“Well, have you nothing to say to us?” said Sylvie. “I am your cousin Sylvie, and that is your cousin Denis.”
“Are you hungry?” asked Rogron.
“When did you leave Nantes?” asked Sylvie.
“She is dumb,” said Rogron.
“Poor child, she has very few clothes to her back!” observed sturdy Adèle, as she untied the bundle wrapped in a handkerchief belonging to old Lorrain.
“Kiss your cousin,” said Sylvie. Pierrette kissed Rogron.
“Yes, kiss your cousin,” said Rogron. Pierrette kissed Sylvie.
“She is scared by the journey, poor little thing; perhaps she is sleepy,” said Adèle.
Pierrette felt a sudden and invincible aversion for her two relations, a feeling she had never before known. Sylvie and the maid went to put the little girl to bed in the room on the second floor where Brigaut was to see the cotton curtain. There were in this attic a small bed with a pole painted blue, from which hung a cotton curtain, a chest of drawers of walnut wood, with no marble top, a smaller table of the same wood, a looking-glass, a common bed-table, and three wretched chairs. The walls and sloping roof to the front were covered with a cheap blue paper flowered with black. The floor was painted and waxed, and struck cold to the feet. There was no carpet but a thin bedside rug made of selvages. The chimney-shelf, of cheap marble, was graced with a mirror, two candlesticks of copper gilt, and a vulgar alabaster vase with two pigeons drinking to serve as handles; this Sylvie had had in her room in Paris.
“Shall you be comfortable here, child?” asked Sylvie.
“Oh! it is beautiful!” replied the little girl in her silvery treble.
“She is not hard to please,” muttered the sturdy peasant woman to herself. “I had better warm the bed, I suppose?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Sylvie, “the sheets may be damp.”
Adèle brought a head kerchief of her own when she came up with the warming-pan; and Pierrette, who had hitherto slept in sheets of coarse Brittany linen, was amazed at the fine, soft cotton sheets. When the little girl was settled and in bed, Adèle, as she went downstairs, could not help exclaiming, “All her things put together are not worth three francs, mademoiselle!”
Since adopting her system of strict economy, Sylvie always made the servant sit in the dining-room, so as to have but one lamp and one fire. When Colonel Gouraud and Vinet came, Adèle withdrew to her kitchen. Pierrette’s arrival kept them talking for the rest of the evening.
“We must get her some clothes tomorrow,” said Sylvie. “She has hardly a stitch.”
“She has no shoes but those thick ones she had on, and they weigh a pound,” said Adèle.
“They wear them so in those parts,” said Rogron.
“How she looked at the room, which is none so fine neither, for a cousin of yours, mademoiselle!”
“So much the better; hold your tongue. You see she is delighted with it.”
“Lord above us! what shifts! They must rub her skin raw. But none of these things are of any use,” said Adèle, turning out the contents of Pierrette’s bundle.
Till ten o’clock master, mistress, and maid were busy deciding of what stuff and at what price the shifts should be made, how many pairs of stockings and of what quality, and how many under-petticoats would be needed, and calculating the cost of Pierrette’s wardrobe.
“You will not get off for less than three hundred francs,” said Rogron to his sister, as he carried the price of each article in his head from long practice, and added up the total from memory.
“Three hundred francs!” exclaimed Sylvie.
“Yes, three hundred; work it out yourself.”
The brother and sister began again, and made it three hundred francs without the sewing.
“Three hundred francs at one cast of the net!” cried Sylvie, who went to bed on the idea so ingeniously expressed by this proverbial figure of speech.
Pierrette was one of those children of love whom love has blessed with tenderness, cheerfulness, brightness, generosity, and devotedness; nothing had as yet chilled or crushed her heart; it was almost wildly sensitive, and the way she was received by her relations weighed on it painfully. Though Brittany had to her been a home of poverty, it had also been a home of affection. Though the old Lorrains were the most unskilful traders, they were the simplest, most loving, most caressing souls in the world, as all disinterested people are. At Pen-Hoël their little granddaughter had had no teaching but that of nature. Pierrette went as she would in a boat on the pools, she ran about the village or the fields with her companion Jacques Brigaut, exactly like Paul and Virginia. Both the children, spoiled and petted by everyone, and as free as the air, ran after the thousand joys of childhood; in summer they went to watch the fishermen, they caught insects, plucked flowers, and gardened; in winter they made slides, built smart snow-palaces and snowmen, or made snowballs to pelt each other. They were everywhere welcome; everybody smiled on them.
When it was time that they should learn something, misfortunes came. Jacques, left destitute by his father’s death, was apprenticed by his relations to a cabinetmaker, and maintained by charity, as Pierrette was soon after in the asylum of Saint-Jacques. But even in this almshouse, pretty little Pierrette had been made much of, loved, and kindly treated by all. The child, thus accustomed to so much affection, no longer found, in the home of these longed-for and wealthy relations, the look, the tone, the words, the manner which she had hitherto met with in everyone, even in the guards of the diligences. Thus her amazement, already great, was complicated by the changed moral atmosphere into which she had been plunged. The heart can turn suddenly cold and hot as the body can. The poor child longed to cry without knowing what for. She was tired, and she fell asleep.
Accustomed to
