Jacquetta. Baring-Gould Sabine

      Chapter I

       Table of Contents

      A brilliant day in early summer, the sea blue as the alpine gentian, the deep large dark flower; and the overarching sky blue as the paler but yet intensely azure gentianella. Not a white horse on the sea, only twinkles where the water-surface wreathed in laughter to the sun’s smile. The little steamer, Sir Francis Drake, was paddling her way very leisurely from Guernsey to St. Malo, and her wake lay behind her as far as the eye could trace. She had left Plymouth the preceding evening, and at early morning arrived off the harbour of St. Pierre, Guernsey, where she picked up a couple of passengers, two gentlemen, both young, who sat on deck, smoked, and talked together in French.

      Presently, from the first cabin emerged two ladies, one old, the other young, who also took up their place on deck, and talked together, not in French, but in English. These ladies had come from England and had accordingly slept on board. Neither presented that dishevelled, haggard, and battered appearance so conspicuous in travellers who have crossed the Channel. Neither had that look of utter break down of self-esteem that may be seen daily on the Dover or Calais pier, but both were fresh, hearty, and neat. There was not much in the elder lady to attract attention—at least, the attention of young men—but it was other with the second lady. She was a girl of eighteen, very pretty, bright, happy, and with the clearest complexion, and with the purest colour in her sweet cheeks. She had honest eyes, of brown, and rather dark-brown hair. Self-consciousness is the bane of most girls’ faces, especially if they have any pretence to beauty, or are well dressed. There was nothing of this in the girl on deck. The gentlemen were struck with the tenderness and consideration she showed for her mother. That same mother wore what was at one time known as an ‘ugly’; it was a sort of hood of blue silk stretched on wires or whalebones, that folded up or drew down in front of her bonnet, like the hood of a carriage. Nothing more disfiguring can be conceived; only an English woman would venture to assume it. A Frenchwoman would die at the stake rather than appear in an ‘ugly.’

      By that ‘ugly’ the date of this story can be fixed. Let our lady readers, if they are old enough, throw back their thoughts to the time when ladies did not blush to wear uglies. At that time the steamers did not run from Southampton or Weymouth to the French port of St. Malo, touching on the way at Guernsey and Jersey. At that time the Channel Islanders did not dream of sending early vegetables to Covent Garden Market. At that time there was no railway from St. Malo to Nantes and Bordeaux.

      ‘I think, my dear Jacket, we will breakfast on deck,’ said the elder lady. ‘It would upset me going down the ladder again. The insides do smell of paint—I mean the cabin.’ Then to the gentlemen, or rather, indiscriminately to one of them, ‘Can you tell me, sir, when we reach our destination?’

      ‘Ca dépend, madame,’ answered one, and added in English with a foreign accent, ‘If madame is going to Jersey—or to St. Malo?’

      ‘Oh, we’re for France, sir,’ explained the lady. ‘My poor Aunt Betsy has been taken bad there, and we’re sent for—that is, I am, as her nearest relative, and I’ve taken my daughter, Jacket, along with me. Bless my heart! I can’t speak a word of Parlez-vous, but Jacket has had the best advantages money could procure, and has been at a boarding-school, and can talk French like a fish.’

      ‘Mamma,’ said the young lady, with a smile, and the slightest deepening of colour in her cheek, ‘thinks because I have read Télémaque that I am fluent in French, but I have had no experience. We are going to St. Malo.’

      Then the gentlemen ordered breakfast on deck as well. The ice was broken, and the two little separate parties coalesced and became almost one for the rest of the voyage. Mrs. Fairbrother, the old lady, indeed, to use one of the gentlemen’s expressions, ran alongside of them and threw out grappling-irons. She had never been out of England before, she was profoundly ignorant of foreign ways, she was mightily afraid of imaginary dangers and difficulties; and she clung to these strangers as likely to assist her to surmount the first obstacles. Mrs. Fairbrother was a worthy woman, the wife of a large grocer who had made a considerable fortune by supplying H.M. vessels when put in commission. Her education was deficient, but she had the best and kindest heart in the world. Her thorough goodness did not allow those who knew her to admit that she was vulgar. The old lady had picked up what little she knew of history and geography from novels and plays, and her mind on such subjects was the veriest lumber-closet of disconnected facts and fictions. The only child, Jacquetta, had been well educated, and in manner and acquirements was far ahead of her mother. She was a true and good girl, and though the old lady’s blunders were ridiculous, and—before company—embarrassing, she never laughed at them, never attempted to correct them unless it were absolutely necessary to do so, lest she should seem to assume superiority over her mother, and hurt the feelings of the woman she loved best in the world.

      The gentlemen were the Baron de Montcontour, and an English friend, Mr. Asheton. M. de Montcontour had been a good deal in England, and spoke English fairly well. He was an easy-going, amiable man, without great energy of mind or body. The Montcontour estates were small. He had a château on the Loire above Nantes, where lived his mother and aunt; his father had saved nothing, the property barely allowed its proprietors to live on it. It was advisable, if not necessary, that the young baron should adopt a profession to supplement his small patrimony. Accordingly he had studied law, and had taken pains to familiarise himself with English, because he saw that it would help him at Nantes, where a good many English were settled, whither English vessels came, and where some commerce went on between the two