[CHAPTER VII.]
A DEADLOCK.
"I found the fullest summer here
Between these sloping meadow-hills and yon;
And came all beauty then, from dawn to dawn,
Whether the tide was veiled or flowing clear."
J. F. H.
Three days later, Vesper had only two friends in Sleeping Water,—that is, only two open friends. He knew he had a secret one in Mrs. Rose à Charlitte, who waited on him with the air of a sorrowing saint.
The open friends were the child Narcisse, and Emmanuel Victor de la Rive, the mail-driver. Rose could not keep her child away from the handsome stranger. Narcisse had fallen into a passionate adoration for him, and even in his dreams prattled of the Englishman from Boston.
On the third night of Vesper's stay in Sleeping Water a violent thunder-storm arose. Lying in his bed and watching the weird lighting up of the Bay under the vivid discharges of electricity, he heard a fumbling at his door-knob, and, upon unlocking the door, discovered Narcisse, pale and seraphic, in a long white nightgown, and with beads of distress on his forehead.
"Mr. Englishman," he said to Vesper, who now understood his childish lingo, "I come to you, for my mother sleeps soundly, and she cannot tell me when she wakes,—the trees and the flowers, are they not in a terrible fright?" and, holding up his gown with one hand, he went swiftly to the window, and pointed out towards the willows, writhing and twisting in the wind, and the gentle flowers laid low on the earth.
A yellow glare lighted up the room, a terrible peal of thunder shook the house, but the child did not quail, and stood waiting for an answer to his question.
"Come here," said Vesper, calmly, "and I will explain to you that the thunder does not hurt them, and that they have a way of bending before the blast."
Narcisse immediately drew his pink heels up over the side of Vesper's bed. He was unspeakably soothed by the merest word of this stranger, in whose nervous sensitiveness and reserve he found a spirit more congenial to his own than in that of his physically perfect mother.