fine as satin, as fine as lace.”
He turned back to his horse, and again drove for a minute or two in silence. At last, always with his eyes on the horse’s ears, “There was not a lady in this country finer than my daughter,” he went on, speaking rapidly, in a thick voice, almost as if to himself. “She was beautiful, she had the sweetest character, she had the best education. She was educated at the convent, in Rouen, at the Sacré Cour. Six years—from twelve to eighteen—she studied at the convent. She knew English, sir—your language. She took prizes for history. And the piano! Nobody living can touch the piano as my daughter could. Well,” he demanded abruptly, with a kind of fierceness, “was a rough farm-house good enough for her?” He answered his own question. “No, Monsieur. You would not soil fine lace by putting it in a dirty box. My daughter was finer than lace. Her hands were softer than Lyons velvet. And oh,” he cried, “the sweet smell they had, her hands! It was good to smell her hands. I used to kiss them and smell them, as you would smell a rose.” His voice died away at the reminiscence, and there was another interval of silence. By-and-by he began again, “I had plenty of money. I was the richest farmer of this neighbourhood. I sent to Rouen for the best architect they have there. Monsieur Clermont, the best architect of Rouen, laureate of the Fine Arts School of Paris, he built that house for my daughter; he built it and furnished it, to make it fit for a countess, so that when she came home for good from the convent she should have a home worthy of her. Look at this, Monsieur. Would the grandest palace in the world be too good for her?”