It was the first effort of either of them to address me in English. As I soon knew, the warning had exhausted her vocabulary. The baroness went below in a moment. Then the one who had spoken came over and sat near me, smiling.
"She does not know you can speak French," said she, whispering and addressing me in her native tongue, as the other tiptoed to the door. "On your life, do not let her know. She will never permit us to see you. She will keep us under lock and key. She knows we cannot speak English, so she thinks we cannot talk with you. It is a great lark. Are you better?"
What was I to do under orders from such authority? As they bade me, I hope you will say, for that is what I did. I had no easy conscience about it, I must own. Day after day I took my part in the little comedy. They came in Quaker-faced if the baroness were at hand, never speaking, except to her, until she had gone. Then—well, such animation, such wit, such bright eyes, such brilliancy, I have never seen or heard.
My wound was healing. War and stern duty were as things of the far past. The grand passion had hold of me. I tried to fight it down, to shake it off, but somehow it had the claws of a tiger. There was an odd thing about it all: I could not for the life of me tell which of the two charming girls I loved the better. It may seem incredible; I could not understand it myself. They looked alike, and yet they were quite different. Louison was a year older and of stouter build. She had more animation also, and always a quicker and perhaps a brighter answer. The other had a face more serious, albeit no less beautiful, and a slower tongue. She had little to say, but her silence had much in it to admire, and, indeed, to remember. They appealed to different men in me with equal force, I did not then know why. A perplexing problem it was, and I had to think and suffer much before I saw the end of it, and really came to know what love is and what it is not.
[Illustration: "I could not for the life of me tell which of the two charming girls I loved the better.">[
Shortly I was near the end of this delightful season of illness. I had been out of bed a week. The baroness had read to me every day, and had been so kind that I felt a great shame for my part in our deception. Every afternoon she was off in a boat or in her caleche, and had promised to take me with her as soon as I was able to go.
"You know," said she, "I am going to make you to stay here a full month. I have the consent of the general."
I had begun to move about a little and enjoy the splendor of that forest home. There were, indeed, many rare and priceless things in it that came out of her chateau in France. She had some curious old clocks, tokens of ancestral taste and friendship. There was one her grandfather had got from the land of Louis XIV.—Le Grand Monarque, of whom my mother had begun to tell me as soon as I could hear with understanding. Another came from the bedchamber of Philip II of Spain—a grand high clock that had tolled the hours in that great hall beyond my door. A little thing, in a case of carved ivory, that ticked on a table near my bed, Moliere had given to one of her ancestors, and there were many others of equal interest.
Her walls were adorned with art treasures of the value of which I had little appreciation those days. But I remember there were canvases of Correggio and Rembrandt and Sir Joshua Reynolds. She was, indeed, a woman of fine taste, who had brought her best to America; for no one had a doubt, in the time of which I am writing, that the settlement of the Compagnie de New York would grow into a great colony, with towns and cities and fine roadways, and the full complement of high living. She had built the Hermitage,—that was the name of the mansion,—fine and splendid as it was, for a mere temporary shelter pending the arrival of those better days.
She had a curious fad, this hermit baroness of the big woods. She loved nature and was a naturalist of no poor attainments. Wasps and hornets were the special study of this remarkable woman. There were at least a score of their nests on her front portico—big and little, and some of them oddly shaped. She hunted them in wood and field. When she found a nest she had it moved carefully after nightfall, under a bit of netting, and fastened somewhere about the gables. Around the Hermitage there were many withered boughs and briers holding cones of wrought fibre, each a citadel of these uniformed soldiers of the air and the poisoned arrow. They were assembled in colonies of yellow, white, blue, and black wasps, and white-faced hornets. She had no fear of them, and, indeed, no one of the household was ever stung to my knowledge. I have seen her stand in front of her door and feed them out of a saucer. There were special favorites that would light upon her palm, overrunning its pink hollow and gorging at the honey-drop.