after listening for a while with assumed stoicism,
my outraged sense of justice at last and suddenly
caught fire. An explosion ensued: for I could
be passionate, too; especially with my present fair
but faulty associate, who never failed to stir the
worst dregs of me. It was well that the carriage-wheels
made a tremendous rattle over the flinty Choseville
pavement, for I can assure the reader there was neither
dead silence nor calm discussion within the vehicle.
Half in earnest, half in seeming, I made it my business
to storm down Ginevra. She had set out rampant
from the Rue Crecy; it was necessary to tame her before
we reached the Rue Fossette: to this end it was
indispensable to show up her sterling value and high
deserts; and this must be done in language of which
the fidelity and homeliness might challenge comparison
with the compliments of a John Knox to a Mary Stuart.
This was the right discipline for Ginevra; it suited
her. I am quite sure she went to bed that night
all the better and more settled in mind and mood, and
slept all the more sweetly for having undergone a
sound moral drubbing.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE WATCHGUARD.
M. Paul Emanuel owned an acute sensitiveness to the
annoyance of interruption, from whatsoever cause occurring,
during his lessons: to pass through the classe
under such circumstances was considered by the teachers
and pupils of the school, individually and collectively,
to be as much as a woman’s or girl’s life
was worth.
Madame Beck herself, if forced to the enterprise,
would “skurry” through, retrenching her
skirts, and carefully coasting the formidable estrade,
like a ship dreading breakers. As to Rosine, the
portress—on whom, every half-hour, devolved
the fearful duty of fetching pupils out of the very
heart of one or other of the divisions to take their
music-lessons in the oratory, the great or little saloon,
the salle-a-manger, or some other piano-station—she
would, upon her second or third attempt, frequently
become almost tongue-tied from excess of consternation—a
sentiment inspired by the unspeakable looks levelled
at her through a pair of dart-dealing spectacles.
One morning I was sitting in the carre, at work upon
a piece of embroidery which one of the pupils had
commenced but delayed to finish, and while my fingers
wrought at the frame, my ears regaled themselves with
listening to the crescendos and cadences of a voice
haranguing in the neighbouring classe, in tones that
waxed momentarily more unquiet, more ominously varied.
There was a good strong partition-wall between me
and the gathering storm, as well as a facile means
of flight through the glass-door to the court, in case
it swept this way; so I am afraid I derived more amusement
than alarm from these thickening symptoms. Poor
Rosine was not safe: four times that blessed
morning had she made the passage of peril; and now,
for the fifth time, it became her dangerous duty to
snatch, as it were, a brand from the burning—a
pupil from under M. Paul’s nose.
