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"Ever since I married you and Lucette Barbond, you have stood in the way of her duty, Bagot. How well I remember that first day when you knelt before me! Was ever so sweet and good a girl with her golden eyes and the look of summer in her face, and her heart all pure! Nothing had spoiled her you cannot spoil such women God is in their hearts. But you, what have you cared?
"Oh, the Prince will soon be here," said I, "and then it will all be over." "All be over? Ah, sapristi! Mademoiselle does not know. The Prince means the priests: and the priests mean Bon! have I not heard my grandmother tell?" "Tell what, Lucette? I thought you were a Papist, like all Frenchwomen." "A Catholic I? Why then came my grandfather to this country, and my father, and all?
"Well, Lucette, dear child," said her father, "won't you recite one of Lafontaine's fables before you go to bed?" "Here," observed M. de Salvandy, "is a little person who to-day recites fables and who one of these days will inspire romances." Lucette did not understand. She merely gazed with her big wondering eyes at Salvandy who was lolling in his chair with an air of benevolent condescension.
The other occupants of the kitchen were the sleeping child in its wooden cradle, some cocks and hens upon the rafters, and a big sheep-dog before the fire. The warmth, and the chicken that Lucette had killed and dressed, brought the colour back to the exhausted wanderer's cheek, and enabled her again to hold council for her safety.
"Lucette does her work thoroughly," said I, "and so does Cicely, the under chambermaid; and Caesar, the black boy, is an honest lad. I am afraid I cannot say much for the rest. But really, Aunt, it seemed to me when I came that people hadn't a notion what work was in the South." "I guess it'll seem so to me, coming and going too," said my Aunt Kezia, in the same tone as before. "No wonder.
For ten or twelve glorious summers I went there to spend my Thursday holidays, and I dreamed of it during the dreary intervening days of study. In May our friends the D -s and Lucette went to their country home and remained until vintage time, usually until after the first October frost, and regularly every Wednesday evening I was taken there.
And upon that summer day those gray and crumbling stones, defaced by the sun and weather, and overgrown with mosses, gave me for the first time an indefinable impression of the persistence of things; a vague conception of existences antedating my own, in times long past. Lucette D , my elder by eight or ten years, seemed to me already a grown person.
"No, I did not, Cary," he said, in a changed voice. "You think I am paying you a poor compliment. Perhaps, some day, you will know better." "Does anyone in this house know of the rescue plot?" "Mr Desborough knows that an attempt may be made, but not that you are in it. Lucette is engaged to keep the coast clear while we get away. And now, Cary, what say you?"
When he married sweet Lucette Barbond his religion reached little farther than a belief in the Scarlet Hunter of the Kimash Hills and those voices that could be heard calling in the night, till their time of sleep be past and they should rise and reconquer the north. Not even Father Corraine, whose ways were like those of his Master, could ever bring him to a more definite faith.
At about eight o'clock, when I recognized their ring, I jumped for joy, and I could not restrain myself from running to the street door to meet them, for Lucette, my dear friend, always came with her parents.
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