Euphame discovered Madam Romieu in her bare room,
which had no carpet, no curtains—but the chairs painted in white with
gilt edges, and an alabaster clock of Master Paul's among the
innumerable brown pipkins of all shapes and sizes on the shelves. Madam
Romieu lay on her bed in her offensive cherry-coloured gown and
uncovered head; only she was marked as an invalid by her white flannel
camisole over her boddice—such a camisole as poor Queen Mary wore under
her velvet for her execution at Fotheringay. But Madam was not alone;
Master Paul sat by her side with his dark eyes looking out keenly from
under their shaggy brows, his light-coloured wig pushed back in his
intensity of attention, and his arm in the sleeve of his brown coat with
its broad buckram-lined skirts and its frogs, flung down on the table,
with a pair of pincers hanging idly between his fingers.
"My son," Euphame heard Madam say faintly, "I am
recovered. I am as well as a strong man. Go back to thy business; yes,
yes, to thy clocks and thy instruments, and permit me to be content."
"No, no, Susette,"answered Master Paul hastily, "thou
knowest I was near losing thee this morning. Hold! my child, that would
have been worse than the last sight of Languedoc—than the recantation of
Jean Cavalier. What would have become of me? But, no, no, thou wast not
very ill, Susette; thou hadst a little sickness, thou wilt do well since
Master Mark has warned me, and I will have great care of thee."
''I fear Master Mark frighted thee, my son; he is a
good boy, Master Mark, a very good boy, but he is sombre and he is
brusque, very brusque. Do not mind him, mind me, and rest tranquil. But,
my son, do not say Jean Cavalier recanted; he left the cause when he
could do no more for it; he laid down his arms to save life, without
doubt; I do not like to hear him blamed—a friend, a brother, one of the
children of God—not him above all, and none other, unless when we cannot
forbid it."
"I believe thee, Susette, I believe thee, my girl, I
bow to thee; but here comes a visitor."
Madam's eyes expressed great surprise and gratitude
for Euphame Napier's inquiries and offers. Madam smote Euphame's
generous heart when she did not reject her pity, but accepted it simply,
and agreed to her presence till she should pass the crisis of her
malady, though Euphame saw that the complaisance was on Master Paul's
account. "See," she whispered, "he cannot sit here; he is not accustomed
to want his trade any more than his prayers; he will do without it
yonder, but here, see, he is used to be occupied with his figures, his
mouldings, his filings, his fine touches. Master Paul is a great man;
his trade is his, and he is his trade's. See, they are one, they are
made for each other; it is not that we cannot confide all to Master
Mark, but Master Paul is the heart, the soul of his calling; it is the
shell, the outer case of his existence on earth, and he is its
main-spring. He would be lost without it; that is to say, he would not
murmur or complain, for he is one of the children of God, but he would
be restless; ah! he would remember Languedoc. I will say yes to your
goodness, for you are a child of God also, mademoiselle; you will not
grudge to break me my bit of galette and hand me my cup of water, until
a few days, until my health is re-established, or till I am gone to
brighter heights than the mountains of the Cevennes. Mademoiselle, ah! I
would see their pines, and hear the fall of their waters, and gather
their chestnuts again. Will I do that yonder, mademoiselle, as well as
meet our pastors and our prophets, Claude Brousson, and the delicate
little Maid of Cassell, who saw the angel, and rough old Jeanne, the
peasant, who herded our cattle and drew our water till she was forty,
and then preached to us like an apostle? If it were not for my poor
little son, and the will of the Lord., I die of envy to see them all
again—my friends murdered on earth, glorified in heaven, and our Lord
whom they loved unto blood. Yes, and Jean Cavalier, our young David whom
they will have a traitor "—and the poor woman sobbed and wept—"so that
even my son believes them, and he has a good heart, so good a heart you
cannot think! But our brave boy, David, he will show yet that he was not
false, though he left us. Yes, see, we are sometimes compelled to blame
the tyrant and the man of violence, but why should he refuse charity to
our young captain?"
Euphame found her always in this spirit, caring for
her son, escaping from herself, judging no man.
Madam Romieu had something of the cast of face of one
of her preachers and prophets, Isabella Vincent, though hers was a far
humbler and safer path in life. Her face, too, was '' irregular, thin,
and brown, by the weather;" " her forehead large, with great black eyes
of a sweet expression," [The Camisards.] and her temper reflected
that of another Camisard worthy, who never addressed an audience without
dealing with them in the end as "sheep" and " doves," and gazing at her
hour after hour in her unconscious patience and goodness. Euphame
wondered that she could ever have deemed Madam a scarecrow. Madam's mind
could not brood on injuries; she did not like to mention the dragon-nades
which like a whirlwind raged through the valleys, or Louvois, who, like
a French Claverse, set them on; she turned with horror from the murder
of the priests, though she would own meekly that she had not the
exaltation of those who announced themselves the appointed soldiers of
God's vengeance. No ; she had none of the four degrees of ecstasy—the
"warning," the "breath," the "prophesy," the "gift;" she was nothing but
a poor sinner, who would not worship stocks and stones, and who trusted
in God's mercy and the Redeemer's sacrifice, and who was sent into the
world to solace and tend her little son—a great man, a very great man,
who refuted the curates when they averred of the Cevennoises that
Balaam's ass spoke again, refuted them clean by his parts and learning,
as did old Palissy the potter in the evil days of Queen Catherine and
the massacre of St. Bartholomew; who would not acquire a ticket of
conversion along with count and baron, who baffled the guards, who
trundled a wheelbarrow (he was always fond of wheels, her. little son)
to the coast, she walking after him as his daughter— think of that, her
little son's daughter!—who established himself cheerfully a stranger in
a strange land.
Master Paul was a single-hearted, impassioned artist,
as well as a loyal man ; he was, let us say, a tenth part as excellent
as his wife-mother reckoned him, and that is declaring a great deal.
Also he was one of those men who stand in urgent need of constant
affectionate attention and direction. An accurate and elegant, as well
as an eager mind in his profession, he was, as his Susette said, " lost"
out of it, bewildered among ordinary concerns and indifferent events, so
careless, rash, awkward, and forgetful, that, as you have observed, when
he was out of Susette's presence, Mark Crichton was impelled to
constitute himself his champion, walk after him with an apprentices'
stout stick, lest he should ramble into the wild outpourings of the
clubs and the smugglers' houses, the Alsatias of the city, pluck him by
the sleeve when he would fling away his crowns, bring him back when he
would go a star-gazing and neglecting his meals till Madam was beside
herself, not with rage for the slight to herself, but with anxiety lest
the stomach of the offender should suffer.
Master Paul had a fervent regard for his Susette, and
was tender of her when he remembered her; but Master Paul was not a
woman, and Master Paul was his trade's, and his trade was Master Paul's.
With some difficulty Euphame induced Master Paul to vacate his post, and
the next day he took it for granted that she should minister to Madam,
and was quite comfortable in the assurance, and no more thought of
interfering with Mademoiselle at the sick-bed than he would have
expected Mademoiselle to meddle with his workman's bench or his
magnifying glasses. Still, when he came up stairs to dinner or supper,
and during the evenings, he would start forward and ask such wistful
questions, and raise Madam's pillow so gently, that the tears would come
into Madam's sweet black eyes while she laughed at her little son, and
even Euphame thought it was nicely done, and Mark Crichton neither
laughed nor shrugged his shoulders.
Happily Madam's malady proved to be an aggravation of
an old complaint which was not mortal, though it was painful and
tedious; and it yielded under Euphame's watchfulness and wisdom, and
soon poor Master Paul was no longer in the danger which, good man and
brave man as he was, he refused to admit, of losing his Susette. Ah! our
God who pardons many an error, did not punish this tacit rebellion of
the exiled clockmaker, and Master Paul lay more prostrate at his
footstool for this act of his Divine mercy, than for any former
deliverance from these shambles in Languedoc.
Euphame Napier moved very
softly about Madam Romieu, and hung her head
near her; it was not that she was still offended by the cherry-coloured
gown or the exposure of the sallow face. Alas ! the cherry-coloured gown
was in too pitiful a contrast to the dark shadows hollowed out by
illness, and the pinched, unshaded features were set off and beautified
by the mildness and disinterestedness of their constant voice and
speech. But Euphame had come there to relieve the fantastic body of a
disguised Frenchman, such as the sturdy Englishman Hogarth saw enter the
French chapel in Hog Lane, when the great artist, like the inexperienced
girl, stared broadly at the cherry-coloured gown, and she found herself
serving a saint; and Euphame, in place of reaping the applause of a good
conscience, was at first disturbed, ashamed, and unhappy, particularly
when Madam would exalt Euphame in her active benevolence, and disparage
herself as a poor helpless sinner, to whom everybody was over kind.
Euphame could not bear that, and she first contradicted Madam flatly,
and declared, "No, Madam Romieu, you are a great deal better lying there
than I am working here, or than I shall ever be, serving or served;" and
then when Madam would protest and disclaim, and continue to overvalue
her, Euphame submitted, with fire in her face, that she had been guilty
of thinking lightly of Madam, and begged her forgiveness and solicited
her blessing,—and Madam Romieu was very much touched, and riveted in the
conviction that Mademoiselle was a distinguished child of God, and must
have the gift about her somehow, though she experienced no trances;—but
she said no more about it to please her, and blessed her solemnly,
kissed her on both cheeks, and assured her volubly of her everlasting
friendship.
Thus Euphame was enlisted as great an ally of Madam
Paul's, as work admitted Mark Crichton to be of Master Paul's.
Afterwards, in her fine foreign tact indicating how fully and freely she
forgave her, Madam, as soon as she had breath, would roguishly pester
Euphame with more and queerer fables,—how an egg opened and let out an
elephant, how a lizard found wings to fly like a bird, how the mouse,
cat, and fox, kept house together, and, finally, what splendid feats of
hunting were performed by grim King Dagobert—his horses and hounds; and
she explained how she first used to her great Master Paul the term "my
son," which French wives apply to athletic and' vigorous, as well as to
drooping and delicate spouses.
V.
Madam Romieu was descended from people of wealth and
rank, whose fortune and position went in the very dawn of the attack on
Calvinism, who supplied the buckets of wine and milk, and the bales of
wool, silk, and lace with which the brutal and licentious dragoons
boasted they fed and foddered their horses. They had been glad to retire
to the fastnesses of the Cevennes, and buy partial immunity by pasturing
cattle and weaving coarse cloth, and living in obscurity with the frugal
hardy natives of the district. There Madam was reared, where a great
part of her education, after studying her Bible, was learning by heart
and repeating those grotesque, pretty fables; and she thought no meal
daintier than the boiled chestnuts, no sight braver than the pine-woods
and the blue misty mountains which ascend, up and up, on both sides, as
they retreat, until they vanish among the white-bonneted, giant Alps and
Pyrenees; no mirth more joyous than the gaiety of the girls whom they
started to gather the scented pine-tops, or the jests of the young men
when they helped them over the snowed-up path, and the rifts in the ice
in the sharp winter; no sound more sweetly solemn, no chants grander
than the echo of the holy hymns of Clement Marot among the everlasting
hills,—these hymns which the Cevennoises were wont to use as a church
bell to attract a proscribed congregation of the desert to an
inaccessible preaching-ground at the dead hour, of the night.
Master Paul had belonged to Madam's village. Master
Paul had returned there after his wanderings to Geneva and Nuremberg,
and impressed the simple country folks at once with his marvellous
ability, his manly steadfastness, and his gentle condescension. Madame
recounted with delight how he was reverenced and admired, how every one
came to style him Father Paul, not in reference to his age, for he was
hardly in his prime, but with respect to his great attainments.
Right womanly was the line of argument by which Madam
Romieu owned that she was gradually impressed with the conviction that
it was a bleak and barren height which Master Paul had reached, that of
being Father to all—their patron, protector, and instructor, with none
to bend over him, to keep watch and ward for him, and he a passionate
reckless man for all his wisdom —and she had protested almost angrily
against the universal election; and as Master Paul had been always very
gracious towards her weakness and ignorance, she had ventured to
denominate him Brother Paul, and Master Paul had paused and listened to
the unwonted sound, and let his lustrous eyes fall from the sparkling,
fixed, immoveable stars down on the brown, agitated, kind, pertinacious
young face raised to his; and then Master Paul had not been pleased with
the appellation, and so she had become his wife, and ' my son' had been
substituted in its stead, and there never had been any confusion
therefrom, since Madam's little child had died on their toilsome
precarious passage to the coast—and they escaped the Barbary pirates,
they reached this secure Scotland, they were spared together; one was
not committed to a hated convent, and the other seized in the
Mediterranean, and subjected to the chains and blows, and pining misery
of the galley slave; and Madam never reflected on the blank in her
heart,—she said he was safe at home, and while she had her first son to
care for, she counted herself well off; but Master Paxil would allude
with compunction to the season's having been winter when he proposed
their flight, and to Madam's having objected that the weather was too
severe for the little child,—and truly the little child, hidden in her
bosom, shivered and grew cold and stiff as stone an hour or two before
they reached their first station. He had meant it for the best, but he
had been a wilful, presumptuous man, and so his little child was taken
up to heaven, that he might not try and torture him further, and he and
his Susette were doomed to be called childless for the rest of their
pilgrimage.
VI.
It was another awakening to Euphame to find how Mark
Crichton was esteemed by these pure-minded, suave Romieus; they might
count his humour but Scotch churlishness, only they never seemed to take
it into consideration at all—he was worthy Master Mark, trusty Master
Mark, well-beloved Master Mark, to his master and mistress; they had
such an esteem for him that they gave him, with their penetrating
instinct, the " master" of the head craftsman from the day that the raw
lad commenced to fulfil his bond. "See," Madam would observe, " how
Master Mark's hands are scorched! Prepare thou cotton and oil, for he
will not hear of a cure from me. He does not fear the fire, that fine
boy! He has been handling the crucible to save my little son, who
provokes great burns rather than have the metal a degree cooler, and
becomes light-headed with the heat and the fumes." Again, "My good
Mademoiselle, Master Paul tells me that Master Mark has executed a set
of our spoons with the •handle enclosing the bowl, and he has modelled
such a tankard—what symmetry, what proportions, what embossing! A deer
and hounds, King Dagobert's, verily. What taste and strength he has! He
will be a great goldsmith like his first patron, Master Heriot, of whom
Master Paul has heard—munificent he called him; and I have gone to see
his palace for poor lads, oh! it is an honour to Master Mark to have
come from such a foundation. You think so also, Mademoiselle, and I know
he loves it, for he dreams of it sometimes; he told me so. I was merry
with him one day on a young man's dreams, and he told me with one of his
sighs, 'I dream of nothing but George Heriot's sometimes.' But he will
not engrave his own name on the tankards; no, he will not. He says he
heard Master Paul describe the design, which is very probable, for my
son discourses on all beautiful designs—none that he has not imagined,
his mind is full of truth and beauty, and he has seen such sights—crowns
of Ghirlandajo before he turned painter, cups by the great Cellini; but
why do I speak of them? My son would be such another. Master Mark will
only sign his works from the workshop of Paul Romieu, and thou wilt see
it will bring orders, and the boy with his mau-vaise honte, and
his dignity and his gratitude, he will lose nothing by it, for Master
Paul is no jealous master that is forced to fear another's renown."
In the lodging-house in the High Street, Mark was a
bugbear, a nuisance, even while he was its chief support. In the
workshop and in the narrow flat of the clockmaker, he was a hero, and
dealt with tenderly—as heroes, it may be, more than ordinary people,
require to be.
"But he is so gruff and sour, Madam Romieu," Euphame
exclaimed, bewildered, "I do not ken if you ever heard of a stern, dowff,
auld carle; but Mark Crichton may bear the weight of threescore, and
have fought no end of battles against the Turks, and seen innocent blood
spilled like water, and come home, and been denied and disowned by his
kindred, for aught of love and cheer there is in him. Mark Crichton
carries no gospel message in his bearing towards his fellow-men."
"Hold! hold! Mademoiselle, thou art unjust," cried
Madam with great vivacity, her sweet black eyes glistening with fervour,
"this is worse than judging our Cavalier. Thou dost not mean it, my
noble Mademoiselle, but whether is a man judged by his words or his
works, thinkest thou? Master Mark greets me briefly, but he treads
softly lest he should shake my miserable body in my chair or on my
paillasse; he makes me no compliments, but he brings me the peaches of
France from costly gardens, and the dandelions which you slight from the
way side. He does not doff his cap to my little son, yes, he is
obstinate enough to contradict him, but he follows him in his evening
rambles with his baton, and he would beat down with his strong young arm
the first villain who would assail him. He professes, 'I do not love my
neighbours; no, no, my neighbours are cowardly and selfish and base,
they do not heed me, why should I heed them? no, we are quits, there is
no love lost between us,' and thereafter he goes and helps his
neighbour, earns money for his gay mother, lives with and holds back his
gay sisters, frowns and bestows gifts, cuffs and lifts up the culprits.
Now, I do not admire Master Mark's speech, or rather his silence; alas!
alas! the good man clogs and poisons his generous deeds, and cleaves
himself with the broadsword of his grumbling and his bitterness. But I
say, here is one of the living examples of the parable of the two
brothers : Master Mark may stand erect for one of the twain; poor,
sickly indolent Madam Romieu, may lie and personate the other; she
promises, and he performs. See, Mademoiselle, which does the will of the
Father?"
Again Euphame felt convicted and compunctious, and
some of the chill ice of her isolation and absorption and involuntary
self-estimation began to give way.
(To be continued.)