Mr. Pennhallow Goes on a Journey Mr. Pennhallow Goes on a JourneyAS has already been told, Mr. Pennhallow made pretty little pictures of landscapes and flowers. Lucan, who as a child had been taught to sketch, often wished that she could draw anything as neat and graceful. But he also, at times, when he was sunk in his own thoughts, let his pencil run over the paper, and produced strange pictures. Once or twice Lucan and Zosine had found such drawings on the school table. They had wondered, smiled a little, and at the same time felt a particular slight shudder at the sight of them. They might, they thought, have been drawn by a person in a dream or a nightmare. There were human figures in them, but they were supplied with new fantastic features and limbs unknown to the girls. Zosine once said that they were like some old, dark idols which the Negroes on Santo Domingo had carved in black wood, and which Olympia had brought with her.
One evening, the next after that on which he had been playing chess with Zosine, the old man amused himself in this way by making lines on a sheet of paper. From time to time he looked up casually at the one or the other of his pupils, so that Lucan, with a certain uneasiness of heart, imagined that he might be drawing a portrait of her. This evening Mr. Pennhallow and his wife were unusually pensive and absent-minded. He was a long time over his drawing. In the end he gazed at it and pushed it across the table to his wife. She gave it a glance, and then a longer glance, and was seized with a fit of chuckling so vehement that she had to hold her handkerchief to her mouth. The drawing remained lying on the table. Many times in the course of the evening the old woman fixed her eyes on it, and each time seemed more pleased with it. Her arms and legs moved jerkily, and once, when she had studied it for a long time, she rose and went out of the room.
Early the next morning the girls heard from their own room that their foster parents were up and busy in the dining-room, where they had sat last night. They pulled out drawers, turned over papers, and the while talked low and violently between them, and as Lucan and Zosine listened, they heard them poke up the charred wood in the fireplace. They also called Baptistine in, and seemed to ask of her a series of hasty questions. When the two girls came into the dining-room, they both noticed that the old people stared at them stiffly and piercingly. They understood that something, they did not know what, was occupying their minds.
In the course of the morning, Mr. Pennhallow and his wife went into their room and remained there for a long time. A little later, the old man wrote a letter, and sent Clon off with it, but called him back before he had gone out of the garden gate. About dusk he went out of the house himself, and was away for a long time. In his absence his wife was silent and restless. And in the evening, after their pupils had gone to bed, they stayed up late, moving and whispering in the dining-room.
About noon the following day, Mr. Pennhallow called in the girls and informed them that he and his wife would have to leave Sainte-Barbe for two or three days. They had received a sad message, which made it necessary for them to go to Marseilles at once. An old fellow-student of Mr. Pennhallow’s, who for many years had been a missionary in China, was on his way home to England in a state of mortal illness, and fervently wished to see his friends for a last time. They would leave Sainte-Barbe on the same evening, to take the late diligence at Lunel, and had ordered a peasant of the neighborhood to drive them to the town. Mrs. Pennhallow went to her room to pack their things. She was pale, and her hands trembled; the sorry news, Mr. Pennhallow said, had moved her deeply. He himself kept on sitting with the girls for a while, and talked to them, mildly dwelling on the idea of death, which will so often be near when you are least thinking of it.
Shortly after, the old woman returned to the dining-room, and gave her daughters new instructions. In her grief, she said, she had forgotten that she had today intended to walk out to a village named Vaour which lay about five miles from Sainte-Barbe in the opposite direction to Lunel. Here lived an old Englishwoman who had once been a governess at Joliet itself, and who was now ill. Mrs. Pennhallow had meant to bring her some good soup and a bottle of mixture. Now that she had been called away from Sainte-Barbe so unexpectedly, the girls would have to take over this duty. Baptistine would go with them to carry the basket, but they themselves would act as true Christians in visiting their sick countrywoman. The young girls had no idea of what their foster parents’ sudden journey meant; they had never heard of any English lady in Vaour, or seen Mrs. Pennhallow pay a visit of charity in the neighborhood. They were seized with surprise and alarm, but dared not look at each other. They would rather have been without Baptistine’s company, but Mrs. Pennhallow insisted that without her they would not be able to find the road to the village. They would have to start on their walk to Vaour at once.
As the girls would not be back at Sainte-Barbe before dark, and Mr. Pennhallow and his wife would by that time already have left the house in their peasant’s carriage on their way to Marseilles, the old and the young people must take leave now. The old couple were a remarkably long time saying good-bye, although they were to be away for a few days only. It was as if they took a quite particular pleasure in the parting scene. Mrs. Pennhallow sat down with folded hands, and listened with a singular expression of content or suspense, while her husband minutely instructed his pupils as to their behavior in his absence. Were they, the old man asked, afraid to be alone in the house? If so, of what were they afraid? Would they, he added with a smile, miss him and long for his return? He added a number of detailed directions, and seemed to hesitate to devise still more. He and Mrs. Pennhallow went to the gate to see their pupils off. When the two girls and Baptistine were already outside the wall, the old woman called Lucan back and gave her a long, deep and scru tinizing glance, the same glance which, in the morning mist outside the inn, she had once given the pretty girl. As the girls walked down the road, the two old people kept looking after them from the gate in the wall.
Out in the fields the air and the landscape itself were already marked by the coming autumn. The colors were faded, the road covered with dry leaves from the trees. It was cold, and the gray clouds seemed to hang low above the earth. The two girls walked on in silence, puzzled in their minds. They asked themselves if there was really a place named Vaour and an old sick English lady there. They wished that they could have talked together in English, but Baptistine walked beside them, so solid and watchful in her heavy shoes that they had not the spirit to do so. Little by little the road and the view took hold of their thoughts; they had never till now been so far out on this side of Sainte-Barbe.
Vaour, when at last they got there, turned out to be a small, gray village at the end of a road with stone walls on both sides. Here, in a small, neat room above a baker’s shop, they really found a very old English miss, like a relic of a distant, forgotten past.
Miss Pinkney was not ill, but dry and spare as a mummy, and in her second childhood. She did not recollect Mrs. Pennhallow’s name, but shook her head when it was repeated to her, and it was not possible for the girls to explain to her who they were themselves. Later on she called them by names which they did not know, and evidently took them for a couple of ancient pupils in England. She had a few English books in her room, between the flower pots and the bird cage, but she had almost forgotten to speak English; the words only slowly and brokenly came back to her. Lucan looked round in the small room, and reflected that she herself might some day come to sit in this same way, like a small bit of human wreckage, washed into a quiet corner of existence by many winds and currents, and forgotten there.
But as they named Joliet, a delicate blush mounted into the wrinkled cheeks, and Miss Pinkney began to talk with much life and for a long time. She obviously believed herself that she was recounting a great many things of interest about the castle and the family there, but only a small part of her long speech was intelligible to her audience. Very old events were taken out and held up, as from a drawer. The old governess was scandalized at the thought of General Buonaparte, who had had himself crowned as emperor, and was looking forward to the time when the legitimate Royal House of France should return, and once more set the country in order. She talked of Baron Thésée, so that Lucan threw a quick glance at Zosine. But they soon realized that it was the present lord’s grandfather, the old Baron who had been murdered, whom she saw before her. Of him she spoke with passionate affection, as of an infatuation of her youth. But when they named his wife, whom they themselves had seen at Peyriac, she became dumb.
In the course of the afternoon a strange little incident took place. Zosine mentioned her companion as Madame Labarre of Sainte-Barbe. At the sound of this name the old maid grew deadly pale, as if she was going to faint, and when she had come to, she endeavored to show Baptistine out of her room. Zosine, though, succeeded in turning her mind to pleasanter things. There stood a little old spinet by the window. Zosine asked Lucan to play to them. Lucan sat down by the spinet, and in her sweet, clear voice sang a couple of old English songs. Now Miss Pinkney forgot her anger and melted. In the end she herself, in an almost inaudible, but pure little voice, joined in the ballad of “Annie Laurie.”
When, on Baptistine’s request, the girls rose to say good-bye, the old miss stared at Zosine, and radiantly exclaimed, “Oh, Madame, is it really you! How happy I am to see you!” At last, she saw her young visitors down the stairs, and from the baker’s shop bought them a big cake to take home with them. Here once more she called them “Fanny” and “Elizabeth.”
It had begun to blow and rain, and the wind and the rain increased as the small party walked home. But it was such a long time since the girls had sung a song; it had stirred forgotten chords in their hearts, and for a time on the road they went on singing the songs of their home country. The while it occurred to Lucan how lonely and hard Baptistine’s position in the world must be, she tried to make her talk, and tell them of her youth. But Baptistine gave but short, sour answers. Her feet were sore from her long walk, and she was not in the mood to speak.
It was almost dark when they once more came within sight of Sainte-Barbe. Against the dark sky the old farmhouse drew its darker outlines. Lucan, who had once painted a small picture of the farm from this side, stood still for a moment, and exclaimed, “How different things do look in the evening, from what they do in the daytime! I should say that something was altered here. Yes, it really looks as if the stack of firewood by the gable is now in another place, and nearer to the house than it used to be!”
Here Baptistine hurried them on. She was content to be home again, and for the first time spoke of her own accord, although more to herself than to the girls. “Is there now. I ask you,” she grumbled, “any sense in making a fuss, and chasing people out in the rain, for the sake of a bit of paper? I may have burnt it or I may not have burnt it. Nobody would care to make a keepsake of any of those pictures.” The girls did not understand what she was talking about, and only later in the night recalled her words.