Presently he passed a low shop with a divided door. The lower half was closed, the upper open, and the winter sun was shining full into the room, where a bright fire burned.
Charley looked up. Over the door was painted, in straggling letters: “Louis Trudel, Tailor.” He looked inside. There, on a low table, bent over his work, with a needle in his hand, sat Louis Trudel the tailor. Hearing footsteps, feeling a shadow, he looked up. Charley started at the look of the shrunken, yellow face; for if ever death had set his seal, it was on that haggard parchment. The tailor’s yellow eyes ran from Charley’s face to his clothes.
“I knew they’d fit,” he said, with a snarl. “Drove me hard, too!”
Charley had an inspiration. He opened the halfdoor, and entered.
“Do you want help?” he said, fixing his eyes on the tailor’s, steady and persistent.
“What’s the good of wanting--I can’t get it,” was the irritable reply, as he uncrossed his legs.
Charley took the iron out of his hand. “I’ll press, if you’ll show me how,” he said.
“I don’t want a fiddling ten-minutes’ help like that.”
“It isn’t fiddling. I’m going to stay, if you think I’ll do.”
“You are going to stop-every day?” The old man’s voice quavered a little.
“Precisely that.” Charley wetted a seam with water as he had often seen tailors do. He dropped the hot iron on the seam, and sniffed with satisfaction.
“A man who wants work. The Cure knows. It’s all right. Shall I stay?”
The tailor nodded, and sat down with a colour in his face.
CHAPTER XIV. ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED
From the moment there came to the post-office the letter addressed to “The Sick Man at the House of Jo Portugais at Vadrome Mountain,” Rosalie Evanturel dreamed dreams. Mystery, so fascinating a thing in all the experiences of life, took hold of her. The strange man in the lonely hut on the hill, the bandaged head, the keen, piercing blue eyes, the monocle, like a masked battery of the mind, levelled at her--all appealed to that life she lived apart from the people with whom she had daily commerce. Her world was a world of books and dreams, and simple, practical duties of life. Most books were romance to her, for most were of a life to which she had not been educated. Even one or two purely Protestant books of missionary enterprise, found in a box in her dead mother’s room, had had all the charms of poetry and adventure. It was all new, therefore all delightful, even when the Protestant sentiments shocked her as being not merely untrue, but hurting that aesthetic sense never remote from the mind of the devout Catholic.