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She was distrait for an instant. "My New York! Monsieur would you believe? I dream of it!" He had found a key to one chamber in the mansion of her confidence. As much to herself as to him, unconsciously dropping into English, she began to talk of her life "at home".... Her father had been a partner in a great jewellery house, Cottier's, of Paris, London, and New York.
"They did not find their way into Cottier's stock, then?" The Comtesse de Lorgnes gave a gesture of excitement. "But what a fortunate woman! You truly have those magnificent emeralds, those almost matchless diamonds, of which one has heard the Anstruther collection?" "I have them, Madame la Comtesse," said Eve with a smiling nod "yes."
The oppression of tithes was little inferior to the tyranny of rack-rents; while the great landholder was nearly exempt from this pressure, a tenth of the produce of the cottier's labor was exacted for the purpose of a religious establishment from which he derived no benefit. . . . The peasant had no resource: not trade or manufactures they were discouraged; not emigration to France the vigilance of government precluded foreign enlistment; not emigration to America his poverty precluded the means.
When we had dressed the wound, I turned to the trap to lift out Mrs Cottier's parcels, which I carried indoors. Breakfast was ready on the table, and Mrs Cottier and Hugh were toasting some bread at the fire. My aunt was, of course, breakfasting upstairs with my uncle; he was hardly able to stir with sciatica, poor man; he needed somebody to feed him. "Good morning, Mims dear," I cried.
If we had to describe a man who is retrogressive in the most evil sense of the word we should say, he is one who would dub himself a reformer of our constitution, while every interest for which he is immediately responsible is going to decay: a philanthropist who cannot bear one rogue to be hanged, but does not mind five honest tenants being half-starved: a man who shrieks at corruption, and keeps his farms at rack-rent: who roars himself red at rotten boroughs, and does not mind if every field on his farms has a rotten gate: a man very open-hearted to Leeds and Manchester, no doubt; he would give any number of representatives who will pay for their seats out of their own pockets: what he objects to giving, is a little return on rent-days to help a tenant to buy stock, or an outlay on repairs to keep the weather out at a tenant's barn-door or make his house look a little less like an Irish cottier's.
To pay the interest and secure this "margin" for themselves there are only two ways to wring the last shilling out of the wretched tenants, to first deprive them of their ancient privileges, and then charge them extra dues for exercising them, or to let every available inch of mountain pasture to a cattle-farmer, whose herds take very good care that the cottier's cow does not get "the run of the mountain" at their master's expense.
It shows you what power the night-riders had in those days. They had gone to Salcombe to Mr Cottier's lodgings; they had questioned him, perhaps with threats, till he had confessed that he had betrayed them to the preventives; then they had gagged him, hustled him downstairs to a waiting closed carriage, and then they had quietly driven him on, undisturbed, to their fastness in the cliff.
I, who had neither family nor kindred, who from earliest childhood had never tasted the sweets of affection nor known the blessings of a father's love; and yet scarce a day crept by without some thought of the far-away land of my birth, some memory of its hills and valleys, of its green banks and changeful skies: and in my dreams, some long-forgotten air would bring me back in memory to the cottier's fireside, where around the red blazing turf were seated the poor but happy peasantry, beguiling the time with song or story, now telling of the ancient greatness of their country, now breathing a hope of its one day prosperity.
Eve turned to him with a look of surprise. "Yes, monsieur?" "It is many years ago, you were a young girl then, if it was truly you, madame; but I have a keen eye for beauty, I do not soon forget it ... I was in the private office of my friend, Edmund Anstruther, of Cottier's, one afternoon, selecting a trinket with his advice, and " "That was my father, monsieur."
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