XII
“So René Dampierre has grown into a handsome man, has he?” said Mrs. Burbage, when Anne went to her room.
She was sitting up in bed, with a shawl thrown round her shoulders.
Her face was yellow and pinched, but the eyes that looked out from under the wasted forehead, were sharp and keen as ever.
“Well! so he ought. His mother was a beautiful creature, and his father was well enough, as men go. Jacques Dampierre was quite a celebrated man in Paris, thirty years ago, when I used to visit them. A writer; a novelist, I believe. I never read any of his books. In those days it wasn’t considered the correct thing for young women to read French novels. And quite right too. They’re all disgraceful.
“René’s a painter, you say? Well! much good may it do him. He won’t make money that way, though I suppose he must have come into a decent income through his father. He’s an only son.”
“His father is dead then?” Anne asked.
“Yes, my dear, dead long ago. He died a year after his wife, and that’s fourteen years now. She was a Leslie, one of the old stock, and as I say, a lovely girl. Fair, is he? Like his mother then. Hers was the only real gold hair I ever saw. And she had brown eyes, like a deer, or a fawn, or some creature of that sort.”
Anne remembered the brown eyes that ought to have been blue. He had his mother’s eyes as well as her hair then, evidently.
“Let me see, René must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight by this time,” the old lady went on. “I haven’t seen him since he was a baby of five or so. He was a pretty boy, then. They sent him over here to be educated, at that Catholic place. Beaumont isn’t it? He ought to be quite an Englishman, and I hope he is.”