The carollers were now close under the windows, and the words of a simple chorus came clearly to our hearing—
The snow lay on the ground,
The stars shone bright,
When Christ our Lord was born
On Christmas night.
After a few moments' silence, our curiosity, like water that has broken through thin ice, flowed into words again. Many questions and a storm of exclamations rang through the room, and the concussion was such that the Yule-logs crashed in two, and broke into a race across the wide hearth, splinters flying to the side, and sparks flying up the chimney. Then Miss Houghton spoke with the marvellous self-possession of her nature.
“I knew my own name and my mother's from the beginning,” she said, “and Monsieur Van Muyden, and the old house, and the Flemish bonne in the Rue Neuve. I remember them all when a child. I used often to sleep there, and the night before I left Bruges I still remember playing with the baron's old sword. I remember my mother coming to see me at school in England, a convent-school, where I was very happy, and giving me these bracelets. She told me never to part with them; she said she would not be with me long. They told me of her death some months afterwards. The other [pg 458] portrait is that of my grandfather, given by him to my mother on her fête day, just before her marriage, with a lock of his hair hidden behind. She always wore it. M. Van Muyden's was done for her when I was born, and was meant to be mine some day, as he was my god-father. The remittances he spoke of used to come regularly; but, when I grew older, my pride rebelled (just as he guessed, you say), and I hated to be dependent on those who, kind as they were, were not my blood-relations. I ran away from school, and lived by myself for a long time in poverty, yet not in absolute need, for I worked for my bread, and worked hard. I had a great deal to go through because I dared not refer any one to the school where I had lived. Mrs. Burtleigh was very kind to me; I told her my story, as far as I knew it, and somehow she found out that we were cousins through my father; so she made me take her maiden name, Houghton, instead of the one I had adopted before. She, of course, thought as I did, that the child of the disinherited Marie Duncombe and the unhappy Englishman, my poor father, could be naught but a beggar. She was kindness itself to me, and, though I was too proud to accept all she offered me, I did accept her companionship and her home. Many little industries of my own, pleasant now because no longer imperatively necessary, help me to support myself, as far as pecuniary support can be called such; my home has been a generous gift—the gift I prize most.”
She stopped, and Mrs. Burtleigh looked up in impatient confusion, perhaps conscious that her feelings and motives had been too mixed to warrant such frank, unbounded gratitude. “Jim” said nothing, and Miss Houghton seemed so calm that it was almost difficult to congratulate her. She was asked if she had recognized herself from the first in the story.
“Yes,” she said; “I knew it must be me.”
“You took it coolly,” some one ventured to observe.