PAGE 13
Miss Lucinda
by
“Mees Lucinda, you have been of the kindest to the poor alien. I have it in my mind to relieve you of this care very rapidly, but it is not in the Fates that I do. I have gone to my house of lodgings, and they cannot to give me a chamber as yet. I have fear that I must yet rely me on your goodness for some time more, if you can to entertain me so much more of time?”
“Why, I shall like to, sir,” replied the kindly, simple-hearted old maid.”I’m sure you are not a mite of trouble, and I never can forget what you did for my pig.”
A smile flitted across the Frenchman’s thin, dark face, and he watched her glittering needles a few minutes in silence before he spoke again.
“But I have other things to say of the most unpleasant to me, Mees Lucinda. I have a great debt for the goodness and care you to me have lavished. To the angels of the good God we must submit to be debtors, but there are also of mortal obligations. I have lodged in your mansion for more of ten weeks, and to you I pay yet no silver, but it is that I have it not at present. I must ask of your goodness to wait.”
The old maid’s shining black eyes grew soft as she looked at him.
“Why!” said she, “I don’t think you owe me much of anything, Mr. Leclerc. I never knew things last as they have since you came. I really think you brought a blessing. I wish you would please to think you don’t owe me anything.”
The Frenchman’s great brown eyes shone with suspicious dew.
“I cannot to forget that I owe to you far more than any silver of man repays; but I should not think to forget that I also owe to you silver, or I should not be worthy of a man’s name. No, Mees! I have two hands and legs. I will not let a woman most solitary spend for me her good self.”
“Well,” said Miss Lucinda, “if you will be uneasy till you pay me, I would rather have another kind of pay than money. I should like to know how to dance. I never did learn, when I was a girl, and I think it would be good exercise.”
Miss Lucinda supported this pious fiction through with a simplicity that quite deceived the Frenchman. He did not think it so incongruous as it was. He had seen women of sixty, rouged, and jewelled, and furbelowed, foot it deftly in the halls of the Faubourg St. Germain in his earliest youth; and this cheery, healthy woman, with lingering blooms on either cheek, and uncapped head of curly black hair but slightly strewn with silver, seemed quite as fit a subject for the accomplishment. Besides, he was poor,—and this offered so easy a way of paying the debt he had so dreaded! Well said Solomon,—”The destruction of the poor is their poverty!” For whose moral sense, delicate sensitiveness, generous longings, will not sometimes give way to the stringent need of food and clothing, the gall of indebtedness, and the sinking consciousness of an empty purse and threatening possibilities?
Monsieur Leclerc’s face brightened.
“Ah! with what grand pleasure shall I teach you the dance!”
But it fell dark again as he proceeded,—
“Though not one, nor two, nor three, nor four quarters shall be of value sufficient to achieve my payment.”
“Then, if that troubles you, why, I should like to take some French lessons in the evening, when you don’t have classes. I learned French when I was quite a girl, but not to speak it very easily; and if I could get some practice and the right way to speak, I should be glad.”