Part 6

Mary longed to tell her that she did make a noise sometimes and that, when she was drinking, in the silence of the large dining-room it sounded like pigeons cooing far away.

"And don't keep pulling up your stockings like that," Grandmamma would say.

"But one of them keeps coming down."

"In that case go to Adèle and ask her to tighten your garter."

"But it's too tight already," Mary objected. "When I undress you can see all crinkles where it was round my leg."

"And don't argue with people older than yourself," Grandmamma would conclude.

At first Mary had rather enjoyed the ceremoniousness with which she was treated by Lady Flower's servants, enjoyed being called Mademoiselle and having doors flung open for her and never having to get up in the middle of dinner and fetch clean plates. She felt like one of her own fairy heroines who had sprung from goose-girl to princess in a night. But all too soon grandeur began to be wearisome, and when she saw the maids disappearing into what Lady Flower called "the lower regions" she felt that she would like to disappear too.

A warm and cosy smell sometimes penetrated "the upper regions" from the open door at the head of the staircase leading down to the kitchens, and this emphasized the frigidity above. At first Mary liked her new frocks and sashes and ribbons, but she never liked having her hair brushed and combed by Adèle. And soon she grew to dislike her new frocks, because they became associated with endless afternoons in the _salon_, when numbers of ladies chattered French, ladies who either smelled very strongly of scent or of being ladies and who had not that pleasant soapy aroma of Aunt Lucy. At first Mary enjoyed walking in the Parc Monceau with Grandmamma or driving with her to the Bois de Boulogne; but soon these walks and drives became tiresome, for she was continually being told to hold herself up or not to turn round and stare or to talk without shouting. In the basement at Paternoster Row she had never missed the company of other children; but here in the Parc Monceau, which was full of children, Mary began to long for playmates. She took to lingering behind Grandmamma on these walks, and when she was reproved for doing so she always made the same excuse that she had waited behind a moment to see what that little boy or that little girl was doing. Lady Flower had enough sympathy and imagination to realize that Mary was beginning to feel the need of companions, so she arranged to have a children's party for her granddaughter. But Mary did not enjoy this party at all. The little girls invited were so very well behaved. Nobody romped or did any of the jolly things children did in books. They treated Mary with grave courtesy, calling her Mademoiselle, and except that the guests were in short frocks and wore their hair down there was no difference between this party and one of Grandmamma's crowded afternoons in the _salon_.

"I really must make up my mind to take you to Châteaublanc," Grandmamma proclaimed after Mary had been in Paris for nearly two months. "Did you tell me that Mr. Fawcus taught you to read and write?"

"Yes, and he said I learned very quickly."

"So I should think," Grandmamma commented dryly. "I'm afraid you'll have a hard time at school."

Mary began to dread this school which was always being talked about, and every time with some unpleasant addition to its already long list of disagreeable potentialities.

"I didn't intend to go to Aix until late in the summer," said Grandmamma. "And I had thought of keeping you with me until then, but perhaps it's unwise to postpone your education any longer. So I'll take you there next week. I've written to Mademoiselle Lucinge and suggested that you should stay right on through the summer holidays, so that by Christmas, when you'll be nearly eleven years old, won't you, I shall expect to see quite a different Mary."

Perhaps Mary looked sad at the notion of the change that was to be wrought in her by so many consecutive months of Mademoiselle Lucinge's _Pension_. At any rate, Lady Flower became momentarily affectionate, as she put her arm round Mary and said:

"It's not your fault, you poor little thing, and you mustn't think I'm unkind. But I do want you to be able to get a great deal out of life, and there's nothing that is so terribly able to prevent that as not knowing exactly how to behave."

Mary stared at her grandmother, utterly incapable of understanding what she was talking about.

The old lady--for when Lady Flower unbent she suddenly became an old lady--took Mary upon her knee.

"You funny little thing," she said, "you and I are so very much alone in the world."

Then a moment later she disengaged herself from Mary's warm, responsive embrace and became her ivorine self.

"When you go to school, I want you to give up writing to Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus. There will have to come a moment when you quite break off communication with them, and it had better be sooner than later. They have both behaved very well, which shows that they understand how completely the relationship between you and them has changed. Now give me a kiss and run off to Adèle. It is time you were in bed."

Mary went sadly upstairs and dreamed of a castle full of dungeons and of being chased by a crocodile, the castle being the _pension de jeunes filles_ and the crocodile being Mademoiselle Lucinge herself.

A week after this Lady Flower succeeded in making up her mind to brave the long railway journey down through the heart of France and leave her granddaughter at Châteaublanc.

"Perhaps after all I could go to Aix earlier this year," she sighed with the air of proclaiming a martyrdom.

It was a fine June morning when they set out from the Gare de Lyon; but Mary became sad and apprehensive as one green mile after another was left behind under the changeless blue sky, for though she had ceased to pine for the life of the basement in Paternoster Row, she always felt while she was still in Paris that she knew the way back and that if ever she should be faced with something unbearably disagreeable, she should be able to escape. Now she was being carried farther away every moment like that bluebottle who was buzzing on the warm glass of the carriage windows. She began to make up a story about that bluebottle while Grandmamma dozed among her cushions on the opposite seat--a story of how this father bluebottle would arrive at Châteaublanc and try to find the mother bluebottle and all the little bluebottles. Of course if he knew the way back he would be better off than herself, because he would be able to fly. But he wouldn't know the way back, and he would go buzzing about Châteaublanc trying to find his home until one day he would be killed, and the mother bluebottle and all the little bluebottles in Paris would never know what had become of him. Mary was so much moved by the woeful story that she felt a tear spring to her eyes and a lump in her throat. If only she had thought of it sooner, she might have let the bluebottle out. Perhaps even now he would not have traveled too far to know his way back. Mary raised the blind and tried to help the bluebottle out of the open window with her handkerchief; but he did not seem able to understand that she was trying to help him and went buzzing all over the compartment until at last he buzzed across Grandmamma's nose and woke her up.

"What are you doing, Mary?"

Mary did not like to explain just what she was really doing. So she looked abashed and said that she was doing nothing.

"Well, don't," said Grandmamma, dozing off again.

Mary tried to think how one did not do nothing; which raised an old problem of how one thought about nothing, and she tried once more to think about nothing.

"But if I think about nothing," she thought, "I'm thinking about thinking about nothing. And if I think about thinking about nothing I'm thinking about something."

She once asked Uncle William if he could think about nothing and if not why not. Whereupon Uncle William had told her that Parmenides had been puzzled by the same problem two thousand years ago and more.

"Who was Pa Many D's?" Mary had asked, for that was the way she pictured the name.

Uncle William had informed her that Parmenides was a philosopher who founded the Eleatic school.

"Well, when I'm old I'll marry a philosopher," Mary had announced, for it sounded a pleasant word to say and a pleasant thing to be, and Uncle William had founded schools. Mary thought about Pa Many D's now in the hot dusty railway carriage, and tried to remember what school he founded. But she could only think of "asthmatic" and "rheumatic," neither of which sounded right.

Mary printed S-K-O-O-L on the window with a wet finger, shuddered, and looking round perceived that the bluebottle had escaped.

At that moment the train puffed into Dijon station, where Grandmamma waking up decided it was time to have lunch. Mary enjoyed that while it lasted. But after lunch Grandmamma went more fast asleep than ever; the carriage grew hotter and hotter; the country grew greener and greener, and the sky more blue.

"Pouff!" Mary sighed. "Pouff-ff-ff!"

The train reached Macon, when Mary was in the middle of speculating how many times she had said pouff since Dijon.

"I must have said a thrillion pouffs," she decided, and wished that Grandmamma would wake up and be conversational, so that she might display her acquaintance with that numeral. Or perhaps she had better reserve it for Mademoiselle Lucinge. How could she bring it in? Mary began to compose the interview with her mistress.

"How do you do, my little girl?"

"I am very well, thank you, Mademoiselle."

"Did you have a comfortable journey?"

"Yes, thank you, Mademoiselle. My grandmamma and I passed a very pleasant day in the train. What a long way off you live! About a thrillion miles, I suppose."

Mary decided that this sounded a little too far when it was put into speech. Perhaps on consideration she had better be content with impressing Grandmamma.

"Supposing she never wakes up!" Mary thought in alarm. "Supposing she's gone to sleep like the Sleeping Beauty for thrillions of years? Only she's not a Beauty," Mary added to herself in hopeful parenthesis. However, soon after this Grandmamma did wake up, by which time Mary herself had fallen asleep, and did not wake until the train reached Lyon, where they got out and drove in the dusk along the banks first of one river and then of another equally large until they reached their hotel. Mary was sent with the chambermaid to have a bath before she went to bed, and she had to walk along half a dozen dark, crooked passages before she reached the bathroom, which was full of steam; the bath itself was covered with a large sheet which floated about in the water and kept bellying out on either side of Mary as she splashed about. Her bath seemed to have caused much excitement in the hotel, for all the time people kept coming to the door and shouting outside to the chambermaid, who kept shouting back as excitedly while the pipes on the wall groaned and bubbled and clashed until Mary was glad when her bath was finished and the chambermaid, after wrapping her in several towels, picked her up in her arms and carried her back through the corridors, running fast and shouting to everybody she met to get out of the way. That night Mary slept in an enormous four-poster with heavy red curtains, and in the morning she went for a drive with her grandmother first along the banks of the sluggish, dark green Saône and then beside the sparkling azure Rhône. But what Mary liked best in Lyon was the Cathedral on the top of a steep hill, which looked like an elephant upside down with gilded legs and a golden trunk. After _déjeuner_ they got into a most extraordinary train with carriages as tall as houses where passengers sat on top without any roof over them, in which they were puffed along until they reached their destination.

Châteaublanc was a small red-roofed town built upon the southern slopes of a range of low hills that rose not much higher than the rolling countryside of woodland, pasture, and vineyard, at the foot of which a small tributary of the Saône ran its shallow course over a bed of limestone. The ruins of the castle that gave its name to Châteaublanc still stood like an acropolis above the town, the sight of which compensated Mary for much, since this must really once upon a time have been an enchanted castle without any need to pretend that it was one. In fact, from the moment she alighted at the station Mary liked Châteaublanc. She liked the wide main street, where the houses dreamed in the sunlight behind green shutters and Gloire de Dijon roses, and where in the middle of the front parterres beautiful purple and silver globes shimmered with the movement of the small world therein reflected.

"Oh, Grandmamma, how beautiful they are!" she cried, clapping her hands.

"Yes, you're in roseland here," said Lady Flower.

"No. Not the roses. They're beautiful too. But those purple balls!"

"My dear child, you don't mean to say you think those monstrous tinsel spheres beautiful! Why, they're perfectly hideous!"

Mary regarded her grandmother in amazement. She must be mad. She must be upset by the journey. She must be joking.

"Oh, and look! That garden's got five!" she shrieked, nearly falling out of the _fiacre_ in her delight. "One purple. One silver. One blue. One gold. And one red. I hope in heaven there are thrillions and thrillions of them."

"God forbid!" exclaimed Lady Flower, sniffing her vinaigrette in dismay at the picture. "And I suppose you mean trillions."

Mary was silent after this until the _fiacre_ took them beyond the main street into an avenue of clipped acacias and limes, from which they turned aside through wide paths into a curved drive where hydrangeas bloomed in the beds on either side.

"What funny flowers!" Mary exclaimed. "They're like the little woman in a house Uncle ... Fawcus ... Mr. Fawcus gave me. When it was going to be wet, her bonnet and dress was pink and when it was going to be fine they were blue. Only really she wasn't ever pink or blue, but like those flowers, and then she was always wrong."

The _fiacre_ pulled up before a house with a white portico and French windows opening to the wide verandah that ran round it.

"Is this really going to be my school?" Mary asked incredulously. "Why, I thought it was going to be quite an ugly place. Oh, Grandmamma," she cried, "how kind of you to give me such a nice school!"

Lady Flower had been influenced by a number of considerations in her choice of a school for Mary, but what undoubtedly had least influence was her granddaughter's point of view in the matter. Nevertheless, as grown-up people use, she accepted the child's gratitude with complacency.

It certainly was a good school. Mademoiselle Lucinge was a woman of taste and breeding, who when little more than a girl had gone as governess to the house of an English nobleman, where she had remained ten years. Having inherited from a distant relative a house and a small property, she had felt justified in carrying out a project upon which she had for a long time set her heart. During her stay in England she had had an opportunity of coming into contact with a number of distinguished people, and from the moment she had opened her _pension_ she had been successful. The greater number of her pupils were English, but many other nationalities were represented; and Lady Flower, who was prejudiced in favor of a cosmopolitan education, thought that in Mademoiselle Lucinge she had found the ideal person to correct in her granddaughter the effects of a deplorable upbringing, for which, strange to say, she did not in the least blame herself.

When Mary went to Châteaublanc, she found herself the youngest of thirty-five girls, and it had been agreed between Lady Flower and Mademoiselle that for the first two years she was to spend all her time there. So, when her grandmother bade good-by on the day after her arrival it was to be a long good-by, although it was understood that she might expect a visit whenever Lady Flower should be on her way to Aix.

Mary was too much delighted with the _pension_ to feel any sorrow at the prospect of so long a parting. Nor indeed was it to be expected that in barely three months her grandmother would have become indispensable to her happiness. Her new surroundings had already begun even to dim the basement of Paternoster Row. Uncle William and Aunt Lucy were now far away indeed. It would not be long before Mary would begin to remember her past life in a few bright patches like the bright patches of a faded carpet.

A month after Mary had arrived at the _pension_ war was declared between France and Prussia. The pupils went home for their summer holidays, and Mary was left with two girls from South America, both considerably older than herself. During this time Mademoiselle Lucinge took a great deal of trouble with Mary's education and was really more like a private governess in the care she lavished than the proprietress and headmistress of a fashionable school. The war was going so badly for France that it seemed more prudent to close the school that autumn. The two South American girls were sent off to Bordeaux that they might sail thence for home and relieve the minds of their parents who had sent a packet of anxious and excited letters. Mademoiselle Lucinge wrote to her grandmother to ask what she would like Mary to do. Lady Flower wrote back to say that she was convinced that the French defeats were of no importance and that very shortly the Prussians would be driven back over the Rhine. In any case, Paris was no place for her granddaughter, and in Paris she herself must stay to do her work with the Red Cross. Would Mademoiselle keep Mary at Châteaublanc?

Nothing could have fallen out better for Mary. She had now the entire attention of Mademoiselle; she had a beautiful house and beautiful gardens to herself; she had as many books to read as she wanted.

Mademoiselle Lucinge was a devout Catholic, and so were most of her pupils. As regards Mary's religious teaching, Lady Flower let Mademoiselle understand that she had no objection to as much religion being instilled into her granddaughter as was consonant with her social obligations in days to come; but she particularly requested that no attempt should be made to lure her into Catholicism. The Papacy was very unpopular in England at this period, and Lady Flower would have regarded it as a serious reflection upon her duty as guardian if she had allowed her granddaughter to enter society under such a handicap. She herself privately believed in nothing that was not material, even obvious, but inasmuch as positive scepticism would be considered as unbecoming as Popish extravagance she conformed to the religious mode of the time and expected her granddaughter to do the same.

Mademoiselle had not been a governess in England for ten years without learning how little the English mind being considered eccentric abroad, how much they hate to be thought eccentric at home. At the same time, Mary was the youngest pupil in her school, and she regarded her own duties of guardianship more gravely than Lady Flower regarded hers. Whatever might be Mary's life in days to come, Mademoiselle was determined that she should not be denied in childhood an opportunity to prepare the soul for those deep consolations of religious belief that might one day come to her aid in a time of stress. And Mary loved the quiet hours with Mademoiselle, when in her gray boudoir she spoke to her about God.

One mellow Sunday evening in mid-September, when the news from the seat of war was as bad as it could be and when Mademoiselle's austere and gracious countenance was lined with care and grief for her country, Mary had been learning the fifth commandment in the catechism of the Church of England:

_Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee._

A robin redbreast was singing in the magnolia on the lawn beneath the turret window of Mademoiselle's gray room, and Mary's thoughts on seeing the bird went back to the attic in Paternoster Row, where she had first read of the death of poor Cock Robin. When Mademoiselle's exposition of filial piety was concluded, Mary asked her if she ought to honor her grandmother as much as she would have honored her father and mother were they alive.

"Quite as much, my child," said Mademoiselle.

Mary thought for a moment or two.

"But oughtn't I to honor Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus, who Grandmamma says I mustn't call Uncle William and Aunt Lucy any more?"

It was Mademoiselle's turn to think for a moment.

"You ought to honor their memory," she said at last.

"But why mayn't I write to them and tell them where I am? And tell about you, Mademoiselle, and what I'm doing and about the garden and the lizards and the white cows who pull the carts and about treading on the grapes and beating the corn with those funny sticks and about my sabots and the melon I have for breakfast? They would like to hear."

Mademoiselle could not bear that the gratitude and affection of a little child should be thus discouraged, although Lady Flower's last words had been to forbid any communication between Mary and her former guardians. In the end she compromised by letting Mary write a letter and writing herself by the same post to Mr. Fawcus, begging him not to reply and explaining the circumstances in which she had allowed Mary to write. It was unlike Mademoiselle to compromise; but she was tormented by the woes of France that autumn and not so much mistress as usual of her judgment or emotions. Her kindly intention did much harm, for when Mary received no answer to her letter she was embittered by the thought that her beloved friends had already forgotten her, and this was the first disillusion of her life.

During this time Mary, with the facility of childhood, learned to speak French, so that before the leaves fell from the trees that year she was as fluent as if she had been living in Châteaublanc from infancy. One day in October--it was soon after the news had arrived of Gambetta's escape from Paris in a balloon--Mary, wandering in a remote corner of the grounds, discovered a stripling of about sixteen who was digging holes for young trees to be planted in them when the autumn rains should have soaked down into the soil. He was a slim, handsome boy with fine features and dark, silky hair; but it was not his good looks that interested Mary so much as the fact that he seemed to be working in a frenzy of despair.

"_Qu'est-ce que tu as?_" she demanded.

"_J'ai mal au cœur_," he replied sullenly, wiping a tear from his eye and bending low over his spade.

"But why are you crying?" she persisted. She spoke in French, of course.

"My tears belong to me," he said. "At least the Prussians have left us our tears."

"Are you the son of our gardener?" she asked.

To this ollendorfian query he nodded.

"Of Monsieur Menard?"

He nodded again.

"_Alors, tu es Pierre?_"

"_Oui, je suis Pierre._"

Mary produced an apple from the pocket of the hideous crimson pelisse she was wearing, and while she slowly munched it she regarded the boy with solemn curiosity. She had heard of young Pierre Menard who had run away from home to join the troops that were everywhere being recruited in the provinces to drive the Prussians out of France, and of how his father had found him in the market-place of Villefranche and brought him back, because he was too young to be a soldier.

"I'm sorry you could not go to be a soldier, Pierre," she said at last. "Would you like the other half of my apple?"

The boy accepted the proffered fruit with a surly grace, and presently he was confiding in Mary the tale of his wrecked ambition.