Esmeralda | Page 4

be moved to pleasure even by our beloved Paris.
"It is a true maladie du pays," Cl��lie remarked to me. "And that is not all."
Nor was it all. One day the whole truth was told amid a flood of tears.
"I--I was going to be married," cried the poor child. "I was to have been married the week the ore was found. I was--all ready, and mother--mother shut right down on us."
Cl��lie glanced at me in amazed questioning.
"It is a kind of argot which belongs only to Americans," I answered in an undertone. "The alliance was broken off."
"Ciel!" exclaimed my Cl��lie between her small shut teeth. "The woman is a fiend!"
She was wholly absorbed in her study of this unworldly and untaught nature. She was full of sympathy for its trials and tenderness, and for its pain.
Even the girl's peculiarities of speech were full of interest to her. She made serious and intelligent efforts to understand them, as if she studied a new language.
"It is not common argot," she said. "It has its subtleties. One continually finds somewhere an original idea--sometimes even a bon mot, which startles one by its pointedness. As you say, however, it belongs only to the Americans and their remarkable country. A French mind can only arrive at its climaxes through a grave and occasionally tedious research, which would weary most persons, but which, however, does not weary me."
The confidence of Mademoiselle Esmeralda was easily won. She became attached to us both, and particularly to Cl��lie. When her mother was absent or occupied, she stole up-stairs to our apartment and spent with us the moments of leisure chance afforded her. She liked our rooms, she told my wife, because they were small, and our society, because we were "clever," which we discovered afterward meant "amiable." But she was always pale and out of spirits. She would sit before our fire silent and abstracted.
"You must not mind if I don't talk," she would say. "I can't; and it seems to help me to get to sit and think about things--Mother won't let me do it down-stairs."
We became also familiar with the father. One day I met him upon the staircase, and to my amazement he stopped as if he wished to address me. I raised my hat and bade him good-morning. On his part he drew forth a large handkerchief and began to rub the palms of his hands with awkward timidity.
"How-dy?" he said.
I confess that at the moment I was covered with confusion. I who was a teacher of English, and flattered myself that I wrote and spoke it fluently did not understand. Immediately, however, it flashed across my mind that the word was a species of salutation. (Which I finally discovered to be the case.) I bowed again and thanked him, hazarding the reply that my health was excellent, and an inquiry as to the state of Madame's. He rubbed his hands still more nervously, and answered me in the slow and deliberate mariner I had observed at the Louvre.
"Thank ye," he said, "she's doin' tol'able well, is mother--as well as common. And she's a-en-joyin' herself, too. I wish we was all"--
But there he checked himself and glanced hastily about him.
Then he began again:--
"Esmeraldy," he said,--"Esmeraldy thinks a heap on you. She takes a sight of comfort out of Mis' Des----I can't call your name, but I mean your wife."
"Madame Desmarres," I replied, "is rejoiced indeed to have won the friendship of Mademoiselle."
"Yes," he proceeded, "she takes a sight of comfort in you and all. An' she needs comfort, does Esmeraldy."
There ensued a slight pause which somewhat embarrassed me, for at every pause he regarded me with an air of meek and hesitant appeal.
"She's a little down-sperrited is Esmeraldy," he said. "An'," adding this suddenly in a subdued and fearful tone, "so am I."
Having said this he seemed to feel that he had overstepped a barrier. He seized the lapel of my coat and held me prisoner, pouring forth his confessions with a faith in my interest by which I was at once-amazed and touched.
"You see it's this way," he said,--"it's this way, Mister. We're home folks, me an' Esmeraldy, an' we're a long way from home, an' it sorter seems like we didn't get no useder to it than we was at first. We're not like mother. Mother she was raised in a town,--she was raised in 'Lizabethville,--an' she allers took to town ways; but me an' Esmeraldy, we was raised in the mountains, right under the shadder of old Bald, an' town goes hard with us. Seems like we're allers a thinkin' of North Callina. An' mother she gits outed, which is likely. She says we'd ought to fit ourselves fur our higher pear, an' I dessay we'd ought,--but you see it goes sorter hard