Читать книгу The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax - Holme Lee - Страница 23

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The rapid action and variety of the next few days were ever after like a dream to Bessie Fairfax. A tiring day in Hampton town, a hurried walk to the docks in the sunset, the gorgeous autumnal sunset that flushed the water like fire; a splendid hour in the river, ships coming up full sail, and twilight down to the sea; a long, deep sleep. Then sunrise on rolling green waves, low cliffs, headlands of France; a vast turmoil, hubbub, and confusion of tongues; a brief excursion into Havre, by gay shops to gayer gardens, and breakfast in the gayest of glass-houses. Then embarkation on board the boat for Caen; a gentle sea-rocking; soldiers, men in blouses, women in various patterns of caps; the mouth of the Orne; fringes on the coast of fashionable resort for sea-bathers. Miles up the stream, dreary, dreary; poplars leaning aslant from the wind, low mud-banks, beds of osiers, reeds, rushes, willows; poplars standing erect as a regiment in line, as many regiments, a gray monotony of poplars; the tide flowing higher, laving the reeds, the sallows, all pallid with mist and soft driving rain. A gleam of sun on a lawn, on roses, on a conical red roof; orchards, houses here and there, with shutters closed, and the afternoon sun hot upon them; acres of market-garden, artichokes, flat fields, a bridge, rushy ditches, tall array of poplars repeated and continued endlessly.

"I think," said Bessie, "I shall hate a poplar as long as I live!"

Mr. Carnegie agreed that the scenery was not enchanting. Beautiful France is not to compare with the beautiful Forest. Harry Musgrave was in no haste with his opinion; he was looking out for Caen, that ancient and famous town of the Norman duke who conquered England. He had been reading up the guide-book and musing over history, while Bessie had been letting the poplars weigh her mind down to the brink of despondency.

A repetition of the noisy landing at Havre, despatch of baggage to Madame Fournier's, everybody's heart failing for fear of that august, unknown lady. A sudden resolution on the doctor's part to delay the dread moment of consigning Bessie to the school-mistress until evening, and a descent on Thunby's hotel. A walk down the Rue St. Jean to the Place St. Pierre, and by the way a glimpse, through an open door in a venerable gateway, of a gravelled court-yard planted with sycamores and surrounded by lofty walls, draped to the summit with vines and ivy; in the distance an arcade with vistas of garden beyond lying drowsy in the sunshine, the angle of a large mansion, and fluttering lilac wreaths of wisteria over the portal.

"If this is Madame Fournier's school, it is a hushed little world," said the doctor.

Bessie beheld it with awe. There was a solemn picturesqueness in the prospect that daunted her imagination.

Harry Musgrave referred to his guide-book: "Ah, I thought so—this is the place. Bessie, Charlotte Corday lived here."

Above the rickety gateway were two rickety windows. At those windows Charlotte might have sat over her copy of Plutarch's "Lives," a ruminating republican in white muslin, before the Revolution, or have gazed at the sombre church of St. Jean across the street, in the happier days before she despised going to old-fashioned worship. Bessie looked up at them more awed than ever. "I hope her ghost does not haunt the house. Come away, Harry," she whispered.

Harry laughed at her superstition. They went forward under the irregular peaked houses, stunned at intervals by side-gusts of evil odor, till they came to the place and church of St. Pierre. The market-women in white-winged caps, who had been sitting at the receipt of custom since morning surrounded by heaps of glowing fruit and flowers, were now vociferously gathering up their fragments, their waifs and strays and remnants, to go home. The men were harnessing their horses, filling their carts. It was all a clamorous, sunny, odd sort of picture amidst the quaint and ancient buildings. Then they went into the church, into the gloom and silence out of the stir. The doctor made the young ones a sign to hush. There were women on their knees, and on the steps of the altar a priest of dignified aspect, and a file of acolytes, awfully ugly, the very refuse of the species—all but one, who was a saint for beauty of countenance and devoutness of mien. Harry glanced at him and his companions as if they were beings of a strange and mysterious race; and the numerous votive offerings to "Our Lady of La Salette" and elsewhere he eyed askance with the expression of a very sound Protestant indeed. The lovely luxuriant architecture, the foliated carvings, were dim in the evening light. A young sculptor, who was engaged in the work of restoring some of these rich carvings, came down from his perch while the strangers stood to admire them.

That night by nine o'clock Bessie Fairfax was in the dortoir at Madame Fournier's—a chamber of six windows and twenty beds, narrow, hard, white, and, except her own and one other, empty. By whose advice it was that she was sent to school a week in advance of the opening she never knew. But there she was in the wilderness of a house, with only a dejected English teacher suffering from chronic face-ache, and another scholar, younger than herself, for company. The great madame was still absent at Bayeux, spending the vacation with her uncle the canon.

It was a moonlight night, and the jalousies looking upon the garden were not closed. Bessie was neither timid nor grievous, but she was desperately wide-awake. The formality of receiving her and showing her to bed had been very briefly despatched. It seemed as if she had been left at the door like a parcel, conveyed up stairs, and put away. Beechhurst was a thousand miles off, and yesterday a hundred years ago! The doctor and Harry Musgrave could hardly have walked back to Thunby's hotel before she and her new comrade were in their little beds. Now, indeed, was the Rubicon passed, and Bessie Fairfax committed to all the vicissitudes of exile. She realized the beginning thereof when she stretched her tired limbs on her unyielding mattress of straw, and recalled her dear little warm nest under the eaves at home.

Presently, from a remote couch spoke her one companion, "I am sitting up on end. What are you doing?"

"Nothing. Lying down and staring at the moon," replied Bessie, and turned her eyes in the direction of the voice.

The figure sitting up on end was distinctly visible. It was clasping its knees, its long hair flowed down its back, and its face was steadily addressed to the window at the foot of its bed. "Do you care to talk?" asked the queer apparition.

"I shall not fall asleep for hours yet," said Bessie.

"Then let us have a good talk." The unconscious quoter of Dr. Johnson contributed her full share to the colloquy. She told her story, and why she was at Madame Fournier's: "Father's ship comes from Yarmouth in Norfolk. It is there we are at home, but he is nearly always at sea—to and fro to Havre and Caen, to Dunkirk and Bordeaux. It is a fine sailing ship, the Petrel. When the wind blows I think of father, though he has weathered many storms. To-night it will be beautiful on the water. I have often sailed with father." A prodigious sigh closed the paragraph, and drew from Bessie a query that perhaps she wished she was sailing with him now? She did, indeed! "He left me here because I was not well—it is three weeks since; it was the day of the emperor's fête—but I am no stronger yet. I have been left here before—once for a whole half-year. I hope it won't be so long this time; I do so miss father! My mother is dead, and he has married another wife. I believe she wishes I were dead too."

"Oh no," cried Bessie, much amazed. "I have a mother who is not really my mother, but she is as good as if she were."

"Then she is not like mine. Are women all alike? Hush! there is Miss Foster at the door—listening. … She is gone now; she didn't peep in. … Tell me, do you hear anything vulgar in my speech?"

"No—it is plain enough." It was a question odd and unexpected, and Bessie had to think before she answered it.

Her questioner mistook her reflection for hesitation, and seemed disappointed. "Ah, but you do," said she, "though you don't like to tell me so. It is provincial, very provincial, Miss Foster admits. … Next week, when the young ladies come back, I shall wish myself more than ever with father."

"What for? don't you like school?" Bessie was growing deeply interested in these random revelations.

"No. How should I? I don't belong to them. Everybody slights me but madame. Miss Hiloe has set me down as quite common. It is so dreadful!"

Bessie's heart had begun to beat very hard. "Is it?" said she in a tone of apprehension. "Do they profess to despise you?"

"More than that—they do despise me; they don't know how to scorn me enough. But you are not common, so why should you be afraid? My father is a master-mariner—John Fricker of Great Yarmouth. What is yours?"

"Oh, mine was a clergyman, but he is long since dead, and my own mother too. The father and mother who have taken care of me since live at Beechhurst in the Forest, and he is a doctor. It is my grandfather who sends me here to school, and he is a country gentleman, a squire. But I like my common friends best—far!"

"If you have a squire for your grandfather you may speak as you please—Miss Hiloe will not call you common. Oh, I am shrewd enough: I know more than I tell. Miss Foster says I have the virtues of my class, but I have no business at a school like this. She wonders what Madame Fournier receives me for. Oh, I wish father may come over next month! Nobody can tell how lonely I feel sometimes. Will you call me Janey?" Janey's poor little face went down upon her knees, and there was the sound of sobs. Bessie's tender heart yearned to comfort this misery, and she would have gone over to administer a kiss, had she not been peremptorily warned not to risk it: there was the gleam of a light below the door. When that alarm was past, composure returned to the master-mariner's little daughter, and Bessie ventured to ask if the French girls were nice.

The answer sounded pettish: "There are all sorts in a school like this. Elise Finckel lives in the Place St. Pierre: they are clock and watchmakers, the Finckels. Once I went there; then Elise and Miss Hiloe made friends, and it was good-bye to me! but clanning is forbidden."

Bessie required enlightening as to what "clanning" meant. The explanation was diffuse, and branched off into so many anecdotes and illustrations that in spite of the moonlight, her nerves, her interest, and her forebodings, Bessie began to yield to the overpowering influence of sleep. The little comrade, listened to no longer, ceased her prattle and napped off too.

The next sound Bessie Fairfax heard was the irregular clangor of a bell, and behold it was morning! Some one had been into the dortoir and had opened a window or two. The warm fragrant breath of sunshine and twitter of birds entered.

"So this is being at school in France? What a din!" said Bessie, stopping her ears and looking for her comrade.

That strange child was just opening a pair of sleepy eyes and exhorting herself by name: "Now, Miss Janey Fricker, you will be wise to get up without more thinking about it, or there will be a bad mark and an imposition for you, my dear. What a blessing! five dull days yet before the arrival of the tormentors!" She slipped out upon the floor, exclaiming how tired she was and how all her bones ached, till Bessie's heart ached too for pity of the delicate, sensitive morsel of humanity.

They had soup for breakfast, greasy, flavorless stuff loaded with vegetables, and bread sour with long keeping. This was terrible to Bessie. She sipped and put down her spoon, then tried again. Miss Foster, at the same table, partook of a rough decoction of coffee with milk, and a little rancid butter on the sour bread toasted.

After breakfast the two girls were told that they were permitted to go into the garden. They spent the whole morning there, and there Mr. Carnegie and Harry Musgrave found Bessie when they came to take their final leave of her. It was good and brave of the little girl not to distress them with complaints, for she was awfully hungry, and likely to be so until her dainty appetite was broken in to French school-fare. Her few tears did not signify.

Harry Musgrave said the garden was not so pretty as it appeared from the street, and the doctor made rueful allusions to convents and prisons, and was not half satisfied to leave his dear little Bessie there. The morning sun had gone off the grass. The walls were immensely lofty—the tallest trees did not overtop them. There was a weedy, weak fountain, a damp grotto, and two shrines with white images of the Blessed Mary crowned with gilt stars.

Miss Foster came into the garden the moment the visitors appeared, holding one hand against the flannel that enveloped her face. She made the usual polite speeches of hope, expectation, and promise concerning the new-comer, and stayed about until the gentlemen went. Then an inexpressible flatness fell upon Bessie, and she would probably have wept in earnest, but for the sight of Janey Fricker standing aloof and gazing at her wistfully for an invitation to draw near. Somebody to succor was quite in Bessie's way; helpless, timid things felt safe under covert of her wing. It gave her a vocation at once to have this weak, ailing little girl seeking to her for protection, and she called her to come. How gladly Janey came!

"What were you thinking of just now when I lost my friends?" Bessie asked her.

"Oh, of lots of things: I can't tell you of what. Is that your brother?"

"No, he is a cousin."

"Are you very fond of him? I wonder what it feels like to have many people to love? I have no one but father."

"Harry Musgrave and I have known each other all our lives. And now you and I are going to be friends."

"If you don't find somebody you like better, as Elise Finckel did. There is the bell; it means dinner in ten minutes." Bessie was looking sorry at her new comrade's suspicion. Janey was quick to see it. "Oh, I have vexed you about Elise?" cried she in a voice of pleading distress. "When shall I learn to trust anybody again?"

Bessie smiled superior. "Very soon, I hope," said she. "You must not afflict yourself with fancies. I am not vexed; I am only sorry if you won't trust me. Let us wait and see. I feel a kindness for most people, and don't need to love one less because I love another more. I promise to keep a warm place in my heart for you always, you little mite! I have even taken to Miss Foster because I pity her. She looks so overworked, and jaded, and poor."

"It is easy to like Miss Foster when you know her. She keeps her mamma, and her salary is only twenty-five pounds a year."

The dinner, to which the girls adjourned at a second summons of the bell, was as little appetizing as the breakfast had been. There was the nauseous soup, a morsel of veal, a salad dressed with rank oil, a mess of sweet curd, and a dish of stewed prunes. After the fiction of dining, Miss Foster took the two pupils for a walk by the river, where groups of soldiers under shade of the trees were practising the fife and the drum. Caen seemed to be full of soldiers, marching and drilling for ever. Louise, the handsome portress at the school, frankly avowed that she did not know what the young women of her generation would do for husbands; the conscription carried away all the finest young men. Janey loved to watch the soldiers; she loved all manner of shows, and also to tell of them. She asked Bessie if she would like to hear about the emperor's fête last month; and when Bessie acquiesced, she began in a discursive narrative style by which a story can be stretched to almost any length:

"There was a military mass at St. Etienne's in the morning. I had only just left father, but Mademoiselle Adelaide took me with her, and a priest sent us up into the triforium—you understand what the triforium is? a gallery in the apse looking down on the choir. The triforium at St. Etienne's is wide enough to drive a coach and four round; at the Augustines, where we went once to see three sisters take the white veil, it is quite narrow, and without anything to prevent you falling over—a dizzy place. But I am forgetting the fête. … It was so beautiful when the doors were thrown open, and the soldiers and flags came tramping in with the sunshine, and filled the nave! The generals sat with the mayor and the prêfet in the chancel, ever so grand in their ribbons and robes and orders. The service was all music and not long: soldiers don't like long prayers. You will see them go to mass on Sunday at St. Jean's, opposite the school. … Then at night there was a procession—such a pandemonium! such a rabble-rout, with music and shouting, soldiers marching at the double, carrying blazing torches, and a cloud of paper lanterns that caught fire and flared out. We could hear the discordant riot ever so far off, and when the mob came up our street again, almost in the dark, I covered my ears. Of all horrible sounds, a mob of excited Frenchmen can make the worst. The wind in a storm at sea is nothing to it."

There was a man gathering peaches from the sunny wall of a garden-house by the river. Janey finished her tale, and remarked that here fruit could be bought. Bessie, rich in the possession of a pocketful of money, was most truly glad to hear it, and a great feast of fruit ensued, with accompaniments of galette and new milk. Then the walk was continued in a circuit which brought them back to the school through the town. The return was followed by a collation of thick bread and butter and thin tea; then by a little reading aloud in Miss Foster's holiday apartment, and then by the dortoir, and another good talk in the moonlight until sleep overwhelmed the talkers. Bessie dropt off with the thought in her mind that her father and dear Harry Musgrave must be just about going on board the vessel at Havre that was to carry them to Hampton, and that when she woke up in the morning they would be on English soil once more, and riding home to Beechhurst through the dewy glades of the Forest. …

This account of twenty-four hours will stand for the whole of that first week of Bessie's exile. Only the walks of an afternoon were varied. In company with dull, neuralgic Miss Foster the two pupils visited the famous stone-quarries above the town, out of which so many grand churches have been built; they compassed the shaded Cours; they investigated the museum, and Bessie was introduced to the pretty portrait of Charlotte Corday, in a simple cross-over white gown, a blue sash and mob-cap. Afterward she was made acquainted with a lady of royalist partialities, whose mother had actually known the heroine, and had lived through the terrible days of the Terror. Her tradition was that the portrait of Charlotte was imaginary, and, as to her beauty, delusive, and that the tragical young lady's moving passion was a passion for notoriety. Bessie wondered and doubted, and began to think history a most interesting study.

For another "treat," as Janey Fricker called it, they went on the Sunday to drink tea with Miss Foster at her mother's. Mrs. Foster was a widow with ideas of gentility in poverty. She was a chirping, bird-like little woman, and lived in a room as trellised as a bird-cage. The house was on the site of the old ramparts, and the garden sloped to the fosse. A magnolia blossomed in it, and delicious pears, of the sort called "Bon chrêtiens," ripened on gnarled trees. This week was, in fact, a beautiful little prelude to school life, if Bessie had but known it. But her appreciation of its simple pleasures came later, when they were for ever past. She remembered then, with a sort of remorse, laughing at Janey's notion of a "treat." Everything goes by comparison. At this time Bessie had no experience of what it is to live by inelastic rule and rote, to be ailing and unhappy, alone in a crowd and neglected. Janey believed in Mrs. Foster's sun-baked little garden as a veritable pattern of Eden, but Bessie knew the Forest, she knew Fairfield, and almost despised that mingled patch of beauty and usefulness, of sweet odors and onions, for Mrs. Foster grew potherbs and vegetables amongst her flowers.

Thus Bessie's first week of exile got over, and except for a sense of being hungry now and then, she did not find herself so very miserable after all.