“Not back at all! Has Mr Goulburn sold it?” young Ashton said, and his changed countenance grew long. He was as much disappointed as she was startled; and for a moment both looked, though from very different reasons, as though not at all indisposed to mingle their tears.
“I don’t know,” said Helen. She looked away from him, her voice shook,—there was trouble indescribable in her face. And he remembered that he had been gone for four years; that he had not heard very much about them for some time back; that many changes might happen, especially in the fortunes of a man in business, however great he might be, and apparently beyond the assaults of fortune. What could young Ashton say or do to show his sympathy? He did not even know how far he might inquire.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. Helen looked up at him timidly, and gave him a little nod of assent, and a faint smile. She granted him his pardon freely. She thanked him for the feeling in his face, but she said nothing more. The secret was not hers, and she did not even know what the secret was. Meanwhile her father had begun to see what was going on. He had looked furtively from the corner of his eyes at the stranger, and had ended by remembering who he was; and he did not know what young Ashton knew, where he had come from, what he might be doing there. When he saw that Helen was fully engaged in conversation, he got up softly and walked away. The sight of a face he had once known made his heart beat wildly, and filled him with a sickening sensation. He went out by a door behind, so as never to come within the stranger’s range of vision. What did he want here? and what would the girl tell him? Would she have the sense to hold her tongue? though, indeed, the very sight of her would be enough if young Ashton knew. He began, without a moment’s delay, to put back his clothes into his portmanteau, and prepare again for flight. Who would have thought that such a thing could happen here? Had the danger been greater, he would have understood. For the sudden appearance of pursuers in search of him, he was always prepared, but not for the ludicrous simplicity of a peril like this; a neighbour’s son! What evil genius had brought him here? It seemed a very long time before Helen came up-stairs. It had relieved her to see her father disappear, and she had yielded to the pleasure of talking to her contemporary, her old friend (as she thought). But after all, in about ten minutes she had held out her hand to him timidly, rising up as she did so, to go away. “But I shall see you to-morrow?” he said. She only smiled faintly and said, “Perhaps,” but even as she said so shook her head. In her heart she felt certain that they would leave Sainte-Barbe that night.
And so they did. In France all the great trains go by night; there was one very late which called at Sainte-Barbe, on the way to Paris. The clatter and clang of the omnibus which met this train disturbed the whole town at midnight so much, that M. le Maire had set every kind of machinery in motion to have it discontinued; but as the convenience of the two extremities of the railway, Marseilles and Paris, forbade this, the authorities paid no attention to the protest of Sainte-Barbe. The few guests in the Lion d’Or felt a double grievance this night, in that the omnibus, after making its usual noisy circuit from the stables, waited, pawing and champing for five minutes, under the porte cochère, having baggage placed upon it, and carrying away travellers at that hour. Who could they be? Oh, les Anglais: that went without saying. Certainly les Anglais; they were the sort of people who would do such a thing simply because it was unlike the rest of the world—though it was the action of a fiend, the landlady exclaimed afterwards, to take such an infant from her rest at such an hour. Young Ashton was still astir, smoking his cigar out of the window with a quite unnecessary regard for the feelings of his hosts, when the omnibus turned out of the great doorway. He thought he saw a pale face look up at his window in the uncertain glimmer of the moon, which was dim with flying clouds, and he let his cigar drop on the head of an ostler below in consternation. Could it be that they had gone away? “Gone away, because I am here!” this young man said to himself. But it seemed a thing too impossible to be true.
CHAPTER V.
It was scarcely daylight of the ruddy but chill October morning, when the travellers set out from the station at which they had been dropped. They had been left there to wait for the diligence, which only left on the arrival of another train from Paris. All had been black and silent at the little station of Montdard, when they were shot out, to the dismay of two or three half-awakened officials, who regarded them with alarm and suspicion. It was very rarely indeed that any one arrived in the middle of the night at Montdard, except from Paris, the train from which did not come in till five o’clock. What were they to do in the meantime? Mr Goulburn had got little Janey in his arms fast asleep. With her dangling feet, and her pale little head thrown back on his shoulder, she looked more like a sick young woman, long and wasted, than a child. Helen followed closely as a shadow, asking no questions, following every indication of her father’s will, silent and watchful, cold and miserable. The gloom around and the suspicious looks of the railway men, and the cold that went to her heart, all began to be familiar. It did not even occur to her to think of the existence which had ended about ten days ago, the life of warmth and luxury and softness, which knew no disturbance, which was waited upon by assiduous servants, and spent in such careful guardianship. She thought of it no more. What she wished for was not her draped and curtained room at Fareham, with its carpets in which the feet sank, but a comfortable bench somewhere, or rush-bottomed chair in a corner out of the wind, where she could get her ulster more closely about her, and put a shawl over Janey’s feet; or, as the very climax of comfort, another white-curtained wooden room with two little beds, where she could lie down with Janey next to her. Helen in her heart had bidden farewell to Fareham for ever and ever. She did not know even where they were going; and it gave her a gleam of comfort to hear her father explain to the sleepy yet vigilant porter in his blouse, that he was going to Latour, where there was to be a sale of the woods on the property of the late Count Bernard de Vieux-bois. Mr Goulburn explained that he had heard of this only at the last moment, and that, as he had no time to lose, he had been obliged to bring his daughters with him, though the journey was so fatiguing for the little one. The French heart is very open to children, and the man with the blouse managed to open the door of a dismal salle, where at least la petite would be sheltered from the cold wind. How kind they are to Janey! Helen thought. The rough peasant-porter with his bristly beard, a man who might have figured in a revolutionary riot, and probably had done so, one time or another, caressed a floating lock of her fair hair which fell from her father’s shoulder with his rough hand, with the softest look of reverence and pity. “Pauvre petite!”—he brought an old braided overcoat, fine, but faded, from an inner room to lay on her feet—“It would have been better to leave her à la maison,” he said. À la maison! People who know no better, say the French have no word that means home; but Helen felt this word go through and through her like a sword. Where was the house to which Janey belonged, where she could find her little bed and her little corner by right? As for Mr Goulburn, he put himself on the bench against the wall in the most painfully constrained attitude to make Janey comfortable. His face, as he looked down upon the child, was lighted up with the most trembling tenderness. He had wronged many people and deprived many children of bread, but he loved his own with a passionate devotion. He could not separate himself from his child. Helen, so watchful beside him, saw it all with an ache of wonder in her heart. She did not understand, perhaps, that clinging of a guilty man to the one thing innocent and sweet in his life. She was sorry for her poor little sister thus dragged about the world, and perhaps a little sorry for herself. If it was necessary for him to fly from one place to another, why should little Janey be made to fly too? And Helen turned her thoughts back upon the Lion d’Or with unspeakable regret. It was not an attractive place, but still it was shelter and safety. What thoughts were going on in her father’s mind, who could say? There were other places of refuge which would have been safer than France, but he had little time to choose. It was not much more than chance which had determined the route they took in leaving England, and he had remembered Sainte-Barbe as the most unfrequented place he had ever seen. But the village which he had chosen must surely be out of the world if ever village was. Among the hills of Burgundy, above the vineyards, beyond the reach of commerce, in the country where the old Gauls fought, and where even the Prussians had not penetrated—what could be more safe? and yet who could guarantee its safety? “We should have been better in Spain,” he was saying to himself.
The diligence started at five o’clock for Latour. It was speedily filled, in the little interior, with five or six young peasant-women in their white caps, each with a baby, little foundlings, or the children of poor shopkeepers and workpeople in Paris, brought to the country to be reared—the healthy hills of la Haute Bourgogne being much approved for that purpose. The travellers managed with great difficulty to get possession for themselves of the banquette, a covered seat like a sort of phaeton, with leathern curtains capable of closing in front, which occupies the place behind the coachman in these rural vehicles. They had ten long leagues to traverse before they got to their journey’s end. Poor little Janey, very pale and shivering, lost for the first time her childish adaptability, and whimpered pitifully, with cold feet, and the wretchedness of her disturbed rest; and a more melancholy and jaded party never confronted the morning mists. They rattled along as in a dream, seeing the country gradually unfold itself, now just visible in the faint grey of the dawn, anon developing into clearer light, the hills rising black against the yellow east, then showing their grass slopes and broken bits of cliff as the sun struck here and there a long golden dart driving away the shadows. A crisp sprinkling of hoarfrost was upon the fields, and the roads were hard, and resounded under the horses’ feet, which made sound enough, with all the jingling of the rude harness, and all the creaking of the springless coach, for a whole cavalcade. In front of the banquette, beside the coachman, sat a large priest and a man wrapped in the thick blue overcoat with its braided collar which the French peasant loves. The talk of these two was all of the old Count de Vieux-bois’s woods. The hills between which the road passed were entirely bare of trees, and Count Bernard had been the subject of much pleasantry, the priest said, when he planted his lands with an unprofitable crop of forest. But time had proved Count Bernard to be right. These voices went on dreamily in Helen’s ear, making a sort of drowsy song to the accompaniment of the wheels and the horses’ hoofs. But Mr Goulburn listened closely to all the heavy talk. The impulse of trade was strong in him, and the idea of turning over money now in his present downfall and fugitive condition roused him. He had seized upon the pretext, catching it up at the moment of necessity from an advertisement in one of the papers, to give an excuse for his hurried journey. But the idea pleased him the more he dwelt upon it. He listened with the greatest attention to all that was being said; he recovered the activity and energy of mind that was natural to him. To outwit fate in such a way would be in itself a kind of triumph. He did not disturb little Janey’s head, which lay on his shoulder, but he withdrew his arm from her as his thoughts quickened. A man of business is always a man of business, however direful may be the plight in which he finds himself. Pale, uncared for, haggard as he looked in the morning light, his bosom’s lord sat more lightly upon its throne than it had done since he left England. So far even as appearances went, there was this good in Mr Goulburn’s false decorations of hair, that they did not grow in the night.
They passed through a number of villages, changing horses with much noise and clangour here and there—a proceeding which cheered up Janey almost as much as the thoughts of a bargain did her father; and through one quaint and wonderful town, all walled and embattled, where the lanterns still hung across the streets as in the days when aristocrats were hanged by that easy method of getting rid of an undesirable intruder; and by dreary old châteaux, grey and homely, without any softening of trees or park to link them to the surrounding country. By-and-by, after a long, long waste of road, they came upon the masses of trees which had hung upon the horizon like clouds, and which showed where Count Vieux-bois’s estates began. Beautiful feathery larches, big pines, and sturdy oaks clothed the slopes, and changed the whole character of the country. And after a while the diligence rattled into a long village street with a church at one end and a quaint old castle at the other, more imposing than anything they had yet seen. The street was irregular, now broad, now narrow, widening out in the centre into a kind of place or square, in which there were two or three white houses, several storeys high, with green persiennes half closed. The rest of the place consisted of cottages, mostly thatched and humble, with a little post-office, and a cavernous shop in which were all kinds of possible and impossible goods. The “general merchant” of France is different from him of England, just as sabots and blouses are different from country-made shoes and fustian coats. And at Latour the sabots and the blouses were universal. M. le Curé himself wore a pair over his shoes in bad weather, leaving them at the door of every house he visited. The diligence stopped with a jarring shock and noise, suddenly drawn up before the humble door of another Lion d’Or, a popular sign in the district. But this one was little more than an auberge, a village public-house, with its description posted up in straggling letters, ICI on loge à Pied et à CHEVAL. There was no porte cochère, no courtyard to mark the importance of the hotel, but only a salle à manger looking out upon the pavement, low-roofed and dark, and smelling as usual, but worse than usual, of bad cigars and the pot au feu.
There were several men seated at the long table eating their breakfast when Helen and little Janey followed their father into the room; one or two others who had finished their meal were smoking their cigars—they were all talking in high voices, harsh to unaccustomed ears. The farther end, the only unoccupied place, was far from the window, and in a kind of twilight. Little Janey grasped her father’s hand tight till the little soft fingers almost hurt him. “Oh, take me away,” she cried, “take me away! I won’t do there. Take me home, papa—take me to my own home.”
He took her in his arms and carried her to the quiet corner. “My little pet,” he said, “I wish I could; but it’s a long, long way off, Janey. You must try and be contented here.”