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They were troublous times even long afterwards, when Anton Dormeur, owner of looms and manufacturer of velvet, went about with a serious face, and trusted few of his neighbours.
They had reached the passage leading to Dobree's queer little oak-panelled room, and as the door was open, both the old men entered; Dormeur walking up to the mantel-piece, and fiddling about there with some old china cups, and other little ornaments with which it was adorned.
There were tables and tripods too, bearing bronzes and Oriental jars filled with scented woods and spices; but it was over this silver cup that the sweet glowing face of Sara Dormeur bent, as she stood watching for her lover's fluttering signal amidst the trees that belted the sloping parterre, beyond the broad stone balcony on which the windows opened.
The sound of wheels aroused him, and Bashley for it was he gave a half-frightened glance behind him, for he had suddenly become conscious that he was talking to himself. He looked upwards also, as though by some strange instinct; and there, leaning over the wooden balustrade of the "well," their faces lighted in the gleam of his lantern, were Anton Dormeur and Sara Rondeau, looking down upon him.
After every such operation this silk was brought back to be reweighed, and only when the piece was finished in a woven fabric did it find its way into the lower warehouse, there to be measured and inspected. Access was gained to this upper warehouse by a door in a back street, inscribed with the words "A. Dormeur. Weavers' Entrance."
Anton Dormeur was a man who kept his own counsel, and, when the persecutions had for a time been stayed, he saved money, hoping to rebuild the fortunes of his house for those two daughters, who were but children when his wife died and left a vacant place that never could be filled. They were lovely these girls each in a different fashion.
"Pierre Pierre Dobree!" shouted the old man, striding to the door, "he should be here; where is he?" "Here am I," said Peter, suddenly confronting him, and drawing Antoine into the room, all grimed and torn, and smirched with mud, as he was. "What is the meaning of that?" said old Dormeur, glaring into Peter's eyes, and laying a grip upon his shoulder that must have left a bruise there.
For the father, Anton Dormeur, was averse to young Dufarge, who though he belonged to a Protestant family among the tanners of Alais, was a man of the people, without that connection with the old nobility which the Huguenots cherished, even though they suffered continually by the laws that king and nobles put in force against them.
That when Sara Dufarge once Sara Dormeur my loved and lovely mistress, joined her husband not by the guillotine, but by a broken heart in a little country lodging at Nogent she left her child that child to the nurse who had been faithful to her to my own good sister Nancy, who, bringing her to England when she and her husband came to escape the troubles, found here another sister, the widow Rondeau childless to whom came as a legacy that same little orphaned one who lies now in her grandsire's chair."
Thus old Dormeur forbade Sara to have any more to say to Dufarge, but encouraged the lover of his eldest girl, a man of twice her age, the grim and saturnine Bartholde, by birth seigneur of an estate near Lozère, where, however, he lived only on sufferance, for the title had been abated after the persecutions following the Edict of Nantes, and though Bartholde was rich, he had abandoned both title and the display that belonged to it.
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