CHAPTER XII.
IN COURSE OF TIME.
For days, weeks, months the memory of lost Janey Fricker haunted Bessie Fairfax with a sweet melancholy. She missed her little friend exceedingly. She did not doubt that Janey would write, would return, and even a year of silence and absence did not cure her of regret and expectation. She was of a constant as well as a faithful nature, and had a thousand kind pleas and excuses for those she loved. It was impossible to believe that Janey had forgotten her, but Janey made no sign of remembrance.
Time and change! Time and change! How fast they get over the ground! how light the traces they leave behind them! At the next Christmas recess there was a great exodus of English girls. The Miss Hiloes went, and they had no successors. When Bessie wanted to talk of Janey and old days, she had to betake herself to Miss Foster. There was nobody else left who remembered Janey or her own coming to school.
As the time went on letters from Beechhurst were fewer and farther between; letters from Brook she had none, nor any mention of Harry Musgrave in her mother's. Her grandfather desired to wean her from early associations, and a mixture of pride and right feeling kept the Carnegies from whatever could be misconstrued into a wish to thwart him. No one came to see her from the Forest after that rash escapade of Harry Musgrave's. Her eighteenth birthday passed, and she was still kept at school both in school-time and holidays.
Madame Fournier, the genial canon, the kind curé, a few English acquaintances at Caen, a few French acquaintances at Bayeux, were very good to her. Especially she liked her visits to the canon's house in summer. Often, as the long vacation of her third year at Caen approached, she caught herself musing on the probability of her recall to England with a reluctancy full of doubts and fears. She had been so long away that she felt half forgotten, and when madame announced that once more she was to spend the autumn under her protection, she heard it without remonstrance, and, for the moment, with something like relief. But afterward, when the house was silent and the girls were all gone, the unbidden tears rose often to her eyes, and the yearning of home-sickness came upon her as strongly as in the early days of her exile.
Bayeux is a triste little city, and in hot weather a perfect sun-trap between its two hills. The river runs softly hidden amongst willows, and the dust rises in light clouds with scarce a breath of air. Yet glimpses of cool beautiful green within gates and over stone walls refresh the eyes; vines drape the placid rustic nook that calls itself the library; every other window in the streets is a garland or a posy, and through the doors ajar show vistas of oleanders, magnolias, pomegranates flowering in olive-wood tubs, and making sweet lanes and hedges across tiled courts to the pleasant gloom of the old houses.
Canon Fournier's house was in the neighborhood of the cathedral, and as secluded, green, and garlanded as any. Oftentimes in the day his man Launcelot watered the court-yard in agreeable zigzags. Bessie Fairfax, when she heard the cool tinkle of the shower upon the stones, always looked out to share the refreshment. The canon's salon was a double room with a portière between. Two windows gave upon the court and two upon a shaded, paved terrace, from which a broad flight of steps descended to the garden. The domain of the canon's housekeeper was at one end of this terrace, and there old Babette sat in the cool shelling peas, shredding beans, and issuing orders to Margot in the sultry atmosphere of the kitchen stove. Bessie, alone in the salon one August morning, heard the shrill monotone of her voice in the pauses of a day-dream. She had dropped her book because, try as she would to hold her attention to the story, her thoughts lost themselves continually, and were found again at every turning of the page astray somewhere about the Forest—about home.
"It is very strange! I cannot help thinking of them. I wonder whether anything is happening?" she said, and yielded to the subtle influence. She began to walk to and fro the salon. She went over in her mind many scenes; she recollected incidents so trivial that they had been long ago forgotten—how Willie had broken the wooden leg of little Polly's new Dutch doll (for surgical practice), and how Polly had raised the whole house with her lamentations. And then she fell to reckoning how old the boys would be now and how big, until suddenly she caught herself laughing through tears at that cruel pang of her own when, after submitting to be the victim of Harry Musgrave's electrical experiments, he had neglected to reward her with the anticipated kiss. "I wonder whether he remembers?—girls remember such silly things." In this fancy she stood still, her bright face addressed towards the court. Through the trees over the wall appeared the gray dome of the cathedral. Launcelot came sauntering and waving his watering-can. The stout figure of the canon issued from the doorway of a small pavilion which he called his omnibus, passed along under the shadow of the wall, and out into the glowing sun. Madame entered the salon, her light quick steps ringing on the parquet, her holiday voice clear as a carol, her holiday figure gay as a showy-plumaged bird.