After a little time Desirée came to Melmar. She had been placed in
charge of Mrs. Payne by an English lady, who had brought her from her
home in France with the intention of making a nursery governess of the
little girl, but who, finding her either insufficiently trained or not
tractable enough, had transferred her, with the consent of her mother,
to the Edinburgh boarding-school as half pupil, half teacher. When
Melmar’s proposal came, Desirée, still indignant at her present ruler,
accepted it eagerly, declared herself quite competent to act
independently, and would not hear of anybody being consulted upon the
matter. She herself, the little heroine said, with some state, would
inform her mother, and she made her journey accordingly half in spite of
Mrs. Payne, who, however, was by no means ill pleased to transfer so
difficult a charge into other hands. Desirée arrived alone on an August
afternoon, by the coach, in Kirkbride. The homely little Scotch village,
so unlike any thing she had seen before, yet so pretty, dwelling on the
banks of its little brown stream, pleased the girl’s fanciful
imagination mightily. Two or three people--among them the servant from
Melmar who had come to meet her--stood indolently in the sultry sunshine
about the Norlaw Arms. In the shadow of the corner, bowed Jaacob’s weird
figure toiled in the glow of the smithy. One or two women were at the
door of the cottage which contained the widow’s mangle, and the opposite
bank lay fair beneath the light, with that white gable of the manse
beaming down among its trees like a smile. The wayward, excitable little
Frenchwoman had a tender little heart beneath all her vivacity and
caprices. Somehow her eyes sought instinctively that white house on the
brae, and instinctively the little girl thought of her mother and
sister. Ah, yes, this surely, and not Edinburgh, was her mother’s
country! She had never seen it before, yet it seemed familiar to her;
they could be at home here. And thoughts of acquiring that same white
house, and bringing her mother to it in triumph, entered the wild little
imagination. Women make fortunes in France now and then; she did not
know any better, and she was a child. She vowed to herself to buy the
white house on the brae and bring mamma there.
Melmar pleased Desirée, but not so much; she thought it a great deal too
square and like a prison; and Patricia did not please her at all, as she
was not very slow to intimate.
“Mademoiselle does not love me, Joanna,” she said to her pupil as they
wandered about the banks of Tyne together, “to see every thing,” as
Joanna said before they began their lessons; “and I never can love any
one who does not love me.”
“Patricia does not love anybody,” cried Joanna, “unless maybe herself,
and not herself either--right; but never mind, Desirée, _I_ love you,
and by-and-by so will Aunt Jean; and oh! if Oswald would only come
home!”
“I hope he will not while I am here,” said Desirée, with a little frown;
“see! how pretty the sun streams among the trees; but I do not like
Melmar so well as that white house at the village; I should like to live
there.”
“At the manse?” cried Joanna.
“What is the manse? it is not a great house; would they sell it?” said
Desirée.
“Sell it!” Joanna laughed aloud in the contempt of superior knowledge;
“but it’s only because you don’t know; they could as well sell the
church as the manse.”
“I don’t want the church, however--it’s ugly,” said Desirée; “but if I
had money I should buy that white house, and bring mamma and Maria
there.”
“Eh, Desirée! your mamma is English--I heard you say so,” cried Joanna.
“_Eh bien!_ did I ever tell you otherwise?” said the little Frenchwoman,
impatiently; “she would love that white house on the hill.”
“Did _she_ teach you to speak English?” asked Joanna, “because everybody
says you speak so well for a Frenchwoman--and I think so myself; and
papa said you looked quite English to him, and he thought he knew some
one like you, and you were not like a foreigner at all.”
The pretty little shoulders gave an immediate shrug, which demonstrated
their nationality with emphasis.
“Every one must think what every one pleases,” said Desirée. “Who, then,
lives in that white house? I remember mamma once spoke of such a house,
with a white gable and a great tree. Mamma loves rivers and trees. I
think, when she was a child, she must have been here.”
“Why?” asked Joanna, opening her eyes wide.
“I know not why,” said Desirée, still with a little impatience, as she
glanced hurriedly round with a sudden look of half-confused
consideration; “but either some one has told me of this place, or I have
been here in a dream.”
It was the loveliest dell of Tyne. The banks rose so high on either
side, and were so richly dotted with trees, that it was only here and
there, through breaks in the foliage, that you could catch a momentary
glimpse of the brown river, foaming over a chance rock, or sparkling
under some dropping line of sunshine which reached it, by sweet caprice
and artifice of nature, through an avenue of divided branches. The path
where the two girls stood together was at a considerable height above
the stream; and close by them, in a miniature ravine, thickly fringed
with shrubs, poured down a tiny, dazzling waterfall, white as foam
against the background of dark soil and rocks, the special feature of
the scene. Desirée stood looking at it with her little French hands
clasped together, and the chiming of the water woke strange fancies in
her mind. Had she seen it somewhere, in fairy-land or in dreams?--or had
she heard of it in that time which was as good as either--when she was a
child? She stood quite silent, saying nothing to Joanna, who soon grew
weary of this pause, complimentary as it might be. Desirée was confused
and did not know what to make of it. She said no more of the white
house, and not much more of her own friends, and kept wondering to
herself as she went back, answering Joanna’s questions and talking of
their future lessons, what strange sentiment of recollection could have
moved her in sight of that waterfall. It was very hard to make it out.
And no doubt it was because Desirée’s mother was English that Aunt Jane
could not keep up her prejudice against the foreigner, but gradually
lapsed to Joanna’s opinion, and day by day fell in love with the little
stranger. She was not a very, very good girl--she was rather the
reverse, if truth must be told. She had no small amount of pretty little
French affectations, and when she was naughty fell back upon her own
language, especially with Patricia, whose Clapham French was not much
different from the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe, and who began with
vigor and reality to entertain, not a feeble prejudice but a hearty
dislike, to the invader. Neither did she do what good governesses are so
like to do, at least in novels--she did not take the place of her
negligent daughters with the invalid Mrs. Huntley, nor remodel the
disorderly household. Sometimes, indeed, out of pure hatred to things
ugly, Desirée put a sofa-cover straight, or spread down a corner of the
crumb-cloth; but she did not captivate the servants, and charm the young
ladies into good order and good behavior; she exercised no very
astonishing influence in that way over even Joanna. She was by no means
a model young lady in herself, and had no special authority, so far as
she was aware of. She taught her pupil, who was one half bigger than
herself, to speak French very tolerably, and to practice a certain time
every day. She took charge of Joanna’s big hands, and twisted, and
coaxed, and pinched them into a less clumsy thump, upon the trembling
keys of the piano. She mollified her companion’s manners even
unconsciously, and suggested improvements in the red hair and brown
merino frock; but having done this, Desirée was not aware of having any
special charge of the general morals and well-being of the family; she
was rather a critic of the same, indeed, but she was not a Mentor nor a
reformer. She obeyed what rules there were in the sloven house--she
shrugged her little French shoulders at the discomforts and quarrels.
She sometimes pouted, or curled her little disdainful upper lip; but she
took nobody’s part save Joanna’s, whom she always defended manfully. It
was not a particularly brilliant or entertaining life for Desirée.
Melmar himself, with his grizzled red hair, and heated face; Mrs.
Huntley, who sometimes never left her room all day, and who, when she
did, lay on a sofa; Patricia, who was spiteful, and did her utmost to
shut out both Joanna and Desirée when any visitors came to break the
tedium--were not remarkably delightful companions; and as the winter
closed in, and there were long evenings, and less pleasure out of
doors--winter, when all the fires looked half choked, and would not
burn, and when a perennial fog seemed to lie over Melmar, did not
increase the comforts of the house. Yet it happened that Desirée was by
no means unhappy; perhaps at sixteen it is hard to be really unhappy,
even when one feels one ought, unless one has some very positive reason
for it. Joanna and she sat together at the scrambling breakfast, which
Patricia was always too late for; then they went to the music lesson,
which tried Joanna’s patience grievously, but which Desirée managed to
get some fun out of, and endured with great philosophy. Then they read
together, and the unfortunate Joanna inked her fingers over her French
exercise. In the afternoon they walked--save when Joanna was compelled
to accompany her sister “in the carriage,” a state ceremonial in which
the little governess was never privileged to share; and after their
return from their walk, Desirée taught her pupil all manner of fine
needleworks, in which she was herself more than usually learned, and
which branch of knowledge was highly prized by Aunt Jean, and even by
Mrs. Huntley. Such was the course of study pursued by Joanna under the
charge of her little governess of sixteen.