The cottage in which Guida lived at the Place du Vier Prison was in
jocund contrast to the dungeon from which the Chevalier Orvilliers
du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir had complacently issued. Even in the hot
summer the prison walls dripped moisture, for the mortar had been made
of wet sea-sand, which never dried, and beneath the gloomy tenement of
crime a dark stream flowed to the sea. But the walls of the cottage were
dry, for, many years before, Guida’s mother had herself seen it built
from cellar-rock to the linked initials over the doorway, stone by
stone, and every corner of it was as free from damp as the mielles
stretching in sandy desolation behind to the Mont es Pendus, where the
law had its way with the necks of criminals.
In early childhood Madame Landresse had come with her father into exile
from the sunniest valley in the hills of Chambery, where flowers and
trees and sunshine had been her life. Here, in the midst of blank and
grim stone houses, her heart travelled back to the chateau where she
lived before the storm of persecution drove her forth; and she spent her
heart and her days in making this cottage, upon the western border of
St. Heliers, a delight to the quiet eye.
The people of the island had been good to her and her dead husband
during the two short years of their married life, and had caused her to
love the land which necessity made her home. Her child was brought up
after the fashion of the better class of Jersey children, wore what
they wore, ate what they ate, lived as they lived. She spoke the country
patois in the daily life, teaching it to Guida at the same time that she
taught her pure French and good English, which she herself had learned
as a child, and cultivated later here. She had done all in her power
to make Guida Jersiaise in instinct and habit, and to beget in her a
contented disposition. There could be no future for her daughter outside
this little green oasis of exile, she thought. Not that she lacked
ambition, but in the circumstances she felt that ambition could yield
but one harvest to her child, which was marriage. She herself had
married a poor man, a master builder of ships, like Maitre Ranulph
Delagarde, but she had been very happy while he lived. Her husband
had come of an ancient Jersey family, who were in Normandy before the
Conqueror was born; a man of genius almost in his craft, but scarcely
a gentleman according to the standard of her father, the distinguished
exile and now retired watchmaker. If Guida should chance to be as
fortunate as herself, she could ask no more.
She had watched the child anxiously, for the impulses of Guida’s
temperament now and then broke forth in indignation as wild as her tears
and in tears as wild as her laughter. As the girl grew in health and
stature, she tried, tenderly, strenuously, to discipline the sensitive
nature, bursting her heart with grief at times because she knew that
these high feelings and delicate powers came through a long line of
ancestral tendencies, as indestructible as perilous and joyous.
Four things were always apparent in the girl’s character: sympathy with
suffering, kindness without partiality, a love of nature, and an intense
candour.
Not a stray cat wandering into the Place du Vier Prison but found an
asylum in the garden behind the cottage. Not a dog hungry for a bone,
stopping at Guida’s door, but was sure of one from a hiding-place in
the hawthorn hedge of the garden. Every morning you might have seen
the birds in fluttering, chirping groups upon the may-tree or the
lilac-bushes, waiting for the tiny snow-storm of bread to fall from
her hand. Was he good or bad, ragged or neat, honest or a thief, not a
deserting sailor or a homeless lad, halting at the cottage, but was fed
from the girl’s private larder behind the straw beehives among the sweet
lavender and the gooseberry-bushes. No matter how rough the vagrant,
the sincerity and pure impulse of the child seemed to throw round him a
sunshine of decency and respect.
The garden behind the house was the girl’s Eden. She had planted upon
the hawthorn hedge the crimson monthly rose, the fuchsia, and the
jonquil, until at last the cottage was hemmed in by a wall of flowers;
and here she was ever as busy as the bees which hung humming on the
sweet scabious.
In this corner was a little hut for rabbits; in that, there was a hole
dug in the bank for a hedgehog; in the middle a little flower-grown
enclosure for cats in various stages of health or convalescence, and a
small pond for frogs; and in the midst of all wandered her faithful dog,
Biribi by name, as master of the ceremonies.
Madame Landresse’s one ambition had been to live long enough to see her
child’s character formed. She knew that her own years were numbered, for
month by month she felt her strength going. And yet a beautiful tenacity
kept her where she would be until Guida was fifteen years of age. Her
great desire had been to live till the girl was eighteen. Then--well,
then might she not perhaps leave her to the care of a husband? At best,
M. de Mauprat could not live long. He had at last been forced to give
up the little watchmaker’s shop in the Vier Marchi, where for so many
years, in simple independence, he had wrought, always putting by, from
work done after hours, Jersey bank-notes and gold, to give Guida a dot,
if not worthy of her, at least a guarantee against reproach when some
great man should come seeking her in marriage. But at last his hands
trembled among the tiny wheels, and his eyes failed. He had his dark
hour by himself, then he sold the shop to a native, who thenceforward
sat in the ancient exile’s place; and the two brown eyes of the stooped,
brown old man looked out no more from the window in the Vier Marchi: and
then they all made their new home in the Place du Vier Prison.
Until she was fifteen Guida’s life was unclouded. Once or twice her
mother tried to tell her of a place that must soon be empty, but her
heart failed her. So at last the end came like a sudden wind out of
the north; and it was left to Guida Landresse de Landresse to fight the
fight and finish the journey of womanhood alone.
This time was the turning-point in Guida’s life. What her mother had
been to the Sieur de Mauprat, she soon became. They had enough to live
on simply. Every week her grandfather gave her a fixed sum for the
household. Upon this she managed, that the tiny income left by her
mother might not be touched. She shrank from using it yet, and besides,
dark times might come when it would be needed. Death had once surprised
her, but it should bring no more amazement. She knew that M. de
Mauprat’s days were numbered, and when he was gone she would be left
without one near relative in the world. She realised how unprotected her
position would be when death came knocking at the door again. What she
would do she knew not. She thought long and hard. Fifty things occurred
to her, and fifty were set aside. Her mother’s immediate relatives
in France were scattered or dead. There was no longer any interest at
Chambery in the watchmaking exile, who had dropped like a cherry-stone
from the beak of the blackbird of persecution upon one of the Iles de la
Manche.
There remained the alternative more than once hinted by the Sieur de
Mauprat as the months grew into years after the mother died--marriage;
a husband, a notable and wealthy husband. That was the magic destiny de
Mauprat figured for her. It did not elate her, it did not disturb her;
she scarcely realised it. She loved animals, and she saw no reason to
despise a stalwart youth. It had been her fortune to know two or three
in the casual, unconventional manner of villages, and there were few in
the land, great or humble, who did not turn twice to look at her as she
passed through the Vier Marchi, so noble was her carriage, so graceful
and buoyant her walk, so lacking in self-consciousness her beauty. More
than one young gentleman of family had been known to ride through the
Place du Vier Prison, hoping to get sight of her, and to offer the view
of a suggestively empty pillion behind him.
She had, however, never listened to flatterers, and only one youth of
Jersey had footing in the cottage. This was Ranulph Delagarde, who had
gone in and out at his will, but that was casually and not too often,
and he was discreet and spoke no word of love. Sometimes she talked to
him of things concerning the daily life with which she did not care to
trouble Sieur de Mauprat. In ways quite unknown to her he had made her
life easier for her. She knew that her mother had thought of Ranulph for
her husband, although she blushed whenever--but it was not often--the
idea came to her. She remembered how her mother had said that Ranulph
would be a great man in the island some day; that he had a mind above
all the youths in St. Heliers; that she would rather see Ranulph
a master ship-builder than a babbling ecrivain in the Rue des Tres
Pigeons, a smirking leech, or a penniless seigneur with neither trade
nor talent. Guida was attracted to Ranulph through his occupation, for
she loved strength, she loved all clean and wholesome trades; that
of the mason, of the carpenter, of the blacksmith, and most of the
ship-builder. Her father, whom she did not remember, had been a
ship-builder, and she knew that he had been a notable man; every one had
told her that.
.........................
“She has met her destiny,” say the village gossips, when some man in the
dusty procession of life sees a woman’s face in the pleasant shadow of a
home, and drops out of the ranks to enter at her doorway.
Was Ranulph to be Guida’s destiny?
Handsome and stalwart though he looked as he entered the cottage in the
Place du Vier Prison, on that September morning after the rescue of the
chevalier, his tool-basket on his shoulder, and his brown face enlivened
by one simple sentiment, she was far from sure that he was--far from
sure.