“Oh, papa,” said the child, “I want to do home! I want to do home! I don’t like it here. I don’t like—nothing at all but—home.”
“Janey, Janey!—speak to her, Helen. You will like it better after: the people are always very kind to you. And you are tired, my little love. You will like it better when you know——”
“I want to do home!” cried Janey; but the sudden odour of the soup put under her nose wrought a revolution in her mind. “And I am so hungry,” she said, her tears drying up. She raised her head from her father’s shoulder where she had been past all consolation the moment before—and slid down from his knee. Ah! why is six so much more easy to console than eighteen? or eighteen than fifty? might be said in other circumstances. But in the present case the father and the little child had both regained their spirits, and it was only Helen whose heart lay like a lump of lead in her breast.
That evening Mr Goulburn called her into the small room which he was to occupy, with an air of some embarrassment. There had been no sitting-room possible at Sainte-Barbe, yet it was practicable to occupy a corner in the salle à manger, when all was quiet there. But in the Lion d’Or at Latour it was never quiet. In the evening the villagers came in to consume slowly their sour piquette, or bitter chope, and fill the place with clouds of smoke; and the two crowded yet scantily furnished bedrooms, in which the strangers were lodged, were the only places in which they could talk. Mr Goulburn called Helen into his room. He was embarrassed, and did not know how to begin. Helen’s look of inquiry seemed to paralyse him. He stammered and hesitated and cleared his throat. At length he said, with the rapidity of one who is anxious to get over a painful operation, “I wanted to speak to you, Helen. There is one little matter: unnecessary to enter into my reasons for it. While we are here, I mean to call myself by my mother’s name, Harford, instead of Goulburn.”
“Papa!” her pale countenance was suffused with the most violent colour. Pale, worn out, and weary as her looks had been a moment since, she was of the colour of passion now.
“I mean what I say,” he said sharply, his own disguised face catching fire at hers. There was a touch of shame in his anger, yet his eyes blazed into a sudden burst of fury, which again was partly put on to hide the shame. “I do not see that I need enter into all my reasons to you. I am satisfied that it is expedient, or I would not do it; and that ought to be enough for my child.”
“It is not enough, it is not enough, papa,” said Helen. “I cannot call myself out of my name.”
“Then you will do what you please,” he said; “but I shall employ the name I have told you; you can do what you please: but in that case you shall not be owned as a daughter of mine.”
The world seemed to go round and round with Helen,—the poor little world so bare and poverty-stricken, the walls with their blue and white striped paper, the bare boards and white-curtained windows. She looked at him piteously, seeing his face blurred and magnified through the two tears of pain and passion in her eyes. “Why is it?” she said with a pathetic appeal; “oh, tell me why it is! If I knew why, perhaps I could bear it better. Oh, papa, tell me why!”
His first impulse was to silence her imperiously and send her away, but a better inspiration followed. “Did you never hear of men in business who were ruined, Helen? Did you never read of destruction coming in a single day? I was a rich man a fortnight since, and never dreamt that such a calamity—was possible. It came upon me all at once. Misfortune of the most complete kind—ruin. I had nothing for it but to take you and the child and hurry away.”