To this room came daily little Péron, the clockmaker’s adopted child, to learn his lessons out of Père Antoine’s primer, and to spend a laborious hour copying from the Gospels, that he might learn his Bible and his penmanship at the same time. It was a pretty sight to see the rosy-faced, dark-eyed boy sitting by the pale, studious priest and taking his lesson soberly. Péron was a good scholar, and willing enough except on occasions when the shouts of children at play made his ears tingle and his heart throb; but he had never been allowed to join in those rough sports, so he bore the ordeal with patience, and only sighed more heavily at the task. He loved his teacher, as many other people loved Père Antoine, and he had a quick mind. The surroundings, too, were an incentive; he longed to be able to read all those books, those beautiful books which he was allowed to look at and to handle with a care that had been instilled by constant teaching and example. By the time he was ten years old he could read both French and Latin fairly well, and by spelling out the longer words could gather the meaning of most of the books which he especially loved to look at. These were the older volumes, with gayly decorated borders, some of great beauty and a few having miniatures en camaïeu or en grisaille after the fashion of the time of Charles VI. There was one, the “Heures de la Croix,” which was curiously bound in white silk with sacred emblems upon it, and encased in a red “chemise,” a kind of pocket in which books were kept, and which was made of silk, velvet, or sandal-wood, as occasion might require. Naturally, the books which attracted the boy were those most gorgeously bound or emblazoned with pictures of saints and martyrs, such as the “Livre d’Heures,” “Les Miracles de Notre Dame,” the illuminated antiphonaries and missals. He had even tried to spell out the “Commentaries of St. Jerome” and “Boèce on Consolation,” this last because it was bound in green “Dampmas cloth” and very beautifully embroidered. He was familiar, too, with every printer’s and bookseller’s mark, and these were then curious enough, from the two leopards of Simon Vostre to the six-oared galley of Galliot de Pré, bookseller of Paris in 1531, nearly a hundred years before Cardinal de Richelieu. But it was these old books, whose capital letters had been decorated by the illuminator in many colors, which pleased Péron, and not any of the more modern volumes. Solid and somewhat dreary books for a child to spell a lesson from, but none the less helpful in the struggle; and so faithful was the pupil that there was seldom a day that Père Antoine did not send him away with some word of commendation. And praise from the priest meant more than the wondering admiration of Madame Michel, who regarded the boy as a marvel of erudition for his years; and so he was, for a child of his condition in the world. So ready was he to learn, and so prone to meditation, that Jacques des Horloges occasionally grumbled out a fear that he might be made a better priest than a soldier, for strangely enough the clockmaker never seemed to entertain a thought of training Péron as an apprentice at his own trade.
It was the child’s custom to talk more to the priest than to any one else. In the shop on the Rue de la Ferronnerie he confined his confidential communications to M. de Turenne, but on the Rue de Bethisi he found his tongue, and many times Père Antoine turned his face aside to hide a smile, too wise to wound the boy’s feelings. This was the secret of his power, for a child both dreads and hates ridicule. It was therefore to the priest that he carried the doubts and the curiosity awakened by his visit to the Château de Nançay. Père Antoine knew nothing of the journey to Poissy, and was unprepared for the sudden questions which his pupil propounded. The boy had been reading laboriously from “Les Petites Heures,” guided by his teacher’s pencil, when he stopped and turned his large eyes upon him.
“Père Antoine,” he said slowly, “who died in the room next the tower at the great château near Poissy?”
The priest leaned back in his chair, an expression of intense astonishment crossing his face, instantly followed by one of sorrow so sharp that the pupils of his eyes contracted as if with pain.
“Who told you of Poissy?” he asked quietly.
“I have been there,” Péron declared with an air of conscious pride; “Maître Jacques took me on horseback. We rode a long way and saw the fair in the forest.”
“The fête at St. Germain-en-Laye?” said Père Antoine. “Did you like the green fields and the flowers, Péron?”
The child looked down; he was thinking of the bunch of violets which he had brought home surreptitiously and hidden in his cupboard; he was ashamed to keep anything that had been thrown at him as if he were a beggar or a vagrant.
“I should like to live always in the green fields,” he said; “they are so much prettier than the stone walls of the Rue de la Ferronnerie.”
Père Antoine sighed, laying his hand softly on the bent head with one of his rare caresses.