She winked at much that was scandalous in the life of her idol, that prim, chaste, good woman; but who shall say that her unswerving fidelity and humble devotion did not act sometimes as a martingale? The bon-vivant, the gambler, the dissipated elderly buck of the First Napoleon’s Court, the ex-Adonis of the Tuileries, who never wasted time in resisting the blandishments of any Venus of the Court or nymph of the Palais Royal, respected decent Smithwick, was even known, at the pathetic stage of wine, to refer to her as the only woman who had ever understood him.
Yet when her sister (her sole remaining relative, who lived upon a small annuity, in the village of Hampstead, near London), sustained a paralytic stroke, and Smithwick was recalled to nurse her, did that poor lady’s employer dream of providing,—out of those hundreds of thousands of thalers wrested from the coffers of the Convent of Widinitz,—for the old age of the faithful creature? You do not know Monsieur the Marshal if you dream he did.
He generously paid her the quarter due of her annual salary of fifteen hundred francs, kissed her knuckly left hand with the garnet ring upon it, placed there by a pale young English curate deceased many years previously—for even the Smithwicks have their romances and their tragedies—told her that his “roof” was “open” to her whenever she desired to return; and bowed her graciously out of his library, whose Empire bookcases were laden with costly editions of the classics, published by the Houbigants and the Chardins, Michaud and Buére (tomes of beauty that were fountains sealed to the illiterate master of the house), and whose walls were hung with splendid engravings by Renard and F. Chauveau, a few gems from the brushes of Watteau and Greuze, Boucher and Mignard; and one or two examples of the shining art of the young Meissonier.
The luxurious house in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin was less wholesome for good Smithwick’s going. But I fear young Hector regretted her departure less than he should have done. True, the meek gentlewoman had not been able to teach her patron’s son very much. But she had at least implanted in him the habit of truth, and the love of soap-and-water and clean linen. Last, but not least, she had taught him to speak the English of the educated upper classes with barely a trace of accent, whereas the Paris-residing teachers of the tongue of Albion were in those days, and too frequently are in these, emigrants from the green isle adjacent; Miss Maloney’s, Misther Magee’s, and Mrs. Maguire’s; equipped with the thinnest of skins for imagined injuries, and the thickest of brogues for voluble speech, that ever hailed from Dublin or Wexford, King’s County or the County Cork.
Not a servant of the household but had some parting gift for Smithwick—from the blue handkerchief full of apples offered by the kitchen-girl, to the housemaid’s tribute of a crocheted lace fichu; from the cook’s canary-bird, a piercing songster, to the green parasol—a sweet thing no bigger than a plate, with six-inch fringe and an ivory handle with a hinge, to purchase which Monsieur Brousset, the Marshal’s valet, Duchard the butler, and Auguste the coachman had clubbed francs.
The question of a token of remembrance for faithful Smithwick was a thorn in her ex-pupil’s pillow. You are to understand that Redskin, in his blundering, boyish way, had been trying hard to keep inviolate the oath imposed upon him by de Moulny. The monthly two louis of pocket-money were scrupulously dropped each pay-day into the alms-box of the Carmelite Church in the Rue Vaugirard, and what a hungry glare followed the vanishing coins, and to what miserable shifts the boy resorted in the endeavor to earn a meager pittance to supply his most pressing needs, and what an unjust reputation for stinginess and parsimony he earned, when it became known that he was willing to help dull or lazy students with their papers for pay, you can conceive.
He possessed the sum of five francs, amassed with difficulty after this fashion, and this represented the boy’s entire capital at this juncture. A five-franc piece is a handsome coin, but you cannot buy anything handsome with it, that is the trouble. The discovery of the scene-painter Daguerre, first made in 1830, was not published by the Government of France until 1839. Otherwise, how the faithful heart of the attached Smithwick might have been gladdened by one of those inexpensive, oily-looking, semi-iridescent, strangely elusive portraits; into which the recipient peered, making discoveries of familiar leading features of relatives or friends, hailing them with joy when found, never finding them all together.
A portrait, even a pencil miniature with stumped shadows, its outlines filled with the palest wash of water-color, was out of the question. There was a silhouettist in the Rue de Chaillot. To this artist Hector resorted, and obtained a black paper profile, mounted and glazed, and enclosed in a gilt tin frame, at cost of all the boy possessed in the world.
That the offering was a poor one never occurred to simple Smithwick. She received it with little squeaking, mouselike cries of delight, and grief, and admiration; she ran at the tall, awkward, blushing youth to kiss him, unaware how he recoiled from the affectionate dab of her cold, pink-ended nose.
You could not say that the organ in question was disproportionately large, but its owner never managed to dispose of it inoffensively in the act of osculation. It invariably got in the eye or the ear of the recipient of the caress. A nose so chill in contact, say authorities, indicates by inverse ratio the temperature of the heart.