The gentry of the neighborhood called in due course at The Lilies, and M. de la Bourbonais punctiliously returned the civility, and here the intercourse ended. He would accept no hospitality that he was not in a position to return. He was on very good terms with his immediate neighbors, who were none of them formidable people. There was Mr. Langrove, the vicar of Dullerton, and Father Henwick, the Catholic priest, and Miss Bulpit and Miss Merrywig, two maiden ladies, who were in their separate ways prominent institutions of the place. These four, with Sir Simon, were the only persons who could boast of being on visiting terms with the shy, polite foreigner who bowed to every old apple-woman on the road as if she were a duchess, and kept the vulgar herd of the town and the fine people of the county as much at a distance as if he were an exiled sovereign who declined to receive the homage of other subjects than his own.
Franceline had been eight years at Dullerton, and was now in her seventeenth year. She was very beautiful, as she stood leaning on the garden-rail amongst the lilies, looking like a lily herself, with one dove perched upon her finger, while another alighted on her head, and cooed to it. She was neither a blonde nor a brunette, as we classify them, but a type between the two. Her complexion was of that peculiar whiteness that we see in fair northern women, Scandinavians and Poles; as clear as ivory and as colorless, the bright vermilion of the finely cut, sensitive mouth alone relieving its pallor. Yet her face was deficient neither in warmth nor light; the large, almond-shaped eyes, flashing in shadow, sometimes black, sometimes purple gray, lighted it better than the pinkest roses could have done; and if the low arch of the dark eyebrows gave a tinge of severity to it, the impression was removed by two saucy dimples that lurked in either cheek, and were continually breaking out of their hiding-places, and brightening the pensive features like a sunbeam. Franceline’s voice had a note in it that was as bright as her dimples. It rang through the brick cottage like the sound of running water; and when she laughed, it was so hearty that you laughed with her from very sympathy. Such a creature would have been in her proper sphere in a palace, treading on pink marble, and waited on by a retinue of pages. But she was not at all out of place at The Lilies; perhaps, next to the palace and pink marble, she could not have alighted in a more appropriate frame than this mossy flower-bed to which a capricious destiny had transplanted her. She seemed quite as much a fitting part of the place as the tall, majestic lilies on either side of the garden-gate. But as regarded Dullerton beyond the garden-gate, she was as much out of place as a gazelle in a herd of Alderney cows. Dullerton was the very ideal of commonplace, the embodiment of respectability and dulness—wealthy, fat-of-the-land dulness; if a prize had been set up for that native commodity, Dullerton would certainly have carried it over every county in England. There was no reason why it should have been so dull, for it possessed quite as many external elements of sociability as other provincial neighborhoods, and the climate was no foggier than elsewhere; everybody was conscious of the dulness, and complained of it to everybody else, but nobody did anything to mend matters. There was, nevertheless, a good deal of intercourse one way or another; a vast amount of food was interchanged between the big houses, and the smaller ones periodically called in the neighbors to roll croquet-balls about on the wet grass, and sip tea under the dripping trees; for it seemed a law of nature that the weather was wet on this social occasion. But nothing daunted the good-will of the natives; they dressed themselves in muslins, pink, white, and blue, and came and played croquet, and drank tea, and bored themselves, and went away declaring they had never been at such a stupid affair in their lives. The gentlemen were always in a feeble minority at these festive gatherings, and, instead of multiplying themselves to supplement numbers by zeal, they had a habit of getting together in a group to discuss the crops and the game-laws, leaving their wives and daughters to seek refuge in county gossip, match-making, or parish affairs, according to their separate tastes. Dullerton was not a scandal-mongering place. Its gossip was mostly of an innocent kind; the iniquities of servants the difficulties of getting a tolerable cook or a housemaid that knew her business, recipes for economical soups for the poor, the best place to buy flannels, etc., formed the staple subjects of the matrons’ conversation. The young ladies dressed themselves bravely in absolute defiance of the rudiments of art and taste; vied with each other in disguising their heads—some of them very pretty ones—under monstrous chignons and outlandish head-gears; practised the piano, rode on horseback, and wondered who Mr. Charlton would eventually marry; whether his attentions to Miss X—— meant anything, or whether he was only playing her off against Miss Z——. Mr. Charlton was the only eligible young man resident within a radius of fifteen miles of Dullerton, and was consequently the target for many enterprising bows and arrows. For nine years he had kept mothers and daughters in harassing suspense as to “what he meant”; and, instead of reforming as he grew older, he was more tantalizing than ever now at the mature age of thirty-two. Mothers and maidens were still on the qui-vive, and lived in perpetual hot water as to the real intentions of the owner of Moorlands and six thousand a year. He had, besides this primary claim on social consideration, another that would in itself have made him master of the situation in Dullerton: he had a fine voice, and sang a capital song; and this advantage Mr. Charlton used somewhat unkindly. He was as capricious with his voice as in his attentions, and it was a serious preoccupation with the dinner-givers whether he would make the evening go off delightfully by singing one of his songs with that enchanting high C, or leave it to its native dulness by refusing to sing at all. The moods and phases of the tyrannical tenor were, in fact, watched as eagerly by the expectant hostess as the antics of the needle on the eve of a picnic.
The one house of that side of the county where people did not bore themselves was Dullerton Court. They congregated here, predetermined to enjoy something more than eating and drinking; and they were never disappointed. There was nothing in the entertainments themselves to explain this fact; the house was indeed on a grander scale of architecture, more palatial than any other country mansion in those parts; but the people who met there, and chatted and laughed and went away in high satisfaction with themselves and each other, were the same who congregated in the other houses to yawn and be bored, and go away grumbling. The secret of the difference lay entirely in the host. Sir Simon Harness came into the world endowed with a faculty that predestined him to rule over a certain class of men—the dull and dreary class; people who have no vital heat of their own, but are for ever trying to warm themselves at other people’s fires. He had, moreover, the genius of hospitality in all its charms. He welcomed every commonplace acquaintance with a heartiness that put the visitor in instantaneous good-humor with himself and his host and all the world. Society was his life; he could not live without it. He enjoyed his fellow-creatures, and he delighted in having them about him; his house was open to his friends at all times and seasons. What else was a house good for? What pleasure could a man take in his house, unless it was full of friends? Unhappily for Dullerton, Sir Simon was a frequent absentee. Some said that he could not stand its dulness for long at a time, and that this was why he was continually on the road to Paris and Vienna and the sunny shores of Italy and Spain. But this could not be true; you had only to witness his mercurial gayety in the midst of his Dullerton friends, and hear the ring of his loud, manly voice when he shook them by the hand and bade them welcome, to be convinced that he enjoyed them to the full as much as they enjoyed him. It is true that since M. de la Bourbonais had come to be his neighbor, the squire was less of a rover than formerly. When he was at home, he spent a great deal of time at The Lilies—a circumstance which gave Dullerton a great deal to talk about, and raised the reserved, courteous recluse a great many pegs in the estimation of the county. The baronet and his friend had many points of sympathy besides the primary one of old hereditary friendship, though they were as dissimilar in tastes and character as any two could be. This dissimilarity was, however, a part of the mutual attraction. Sir Simon was an inexhaustible talker, and M. de la Bourbonais an indefatigable listener; he had what Voltaire called a talent for holding his tongue. But this negative condition of a good listener was not his only one; he possessed in a rare degree all the merits that go to the composition of that delightful personage. Most people, while you are talking to them, are more occupied in thinking what they will say to you than in attending to what you are saying to them, and these people are miserable listeners. M. de la Bourbonais gave his whole mind to what you were saying, and never thought of his answer until the time came to give it. He not only seemed interested, he really was interested, in your discourse; and he would frequently hear more in it than it was meant to convey, supplying from his own quick intelligence what was wanting in your crude, disjointed remarks. There was nothing in a quiet way that Sir Simon liked better than an hour’s talk with his tenant, and he always came away from the luxury of having been listened to by a cultivated, philosophical mind in high good-humor with himself. His vanity, moreover, was flattered by the fact beyond the mere personal gratification it afforded him. Everybody knew that the French emigré was a man of learning, given to abstruse study of some abstract kind; the convivial squire must therefore be more learned than he cared to make believe, since this philosophical student took such pleasure in his society. When his fox-hunting friends would twit him jocosely on this score, Sir Simon would pooh-pooh them with a laugh, observing in a careless way: “One must dip into this sort of thing now and then, you see, or else one’s brain gets rusty. I don’t care much myself about splitting hairs on Descartes or untwisting the fibres of a Greek root, but it amuses Bourbonais; you see he has so few to talk to who can listen to this sort of thing.” It was true that the conversation did occasionally take such learned turns, and equally true that M. de la Bourbonais enjoyed airing his views on the schools and dissecting roots, and that Sir Simon felt elevated in his own opinion when the count caught up some hazardous remark of his on one of the classic authors, and worked it up into an elaborate defence of the said author; and when, on their next meeting, Raymond would accost him with “Mon cher, I didn’t quite see at the moment what you meant by pointing that line from Sophocles at me, but I see now,” Sir Simon would purr inwardly like a stroked cat. Every now and then, too, he would startle the Grand Jury by the brilliancy of his classical quotations, and the way in which he bore down on them with a weight of argument worthy of a Q.C. in high practice; little they dreamed that the whole case had been sifted the day before by the orator’s learned friend, who had analyzed it, and put it in shape for the rhetorical purpose of the morrow. The baronet was serenely unconscious of being a plagiarist; he had got into a way of sucking his friend’s brains, until he honestly thought they were his own.
This intellectual piracy is not so rare, perhaps, as at first sight you may imagine. It would be a curious revelation if our own minds could be laid bare to us, and we were enabled to see how far their workings are original and how far imitative. We should, I fancy, be startled to find how small a proportion the former bears to the latter, and how much that we consider the spontaneous operation of our minds is, in reality, but the reflex of the minds of others, and the unconscious reproduction of thoughts and ideas that are suggested by things outside of us.
Franceline’s bonne, as she still called her, though Angélique had passed from that single capacity into the complex position of butler, cook, housemaid, lady’s maid, and general factotum at The Lilies, was as complete a contrast to a name as ever mortal presented. A gaunt, high-cheek-boned, grizzly-haired woman, with a squint and a sharp, aggressive chin, every inch of her body protested against the mockery that had labelled her angelic. She had a gruff voice like a man’s, and a trick of tossing her head and falling back in her chair when she answered you that had gained her the nickname of the French grenadier amongst the rising generation of Dullerton. Yet the kernel of this rough husk was as tender and mellow as a peach, and differed from the outer woman as much as the outer woman differed from her name. When the small boys followed her round the market, laughing at her under her very nose, and accompanying their vernacular comments with very explicative gestures, the French grenadier had not the heart to stop the performance by sending the actors to the right-about, as she might have done with one shake of her soldier-like fist; but if they had dared to look crooked at Franceline, or play off the least of their tricks on M. de la Bourbonais, she would have punched their heads for them, and sent them off yelling with broken noses without the smallest compunction. Angélique had found a husband in her youth, and when he died she had transferred all her wifely solicitude to her master and his wife and child. She could have given him no greater proof of it than by leaving her native village and following him to his foreign home; yet she never let him suspect that the sacrifice cost her a pang. She was of a social turn, and it was no small trial to be shut out from neighborly chat by her ignorance of the language. She took it out, to be sure, with the count and Franceline, and with the few intimates of The Lilies who spoke French; but, let her improve these opportunities as she might, there was still a great gap in her social life. Conversation with ladies and gentlemen was one thing, and a good gossip with a neighbor was another. But Angélique kept this grief to herself, and never complained. With M. le Curé, as she dubbed Father Henwick, the Catholic priest of Dullerton, she went the length of shaking her head, and observing that people who were in exile had their purgatory in this world, and went straight to heaven when they died. Father Henwick had been brought up at S. Sulpice, and spoke French like a native, and was as good as a born Frenchman. She could pour her half-uttered pinings into his ear without fear or scruple; her dreams of returning dans mon pays at some future day, when M. le Comte would have married mademoiselle. She could even confide to this trusty ear her anxieties on the latter head, her fear that M. le Comte, being a philosopher, would not know how to go about finding a husband for Franceline. She could indulge freely in motherful praises of Franceline’s perfections, and tell over and over again the same stories of her nurseling’s babyhood and childhood; how certain traits had frightened her that the petite was going to turn out a very Jezabel for wickedness, but how she had lived to find out her mistake. She loved notably to recall one instance of these juvenile indications of character; when one day, after bellowing for a whole hour without ceasing, the child suddenly stopped, and Mme. la Comtesse called out from her pillows under the palm-tree: “At last! Thank goodness it’s over!” and how Franceline stamped her small foot, and sobbed out: “No-o-o, it’s not over! I repose myself!” and began again louder than ever. And how another day, when a powerful Arab who was leading her mule over the hills suddenly lashed his whip across the shoulders of a little boy fast asleep on the pathway, waking him up with a howl of pain, Franceline clutched her little fist and struck the savage a box on the ear, screaming at him in French: “O you wicked! I wish you were a thief, and I’d lock you up! I wish you were a murderer, and I’d cut your head off! I wish you were a candle, and I’d blow you out!” Father Henwick would listen to the same stories, and delight Angélique by assuring her for the twentieth time that they were certain pledges of future strength and decision in the woman. And when Angélique would wind up with the usual remark, “Ah! our little one is born for something great; she would make a famous queen, Monsieur le Curé,” he would cordially agree with her, revolving, nevertheless, in his own mind the theory that there are many kinds of greatness, and many queens who go through life without the coronation ceremony that crowns them with the outward symbols of royalty.
Miss Merrywig was another of Angélique’s friends; but she had not been educated at S. Sulpice, and so the intercourse was sustained under difficulties. Her French was something terrific. She ignored genders, despised moods and tenses; and as to such interlopers as adverbs and prepositions, Miss Merrywig treated them with the contempt they deserved. Her mode of proceeding was extremely simple: she took a bundle of infinitives in one hand, and pronouns and adjectives in another, and shook them up together, and they fell into place the best way they could. It was wonderful how, somehow or other, they turned into sentences, and Angélique, by dint of good-will, always guessed what Miss Merrywig was driving at. A great bond between them was their love of a bargain. Miss Merrywig delighted in a bargain as only an old maid with an income of two hundred pounds a year can delight in it. She had, moreover, a passion for making everybody guess what she paid for things. This harmless peculiarity was apt to be a nuisance to her friends. The first thing she did after investing in a remnant of some sort, or a second-hand article, was to carry it the rounds of Dullerton, and insist on everybody’s guessing how much it cost.
“Make a guess! You know what a good linsey costs, and you see this is pure wool; you can see that? you have only to feel it. Just feel it! It’s as soft as cashmere. That’s what tempted me. I don’t want it exactly, but then I mightn’t get such a bargain when I did want it; and, as the young man at Willis’ said—they’re so uncommonly civil at Willis’!—a good article always brings its value; and there was no denying it was a bargain, and one never can go wrong in taking a good thing when one gets it cheap; and they do mix cotton so much with the wool nowadays that one can’t be too particular, as my dear mother used to say, though in her time it was of course very different. Now you’ve examined it, what do you think I gave for it?” There was no getting out of it: you might try to fight off on the plea that you had no experience in linseys, that you were no judge—Miss Merrywig would take no excuse.
“Well, but give a guess. Say something. What would you consider cheap? You know what a stuff all pure wool ought to be worth. Just give a guess. Remember, it was a bargain!” Thus adjured and driven into a corner, you timidly ventured a sum, and, whether you hit it or not, Miss Merrywig was aggrieved. If you fell below the mark, there was no describing her astonishment and disappointment. “Fifteen shillings! Dear me! Why, that’s the price of a common alpaca! Fifteen shillings! Good gracious! Oh? you can’t mean it. Do guess again.”
And when, to console her, you guessed double, and it happened to be right, she was still inconsolable.