The next day Cameron came up stairs to Cosmo’s room, where the lad was
writing by the window, with an open letter in his hand and rather a
comical expression on his face.
“Here is for you, Cosmo,” said Cameron. “The like of me does not
captivate ladies. Macgregor and I must make you our reverence. We never
would have got this invitation but for your sake.”
“What is it?” cried Cosmo, rising eagerly, with a sudden blush, and
already more than guessing, as he leaned forward to see it, what the
communication was. It was a note from Madame Roche, oddly, yet prettily,
worded, with a fragrance of French idiom in its English, which made it
quite captivating to Cosmo, who was highly fantastical, and would not
have been quite contented to find his beautiful old lady writing a
matter-of-fact epistle like other people. It was an invitation to “her
countrymen” to take a cup of tea with her on the following evening. She
had heard from Baptiste and his wife that they were English travelers,
and loved to hear the speech of her own country, though she had grown
unfamiliar with it, and therewith she signed her name, “Mary Roche de
St. Martin,” in a hand which was somewhat stiff and old-fashioned, yet
refined. Cosmo was greatly pleased. His face glowed with surprised
gratification; he was glad to have his old heroine come up so entirely
to his fancy, and delighted to think of seeing and knowing her, close at
hand in her own home.
“You will go?” he said, eagerly.
Cameron laughed--even, if truth must be told, the grave Highlander
blushed a little. He was totally unused to the society of women; he was
a little excited by the idea of making friends in this little foreign
town, and already looked forward with no small amount of expectation to
Madame Roche’s modest tea-drinking. But he did not like to betray his
pleasure; he turned half away, as he answered:--
“For your sake, you know, laddie--Macgregor and I would have had little
chance by ourselves--yes, we’ll go,” and went off to write a very stiff
and elaborate reply, in the concoction of which Cameron found it more
difficult to satisfy himself than he had ever been before all his life.
It was finished, how ever, and dispatched at last. That day ended, the
fated evening came. The Highland student never made nor attempted so
careful a toilette--he, too, had found time to catch a glimpse of
Cosmo’s beautiful old lady, and of the pale, fragile daughter, who went
out once a week to drive in the little carriage. Mademoiselle Marie,
whom Cosmo had scarcely noticed, looked to Cameron like one of the
tender virgin martyrs of those old pictures which had impressed his
uncommunicative imagination without much increasing his knowledge. He
had watched her, half lifted, half helped into the little carriage, with
pity and interest greater than any one knew of. He was a strong man,
unconscious in his own person of what illness was--a reserved, solitary,
self-contained hermit, totally ignorant of womankind, save such as his
old mother in her Highland cottage, or the kind, homely landlady in the
High Street whose anxiety for his comfort sometimes offended him as
curiosity. A lady, young, tender, and gentle--a woman of romance,
appealing unconsciously to all the protecting and supporting impulses of
his manhood, had never once been placed before in Cameron’s way.
So Cosmo and his friend, with an interest and excitement almost equal,
crossed the little street of St. Ouen, towards Madame Roche’s second
floor, in the early darkness of the February night, feeling more
reverence, respect, and enthusiasm than young courtiers going to be
presented to a queen. As for their companion, Cameron’s pupil, he was
the only unconcerned individual of the little party. _He_ was not
unaccustomed to the society of ladies--Madame Roche and her daughter
had no influence on his imagination; he went over the way with the most
entire complacency, and not a romantical sentiment within a hundred
miles of him; he was pleased enough to see new faces, and share his own
agreeable society with some one else for the evening, and he meant to
talk of Italy and pictures and astonish these humble people, by way of
practice when he should reach home--Macgregor was not going to any
enchanted palace--he only picked his steps over the causeway of the
little street of St. Ouen, directing his way towards Madame Roche’s
second floor.
This chamber of audience was a small room, partly French and party
English in its aspect; the gilded clock and mirror over the
mantel-piece--the marble table at the side of the room--the cold
polished edge of floor on which Cameron’s unwary footsteps almost
slid--the pretty lamp on the table, and the white maze of curtains
artistically disposed at the window, and looped with pink ribbons, were
all indigenous to the soil; but the square of thick Turkey carpet--the
little open fire-place, where a wood fire burned and crackled merrily,
the warm-colored cover on the table, where stood Madame Roche’s pretty
tea equipage, were home-like and “comfortable” as insular heart could
wish to see. On a sofa, drawn close to the fire-place, half sat, half
reclined, the invalid daughter. She was very pale, with eyes so blue,
and mild, and tender, that it was impossible to meet their gentle glance
without a rising sympathy, even though it might be impossible to tell
what that sympathy was for. She was dressed--the young men, of course,
could not tell how--in some invalid dress, so soft, so flowing, so
seemly, that Cameron, who was as ignorant as a savage of all the graces
of the toilette, could not sufficiently admire the perfect gracefulness
of those most delicate womanly robes, which seemed somehow to belong to,
and form part of, this fair, pale, fragile creature, whose whole
existence seemed to be one of patience and suffering. Madame Roche
herself sat on the other side of the table. She was not in widow’s
dress, though she had not been many years a widow. She wore a white lace
cap, with spotless, filmy white ribbons, under which her fair hair,
largely mixed with silver, was braided in soft bands, which had lost
nothing of their gloss or luxuriance. Her dress was black satin, soft
and glistening--there was no color at all about her habiliments,
nothing but soft white and black. She did not look younger than she was,
nor like any thing but herself. She was not a well-preserved, carefully
got-up beauty. There were wrinkles in her sweet old face, as well as
silver in her hair. Notwithstanding, she sat there triumphant, in the
real loveliness which she could not help and for which she made no
effort, with her beautiful blue eyes, her soft lips, her rose cheek,
which through its wrinkles was as sweet and velvety as an infant’s, her
pretty white hands and rosy finger tips. She was not unconscious either
of her rare gift--but bore it with a familiar grace as she had borne it
for fifty years. Madame Roche had been beautiful all her life--she did
not wonder nor feel confused to know that she was beautiful now.
And she received them, singular to say, in a manner which did not in the
slightest degree detract from Cosmo’s poetic admiration, asking familiar
questions about their names, and where, and how, and why they traveled,
with the kindly interest of an old lady, and with the same delightful
junction of English speech with an occasional French idiom, which had
charmed the lad in her note. Cameron dropped shyly into a chair by the
side of the couch, and inclined his ear, with a conscious color on his
face, to the low voice of the invalid, who, though a little surprised,
took polite pains to talk to him, while Cosmo as shyly, but not with
quite so much awkwardness, took up his position by the side of Madame
Roche. She made no remark, except a kindly smile and bow, when she heard
the names of Cameron and Macgregor, but when Cosmo’s was named to her
she turned round to him with a special and particular kindness of
regard.
“Ah! Livingstone!” she said; “I had a friend once called by that name,”
and Madame Roche made a little pause of remembrance, with a smile and a
half sigh, and that look of mingled amusement, complacence, gratitude,
and regret, with which an old lady like herself remembers the name of an
old lover. Then she returned quietly to her tea-making. She did not
notice Macgregor much, save as needful politeness demanded, and she
looked with a little smiling surprise into the shadow where Cameron had
placed himself by the side of her daughter, but her own attention was
principally given to Cosmo, who brightened under it, and grew shyly
confidential, as was to be looked for at his age.
“I have seen you at your window,” said Madame Roche. “I said to Marie,
this young man, so modest, so ingenuous, who steals back when we come to
the window, I think he must be my countryman. I knew it by your
looks--all of you, and this gentleman, your tutor--ah, he is not at all
like a Frenchman. He has a little forest on his cheeks and none on his
chin, my child--that is not like what we see at St. Ouen.”
The old lady’s laugh was so merry that Cosmo could not help joining in
it--“He is my dear friend,” said Cosmo, blushing to find himself use the
adjective, yet using it with shy enthusiasm; “but he is only Macgregor’s
tutor not mine.”
“Indeed! and who then takes care of you?” said the old lady. “Ah, you
are old enough--you can guard yourself--is it so? Yet I know you have a
good mother at home.”
“I have indeed; but, madame, how do you know?” cried Cosmo, in
amazement.
“Because her son’s face tells me so,” cried Madame Roche, with her
beautiful smile. “I know a mother’s son, my child. I know you would not
have looked down upon an old woman and her poor daughter so kindly but
for your mother at home; and your good friend, who goes to talk to my
poor Marie--has he then a sick sister, whom he thinks upon when he sees
my poor wounded dove?”
Cosmo was a little puzzled; he did not know what answer to make--he
could not quite understand, himself, this entirely new aspect of his
friend’s character. “Cameron is a very good fellow,” he said, with
perplexity; but Cosmo did not himself perceive how, to prove himself a
good fellow, it was needful for Cameron to pay such close reverential
regard to the invalid on her sofa, whom he seemed now endeavoring to
amuse by an account of their travels. The reserved and grave Highlander
warmed as he spoke. He was talking of Venice on her seas, and Rome on
her hills, while Marie leaned back on her pillows, with a faint flush
upon her delicate cheek, following his narrative with little assenting
gestures of her thin white hand, and motions of her head. She was not
beautiful like her mother, but she was so fragile, so tender, so
delicate, with a shadowy white vail on her head like a cap, fastened
with a soft pink ribbon, which somehow made her invalid delicacy of
complexion all the more noticeable, that Cosmo could not help smiling
and wondering at the contrast between her and the black, dark,
strong-featured face which bent towards her. No--Cameron had no sick
sister--perhaps the grave undemonstrative student might even have smiled
at Madame Roche’s pretty French sentiment about her wounded dove; yet
Cameron, who knew nothing about women, and had confessed to Cosmo long
ago how little of the universal benevolence of love he found himself
capable of, was exerting himself entirely out of his usual fashion, with
an awkward earnestness of sympathy which touched Cosmo’s heart, for the
amusement of the poor sick Marie.
“We, too, have wandered far, but not where you have been,” said Madame
Roche. “We do not know your beautiful Rome and Venice--we know only the
wilderness, I and my Marie. Ah, you would not suppose it, to find us
safe in St. Ouen; but we have been at--what do you call it?--the other
side of the world--down, down below here, where summer comes at
Christmas--ah! in the Antipodes.”
“And I would we were there now, mamma,” said Marie, with a sigh.
“Ah, my poor child!--yes, we were there, gentlemen,” said Madame Roche.
“We have been great travelers--we have been in America--we were savages
for a long time--we were lost to all the world; no one knew of us--they
forgot me in my country altogether; and even my poor Jean--they scarce
remembered _him_ in St. Ouen. When we came back, we were like people who
drop from the skies. Ah, it was strange! His father and his friends were
dead, and me--it was never but a place of strangers to me--this town. I
have not been in my country--not for twenty years; yet I sometimes think
I should wish to look at it ere I die, but for Marie.”
“But the change might be of use to her health,” said Cameron, eagerly.
“It often is so. Motion, and air, and novelty, of themselves do a great
deal. Should you not try?”
“Ah, I should travel with joy,” said Marie, clasping her white, thin
hand, “but not to Scotland, monsieur. Your fogs and your rains would
steal my little life that I have. I should go to the woods--to the great
plains--to the country that you call savage and a wilderness; and there,
mamma, if you would but go you should no longer have to say--‘Poor
Marie!’”
“And that is--where?” said Cameron, bending forward to the bright sick
eyes, with an extraordinary emotion and earnestness. His look startled
Cosmo. It was as if he had said, “Tell me but where, and I will carry
you away whosoever opposes!” The Highlandman almost turned his back upon
Madame Roche. This sick and weak Marie was oppressed and thwarted in her
fancy. Cameron looked at her in his strong, independent manhood, with an
unspeakable compassion and tenderness. It was in his heart to have
lifted her up with his strong arms and carried her to the place she
longed for, wherever it was--that was the immediate impulse upon him,
and it was so new and so strange that it seemed to refresh and expand
his whole heart. But Marie sank back upon her pillows with a little
movement of fatigue, perhaps of momentary pettishness, and only her
mother spoke in quite another strain.
“You do not know my country, my child,” said Madame Roche. “I have
another little daughter who loves it. Ah, I think some day we shall go
to see the old hills and the old trees; but every one forgets me there,
and to say truth, I also forget,” said the old lady, smiling. “I think I
shall scarcely know my own tongue presently. Will you come and teach me
English over again?”
“You should say Scotch, madam--it is all he knows,” said Cameron,
smiling at Cosmo, to whom she had turned. It was an affectionate look on
both sides, and the boy blushed as he met first the beautiful eyes of
his lovely old lady, and then the kind glance of his friend. He
stammered something about the pleasure of seeing them in Scotland, and
then blushed for the common-place. He was too young to remain unmoved
between two pair of eyes, both turned so kindly upon him.
“He is his mother’s son, is he not?” said Madame Roche, patting Cosmo’s
arm lightly with her pretty fingers. “I knew his name when I was young.
I had a friend called by it. You shall come and talk to me of all you
love--and you and I together, we will persuade Marie.”
Cameron glanced as she spoke, with a keen momentary jealous pang, from
the handsome lad opposite to him, to the invalid on the sofa. But Marie
was older than Cosmo--a whole world apart, out of his way, uninteresting
to the boy as she lay back on her cushions, with her half-shut eyes and
her delicate face. It was strange to think how strong and personal was
this compassion, the growth of a day, in the Highlander’s stern nature
and uncommunicating heart.