“Ah! that is because you don’t read the lessons. You should read the lessons every day,” said Janey, delighted with her rôle of counsellor, “like nurse, papa! How funny it would be when nurse went up-stairs and found only dolly in my little bed, and Janey gone away!” She laughed, and then looked at him with a look of examination more keen than that timid, wistful look of Helen’s. “But I like this,” she added; “it is funny. Why do the little children wear caps? And what funny little shoes, that make such a noise! And why do they all speak French, papa? Who taught them to speak French?” Janey, in her fresh wonder, put all the threadbare questions that everybody has put before. She skipped upon the rough stones by her father’s side, holding his hand tight; and the three people who were in the great square (besides the soldiers) looked upon the pair with kindly eyes, and pointed out to each other that the newly arrived Anglais worshipped his child. They have the domestic instinct above all—they adore their infants. “But tiens,” they said; “is it madame the young wife who follows with a look so maussade?”
The sympathies of these spectators were all with the father and the child. Helen followed like a creature in a dream. The great, silent, empty, open cathedral, with its altars all dressed in artificial lilies, and the scent of incense still in the air, came into her silent picture-gallery with all its details distinct, yet strange; and the long line of boulevard with its trees, and the white houses with their veiled windows, and the clanking of the sabots, and the little soldiers in the archway. They gave her no pleasure as of a novel sight, but they completed the vague, feverish world around her, so dim to her mental perception, yet keenly clear to her outward eye in the sharp blueness of the sky, the more vivid tints of an atmosphere without smoke. They went over all the town thus, mounting to the ramparts, going through all the narrow streets: Janey dancing along with her hand in her father’s, Helen following, silent, like a creature walking in her sleep, taking in all the novel scene only as a background to the pain of her soul.
CHAPTER IV.
The little city of Sainte-Barbe was the quaintest and most slumbrous of little French towns, and that is saying a great deal. The walls were intact and in good order, supplying the inhabitants with pleasant walks, which few people took advantage of. Their pretence at defence was antiquated and useless, but then there was nothing to defend nor any enemy intending to attack. From the ramparts you looked out upon a great plain bounded towards the north with hills, and dropping southwards into those low swelling slopes and hillocks which form the best vineyards. Sainte-Barbe was on the edge of a rich wine country verging upon the Côte d’Or; but there were no vineyards close to the town, which rose up, with its cluster of towers, its high walls and peaked roofs, out of the plain. It is to be supposed that in former days it had been a centre of more important life, for the cathedral was large enough for a metropolis, and the great town-hall, with its fine belfry, looked like one of the warlike municipalities of the middle ages. These two great buildings stood and sunned themselves, resting from whatever labours they might once have known, in a sort of dull beatitude—the one with half-a-dozen erratic worshippers coming and going, the other with three little red-legged soldiers under its grand gateway. Now and then a tourist who had heard of these buildings stopped for a few hours on his way from Italy to Paris to see them; but the fame of them was fast fading out, now that nobody thinks of posting from Paris to Dijon, and it was the rarest thing in the world to see a stranger in the streets. For the first week the townsfolk said among themselves, “Tiens! voilà les Anglais!” when Mr Goulburn and his daughters appeared; but at the end of that time became familiar with the appearance of them. It was a curious life which they led at the Lion d’Or—in a quaint discomfort, which may be amusing to tourists in high spirits, but to the timid and troubled English girl was the strangest travesty of existence. The mixture of small discomforts with great troubles is perhaps the combination above all others which procures most entire and complete confusion in life. And the want of a room to sit in other than that wooden bedroom, where every movement of a chair jarred upon the bare planks, began after a while to mingle in Helen’s mind with all the painful circumstances of their flight, so that she scarcely knew what it was that made her so wretched, so disjoined from all her past. Twice a day the little party ate in company with some of the best people in Sainte-Barbe. M. le Notaire, who was unmarried, an old bachelor, and M. le Maire, who was a widower, took their meals regularly at the Lion d’Or. They tied their napkins round their bottle of wine when they left after one meal, and tucked them under their chins when they next sat down. On Sunday there was an officer who came in his uniform, with his sword clanking, who impressed Janey with great awe, accompanied by his wife and their little boy and bonne, who sat down next her charge and dined too, cutting the child’s meat for him, and having a little wine poured out for her by her mistress from the family bottle. Janey could not eat her own dinner, so absorbed was she in watching this party. She pulled Helen’s dress to call her attention a dozen times in a minute. “Oh! what would nurse say?” she cried, with big eyes of astonishment. “Look, Helen! he has some of that that you would not let me have, and he is so little—much more little than me. And he has dot wine: and oh, look! he has put his knife in his mouth—he will kill himself. And now he has his hand in, the nasty little boy!”
“Cela amuse mademoiselle de voir manger mon petit,” said the lady across the table in a tone of offence.
Helen blushed as if she had been caught in a mortal sin. “Oh no, madame—only—elle ne sait pas——” she murmured in apology.
“He has dot his knife in his mouth, and that will kill him,” said Janey. “She ought to tell him. Oh, little boy, little boy! couteau—bouche!” she cried, with the anxiety of her age to put everything right.
Mr Goulburn tried to apologise. “My little girl thinks it is her business to set everybody right. She takes it upon her to regulate my conduct and manners. I hope you will forgive the little impertinent. Besides, she is astonished to see the bonne by your side, madame, at table. It is contrary to our English usage. Forgive her,” he said.
“Oh, de rien, monsieur,” said the French lady, politely. “We all know that England is the most aristocratic of countries. Do not apologise; there is great good in that—the canaille are kept in their place.”
“The canaille are in all places, madame,” said M. le Maire. “They are among us when we least suspect it. Persons of the best manners, the most irreproachable in appearance——”