“You would say my Aunt Margaret,” he rejoined. “She is quite well. She and the major and the children will make the voyage to Europe next year.”
After the eau sucrée came to an end, the doctor turned him over to me, telling me to take care of him till dinner-time, which that day would be early. Van Rheyn said he should like to unpack his box, and we went upstairs together. Growing confidential over the unpacking, he gave me scraps of information touching his home and family, the mention of one item leading to another.
His baptismal name in full, he said, was Charles Jean Aberleigh; his father’s was Jean Marie. Their home was a très joli château close to Rouen: in five minutes you could walk there. It was all much changed since his mother died (he seemed to have loved her with a fervent love and to revere her memory); the last thing he did on coming away for England was to take some flowers to her grave. It was thought in Rouen that his father was going to make a second marriage with one of the Demoiselles de Tocqueville, whom his Aunt Claribelle did not like. His Aunt Claribelle, his father’s sister, had come to live at the château when his mother died; but if that Thérèsine de Tocqueville came into the house she would quit it. The Demoiselles de Tocqueville had hardly any dot,—which would be much against the marriage, Aunt Claribelle thought, and bad for his father; because when he, Charles, should be the age of twenty-one, the money came to him; it had been his mother’s, and was so settled: and his father’s own property was but small. Of course he should wish his father to keep always as much as he pleased, but Aunt Claribelle thought the English trustees would not allow that. Aunt Claribelle’s opinion was, that his father had at length decided to send him to a pension in England while he made the marriage; but he (Charles) knew that his mother had wished him to finish his education in England, and to go to one of the two colleges to which English gentlemen went.
“Here comes old Fontaine,” I interrupted at this juncture, seeing his arrival from the window.
Van Rheyn looked up from his shirts, which he was counting. He seemed to have the tidiest ways in the world. “Who is it that you say? Fontaine?”
“Monsieur Fontaine, the French master. You can talk away with him in your native tongue as much as you like, Van Rheyn.”
“But I have come here to speak the English tongue, not the French,” debated he, looking at me seriously. “My father wishes me to speak and read it without any accent; and I wish it also.”
“You speak it very well already.”
“But you can hear that it is not my native tongue—that I am a foreigner.”
“Yes.”