’Maud!—­what pretty name!  Eh bien!  I am very sure my dear Maud she will be very good little girl—­is not so?—­and I am sure I shall love you vary moche.  And what ’av you been learning, Maud, my dear cheaile—­music, French, German, eh?’

’Yes, a little; and I had just begun the use of the globes when my governess went away.’

I nodded towards the globes, which stood near her, as I said this.

‘Oh! yes—­the globes;’ and she spun one of them with her great hand.  ’Je vous expliquerai tout cela a fond.’

Madame de la Rougierre, I found, was always quite ready to explain everything ‘a fond;’ but somehow her ‘explications,’ as she termed them, were not very intelligible, and when pressed her temper woke up; so that I preferred, after a while, accepting the expositions just as they came.

Madame was on an unusually large scale, a circumstance which made some of her traits more startling, and altogether rendered her, in her strange way, more awful in the eyes of a nervous child, I may say, such as I was.  She used to look at me for a long time sometimes, with the peculiar smile I have mentioned, and a great finger upon her lip, like the Eleusinian priestess on the vase.

She would sit, too, sometimes for an hour together, looking into the fire or out of the window, plainly seeing nothing, and with an odd, fixed look of something like triumph—­very nearly a smile—­on her cunning face.

She was by no means a pleasant gouvernante for a nervous girl of my years.  Sometimes she had accesses of a sort of hilarity which frightened me still more than her graver moods, and I will describe these by-and-by.

CHAPTER V

SIGHTS AND NOISES

There is not an old house in England of which the servants and young people who live in it do not cherish some traditions of the ghostly.  Knowl has its shadows, noises, and marvellous records.  Rachel Ruthyn, the beauty of Queen Anne’s time, who died of grief for the handsome Colonel Norbrooke, who was killed in the Low Countries, walks the house by night, in crisp and sounding silks.  She is not seen, only heard.  The tapping of her high-heeled shoes, the sweep and rustle of her brocades, her sighs as she pauses in the galleries, near the bed-room doors; and sometimes, on stormy nights, her sobs.

There is, beside, the ‘link-man’, a lank, dark-faced, black-haired man, in a sable suit, with a link or torch in his hand.  It usually only smoulders, with a deep red glow, as he visits his beat.  The library is one of the rooms he sees to.  Unlike ‘Lady Rachel,’ as the maids called her, he is seen only, never heard.  His steps fall noiseless as shadows on floor and carpet.  The lurid glow of his smouldering torch imperfectly lights his figure and face, and, except when much perturbed, his link never blazes.  On those occasions, however, as he goes his rounds, he ever and anon whirls it around his head, and it bursts into a dismal flame.  This is a fearful omen, and always portends some direful crisis or calamity.  It occurs, only once or twice in a century.