Esmeralda | Page 3

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 Cl��lie 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. Cl��lie 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 Cl��lie again excited. She had been summoned to the first floor by Madame.
"I went into the room," said Cl��lie, "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 Cl��lie 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 Cl��lie 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 Cl��lie 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 Cl��lie, with the greatest na?vet��, 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 she'd set her mind on it."
She was very simple and unsophisticated. To the memory of her former truly singular life she clung with unshaken fidelity. She recurred to it constantly. The novelty and luxury of her new existence seemed to have no attractions for her. One thing even my Cl��lie found incomprehensible, while she fancied she understood the rest--she did not appear to