Daubeny, in the spring of last year. He had already been married--in
fact, had been twice a widower--when Julia met him at a Garrison
Gymkhana. It was a case of love at first sight, and I gave Julia her
trousseau as my wedding present. And now she is sending me home the
General’s baby--the child of his last wife--as it cannot stand the
climate, and she knows how I dote on little children.”
“How old is this child?” queried Lady Cranberry.
Mrs. Lovelace-Legge produced a thin crackling envelope from her pocket,
and unfolded Mrs. Carabyne’s letter. “Julia always writes without
punctuation, and all her capitals are in the wrong places,” she said,
apologizing for the hesitation with which she attacked the scrawled
pages. “‘_I forgot to mention_,’” wrote Julia, “‘_that the General
has one son quite a darling and a favorite with everybody. He was
christened Dampierre. There is French blood on the mother’s side, but
everybody calls him ‘Dumps.’ He has the sweetest nature and splendid
teeth until about six months old----_’”
“Incoherent, isn’t she, rather?” hinted Lady Cranberry.
“‘_Six months old when he was thrown out of his
bamboo-cart_’--Anglo-Indian for perambulator, I suppose--‘_thrown out
of his bamboo-cart with a woman who had got hold of him at the time a
most dreadful creature and sustained a severe concussion of the brain.
You will gather by this that the poor dear is inclined to be more than
a little child._’”
“Is not the sense of that rather--involved?”
Mrs. Lovelace-Legge held out the letter.
“It is ‘child’ or else ‘wild,’” Lady Cranberry said, dropping her
eyeglasses.
“As if an infant of six months old could be called ‘wild’!” giggled
Mrs. Lovelace-Legge. She read on:
“‘_Now the doctors have positively ordered him home, and we have not
the least idea where to send him. In this dilemma I thought of you. The
General shakes his head, but I have carried my point, and Dumps and
his nurse sail by the “Ramjowrah” next Thursday, and when arrived in
London will come straight to you. I have every faith in your goodness
of heart, and know that poor dear Dumps could be placed in charge of no
kinder friend. He is extremely affectionate--from pursuits which ruin
many of the most promising young._’”
“Humph!” ejaculated the puzzled Lady Cranberry.
“Perhaps Julia means tearing his clothes and sucking the paint off his
toys?” suggested the second-best dearest friend.
Mrs. Lovelace-Legge read on: “‘_Men in India if you have read Rudyard
Kipling I need not be more definite we shall look to your gentle
influence to wean him._’”
“One thing at least is clear,” remarked Lady Cranberry. “The child is
not yet weaned. As to your correspondent’s style, Lotta----” She said
no more, but in her mind she harbored a most definite conviction that
Julia Carabyne drank. “Eau de Cologne or red lavender,” she thought,
“or pure, unadulterated cognac. I pity the General from my heart!”
A few more confused and comma-less paragraphs, and the letter wound up.
“You think I did right?” Mrs. Lovelace-Legge glanced round at her
preparations. “But, indeed, I had no choice. How could any woman with a
heart--and a nursery----”
“Both unoccupied?” said Lady Cranberry.
“Close her doors against a little sick baby, coming all the
way from India in a nurse’s arms? The bare idea strikes one as
horrible! Besides, the poor darling may arrive at any moment!” Mrs.
Lovelace-Legge dried her pretty eyes with a fragment of gossamer
cambric, and then--rat-tatter, tatter, TAT! went the hall-door knocker.
The three ladies started to their feet. Mrs. Lovelace-Legge rushed to
the window.
“Can it be?”
“The baby--arrived?”...
“It has! I see the top of a cab piled with luggage!” cried Mrs.
Lovelace-Legge, leaning eagerly from the nursery window. “I can make
out the Harries Line label on the portmanteaux----”
The second-best friend joined her at the casement.
“One thing puzzles me,” she said, peering downward. “Would a child of
that age travel with gun-cases and a bicycle?”
“They may belong to a passenger friend who promised to see the dear
child delivered safely into my hands. Ah, here is Simmons!”
Simmons it was, with a salver and a card. He wore a peculiar, rather
wild expression, and his countenance was flushed and somewhat swollen;
perhaps with the effort of climbing so many stairs. All three ladies
hurried to meet him.
“He--it--the----”
“_They_ have arrived?” gasped little Mrs. Lovelace-Legge.
Simmons bowed his head. His mistress could not speak. She took the card
without looking at it, and turned away.
“Show them up here!” commanded Lady Cranberry, sympathetically
comprehending Lotta’s emotion.
“And pay the cabman,” added the second-best friend.
Left together, the three women broke out into anticipatory ejaculations:
“The pet!”
“The wumpsy!”
“Will it be pretty?”
“Oh, I hope so! But even if it is not,” cried little Mrs.
Lovelace-Legge, clasping her hands, “I feel that I shall love it. Ought
we”--her eyebrows crumpled inquiringly--“ought we to give it a warm
bath at once? Where is Nurse?”
Nurse and her understrapper appeared on the scene with the young lady
from the Kindergarten. Six eager feminine heads were projected over the
balusters of the top landing as masculine footsteps creaked upon the
staircase, and a tall young man, dressed in a rough yachting suit of
blue serge, raised his eyes--a handsome and ingenuous pair--and blushed
under the salvo of optical artillery which greeted his appearance.
Behind him followed a grizzled, middle-aged person, evidently a
soldier-servant in mufti.
“I--I presume ...,” the young gentleman began, “I--I have the honor....”
“I am Mrs. Lovelace-Legge,” cried the charming widow, craning forward,
“and where--oh, where is the baby?”
The young man turned pale. “The--the baby?”
“Haven’t you brought it?” cried all the ladies.
Tears welled up in Mrs. Lovelace-Legge’s lovely eyes.
“Don’t tell me it is dead!” she gasped. “Oh, if that were true, how
could I break the news to Julia and General Carabyne?”
“Madam,” stammered the young gentleman, “I am the only son of General
Carabyne--Dampierre Carabyne.” He blushed again. “People usually call
me ‘Dumps,’” he said, and broke off as all six women screamed at once:
“YOU! YOU THE BABY!”
And the nurses flung their clean cambric aprons over their heads, and
rushed in titters from the scene, as poor little Mrs. Lovelace-Legge
went into screaming hysterics in the arms of her second-dearest friend.
“It is all a ridi--a ridiculous misunderstanding!” gasped Lady
Cranberry, an hour later, as the recovered hostess, her friends, and
her newly-arrived guest sat together in the drawing-room. “Let him
see Mrs. Carabyne’s letter, Lotta. Perhaps he will be able to----
No! Better give it to me.” She mounted her gold eyeglasses upon her
aquiline nose, and conned the Runic scroll a while. “We were misled,”
she explained to the young man, “principally by a reference to your
nurse.”
“Molloy _is_ my nurse,” explained Mr. Dampierre Carabyne. “He was one
of the hospital orderlies at Calcutta, and looked after me when I was
ill. And the Pater thought it best that he should valet me on the
voyage, being a useful, experienced kind of man.”
“As to this illness you speak of?” said Lady Cranberry.
“It happened six months ago....”
“Ago! I see a glimmer,” said Lady Cranberry.
“When I was thrown out of a bamboo-cart in which I was driving a friend
of mine--a very great friend.”
Again the young man colored.
“_The woman who had got hold of him_,” murmured Lady Cranberry to
herself. “And ‘_more than a little child_’ means ‘_more than a little
wild_.’ I should have seen _that_ in his eye without a hint from Mrs.
Carabyne.”
Thus, bit by bit, the determined lady translated Julia’s letter, which
ran as follows:
“He was christened Dampierre (there is French blood on the mother’s
side); but everybody calls him ‘Dumps.’ He has the sweetest nature, and
splendid health until six months ago, when he was thrown out of his
bamboo-cart with a woman who had got hold of him at the time--a most
dreadful creature--and sustained a severe concussion of the brain.
(You will gather by this that the poor dear is inclined to be more than
a little wild.) Now the doctors have positively ordered him home, and
we have not the least idea where to send him. In this dilemma I thought
of you. The General shakes his head, but I have carried my point, and
Dumps and his nurse sail by the _Ramjowrah_ next Thursday, and when
arrived in London will come straight to you. I have every faith in your
goodness of heart, and know that poor dear Dumps could be placed in
charge of no kinder friend.... He is extremely affectionate.... From
pursuits which ruin many of the most promising young men in India (if
you have read Rudyard Kipling I need not be more definite) we look to
your gentle influence to wean him.”
Lady Cranberry took off her _pince-nez_ and refolded the letter. As
she did so she glanced toward the snug nook by the fireplace, where
the pretty widow, entrenched behind the barricade of her afternoon
tea-table, was making but a feeble show of resistance to the raking
fire of Dumps’s handsome eyes. In such a mood such a woman as Lady
Cranberry shares a corner of the mantle of the Prophets. It occurred to
her that the infantile Paradise upstairs might not, if all went merrily
as marriage bells, remain so very long untenanted.
And, indeed, at the expiration of a twelvemonth from that date Mrs.
Dampierre Carabyne----
Please see the left-hand top corner reserved in the morning papers for
these delicate and personal intimations.
YVONNE
IN TWO PARTS
I
A mile or so north of the fishy little Breton harbor town of Paimpol,
the hamlet of Pors Lanec is represented by a scattered cluster of
low-pitched, straggling cottages built of gray granite boulders
splashed with yellow lichen, their thatch of furze and reeds or
broom-bush secured by lashings of rope, and heavy flagstones from the
fierce assaults of the western gales. One in especial stands on an
incline trending toward the beach, below the level of the Paimpol road.
Its rear wall is formed by a low cliff against which it has been built,
and which, rearing some twenty feet above the level of its shaggy brown
roof, and throwing out a natural buttress toward the sea, protects the
poor dwelling from the icy northern winds. Three uneven steps, worn by
the feet of generations of fisher-dwellers, lead to the door, whose
inner latch is lifted by a length of rope-yarn, reeved through a hole.
On each side of the door a window has been hollowed out in the solid
masonry of the wall, and roughly glazed; and beneath the rude slate
ledge of each is a weather-beaten bench of drift-oak, blackened by age
and usage. The door standing open gives a glimpse of the usual Breton
interior, bunches of dried herbs, nets, and baskets depending from
the blackened rafters, carved sleeping-bunks set about the walls, a
few quaint pewter and copper flagons hanging on pegs driven into the
chimney, and reflecting the leaping blaze of the pine and beechwood
branches burning on the hearth.
I do not know who lives in Mademoiselle Yvonne’s cottage now, but a
year ago the western gale was churning the gray sea into futile anger,
and thrashing the stunted bushes into a more bending shape. The sky was
somber as the sea, with eastward-hurrying drifts of slaty cirrus, which
separated to reveal pale, sun-washed sky-spaces, and closed again,
making the gloom seem deeper than before.
It was the eighth of December, the Feast of the Immaculate
Conception--the day of the Pardon des Islandais--and the morning
Angelus was ringing from the storm-beaten little chapel on the heights
above, where nosegays of artificial flowers and strings of shells
adorned the image of Our Lady of Good Help, and white-capped women, and
rugged-faced, long-haired men knelt, rapt and serious, on the sandy
stone pavement. Others were hurrying into Paimpol, where the streets
were decorated with white sheets bordered with holly and ivy leaves in
readiness for the procession. And a fine, icy rain was driving before
the wind, and Yvonne’s tables and chairs stood out of doors while their
owner beat and scrubbed them vigorously with a birch-broom dipped in
soap-suds.
“She works upon the _fête_ day, yes; but for all that she is no
heretic, the poor Yvonne,” a passer-by explained to a companion--a
stranger who showed surprise at the unusual spectacle. “All days are
alike to her--and Our Lady understands.”
The speaker, a brown-faced, vigorous woman of fifty, paused on the
pathway, littered with brown trails of slippery seaweed, and cried:
“Hey! So you’re not going with us to Paimpol, Mademoiselle Yvonne?”
Mademoiselle Yvonne ceased flogging her table, and turned her face
toward the questioner. It was a full, straight-featured, rather massive
face, framed in the shell-fluted cap worn by unmarried women. The brows
were broad, and from under the straight eyebrows looked a pair of eyes
that were blue and clear and candid as those of the little boy who
clung to the skirts of the woman who addressed her. As she drew herself
up, resting on her birch-broom, it might be seen that she was tall and
deep-chested and broad-bosomed, and that the massive plaits of hair
coiled upon her temples were gray.
“Going to Paimpol! Sure, it is impossible,” said Mademoiselle Yvonne.
“There is so much to do getting the house ready.” A rich deep color
flushed her cheeks, staining her temples and tinting her full throat
to the edge of her bodice. “When one is to be married, Madame
understands----”
“So then! You have heard?” cried the neighbor with an elaborate
pantomime of delight at the good news. “You have had a letter from
Iceland at last?”
The clear blue eyes looked troubled for a moment.
“No. Not that,” said Mademoiselle Yvonne. “Not precisely a letter, but
I have made out why the _Marie au Secours_ delays so long. You see,
they must have had a great catch at the cod-fisheries, and, being a
man of brains, my Yann set out to make the most of his good luck. So
the _Marie au Secours_ will have merely touched at Paimpol, and then
sailed down to the Gulf of Gascony, where fish fetch high prices, or
even to the Sandy Isles.” One of her massive plaits, released by her
vigorous movements from the confining pin, uncoiled and fell below her
waist. “That is how it will have been, Madame Pilot!” exclaimed Yvonne,
smiling and coiling up the beautiful hair.
“Without doubt, that is how it will have been!” assented the other.
She drove her stout elbow into the ribs of the woman who had whispered
to her. “Not so loud! We people of the coast have sharper ears than you
folks from inland.”
“When did he sail?”
“Twenty years ago, when she was eighteen, and all that gray hair gold.”
“Pfui! There was a blast!”
“We shall have to pick the wind’s bones all the way to Paimpol. So
good-day, Mademoiselle.... Gaos, run and bid Mademoiselle Yvonne
good-day.”
Madame Pilot nudged the other woman again, as much as to say: “Watch
her with the child!”
Gaos obediently quitted his mother’s skirts, and Yvonne knelt down
to kiss him. She whispered in the child’s ear coaxingly, and, as
he hesitated, watched the innocent lips as though her fate in some
inexplicable way hung upon their utterance.
“She always tries to get him to say it, and he never will!” said Madame
Pilot under her breath.
“What?” mouthed the inland woman, with round, interested eyes.
The child spoke at that moment loudly and clearly.
“He will come back to-day!”
“Lord above! if he hasn’t said it!” cried Madame Pilot, and crossed
herself under her ample cloak as the boy came running to her.
She caught his hand, and clattered on in her heavy wooden shoes,
fighting her way resolutely against the wind, followed more slowly by
the gaping inlander.
“You rogue! You little villain!” she cried to the child she dragged.
“What made you say it?”
“Be-be-cause--bub--bub--boo--because it’s true!” roared Gaos, through
angry sobs.
His mother, with a hasty invocation of her patron saint, dropped his
hand, stopped where the beach-pathway merged in the Paimpol road, and
looked back. Mademoiselle Yvonne was nowhere to be seen at first, but
presently her figure mounted into view climbing the pathway to the
chapel.
“She has gone to burn a candle for her good news,” said Madame Pilot.
“Now which have I for a son ... a liar or a prophet? If one were
to mistake and smack the prophet, it’s enough to bring a judgment
down....” She shook her head mournfully. “But it is to be prayed for,
all the same, that that great rogue Yann may never come wheedling back.
Drowned, did you suppose? Dead? Not a bit of it!... He’s living on the
fat of the land in Ploubazou, where he landed his last cargo of fish
nineteen years ago, married a tavern-keeper’s daughter, and set up a
sailor’s drinking-house himself; ‘The Chinese Cider Cellars,’ they call
it. May Heaven punish such vagabonds!” panted Madame Pilot. “As for us
in Pors Lanec, we’re peace-lovers and law-abiders, but there are stones
and cudgels waiting for Monsieur Yann Tregnier whenever he shows his
nose here.”
Madame Pilot stopped, as a broad-shouldered young man in a sailor’s
cap and pilot-cloth jacket came tramping toward her along the puddly
Paimpol road, whistling a cheerful tune. He wore thick town-made
brogues instead of wooden _sabots_, and saluted the women in the
country fashion, though to him personally they were unknown, and passed
by, leaving the mother of the possible prophet staring; for he was
known to her as the son of the Ploubazou tavern-keeper Yann Tregnier,
christened Jean-Marie after his mother’s father. He was a well-looking,
sturdy young fellow of eighteen, who had always hankered to join the
Icelanders, as the cod-trawlers are called, and sail with the yearly
fleet on the last day of February for the big, dangerous fisheries in
the icy regions where the summers have no night. But Yann, his father,
would not hear of it, and Jean-Marie had been apprenticed to a cooper
in Paimpol. He had grumbled, but his fate appeared less hard now that
he was in love with Gaud. Gaud lived with an aunt in the village of
Pors Lanec, a place Jean-Marie knew as yet only by hearsay, since her
parents lived in Paimpol, and she had met her lover while upon a visit
to them. Pors Lanec lay by the beach a mile or two from Paimpol, Gaud
had told him. The cottage was built against a great rock, the doorstep
was the beach, and the sea the duck-pond before the door; he could not
fail to recognize the place, Gaud had described it so clearly.
Gaud was a little delicate creature, with hair of burning gold hidden
under her shell cap, and great violet-gray eyes, full of possible
adoration for any likely young fellow who should come wooing to Pors
Lanec, and the likely young fellow had come along in the person
of Jean-Marie. And he had won her promise, and meant to marry her
and settle down to the cooper’s trade in earnest. True, the girl
was without a dower, and his father, with whom he had had a talk
at Ploubazou last Sunday, had pulled a long lip at that piece of
information, and he had said to the old man straight out: “Either I get
Gaud or go to sea!”
“Either I get Gaud--or go to sea!” Jean-Marie repeated now in the
most deep and manly voice he had at command. For the cottage built
against the cliff had come in sight, a dwelling so weather-worn and
lichen-stained that it might have been an excrescence upon the side of
the rock that sheltered it. “Either I get Gaud....” Jean-Marie squared
his shoulders, and marched down upon the cottage where Gaud lived. As
his firm footsteps crossed the plateau of sandy rock that lay before
the cottage door he heard a cry from within, and before he could lift a
hand to the rope-yarn of the latch, the door was pulled violently back,
thrown open, and a woman fell upon his breast with a sobbing shriek of
joy.
“Yann! Oh, my beloved, at last!”
“Madame!” he stuttered.
“Our Lady sent me word you would return to-day, and even as I was upon
my way to thank her for such grace, I turned back thinking. ‘If he
should come and miss me!’”
The wind blew shrilly; the sky grew black with storm. Jean-Marie’s
cheek was wet with rain or the woman’s tears. He was conscious of a
dizziness. It was as though a web of some strange tissue were weaving
in the chambers of his brain, and the pattern grew more and more
familiar. The arms that clasped him were not those of a stranger; the
heart that throbbed upon his own had rested there before. Even the
cottage interior shown through the low doorway was familiar, and the
oaken benches to right and left, had he not carved his name on one of
them, his and another’s?
But even as these strange questions awakened in the mind of the young
man, he was thrust violently back, and Yvonne was gazing, with still
streaming eyes, at the face of a stranger, while, partly hidden by
the tall figure of her aunt, appeared the little shrinking figure of
Mademoiselle Gaud!
“Who is it?” asked Yvonne dully, without removing her eyes from that
unknown face of the man whose step was like Yann’s.
“I--I believe--I think--’tis Monsieur Jean-Marie,” panted Gaud. “Sweet
St. Agnes!” she prayed inwardly to her patron saint, “make her not ask
me his other name! If she does I am sure I shall lie and say I do not
know; so, sweetest St. Agnes, preserve me from sinning!” Next moment
she breathed freely, for Yvonne stepped aside, leaving the threshold
free to the stranger.
“Ask of his business, little one!” she said, without looking at Gaud,
“and let him know that he was mistaken for one who has a right to be
welcomed with open arms.”
She had a black woollen cloak loosely thrown about her shoulders. She
sat down upon the seat to the right of the door, her elbow on her
knee, her chin upon her hand, the dark folds half concealing the noble
outlines of her form, her eyes fixed upon the most distant turn in the
Paimpol road.
Jean-Marie was at liberty to proceed with his courting; Yvonne seemed
to hear and see him no longer. Only as the lover grew gayer, and the
clear laugh of Gaud sounded in unison with his, a quiver passed over
the face of Yvonne. At twelve o’clock, when the dinner was ready, Gaud
came dutifully to tell her. She only shook her head, and the midday
meal of salt fish, potatoes, and cider was shared by the lovers.
When the dishes were washed, Jean-Marie proposed a stroll to the chapel
on the cliff. Gaud, her pale cheeks tipped with a little crimson, like
the leaves of a daisy, came to ask Yvonne’s permission.
“My mother allowed him to visit us in Paimpol,” she said meekly,
flushing deeper as she remembered that she had introduced him as
Monsieur Jean-Marie, the cooper’s apprentice, and that her mother knew
nothing of his relationship to the man who had used her Aunt Yvonne
so wickedly. Through the crystal of Gaud’s nature ran a little streak
of deceptiveness. Like all weak things, she could be cunning where
her love or her interest was concerned, and what did it matter what
Jean-Marie’s father had done? she argued. He was not Jean-Marie. So she
and her sweetheart set out upon their walk, keeping a decorous distance
of at least six feet between them, and swinging unoccupied hands that,
when the path grew narrow, would meet and cling. And Yvonne saw two
figures appear in the distance upon the Paimpol road, neither of which
caused her any emotion. Monsieur Blandon, the Paimpol doctor, was
hirpling out upon his old white mare, to visit some of his Pors Lanec
patients; half an hour must elapse before he could dismount at Yvonne’s
door, the mare was so old and the road so stony. She looked away, far
out to sea, and watched a tossing white sail upon the inky horizon,
and with the instinct of one bred by the sea knew that there would be
weather yet more stormy, for the seagulls and kittiwakes were hurrying
inland. Then a heavy pair of wooden shoes clacked over the stones, and
a vinous voice gave her “good-day.” It was one Piggou Moan, once a
smart young fisherman and avowed rival of Yann, now the smuggler, the
loafer, the drunkard of the hamlet.