Part 90

Then Paris had endless charms for us both, and we relieved ourselves at last of that long homesickness of years, and could almost believe we were boys again, as we dived into such old and well-remembered streets as yet remained.

There were still some slums we had loved; one or two of them exist even now. Only the other day I saw the Rue de Cléry, the Rue de la Lune, the Rue de la Montagne--all three on the south side of the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle: they are still terrible to look at from the genial Boulevard, even by broad daylight--the houses so tall, so irregular, the streets so narrow and winding and black. They seemed to us boys terrible, indeed, between eight and nine on a winter's evening, with just a lamp here and there to make their darkness visible. Whither they led I can't say; we never dared explore their obscure and mysterious recesses. They may have ended in the cour des miracles for all we knew--it was nearly fifty years ago--and they may be quite virtuous abodes of poverty to-day; but they seemed to us then strange, labyrinthine abysses of crime and secret dens of infamy, where dreadful deeds were done in the dead of long winter nights. Evidently, to us in those days, whoever should lose himself there would never see daylight again; so we loved to visit them after dark, with our hearts in our mouths, before going back to school.

We would sit on posts within call of the cheerful Boulevard, and watch mysterious women hurry up and down in the cold, out of darkness into light and back again, poor creatures--dingy moths, silent but ominous night-jars, forlorn women of the town--ill-favored and ill-dressed, some of them all but middle-aged, in common caps and aprons, with cotton umbrellas, like cooks looking for a situation.

They never spoke to us, and seemed to be often brutally repulsed by whatever men they did speak to--mostly men in blouses.

"Ô dis-donc, Hôrtense! qu'y faît froid! quand donc qu'y s'ra ônze heures, q'nous allions nous coûcher?"

So said one of them to another one cold, drizzly night, in a raucous voice, with low intonations of the gutter. The dimly felt horror and despair and pathos of it sent us away shivering to our Passy omnibus as fast as our legs could carry us.

That phrase has stuck in my memory ever since. Thank Heaven! the eleventh hour must have struck long ago, and Hortense and her friend must be fast asleep and well out of the cold by now--they need walk those evil streets no more....

When we had exhausted it all, and we felt homesick for England again, it was good to get back to Marsfield, high up over the Thames--so beautiful in its rich October colors which the river reflected--with its old trees that grew down to the water's edge, and brooded by the boat-house there in the mellow sunshine.

And then again when it became cold and dreary, at Christmas-time there was my big house at Lancaster Gate, where Josselins were fond of spending some of the winter months, and where I managed to find room for them all--with a little squeezing during the Christmas holidays when the boys came home from school. What good times they were!

* * * * *

"On May 24th, at Marsfield, Berks, the wife of Bartholomew Josselin, of a daughter"--or, as Leah put it in her diary, "our seventh daughter and ninth child--to be called Martia, or Marty for short."

It seems that Marty, prepared by her first ablution for this life, and as she lay being powdered on Mrs. Jones's motherly lap, was of a different type to her predecessors--much whiter, and lighter, and slighter; and she made no exhibition of that lusty lung-power which had so characterized the other little Barties on their introduction to this vale of tears.

Her face was more regularly formed and more highly finished, and in a few weeks grew of a beauty so solemn and pathetic that it would sometimes make Mrs. Jones, who had lost babies of her own, shed motherly tears merely to look at her.

Even I felt sentimental about the child; and as for Barty, he could talk of nothing else, and made those rough and hasty silver-point studies of her head and face--mere sketches--which, being full of obvious faults, became so quickly famous among æsthetic and exclusive people who had long given up Barty as a writer on account of his scandalous popularity.

Alas! even those silver-points have become popular now, and their photogravures are in the shop-windows of sea-side resorts and in the back parlors of the lower middle-class; so that the æsthetic exclusives who are up to date have had to give up Barty altogether. No one is sacred in those days--not even Shakespeare and Michael Angelo.

We shall be hearing Schumann and Wagner on the piano-organ, and "nous autres" of the cultured classes will have to fall back on Balfe and Byron and Landseer.

In a few months little Marty became famous for this extra beauty all over Henley and Maidenhead.

She soon grew to be the idol of her father's heart, and her mother's, and Ida's. But I really think that if there was one person who idolized her more than all the rest, it was I, Bob Maurice.

She was extremely delicate, and gave us much anxiety and many alarms, and Dr. Knight was a very constant visitor at Marsfield Lodge. It was fortunate, for her sake, that the Josselins had left Campden Hill and made their home in Marsfield.

Nine of these children--including one not yet born then--developed there into the finest and completest human beings, take them for all in all, that I have ever known; nine--a good number!

"Numero Deus impare gaudet."

Or, as poor Rapaud translated this (and was pinched black and blue by Père Brossard in consequence):

"Le numéro deux se réjouit d'être impair!" (Number two takes a pleasure in being odd!)

The three sons--one of them now in the army, as becomes a Rohan; and one a sailor, as becomes a Josselin; and one a famous actor, the true Josselin of all--are the very types of what I should like for the fathers of my grandchildren, if I had marriageable daughters of my own.

And as for Barty's daughters, they are all--but one--so well known in society and the world--so famous, I may say--that I need hardly mention them here; all but Marty, my sweet little "maid of Dove."

When Barty took Marsfield he and I had entered what I have ever since considered the happiest decade of a successful and healthy man's life--the forties.

"Wait till you get to forty year!"

So sang Thackeray, but with a very different experience to mine. He seemed to look upon the fifth decade as the grave of all tender illusions and emotions, and exult!