She nodded and answered him, to his surprise, in broken but comprehensible English.
"I was your mother's servant three years, m'sieur—a very little child. I am nearly sixty years old, but my memory is good."
"You remember my father, then?"
"If I remember him! Do children forget such things?"
"Were you here when he died, madame?"
She clasped her hands together almost as one in prayer. Her voice was a sing-song, like that of a child reciting a learned lesson.
"It was at nine o'clock on the Friday night. Ah! what a day, m'sieur! There had been cannon since the Sunday, and the streets full of mad people. I looked down from my window and saw the dead carried away. I was cold with a child's curiosity. When night came, m'sieur would not dine. He had been out all day helping the wounded, and all he would take was a little soup and wine. Then he went out again while madame and I were up in the front room watching the fires burn and listening to the cannon. M'sieur, the heavens opened that night! My soul shrank at the sight; I thought the end of the world had come. And I was but a child, and had lived such a little while."
She paused and breathed almost convulsively, as though suffering the terrible hours again. Faber watched her without flinching. His swift imagination moved out there in the streets where his father worked amid the wounded.
"And afterwards, madame—afterwards?" said Bertie Morris in French.
She looked up at him almost angrily, the thread of the inspiration of memory broken.