Читать книгу Fire in Stubble - Baroness Orczy - Страница 5

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Rose Marie hardly knew how she reached the tiny room up under the sloping roof, which room was her very own.

She only realised that she longed to be alone to think matters out all by herself, and then to indulge in a long and happy cry.

Oh, yes! she was quite, quite sure that she was very happy, and that it was because of this great happiness which filled her heart to bursting, that she felt so very much inclined to cry.

Presently maman came in with the red wine and the fricassée and was horrified to find the child in tears.

“My pigeon, my little cabbage, but what ails thee, my jewel?” ejaculated the good old soul, as she hastily put down the platter and bottle which she was carrying and went to kneel beside the narrow bed in the wall, from the depths of which came ominous sounds of a girl sobbing.

“Nothing, Maman, nothing!” said Rose Marie, smiling at her mother’s anxiety and hastily endeavouring to dry her tears.

“Nothing—nothing—” grumbled Mme. Legros, “one does not cry for nothing, my child—”

“And I am vastly silly, Maman, for doing it—but I assure you that it is nothing—and—and—”

The young voice broke in renewed sobs, and two arms were stretched forth from out the bed and sought the mother’s kindly shoulder, whereon a strangely overburdened childish heart could sob itself out in perfect peace.

“There! there! my little cabbage,” said Mme. Legros, trying with tender pattings of the soft fair hair to soothe this well-nigh hysterical outburst, “of a truth, thou hast been overwrought, and it was not right for father to speak of all this before thee. Thou didst not know that the young English lord had endeavoured to break his marriage vows, and that thy father and I have been working hard in order to bring influence to bear upon the rogue. Fortunately now we have succeeded, with the help of Monseigneur, so there is no need to cry, my cabbage, is there?”

“No, no, Maman, it is not that,” said the girl more quietly; “I cannot quite explain to you what it is that made me cry—for I have known all along that milor—now that he is a milor and passing rich—was anxious to forget us humble folk, who helped his parents in their need—I have felt the shame of that before now, and it never made me cry. But to-day—somehow—Maman, darling,” she added, sitting up quite straight in bed and looking at her mother with enquiring eyes, whilst her fine brow was puckered in a deep frown of thought, “somehow I feel—I cannot quite explain how it is—I feel as if my old life was finished—quite, quite finished—as if nothing would ever be quite the same again—my little room here, the pink curtains, that chair over there—they do not seem the same—not quite, quite the same—Maman, cherie, I suppose you don’t understand?”

And the great childish eyes sought anxiously the mother’s face, longing for comprehension, for the explanation of an unaccountable mystery.

“No, my pigeon, I confess I do not understand,” quoth worthy Mme. Legros drily, “for I do not see—nor would any sensible person admit—that a great English milor just because he is thy husband—can from all that distance, from the other side of the sea, change thy room and thy chair, nor yet thy curtains, though the latter, I will say, sorely need washing at the present moment,” she added with sublime irrelevance.

The girl sighed. Maman for once did not understand. Nor of a truth did she understand herself. She had tried to explain it all but had signally failed—had only succeeded in suggesting something which of course was supremely silly.

“I’ll tell thee how it is, Rose Marie,” resumed Mme. Legros with firm decision, “thy stomach is in a disturbed condition, and a cup of cold camomile tea thou shalt drink to-morrow before rising. I’ll see to the making of it at once,—for it must be brewed over-night to be truly efficacious,—and come back and give thee thy supper a little later on.”

Mme. Legros struggled back to her feet, happy to have found in a prospective cup of camomile tea a happy solution for Rose Marie’s curious mood. She took up the platter again, for the fricassée must be kept hot, and the child must eat some supper a little later on. The good woman’s heart was filled with that cheerful optimism which persistently seeks the good side of every eventuality and nearly always finds it. In this case Mme. Legros failed to see that anything but good could come out of the present position. That same wonderful optimism of hers had not been altogether proof against the events of the past years, when she first began to realise that the marriage which she—more so than her husband—had planned in conjunction with Mistress Angélique Kestyon, was destined to prove a bar to her daughter’s happiness.

In those far-off days eighteen years ago, Mme. Legros had still fostered in her homely bosom the—since then—aborted seeds of social ambition. Well-connected on her mother’s side, with a good English family, she had wedded the Paris tailor for pecuniary rather than for sentimental reasons, and she had a sufficiency of sound common sense to understand that as a tradesman’s wife she could not in these days of arbitrary class distinction aspire to remain within that same social circle to which her connections and parentage would otherwise have entitled her. But though the seeds of ambition lay dormant in the homely soil of her husband’s back shop, they were not then altogether destroyed.

Mélanie de Boutillier had been well past her youth when she married Armand Legros; when her baby girl was born, and the mother with justifiable pride realised that the child was passing fair, those same seeds once more began to germinate. The visit of the English relative—high-born, well-connected and accompanied by a boy not yet seven years of age, brought them to final perfection. What Mélanie de Boutillier had failed to obtain, Rose Marie Legros should possess in measureless plenty, and little Rupert Kestyon, great nephew of an English milor, should be the one to shower the golden gifts on her.

All these schemes seemed at first so easy of accomplishment. It had been useless afterwards to cry over undue haste; at the time it seemed right, fitting and proper. Times then were troublous in England; Mistress Angélique Kestyon feared the democratic spirit there. It seems that the English were actually fighting against their king, and that the fate of the great noblemen in the country was in consequence somewhat uncertain; but only temporarily, of course, for King Charles Stuart would soon overcome his enemies and duly crush the rebellious traitors who had taken up arms against him. In the meanwhile the children would grow up, and anon when the Court of England had resumed its former splendour, Rupert Kestyon, the dearly-loved relative of the powerful Earl of Stowmaries, would introduce his beautiful bride to the charmed inner circle of English aristocracy.

It all seemed so clear—so simple—as if, of a truth, the match and its glorious consequences had been specially designed by Providence for the glorification and social exaltation of Rose Marie Legros. Surely no one in those days would have thought that any blame could be attached to the parents for hurrying on the marriage ceremony between the two children, whose united ages fell short of a decade.

The catastrophe came afterwards when the tale of deceit and of fraud was gradually unfolded. Then came the requests for money, the long voyage to America, the knowledge that milor Stowmaries not only had no love for these relatives of his, but had finally and irrevocably refused to help them in their distress, unless they took ship for a far distant colony and never troubled him with sight of their faces again.

Good Armand Legros, who adored his daughter, was quite broken-hearted. Madame tried to remain hopeful against these overwhelming odds—always thinking that—though it had certainly pleased God to try the Legros family very severely for the moment—something would inevitably turn up which would be for the best.

The immediate result of that unvarying optimism was that she continued Rose Marie’s education on the same lines as she had originally intended, as if the girl-wife was indeed destined anon to grace the Court of the King of England. The child was taught the English language by one of the many impoverished English gentlemen who had settled in France after the murder of their king. She learned to write and to read, to spell and to dance. She was taught to play on the virginals and to sing whilst playing a thorough-bass on the harpsichord. Nay! her knowledge, so ’twas said, extended even as far as geography and the Copernican system.

Her mother kept her apart from girls of her own age, unless these belonged to one of those few families where learning was esteemed. She was never allowed to forget that some day she would leave her father’s shop and be a great lady in England.

Whilst Mme. Legros and the kindly bonhomme Armand gradually drifted in their middle age to the bourgeois manners and customs of their time and station, they jealously fostered in their only child that sense of elegance and refinement which mayhap she had inherited from one of her remote ancestors, or mayhap had received as a special gift from the fairy godmother who presided at her birth.

Mme. Legros cooked and scoured, Master Armand made surcoats and breeches, but Rose Marie was never allowed to spoil her hands with scrubbing, or to waste her time presiding over the stewpot. Her father had bought her a pair of gloves; these she always wore when she went out, and she always had stockings and leather shoes on her feet. As the girl grew up, she gradually assimilated to herself more and more this idea that she was to be a great lady. She never doubted her future for a moment. Her father from sheer fondness, her mother from positive conviction, kept the certitude alive within her.

But it became quite impossible to keep from the girl’s growing intelligence all knowledge of the Kestyon’s misdeeds. The worthy tailor who was passing rich kept but a very small house, in which the one living room, situate just above the shop, was the family meeting ground. Rose Marie could not be kept out of the room every time her father and mother talked over the freshly-discovered deceits and frauds practised by their new relations.

We must suppose that the subject thus became such a familiar one with the child-wife from the moment when she first began to comprehend it, that it never acquired any horror or even shame for her. Mistress Angélique Kestyon had grossly deceived papa and maman; they were not so rich or so grand just now as they had represented themselves to be, but it would all come right in the end—maman at least was quite sure of that.

If—as time went on and Rose Marie from a child became a girl—that pleasing optimism somewhat gave way, this was no doubt due to too much book learning. Rose Marie was very fond of books, and books we all know have a tendency to destroy the innocent belief in the goodness of this world. This at least was Papa Legros’ opinion.

Mme. Legros spoke less and less on the subject. She hoped.

She hoped resolutely and persistently, whilst the Kestyons from distant Virginia begged repeatedly for money. She went on hoping even whilst urging her husband to cut off further supplies, after ten years of this perpetual sponging. She still hoped whilst no news whatever came from the emigrants and when the rumour reached her that young Rupert Kestyon had died out there.

At this point, however, her optimism took a fresh turn. She hoped that the rumour was true, and that Rose Marie was now free to wed some other equally high-born but more reliable gentleman. She continued to hope despite the difficulty of proving that the young man had really died, and Monseigneur the Archbishop’s refusal to grant permission for a second marriage.

Then when the news filtered through from England as far as the back shop in the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie that Rupert Kestyon was not only alive but had—by a wonderful, almost miraculous series of events—inherited the title and estates of his deceased kinsman and was now of a truth by the will of God and the law of his country milor of Stowmaries, and one of the greatest gentleman in the whole of England, Mme. Legros’ optimism found its crowning glory in its justification.

That the young milor seemed disinclined to acknowledge the daughter of the Paris tailor as his wife and that he seemed to be taking serious steps to have the marriage annulled, were but trifling matters which never upset Mme. Legros’ equanimity.

She was quite sure that the marriage could not be annulled without special dispensation from the Holy Father himself, and equally sure that that dispensation would never be granted. She had perfect faith not only in the sacred indissolubility of the marriage tie, but in the happy future of Rose Marie.

When Monseigneur the Archbishop of Paris granted her Armand a special audience, whereat the tailor had begged permission to lay the family case before His Greatness, Mme. Legros never for a moment doubted the happy issue of that interview: and when her man came home and told his satisfactory tale, maman was in no way astonished.

Her optimism had been justified: that was all.

But what did astonish the good soul was the fact that the child—Rose Marie—sat crying in her bed, whereas she should have been singing and laughing all about the place.

Therefore, maman, with commendable forethought, prescribed cold camomile tea as a remedy against what was obviously but a sharp attack of megrims.