“You dare tell me, you little French whipper-snapper, that France is as good as England, and that my cooking isn’t as much to your liking as your old Murrie’s, or whatever you call her,” Martha exclaimed; “Not eat my potatoes, indeed!”
This was when Gaston, sighing for his pommes de terre sautées, had pushed aside a plate of plain boiled potatoes with a sigh.
“You’ll learn to starve a little, young gentleman, or have some English sense shaken into you.”
Martha did not mean to be unkind to the forlorn little foreigner, but still, she had struck at his very heart’s roots, and before he had been many months in England, Gaston found himself wondering why the fact of being a French boy was reckoned to him as a disgrace, which entitled him to all manner of scornful epithets and contemptuous insinuations.
“I wonder,” Gaston said to himself one morning, as he sat on the wall of his grandmother’s garden, “I wonder if the people in England do not like being called what they really are. I do notice that boy who has red hair does not like being called red-haired, and the only time that Martha ever slapped me was when I said that she looked old. Perhaps they don’t like being called English, so that is why, when they want to be unpleasing to me, they call me a French boy. I’ll try, and see.” And, anxious to test the worth of his new theory, Gaston slipped off the wall and accosted an ancient man, who was trimming the laurels.
“Jardinor,” he began, standing well beyond the range of that functionary’s shears, “Jardinor, you’re an Englishman.”
“Thank the Lord, I am. I’d have been ashamed to have been born anything else,” returned old Wakeford, with a heartiness that demolished poor Gaston’s theory.
“Well, it is droll, I do not understand,” he thought, retreating disconcerted, and more bewildered than ever.
Yet, although in his new surroundings, his nationality was so clearly accounted a shameful thing, Gaston was too good a patriot to be persecuted into accounting it so himself. “On the contrary,” he said to himself, “they shall see for themselves, that a French boy can be as good as an English one,” and with a resolution that did credit to his tiny frame and tender age, Gaston, in spite of many involuntary tears and frequent failures, held fast to his determination.
All the same, his present training under the young Kenyons, though it might in the end “make a man” of him, was actually making him very miserable.