Poor Pierre! Many an anxious hour did he spend wondering how he was to present his plan so that it would not seem cruel.
Then one day he suddenly saw how useless had been his worry. It was his mother herself who spoke and made the very suggestion he had been hesitating to voice. How calmly and with what courage she did it! Ah, Pierre need not have feared that she would fail to meet the great issue when it came! Madame Bretton was too much of a woman for that. Instead she had a long talk with her children and afterward a letter was dispatched to the relatives in that mystic land, America. Soon a reply came back. Madame Bretton had come of fine peasant stock, and her brother had carried with him into the new land of which he had become a citizen his native loyalty and bigness of heart. He now wrote urging his sister and her fatherless children to come to Paterson and share his home until such time as they could find work and settle themselves in some convenient community.
And when this was agreed upon who should come forward to Pierre's aid but Henri St. Amant! He it was who found at Pont-de-Saint-Michel a customer ready to purchase for a good price the Bretton homestead, with its well-equipped silk-house, and its grove of thriving mulberry trees. Together with Pierre and the curé he worked out every detail of the Brettons' departure, acting with a wisdom that was amazing in so young a lad. The faithful Josef was to have a home with the old priest; nothing was forgotten. Certainly Henri was a friend in need!
Therefore one sunny morning the Brettons started south across France for the seaport from which, a week later, they were to set sail for that untried world toward which many another hapless exile had journeyed, and within whose borders the refuge of a home was offered.
CHAPTER XIV
PIERRE AS A TEACHER
It appalled Pierre to see how much of the little fortune received from the Bretton homestead had to be expended in reaching America. The money which had seemed such a fabulous sum in Bellerivre evaporated in the new land like the dew before the sun. Madame Bretton was too independent to consent to live with her brother's family and be a burden to them longer than was absolutely necessary, and therefore the renting and furnishing of a simple apartment became unavoidable. After this expenditure but a small bank account remained, and this the family agreed must not be cut in upon; something must be left in case of illness or disaster. In consequence the only way left to meet the expenses of daily living was for all three of them to take positions in the great silk mills, where so many hundreds of others were employed.
This was a great mortification to Pierre. Not that he was ashamed to have his family rated as working people. Every one in the world, at least those who were useful, worked in one way or another. His humiliation lay in the fact that he who had thought himself able to be the breadwinner for both mother and sister, was in reality nothing but an unskilled laborer, whose services for the present commanded but slight remuneration. The discovery was not only disconcerting but galling. It was bad enough to have Marie enter the mill. But his mother——! To think of his mother, at her age, becoming a mill operative!