The Count thought it a fine joke, and laughed uproariously. “She is just like her mother, Youle!” he remarked, twirling his fine moustache.
Julie handed her tempestuous child back to the nurse.
“If that is the way she behaves when her mother comes to see her,” she said, “I shall not come again.”
She kept her word to such good purpose that, eighteen months later, when the nurse married for a third time, and desired to take the child with her to her new home, letters to Julie’s address were returned undelivered. The errant mother had not even thought it worth her while to keep her child’s nurse informed of her movements.
The nurse’s new husband was a concierge, one of those indispensable people who open the doors of Paris buildings, lose letters, clean stairs, quarrel with flat-owners, and generally make themselves as much of a nuisance as possible. This particular specimen was a big, upstanding man with sandy hair, about forty years of age, or ten years younger than his bride.
He was then concierge at Number 65, rue de Provençe, in the heart of Paris, near where the Galeries Lafayette, the great stores, now stand. It was a dingy building, mostly devoted to commerce, and the concierge occupied one room on the first floor. This one room was bedroom, sitting-room and kitchen combined.
There was only one bed, a big four-poster, jammed against the window. There was also one kitchen table, on which he ate his meals; two chairs in varying stages of decrepitude; a small coal stove screened from the bed by a heavy velvet curtain—soiled legacy of some opulent tenant—and another small table, on which stood a wash-basin and pail. When water was wanted it was necessary to fetch it from a pump in the street.
It was into this sordid environment that little Sarah, “Flower-of-the-Milk,” now almost five years old, was brought willy-nilly by her foster-mother. There was no room to put a cot for the child, so she shared a fraction of the bed. She was quickly put to work by her new lord, who soon initiated her into the mysteries of floor-washing and door-knob polishing, while it was generally la petite Sarah, when water was wanted, who was commissioned to stagger down the stairs with the empty pail and return with the full one.
Living with two adults in this ill-ventilated, badly-lighted room—the sole window was one about twice the size of a ship’s port-hole—and forced to do work which might well have proved too much for a child twice her age, it is small wonder that Sarah was frequently ill.
She lost appetite and colour, and grew weak, while the anæmia, which the bracing air of the country had almost cured, returned. Her eyes grew listless and had large puffs under them, so that neighbours, who pitied the child, prophesied that her days would soon be over.