A brilliant day in early summer, the sea blue as the alpine gentian, the deep large dark flower; and the overarching sky blue as the paler but yet intensely azure gentianella. Not a white horse on the sea, only twinkles where the water-surface wreathed in laughter to the sun’s smile. The little steamer, Sir Francis Drake, was paddling her way very leisurely from Guernsey to St. Malo, and her wake lay behind her as far as the eye could trace. She had left Plymouth the preceding evening, and at early morning arrived off the harbour of St. Pierre, Guernsey, where she picked up a couple of passengers, two gentlemen, both young, who sat on deck, smoked, and talked together in French.
Presently, from the first cabin emerged two ladies, one old, the other young, who also took up their place on deck, and talked together, not in French, but in English. These ladies had come from England and had accordingly slept on board. Neither presented that dishevelled, haggard, and battered appearance so conspicuous in travellers who have crossed the Channel. Neither had that look of utter break down of self-esteem that may be seen daily on the Dover or Calais pier, but both were fresh, hearty, and neat. There was not much in the elder lady to attract attention—at least, the attention of young men—but it was other with the second lady. She was a girl of eighteen, very pretty, bright, happy, and with the clearest complexion, and with the purest colour in her sweet cheeks. She had honest eyes, of brown, and rather dark-brown hair. Self-consciousness is the bane of most girls’ faces, especially if they have any pretence to beauty, or are well dressed. There was nothing of this in the girl on deck. The gentlemen were struck with the tenderness and consideration she showed for her mother. That same mother wore what was at one time known as an ‘ugly’; it was a sort of hood of blue silk stretched on wires or whalebones, that folded up or drew down in front of her bonnet, like the hood of a carriage. Nothing more disfiguring can be conceived; only an English woman would venture to assume it. A Frenchwoman would die at the stake rather than appear in an ‘ugly.’
By that ‘ugly’ the date of this story can be fixed. Let our lady readers, if they are old enough, throw back their thoughts to the time when ladies did not blush to wear uglies. At that time the steamers did not run from Southampton or Weymouth to the French port of St. Malo, touching on the way at Guernsey and Jersey. At that time the Channel Islanders did not dream of sending early vegetables to Covent Garden Market. At that time there was no railway from St. Malo to Nantes and Bordeaux.
‘I think, my dear Jacket, we will breakfast on deck,’ said the elder lady. ‘It would upset me going down the ladder again. The insides do smell of paint—I mean the cabin.’ Then to the gentlemen, or rather, indiscriminately to one of them, ‘Can you tell me, sir, when we reach our destination?’
‘Ca dépend, madame,’ answered one, and added in English with a foreign accent, ‘If madame is going to Jersey—or to St. Malo?’
‘Oh, we’re for France, sir,’ explained the lady. ‘My poor Aunt Betsy has been taken bad there, and we’re sent for—that is, I am, as her nearest relative, and I’ve taken my daughter, Jacket, along with me. Bless my heart! I can’t speak a word of Parlez-vous, but Jacket has had the best advantages money could procure, and has been at a boarding-school, and can talk French like a fish.’
‘Mamma,’ said the young lady, with a smile, and the slightest deepening of colour in her cheek, ‘thinks because I have read Télémaque that I am fluent in French, but I have had no experience. We are going to St. Malo.’
Then the gentlemen ordered breakfast on deck as well. The ice was broken, and the two little separate parties coalesced and became almost one for the rest of the voyage. Mrs Fairbrother, the old lady, indeed, to use one of the gentlemen’s expressions, ran alongside of them and threw out grappling-irons. She had never been out of England before, she was profoundly ignorant of foreign ways, she was mightily afraid of imaginary dangers and difficulties; and she clung to these strangers as likely to assist her to surmount the first obstacles. Mrs Fairbrother was a worthy woman, the wife of a large grocer who had made a considerable fortune by supplying H.M. vessels when put in commission. Her education was deficient, but she had the best and kindest heart in the world. Her thorough goodness did not allow those who knew her to admit that she was vulgar. The old lady had picked up what little she knew of history and geography from novels and plays, and her mind on such subjects was the veriest lumber-closet of disconnected facts and fictions. The only child, Jacquetta, had been well educated, and in manner and acquirements was far ahead of her mother. She was a true and good girl, and though the old lady’s blunders were ridiculous, and—before company—embarrassing, she never laughed at them, never attempted to correct them unless it were absolutely necessary to do so, lest she should seem to assume superiority over her mother, and hurt the feelings of the woman she loved best in the world.
The gentlemen were the Baron de Montcontour, and an English friend, Mr Asheton. M. de Montcontour had been a good deal in England, and spoke English fairly well. He was an easy-going, amiable man, without great energy of mind or body. The Montcontour estates were small. He had a château on the Loire above Nantes, where lived his mother and aunt; his father had saved nothing, the property barely allowed its proprietors to live on it. It was advisable, if not necessary, that the young baron should adopt a profession to supplement his small patrimony. Accordingly he had studied law, and had taken pains to familiarise himself with English, because he saw that it would help him at Nantes, where a good many English were settled, whither English vessels came, and where some commerce went on between the two countries; where accordingly little difficulties sprang up occasionally which demanded the intervention of a lawyer familiar with both tongues.
Mr Asheton was the son of an English merchant at Nantes, and as the Baron had had some business connection with his father’s house, the two young men came to know each other, and strike up a warm, if not very deep, friendship. They had just made a tour together of the Channel Islands, and were on their way home. There was a slight assumption of superiority and superciliousness in the tone of young James Asheton. He was the young man of the English colony at Nantes; a good deal of deference was shown him, his father was well off, he was of a marriageable age, and there were some dozen and a half young English girls at Nantes also marriageable. This is a condition of affairs not calculated to engender diffidence in a young man. He wore an eyeglass, and somewhat cocked his cap. He had fair hair, light whiskers, so fine that the soft air on the vessel blew them about, and he was constrained to stroke them back with his delicate hand, on which were several rings.
‘What is that thing-a-bob sticking up on the coast yonder?’ asked Mrs Fairbrother, pointing eastward, after the steamer had left Jersey.
‘That ma’m, is Coutance cathedral,’ answered Asheton. ‘And, for a thing-a-bob, is a noble pile, in the early Norman style of architecture.’
‘Is it in France?’
‘Certainly, but on the extreme verge. An earthquake would send it over into debatable waters.’
‘Well, that is odd,’ remarked the old lady, ‘because it is nearer Jersey than England; we can’t even see our own coast from here, and we can those of France. How comes it that the islands belong to us and not to the French?’
‘The Channel Islands,’ explained Mr Asheton, stroking his whiskers, ‘are the only remains of the Duchy of Normandy that are held by the British crown.’
‘You know, mamma, that William the Conqueror was Duke of Normandy before he became King of England,’ said Jacquetta hastily, afraid lest her mother should commit herself. The girl saw a twinkle in the young Englishman’s eye.
‘My dear,’ answered the old lady frankly, ‘I know nothing about it. I have no head for the kings of England. Indeed, I only remember about two of them, Edward who picked up a lady’s garter, and refused to stand on the Bible, and Charles I who walked and talked thirty years after his head was cut off. Yes—by the way, there was another—Alfred, who burnt some cakes. It is enough for me, my dear, to know and to love the name of our gracious Queen. Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, and make them fall. Amen.’
‘What, ma’m, a Republican? Wish to overthrow the monarchy?’ exclaimed Mr Asheton nibbling his whiskers.
‘Fiddlesticks. I mean the enemies of our great and gracious sovereign lady Queen Victoria—and—make—them—fall.’
Jacquetta drew her pretty lips together; a little tightening of her eyebrows might have been observed. She did not like the tone of the Englishman; he was laughing at her mother.
‘Madame has never been in France before? nor Mademoiselle?’ asked the baron.
‘O never, neither of us,’ answered Mrs Fairbrother eagerly. ‘And whatever I shall do if I find Aunt Betsy dead I don’t know. Has one to send notice to the registrar? and what is registrar in French? And how about the will, taking inventory, and undertaker, and all that? They don’t burn the dead in France, do they? I have read about such things; and I saw it done in a play once, only just as they were about to light the fire, the corpse blazed away out of a revolver at them and drove them away, and so saved the widow—but, no, I haven’t got it quite right, it was an Irishman who took the place on the settee, that is what it was called, I think. I hope nothing of the sort is done in France.’
‘Certainly there are no suttees there, ma’m,’ answered Asheton.
‘Well, I did not know. They are Catholics.’
‘Let us hope, madam, your aunt will be alive,’ said the baron. ‘I would grieve to think that your first visit to my poor country should be made under sad circumstances.’
‘One must be prepared, you know,’ said Mrs Fairbrother. ‘Whatever Jacket and I will do in a foreign land with all their queer ways, I’m sure I can’t tell. Fairbrother ought to have come with us, but he couldn’t leave the shop—business, I mean, couldn’t or wouldn’t—his foreman is a sharp man and honest. It is too bad, sending off us unprotected females like this, scrimmaging after a dead aunt, and neither of us knowing how to manage.’
‘Where, if I may ask, did madame your aunt live?’ inquired the baron.
‘Near Nantes,’ answered the girl for her mother, who was too vague in her ideas of locality to give an intelligible answer. But Mrs Fairbrother replied as well, eagerly,
‘At a place called Chanticleer.’ Then seeing her daughter’s lips move, she said, ‘Now, I know I’m right. I can’t be wrong. I know it has to do with cocks and hens.’
‘Yes, mamma, you are quite right—Champclair.’
‘Champclair?’ exclaimed the baron, and raised his eye brows. ‘May I presume to ask the name of the deceased lady?’
‘Oh yes, Mary Elizabeth Pengelly,’ answered Mrs Fairbrother. ‘Miss Betsy Pengelly. She had been companion to an old French lady with a blasphemous name, that is, a name which should only be mentioned in the pulpit. It has to do with the broad road that leads to destruction. My aunt got Chanticleer by the old lady’s will when she died.’
‘Ah! my faith,’ exclaimed the baron, ‘Madame de Hoelgoet.’
‘That’s it—Hellgate.’
‘That is very singular,’ remarked the young Frenchman; ‘as it happens, I know the circumstances, and you will perhaps allow me the honour of assisting you in any way that lies in my power. On my desire to serve you, madame, you may calculate. Madame de Hoelgoet was a near relative of my mother and of the aunt who lives with her at château, and,’ he smiled, ‘my mother has always felt a little annoyed because Madame de Hoelgoet left Champclair out of the family to a—what you call her—a companion. But that need make no difference. I do not feel with my mother in this matter. I have even heard that Madame Pain-au-lait—excuse me if I do not give the name quite as you pronounce it—deserved all she got. Madame de Hoelgoet suffered for many years from a most painful internal disorder, and Madame Pain-au-lait was devoted to her, and ministered to her through all, with unexampled devotion. No, for my part, I rejoice that she received her due, and my joy is doubled when I think that Champclair will pass now into such fair and excellent hands,’ he made a bow to Mrs and then to Miss Fairbrother.
‘Well, baron,’ said the old lady with a pleased expression illumining her broad good-natured face, ‘I’m glad you see it in that light, and express it so prettily. It shows you have a right way of looking at things, my lord.’ Since she had heard that Montcontour was a baron, she insisted on ‘my lording’ him, to Asheton’s great amusement. ‘I haven’t seen my Aunt Betsy for an age, but I’ve a notion what she did for the old lady with the Broadway name shortened her days.’
‘M. de Montcontour and I live near Nantes,’ said Asheton, ‘and it will be a privilege, if you will suffer us to offer our services.’
‘Bless us! I shall be most thankful,’ said Mrs Fairbrother. ‘I don’t know how to manage anything. We’ve never had a death in our house, thanks be. I never had any husband before Fairbrother, and no other child but Jacket. It is bad enough in England, and the undertakers take such advantage of the situation. What they’d do in France to us strangers I shudder to contemplate. For my soul’s sake I’m glad I’m not an undertaker.’
Mrs Fairbrother was not an observant person; she did not suspect in the least the little play that was going on about her, whilst she talked. Both of the young men found Jacquetta more agreeable to converse with than the old lady, and each tried to involve his companion in conversation with the latter so as to retain the society of the young girl for himself. Asheton proved restive when the good woman linked herself on to him. Through the corner of his eye he could see the baron ingratiating himself with Jacquetta. Therefore he took pains to refer the mother to his friend for information on the necessary formalities attached to a death and burial and the proving of wills; and no sooner did he find the baron engaged in the explanation than he spread an umbrella to inclose himself with the girl from the other group, under the plea of cutting off from her the glare from the sun and water, but in reality to raise a stumbling-block in the way of his friend joining them. However, M. de Montcontour was quite sensible of his friend’s intentions, and he extricated himself abruptly from his discussion with Mrs Fairbrother by starting to his feet and calling on Mademoiselle to cross with him to the other side of the boat where porpoises were tumbling in the water.
Asheton at once insisted on bringing Mrs Fairbrother over to the same bulwarks, to look at the porpoises, and he sat himself on the other side of Jacquetta to that occupied by the baron. The move was not absolutely successful, as he had the old lady on his left, and was obliged to talk to and listen, or pretend to listen to her. But he waited his opportunity to shunt her on the baron.
‘Alphonse,’ said he, when he saw his friend talking in a low tone to the girl, about something that seemed to interest her, ‘Alphonse, Madame asks which hotel you recommend at Saint Malo.’
‘Oh,’ said the baron, completely concealing his disgust at the interruption, ‘of course l’Hotel de France—Chateaubriand’s native house. The hostess English, excellent wines, and a table d’ hote famous everywhere.’ Then to Miss Fairbrother, ‘As I was telling you, the Guernsey lilies are not natives of the island, they were bulbs of African plants washed up from a wreck.’
‘What about natives?’ asked Mrs Fairbrother.
‘The baron,’ explained Asheton sulkily, ‘was merely telling you that Chateaubriand was born in the house now a hotel. Chateaubriand, you know, who wrote Atala.’
‘I know the march out of it,’ said the old lady. ‘It goes something like this, Tum—tiddletee—tum—ti!’ and she hummed, and with her fingers drummed on the bulwarks. ‘Do you know Chanticleer? I am afraid the drainage is bad, and that is what has brought my Aunt Betsy to an early grave.’
‘Is she so very young?’
‘Oh, well about seventy. What sort of a place, now, is Chanticleer?’
‘My dear madam,’ said Asheton with eagerness, ‘the baron alone can tell you. I have never seen it. I do not know where it is. I have not the smallest idea as to how the drains are carried. He knows all about it, has the map of the place in his head.’
That answered. The old lady let go the bulwarks and went behind Asheton and Jacquetta, and ‘caught the bulwarks again beside Montcontour, on his right, and entangled him at once. Now was Asheton’s turn with the young lady and he availed himself of it; he could be very agreeable when he chose, and he made an effort now and succeeded. The baron writhed in the meshes of the mother’s talk, and it was some time before the chance presented itself to him of flinging her off on Asheton; but it came and he grasped it with eagerness.
‘Come here, Jacques,’ he called. ‘Madame is asking if there is an English church service at Nantes, and wants to know the views of the chaplain. I cannot help her.’
‘I am at Madame’s orders,’ said James Asheton stiffly, without showing annoyance, more than he could help.
‘Ah, mademoiselle,’ said the Baron, ‘I was telling you, or about to tell you, that whilst on the Loire you should try to make an excursion up the river to Angers and Saumur. At the latter place you will see human habitations scooped in the rock, and families living in subterrains—what is the word?—caverns. Then, at Fontevrault you will see the monuments of Richard Sans Peur, and his Queen Berengaria. Mademoiselle will be staying some months at Nantes?’
‘I do not know. Nothing is settled. We do not know whether my poor great-aunt is alive or dead.’
On arriving at St. Malo all four passengers agreed that the time had passed with marvellous rapidity since they had left Guernsey, and that the passage had been an agreeable one. There was but one drawback to it, thought each of the gentlemen, and that was that the other did not wholly engross the old lady, and leave to him an uninterrupted tête-á-tète with Jacquetta. Mrs Fairbrother liked both gentlemen, she hardly knew which she preferred. Miss Fairbrother did not say what she thought or felt, but she smiled and seemed happy, and not too depressed by the mourning for Aunt Betsy, whom, indeed, she hardly knew. The gentlemen passed the ladies’ goods through the douane, and escorted them to the hotel, and insisted on carrying their umbrellas, parasols, and bundles of wraps and novels. Then they requested permission to call later in the evening and take Madame and Mademoiselle out on the ramparts to see the tide, which rises to a phenomenal height at St. Malo. The permission was readily granted, and three-quarters of an hour before the tide would reach its height the gentlemen appeared in the courtyard of the hotel, for the ladies.