The Red City Part 8

"Not I," laughed De Courval.

"Let us say, then, I have paid a score of thanks; credit me with these--one should be prudent. Only in the Bible it is a thank,--one. Be careful of the coin. Let it rest there. So you go to work to-morrow. It is well; for you have been anxious of late, and for that exacting work is no bad remedy."

The next day De Courval found himself before seven-thirty in the counting-house. "It is hard in winter," said the clerk who was to instruct him. "Got to make the fires then. Mr. Potts is particular. You must leave no dust, and here are brooms in the closet." And so, perched on a high stool, the clerk, well amused, watched his successor, Louis Rene, Vicomte de Courval, sweep out the counting-house.

"By George!" said the critic, "you will wear out a broom a day. What a dust! Sweep it up in the dust-pan. Sprinkle it first with the watering-pot. Lord, man, don't deluge it! And now a little sand. Don't build a sea-beach. Throw out the dust on the ash-heap behind the house."

It was done at last.

"Take your coat off next time. The clerks will be here soon, but we have a few minutes. Come out and I will show you the place. Oh, this is your desk, quills, paper, and sand, and 'ware old man Potts."

They went on to the broad landing between the warehouse and Dock Creek.

"There are two brigs from Madeira in the creek, partly unloaded."

The great tuns of Madeira wine filled the air with vinous odors, and on one side, under a shed, were staves and salt fish from the North for return cargoes, and potatoes, flour, and onions in ropes for the French islands.

"The s.h.i.+p outside," said the clerk, "is from the Indies with tea and silks, and for ballast cheap blue Canton china."

The vessels and the thought of far-away seas pleased the young man. The big s.h.i.+p, it seemed, had been overhauled by a small British privateer.

"But there is no war?"

"No, but they claim to take our goods billed for any French port, and as many men as they choose to call English."

"And she beat them off?"

"Yes; Mr. Wynne gave the master a silver tankard, and a hundred dollars for the men."

De Courval was excited and pleased. It was no day of tame, peaceful commerce. Malayan pirates in the East, insolent English cruisers to be outsailed, the race home of rival s.h.i.+ps for a market, made every voyage what men fitly called a venture. Commerce had its romance. Strange things and stranger stories came back from far Indian seas.

After this introduction, he thanked his instructor, and returning to the counting-house, was gravely welcomed and asked to put in French two long letters for Martinique and to translate and write out others. He went away for his noonday meal, and, returning, wrote and copied and resolutely rewrote, asking what this and that term of commerce meant, until his back ached when he went home at six. He laughed as he gave his mother a humorous account of it all, but not of the sweeping.

Then she declared the claret good, and what did it cost? Oh, not much.

He had not the bill as yet.

VI

Despite the disgust he felt at the routine of daily domestic service, the life of the great merchant's business began more and more to interest De Courval. The clerks were mere machines, and of Mr. Wynne he saw little. He went in and laid letters on his desk, answered a question or two in regard to his mother, and went out with perhaps a message to a s.h.i.+pmaster fresh from the Indies and eager to pour out in a tongue well spiced with sea oaths his hatred of England and her ocean bullies.

The mother's recovery was slow, as Chovet had predicted, but at the end of June, on a Sat.u.r.day, he told Mistress Wynne she might call on his patient, and said that in the afternoon the vicomtesse might sit out on the balcony upon which her room opened.

Madame was beginning to desire a little change of society and was somewhat curious as to this old spinster of whom Rene had given a kind, if rather startling, account. Her own life in England had been lonely and amid those who afforded her no congenial society, nor as yet was she in entirely easy and satisfactory relations with the people among whom she was now thrown. They were to her both new and singular.

The Quaker lady puzzled her inadequate experience--a _dame de pension_, a boarding-house keeper with perfect tact; with a certain simple sweetness, as if any common bit of service about the room and the sick woman's person were a pleasure. The quiet, gentle manners of the Quaker household, with now and then a flavor of some larger world, were all to Madame's taste. When, by and by, her hostess talked more and more freely in her imperfect French, it was un.o.btrusive and natural, and she found her own somewhat austere training beginning to yield and her unready heart to open to kindness so constant, and so beautiful with the evident joy of self-sacrifice.

During the great war the alliance with France had made the language of that country the fas.h.i.+on. French officers came and went, and among the Whig families of position French was even earlier, as in Mary Plumstead's case, a not very rare accomplishment. But of late she had had little opportunity to use her knowledge, and with no such courage as that of Gainor Wynne, had preferred the awkwardness of silence until her guest's illness obliged her to put aside her shy distrust in the interest of kindness. She soon found the tongue grow easier, and the vicomtesse began to try at short English sentences, and was pleased to amuse herself by correcting Margaret, who had early learned French from her mother, and with ready intelligence seized gladly on this fresh chance to improve her knowledge.

One day as Mrs. Swanwick sat beside her guest's couch, she said: "Thy son told me soon after thy coming that thou art not, like most of the French, of the Church of Rome." He, it seemed, desired to see a Friends'

meeting, and his mother had expressed her own wish to do the same when well enough.

"No," said madame; "we are of the religion--Huguenots. There is no church of my people here, so my son tells me, and no French women among the emigrants."

"Yes, one or two. That is thy Bible, is it not?" pointing to the book lying open beside her. "I am reading French when times serve. But I have never seen a French Bible. May I look at it? I understand thy speech better every day, and Margaret still better; but I fear my French may be queer enough to thee."

"It is certainly better than my English," said the vicomtesse, adding, after a brief pause: "It is the French of a kind heart." The vicomtesse as she spoke was aware of a breach in her usual reserve of rather formal thankfulness.

"I thank thee for thy pretty way of saying a pleasant thing," returned Mrs. Swanwick. "I learned it--thy language--when a girl, and was foolishly shy of its use before I knew thee so well. Now I shall blunder on at ease, and Margaret hath the audacity of youth."

"A charming child," said madame, "so gay and so gentle and intelligent."

"Yes, a good girl. Too many care for her--ah, the men! One would wish to keep our girls children, and she is fast ceasing to be a child."

She turned to the Bible in her hand, open at a dry leaf of ivy. "It has psalms, I see, here at the end."

"Yes, Clement Marot's. He was burned at the stake for his faith."

"Ah, cruel men! How strange! Here, I see, is a psalm for one about to die on the scaffold."

"Yes--yes," said the vicomtesse.

"What strange stories it seems to tell! It was, I see, printed long ago."

"Yes, two years before the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew."

"And here is one for men about to go into battle for G.o.d and their faith." The hostess looked up. Her guest's face was stern, stirred as with some deep emotion, her eyes full of tears.

She had been thinking, as she lay still and listened to Mary Swanwick's comments, of death for a man's personal belief, for his faith, of death with honor. She was experiencing, of a sudden, that failure of self-control which is the sure result of bodily weakness; for, with the remembrance of her husband's murder, she recalled, amid natural feelings of sorrow, the shame with which she had heard of his failure at once to declare his rank when facing death. For a moment she lay still. "I shall be better in a moment," she said.

"Ah, what have I done?" cried Mrs. Swanwick, distressed, as she took the thin, white hand in hers. "Forgive me."

"You have done nothing--nothing. Some day I shall tell you; not now."

She controlled herself with effectual effort, shocked at her own weakness, and surprised that it had betrayed her into emotion produced by the too vivid realization of a terrible past. She never did tell more of it, but the story came to the Quaker dame on a far-off day and from a less reserved personage.

At this moment Margaret entered. Few things escaped the watchful eyes that were blue to-day and gray to-morrow, like the waters of the broad river that flowed by her home. No sign betrayed her surprise at the evident tremor of the chin muscles, the quick movement of the handkerchief from the eyes, tear-laden, the mother's look of sympathy as she dropped the hand left pa.s.sive in her grasp. Not in vain had been the girl's training in the ways of Friends. Elsewhere she was more given to set free her face to express what she felt, but at home and among those of the Society of Friends she yielded with the imitativeness of youth to the not unwholesome discipline of her elders. She quietly announced Aunt Gainor as waiting below stairs.

"Wilt thou see her?" said Mrs. Swanwick.

"Certainly; I have much to thank her for. And tell my son not to come up as yet," for, being Sat.u.r.day, it was a half-holiday from noon, and having been out for a good walk to stretch his desk-cramped legs, he was singing in the garden bits of French songs and teasing June or watching her skilful hunt for gra.s.shoppers. He caroled gaily as he lay in the shade:

"La fin du jour Sauve les fleurs et rafraichit les belles; Je veux, en galant troubadour, Celebrer, au nom de l'amour, Chanter, au nom des fleurs nouvelles La fin du jour."

The message was given later, and as Mistress Gainor came in to his mother's room she was a striking figure, with the beaver hat tied under her chin and the long, dark-green pelisse cast open so as to reveal the rich silk of her gown. It was not unfit for her age and was in entire good taste, for as usual she was dressed for her role. Even her G.o.ddaughter was slightly surprised, well as she knew her. This was not the Gainor that Chovet knew, the woman who delighted to excite the too easily irritated Dr. Rush, or to shock Mrs. Adams, the Vice-President's wife, with well embroidered gossip about the Willing women and the high play at Landsdowne, where Mrs. Penn presided, and s.h.i.+ppens, Chews, and others came. This was another woman.

Margaret, curious, lingered behind Miss Wynne, and stood a moment, a hand on the door. Miss Wynne came forward, and saying in French which had amazed two generations, "_Bon jour, madame_," swept the entirely graceful courtesy of a day when even the legs had fine manners, adding, as the vicomtesse would have risen, "No, I beg of you."

"The settle is on the balcony," said the hostess, "and Cicero will come up by and by and carry thee out. Not a step--not a step by thyself,"