Esmeralda | Page 3

friendly gossip. "The apartment upon the first
floor," and she nodded to me significantly, and with good-natured
encouragement. "Perhaps you may get pupils," she added. "They are
Americans, and speak only English, and there is a young lady, Madame
says."
"Americans!" exclaimed Clélie, with sudden interest.
"Americans," answered the concierge. "It was Madame who came.
Mon Dieu! it was wonderful! So rich and so--so"--filling up the blank
by a shrug of deep meaning.
"It cannot have been long since they were--peasants," her voice
dropping into a cautious whisper.
"Why not our friends of the Louvre?" said Clélie as we went on
up-stairs.
"Why not?" I replied. "It is very possible."
The next day there arrived at the house numberless trunks of large

dimensions, superintended by the small angry woman and a maid. An
hour later came a carriage, from whose door emerged the young lady
and her father. Both looked pale and fagged; both were led up-stairs in
the midst of voluble comments and commands by the mother; and both,
entering the apartment, seemed swallowed up by it, as we saw and
heard nothing further of them. Clélie was indignant.
"It is plain that the mother overwhelms them," she said. "A girl of that
age should speak and be interested in any novelty. This one would be if
she were not wretched. And the poor little husband!"--
"My dear," I remarked, "you are a feminine Bayard. You engage
yourself with such ardor in everybody's wrongs."
When I returned from my afternoon's work a few days later, I found
Clélie again excited. She had been summoned to the first floor by
Madame.
"I went into the room," said Clélie, "and found the mother and daughter
together. Mademoiselle, who stood by the fire, had evidently been
weeping Madame was in an abrupt and angry mood. She wasted no
words. 'I want you to give her lessons,' she said, making an ungraceful
gesture in the direction of her daughter. 'What do you charge a lesson?'
And on my telling her, she engaged me at once. 'It's a great deal, but I
guess I can pay as well as other people,' she remarked."
A few of the lessons were given downstairs, and then Clélie preferred a
request to Madame.
"If you will permit Mademoiselle to come to my room, you will confer
a favor upon me," she said.
Fortunately, her request was granted, and so I used afterward to come
home and find Mademoiselle Esmeralda in our little salon at work
disconsolately and tremulously. She found it difficult to hold her pencil
in the correct manner, and one morning she let it drop, and burst into
tears.

"Don't you see I'll never do it!" she answered, miserably. "Don't you
see I couldn't, even if my heart was in it, and it aint at all!"
She held out her little hands piteously for Clélie to look at. They were
well enough shaped, and would have been pretty if they had not been
robbed of their youthful suppleness by labor.
"I've been used to work," she said, "rough work all my life, and my
hands aint like yours."
"But you must not be discouraged, Mademoiselle," said Clélie gently.
"Time"--
"Time," interposed the girl, with a frightened look in her pretty gray
eyes. "That's what I can't bear to think of--the time that's to come."
This was the first of many outbursts of confidence. Afterward she
related to Clélie, with the greatest naïveté, the whole history of the
family affairs.
They had been the possessors of some barren mountain lands in North
Carolina, and her description of their former life was wonderful indeed
to the ears of the Parisian. She herself had been brought up with
marvelous simplicity and hardihood, barely learning to read and write,
and in absolute ignorance of society. A year ago iron had been
discovered upon their property, and the result had been wealth and
misery for father and daughter. The mother, who had some vague
fancies of the attractions of the great outside world, was ambitious and
restless. Monsieur, who was a mild and accommodating person, could
only give way before her stronger will.
"She always had her way with us," said Mademoiselle Esmeralda,
scratching nervously upon the paper before her with her pencil, at this
part of the relation. "We did not want to leave home, neither me nor
father, and father said more than I ever heard him say before at one
time. 'Mother,' says he, 'let me an' Esmeraldy stay at home, an' you go
an' enjoy your tower. You've had more schoolin' an' you'll be more at
home than we should. You're useder to city ways, havin' lived in

'Lizabethville.' But it only vexed her. People in town had been talking
to her about traveling and letting me learn things, and