“Interfere!” said Helen, not knowing what to think.
“Jacques, who is my man, is not always of my opinion, mademoiselle. He says, why should there be a château for one and a little cabin for another? But I say, ‘Hold thy tongue, mon homme. How would it advantage thee?’ It is hard, nevertheless,” said Margot, “that we should have to go and buy our own woods to warm us in the winter. The trees were not made by M. le Comte; they are there for all the world. Yet we must spend our little money, and go to the vente, and pay for what has grown out of the earth! This is an injustice. When anything passes through a fabrique, and is manufactured, I allow that it should be paid for; but that which grows by itself, which comes out of the ground, that is different. Figure to yourself that I am talking politics to the English young lady. Va, Margot, thou art a fool for thy pains! Naturally mademoiselle is Conservative—she loves the aristocrats, like all her nation?”
“I don’t know,” said Helen, surprised. She had heard her father rail against aristocrats, but she had understood that it was because the great people round Fareham had been uncivil. She had never supposed the existence of such a feeling in a cottage, and it puzzled her too much to make any reply possible. “But surely——” she began, then stopped, for she was not very sure of anything in French, and even in English could not venture upon a political argument. She returned with some difficulty and discomfort to the original question.
“The young ladies at the château, are they not good to the poor?”
“Oh, les pauvres! Yes, yes; they are kind enough. When one is ill they will come and demand, ‘What can one do for you?’ It is true, mademoiselle; but one does not like to have it thus forced upon one brutally that others are better off than one’s self. That humbles you. I prefer, for my part, that they should not interfere. Assez! let us talk of something else,” said Margot, taking up her plumet, which in her fervour she had allowed to drop from her hand. This was the worst of Margot’s ministrations. When she became interested in the conversation, the feather-brush always dropped and the dusting was suspended. As for Helen, she felt her world widening around her. She forgot the strange sentiments she had been hearing, and the strange position in which she found herself. On one hand, there was little Blanchette with her story; and on the other, the young ladies at the château, who spoke English. Her heart filled with excitement and hope. They were nothing to her, but they opened once more the ordinary world, and delivered her from her own tribulations and thoughts.
CHAPTER VIII.
Helen and her little sister were left very much to themselves for some time after they settled in M. Goudron’s house, and the village life going on round them soon became interesting and important to the strangers. Little Janey played all day long with Marie and Petit-Jean, and acquired a Burgundian accent, and an ease of speech much beyond that of Helen, who still talked as with a shadow behind her of her governess, and was tremulous about her genders, and afraid of the subjunctive mood. It was wonderful how soon they came to know the stories which hid under each little thatched roof. Though Helen did not dare in the face of public opinion to unfasten the closely strained curtain that covered her windows, she managed to draw its fulness towards the centre, leaving a little corner by which she could see what was going on. The chief thing she saw, it must be allowed, was old Goudron standing at the door watching everything that went on with his hungry old eyes, and grinning with malicious pleasure at every mishap. Nothing escaped the old man, and his grin was the chief thing in Latour which soured the milk of human kindness, made the good wives cross, they could not tell why, and exasperated the men. He was always there with malignant and mocking words whatever happened, to say that “I told you so”—which makes every misfortune a little more unbearable;—“if you had listened to me.” The house next door was the only house in the village which made any pretensions to gentility. M. le Précepteur who lived in it was not a schoolmaster, as the English reader may suppose, but the collector of taxes, a Government employé, who held on with a very stern clutch to the skirts of the aristocracy, as a man well born, with a wife who found herself sadly out of place in this desert. When madame went by in her pretty toilets, M. Goudron had always a gibe. The public virtue of M. le Précepteur, and his devotion to the country, was his favourite subject. “Quoi, madame! it is too much to have an old Roman for a husband. Again you go out alone,” he would say. Madame knew that her irreproachable husband was playing billiards at the moment, thinking very little of public duty, and still less of the enormity of leaving her to go out alone, but she held up her head and smiled disdainfully. “In our class, monsieur,” she said, “we are trained from our cradles to recognise that each has their share of duty—society for the women, but for the men the country. It is difficult, I am aware, to make it comprehensible among the bourgeois,” she added, sweeping past with the sweetest smile. Old Goudron grinned, but he had his match. Helen watched their passages of arms daily. The employé’s wife was a good mother and an excellent housewife, but neither for home nor children would she have relinquished the grandeur of her caste. She paid visits at the château; she patronised the Curé; and visited the good Sisters, who kept their little school at the other end of the village; and maintained her little social circle with the stateliness of a duchess. Once a-week she had her little reception, which was attended by M. le Curé, M. le Vicaire (for it was a large parish), and the notary. Once a-week she and her husband dined at the château. Regularly as the weeks came round were these social rules observed, for, as she justly remarked, “Without society one vegetates, one does not live.” It was much in the mind of this one representative of high life in Latour, to open her doors to the strangers. The father’s appearance was perfectly comme il faut; and though Helen was shy, she had still the air of a young person who had been instructed, and might have been né, like madame herself.
Nobody else in Latour had a salon or the ghost of a salon. But Helen, peeping from her corner, soon got to know which of the cottage wives looked out anxiously for the return of their husbands, and which reposed with pride and calm upon the certainty of Jean or Jacques’ sobriety and good behaviour. She began to know the different clank of the sabots—from the little patter of the children, in their dark-blue homespun frocks and close little caps, to the heavy resounding tread of the big boys and men. She knew M. le Curé’s measured step, and the pause he made to leave his wooden overshoes behind when he went in to see a sick man; and the brisker little trot of M. le Vicaire, who had been in the war, and who was a fiery little martyr, tramping leagues off to the edge of the parish to see the sick, or any one who called for his aid. On Monday every week M. le Curé went to the château to say a mass for the old Count in the little chapel, and stayed afterwards to take his déjeûner, the second breakfast, which, till all these masses were over, was the first meal for the good Curé. It was on Thursday that the priest and the Précepteur and his wife dined at the Château of Latour, and on Sunday was the reception of madame next door. On Sunday all the village was astir. There was a great deal going on in the church in the morning, and a tolerable amount of people there—a far larger number than was justified by the professions of the villagers, who disowned all the habits of piety, and made themselves out much less Christian than they were. It is the fashion to be religious in the upper classes, and all who would aspire to belong to them in France: and it is the fashion among the peasantry to hate the Church; yet notwithstanding, there were a great many people at High Mass, wherever they came from. M. le Précepteur was there with his wife in her prettiest toilet, and their little girl as fine as a little girl could be; and M. le Maire and the adjoint both thought it expedient to set a good example to the community. But it was only the morning that the best of Catholics thought it necessary to devote to the services of religion. Even Madame la Comtesse at the château, though orthodox to the fingers’ tips, took care to assure her guests that vespers were not a duty, pas obligatoire, and in the afternoon and evening all the merriment of the village, such as it was, was in full swing. The Lion d’Or and the Cheval Blanc were both full; and in a large loft belonging to the former there was dancing, which Helen and Janey watched with a fearful joy through the open window. To be able to see this, even at a distance, was an amusement they had not hoped for; yet Helen was very uneasy as to whether it was justifiable on Sunday even to look on at a dance. But it was not very riotous dancing, or even very gay, as we are led to suppose the amusements of our gayer neighbours are. They took their pleasure very seriously, these Burgundian peasants, just as our own country folks do. The violinist of the village had no great variety of music in his répertoire, and the peasant couples, solemnly circling round and round with their hands on each others’ shoulders, displayed little of that characteristic gaiety of France which we hear so much about.
Down below, in front of the windows on the benches outside, the men drank steadily and talked, till it became too cold, while the women sitting by, knitting their stockings, sometimes threw in a word. They made a great deal more noise than similar assemblies do in England, but there was not much more mirth. Very often a passing show, a travelling establishment of pedlar’s wares—a “Cheap Jack,” or at the worst, a dentist in a triumphal car, making their last rounds before the winter set in, would arrive at Latour, and this made Sunday very piquant, before everything succumbed under the chills of the declining season. Madame Dupré at the Lion d’Or, in her whitest cap, with her long ear-rings, occupied the large chair on these Sundays, leaving the waiting to Auguste, and Baptiste, and Jeanne from the kitchen, whose holiday it was to emerge from that hot and stifling place, putting also long ear-rings in her ears, and a cap that might have been starched in Paris, it was so comme il faut. Jeanne liked to show herself in the salle among all the people on these Sunday nights. But Baptiste for his part was always seeking to get away. He stole up to the dancing-room to have one waltz with his Blanchette, then rushed down to get a chope for Jean Pierre, or a new bottle of piquette for Père Roussel, or the absinthe which the little city clerk, who had come to help M. le Notaire, thought it fine to call for. And thus the Sunday evenings went on. Madame la Comtesse would have liked to shut up the auberges and have Sunday kept as in England, if she could; and Madame Vincent, the Précepteur’s wife, had fixed her reception for Sunday in order to prevent her husband and the notary from patronising the vulgar popular meeting in the Lion d’Or. But neither of these great ladies influenced the village. The first it regarded as a hostile power, whom to thwart was one of the first of its duties, the other as a laughing-stock.
Mr Goulburn walked about the village for the first Sunday evening, and amused himself, while his daughters at the window saw all the rude little frolicking at a distance—the dancing-room with its open windows, the oil-lamps burning hot and smoky in the gloom, the dancers gyrating, not always in time, to the squeak of the village fiddle; and down below, the light in the windows of the salle at the Lion d’Or broken by the figures of the people who sat outside. The girls were not so soon bored as he was. He was a man who liked to be popular, as has been said. He went in to pay his respects to Madame Dupré and made her his little compliments.