That night Master Sheffield’s guests, although they were many and of high importance, had to wait in the long drawing-room, while their host, yonder across the misty field, sat on the bench before the shoemaker’s cottage and talked in French to Mother Jeanne Lamotte. She, poor soul, had learned but little English and found black Jason’s few halting words of French, very small comfort indeed. Now that she could pour her heart out to one who could understand her native speech, it seemed as though she would never have done. Stephen duly admired the neatness and strict order of her little dwelling but finally declared that it had grown too old and tumble-down for comfort and that she and Clotilde must come to abide in the great house, where, since his sisters’ marriages and the death of his parents he lived alone save for the black servants.
“There is room in abundance,” he said, “and the little maid will help to brighten a place where all of us, master and men, are growing dreary and old together. Would you like to dwell there, Mademoiselle Clotilde?”
“Indeed I would,” she cried with joy, “for there are great wide rooms to play in and here are only four walls and a smoky chimney.”
Mother Jeanne reproached her severely for this criticism of their dwelling but Stephen, laughing, insisted that she was right and that the change must be made at once. But when next day Mother Jeanne and Clotilde gathered up their few possessions and carried them to the big house, they found the master gone again and for several months they saw his face no more.
He went and came much in the years that followed so that he and Clotilde caught only fleeting glimpses of each other, yet learned, for all that, to be close friends. Sometimes he found her racing about the garden walks with her boon companion, Miles Atherton, a sturdy, slow-spoken lad of Hopewell, sometimes he found her going about her work in the big house, for she was nimble-fingered and industrious and began early to be a great help to her dear Mère Jeanne. There was one cosy winter evening when she sat on his knee before the blazing fire and heard the tale of King James’ Tree and of Sergeant Branderby and learned how his two great pistols came to hang above the chimney-piece. Upon another occasion, a warm summer morning when the linden tree was in bloom, he and she and Miles Atherton sat upon the bench in the Queen’s Garden while Stephen told the two eager children the story of Master Simon and Queen Elizabeth, and of how Margeret Radpath and Roger Bardwell had, on that very spot, witnessed the French priest’s forbidden mass.