Part 8 (1/2)
”Not I,” laughed De Courval.
”Let us say, then, I have paid a score of thanks; credit me with these--one should be prudent. Only in the Bible it is a thank,--one. Be careful of the coin. Let it rest there. So you go to work to-morrow. It is well; for you have been anxious of late, and for that exacting work is no bad remedy.”
The next day De Courval found himself before seven-thirty in the counting-house. ”It is hard in winter,” said the clerk who was to instruct him. ”Got to make the fires then. Mr. Potts is particular. You must leave no dust, and here are brooms in the closet.” And so, perched on a high stool, the clerk, well amused, watched his successor, Louis Rene, Vicomte de Courval, sweep out the counting-house.
”By George!” said the critic, ”you will wear out a broom a day. What a dust! Sweep it up in the dust-pan. Sprinkle it first with the watering-pot. Lord, man, don't deluge it! And now a little sand. Don't build a sea-beach. Throw out the dust on the ash-heap behind the house.”
It was done at last.
”Take your coat off next time. The clerks will be here soon, but we have a few minutes. Come out and I will show you the place. Oh, this is your desk, quills, paper, and sand, and 'ware old man Potts.”
They went on to the broad landing between the warehouse and Dock Creek.
”There are two brigs from Madeira in the creek, partly unloaded.”
The great tuns of Madeira wine filled the air with vinous odors, and on one side, under a shed, were staves and salt fish from the North for return cargoes, and potatoes, flour, and onions in ropes for the French islands.
”The s.h.i.+p outside,” said the clerk, ”is from the Indies with tea and silks, and for ballast cheap blue Canton china.”
The vessels and the thought of far-away seas pleased the young man. The big s.h.i.+p, it seemed, had been overhauled by a small British privateer.
”But there is no war?”
”No, but they claim to take our goods billed for any French port, and as many men as they choose to call English.”
”And she beat them off?”
”Yes; Mr. Wynne gave the master a silver tankard, and a hundred dollars for the men.”
De Courval was excited and pleased. It was no day of tame, peaceful commerce. Malayan pirates in the East, insolent English cruisers to be outsailed, the race home of rival s.h.i.+ps for a market, made every voyage what men fitly called a venture. Commerce had its romance. Strange things and stranger stories came back from far Indian seas.
After this introduction, he thanked his instructor, and returning to the counting-house, was gravely welcomed and asked to put in French two long letters for Martinique and to translate and write out others. He went away for his noonday meal, and, returning, wrote and copied and resolutely rewrote, asking what this and that term of commerce meant, until his back ached when he went home at six. He laughed as he gave his mother a humorous account of it all, but not of the sweeping.
Then she declared the claret good, and what did it cost? Oh, not much.
He had not the bill as yet.
VI
Despite the disgust he felt at the routine of daily domestic service, the life of the great merchant's business began more and more to interest De Courval. The clerks were mere machines, and of Mr. Wynne he saw little. He went in and laid letters on his desk, answered a question or two in regard to his mother, and went out with perhaps a message to a s.h.i.+pmaster fresh from the Indies and eager to pour out in a tongue well spiced with sea oaths his hatred of England and her ocean bullies.
The mother's recovery was slow, as Chovet had predicted, but at the end of June, on a Sat.u.r.day, he told Mistress Wynne she might call on his patient, and said that in the afternoon the vicomtesse might sit out on the balcony upon which her room opened.
Madame was beginning to desire a little change of society and was somewhat curious as to this old spinster of whom Rene had given a kind, if rather startling, account. Her own life in England had been lonely and amid those who afforded her no congenial society, nor as yet was she in entirely easy and satisfactory relations with the people among whom she was now thrown. They were to her both new and singular.
The Quaker lady puzzled her inadequate experience--a _dame de pension_, a boarding-house keeper with perfect tact; with a certain simple sweetness, as if any common bit of service about the room and the sick woman's person were a pleasure. The quiet, gentle manners of the Quaker household, with now and then a flavor of some larger world, were all to Madame's taste. When, by and by, her hostess talked more and more freely in her imperfect French, it was un.o.btrusive and natural, and she found her own somewhat austere training beginning to yield and her unready heart to open to kindness so constant, and so beautiful with the evident joy of self-sacrifice.
During the great war the alliance with France had made the language of that country the fas.h.i.+on. French officers came and went, and among the Whig families of position French was even earlier, as in Mary Plumstead's case, a not very rare accomplishment. But of late she had had little opportunity to use her knowledge, and with no such courage as that of Gainor Wynne, had preferred the awkwardness of silence until her guest's illness obliged her to put aside her shy distrust in the interest of kindness. She soon found the tongue grow easier, and the vicomtesse began to try at short English sentences, and was pleased to amuse herself by correcting Margaret, who had early learned French from her mother, and with ready intelligence seized gladly on this fresh chance to improve her knowledge.
One day as Mrs. Swanwick sat beside her guest's couch, she said: ”Thy son told me soon after thy coming that thou art not, like most of the French, of the Church of Rome.” He, it seemed, desired to see a Friends'