"Anne," said Claude, quietly, "let me make known to you my wife."
"Your wife!"
Deborah, with rather a pathetic little smile, courtesied low.
CHAPTER III
November Thirteenth
It was thus that Claude brought home his wife. Two months before he had been married to her in Dr. Carroll's chapel by Aimé St. Quentin, with all Annapolis to witness; and next day he left America on the Baltimore, in company with Deborah, and her very modest little travelling coffer. Truly bridal weather was theirs. The skies were fair, seas calmly blue, and continuous light western winds, sent by the very gods themselves, carried them straight to the English coast. All told, they were on the ship but six weeks—six strange, half-terrible weeks to the colonial girl. She was learning to know her husband, and he her. In a way, not always, but by spells, Deborah was happy. She loved the sea, and she grew to be very fond of the ship, clinging to it during the last days of the voyage as she had not clung to her far Maryland home. She had become dimly apprehensive of the life into which she was going, of which Claude had lately told her so much more than he could do during their comradeship in Annapolis. He also made her speak with him much in the French tongue, which she did readily enough at first, in a manner caught from St. Quentin, her first instructor. But when it came to using no English, to hearing none from Claude, her tongue faltered, and she would remain silent for hours at a time rather than appear awkward before him. Claude was very gentle. He made her finally understand, however, how much easier it would be for her to make mistakes now, than to do so in the land to which they were going. He told her the story of Marie Leczinska, who had acquired all her knowledge of the language of her adopted country from a waiting-maid who spoke a Provençal patois, and how the Queen was ridiculed by all the Court till she studied secretly, many hours a day, with her confessor, and was now, when she chose to exert herself, one of the most excellent linguists in France. So Deborah took heart, and tried more bravely, until, by the time they had crossed the English Channel and landed in Calais, none but a close observer could have found a flaw in her ordinary conversation.
Claude de Mailly himself passed a very contented six weeks on the Atlantic. A day or two after his marriage the realization of that marriage, its haste, its rashness, its short-sightedness, the fact that his wife had not one drop of blue blood in her veins, came over him in such a wave that he was half drowned. What was it that he had done? Who was he carrying back with him to the most fastidious, the most critical Court in Christendom? A bourgeois! A Provençal! A child! And Claude, with angry, anxious injustice, for three days avoided his wife, and barely saw her except at meals. The thing that reattracted his attention to her was the fact that, during this time, Deborah never made the slightest attempt to force her presence upon him. If she were unhappy, he did not know it. He never saw her weep; he heard no word of complaint. And this unusual thing piqued his interest. On the fourth morning he found her sitting alone in the stern of the vessel, gazing back at the western horizon with far-off eyes. Seating himself beside her, he leaned over and took one of her hands in his. She turned towards him instantly, looked at him for a moment, and then drew it quietly away.
"You needn't do that," she said.
And then it was that Claude knew how glad he was to do it—to have the right to do it. And thereupon he threw care to the winds and became her slave. He, too, regretted the end of the voyage, when it came. Nevertheless, he had, in the past, suffered severely from homesickness, and Paris, Versailles, Henri, Elise, and, more than all of them together, his other cousin, were constantly in his mind. He dreamed and talked of them when he slept, and, if Deborah had been proficient enough in French to make out the half-coherent sentences that passed her husband's lips at night, she would probably have learned still more about her approaching life in this way.
Unquestionably, Deborah dreaded the new life. She had reason to; not alone because of the natural shyness attendant on a country girl's first appearance at a great Court. She knew that Claude's whole existence was bound up there. She believed that he cared rather more than he actually did about this life that she had never lived. In consequence, upon the drive of several days from Calais to Paris, Deborah grew more and more silent, more and more definitely apprehensive, with each new stage. On the evening of November 8th they arrived at Issy, and there spent the night. Next morning Claude rose with the sun, some time before Deborah even awoke. He went outside of their post-house and walked delightedly through the familiar streets, listening to his own language spoken with his own accent on every hand, discovering well-known shops and buildings, and returning in the highest spirits to Deborah at nine o'clock. They had their chocolate and rolls together, Deborah eating little and silently, Claude jesting and laughing continually till she was roused out of her apathy by his thoughtlessness towards her. It was not, however, till they were rolling along the Paris road that she spoke—in English: