CHAPTER III SIMON'S OLD-FASHIONED NIGHT IN TOWN
Madame Rossignol was a charming old lady of sixty, a production of France—no other country could have produced her. She lived in Duke Street, Leicester Square, supporting herself and her daughter Cerise by translating English books into French. Cerise did millinery. Madame combined absolute innocence with absolute instinct. She knew all about things; her innocence was not ignorance, it was purity—rising above a knowledge of the world, and disdaining to look at evil.
She was dreadfully poor.
Her love for Cerise was like a disease always preying upon her. Should she die, what would happen to Cerise?
Behold these together clasped in each other's arms. Set in the shabby sitting-room, it might have been a scene at the Port St. Martin.
"Oh, mother," murmured the girl, "is he not good!"
"He is more than good," said Madame. "Most surely the bon Dieu sent him to be your guardian angel."
"Is he not charming?" went on Cerise, unlinking herself from the maternal embrace and touching her hair into order again with a little laugh. "So different from the leaden-faced English, so gay and yet so—so——"
"There is a something—I do not know what—about him," said the old lady; "something of Romance. Is it not like a little tale of Madame Perichon's or a little play of Monsieur Baree? Might he not just have come in as in one of those? You go out, lose your purse, are lost. I sit waiting for you at your non-return in this wilderness of London; you return, but not alone. With you comes the Marquis de Grandcourt, who bows and says, 'Madame, I return you your daughter; I ask in return your friendship. I am alone, like you; let us then be friends.' I reply, 'Monsieur, you behold our poverty, but you cannot behold our hearts or the gratitude in my mind.' What a little story!"