CHAPTER IV.

Madelon’s Promise.

A week later, and Madelon was again, as on the day of her father’s death, standing at a long open window, looking out on the fading glories of another evening sky.  But instead of the narrow Paris street, with its noisy rattle of vehicles, and high white houses limiting the view of earth and heaven, before her lay the small garden of a Liege hotel, and beyond, the steep slope of a hill, where, mingled with trees, roof rose above roof, to where two churches crowning the ridge, showed their grey masses outlined against the clear pale blue.

Madelon had left Paris with Horace Graham the day before, and they had arrived at Liege that afternoon.  The young doctor, bent on fulfilling the promise he had made to M. Linders, had altered all his plans, remaining in Paris till his little charge’s affairs were settled, and then bringing her to Liege, with the intention of leaving her in her aunt’s hands, and then proceeding to Switzerland for the accomplishment of as much of his proposed tour as should still be practicable.  He willingly forfeited these days out of his brief holiday, for he had come to regard the child so unexpectedly thrown upon his care, with a very sincere interest, an affection not unmixed with wonder.  Madelon was not at all like any other little girl he had ever had anything to do with, or rather—­for his experience on this point was limited—­unlike his preconceived notions of little girls in general.  We, who know what Madelon’s education had been, cannot feel surprised at her total ignorance of all sorts of elementary matters, her perfect unconsciousness of the most ordinary modes of thought current in the world, and of the most generally received standards of right and wrong, combined with a detailed experience in a variety of subjects with which children in general have no acquaintance.  But for Graham, there was much that could only be matter for conjecture, much that he could only learn from inference, and to him there was something at once strange and pitiable in the simplicity with which she talked to him of her past life, dwelling on little episodes that only served to exhibit more and more clearly the real character of M. Linders and his associates.  Not for the world would he have touched the child’s innocent faith, or revealed to our simple Madelon that her father was not the perfection she dreamed him; but he began to understand better the meaning of M. Linders’ last words in his letter to his sister, and they gained a pathetic significance and force as he learnt to appreciate the affection that had subsisted between the father and child, and foresaw too plainly that the time must come when some rude shock would shatter all Madelon’s early beliefs, and desecrate, as it were, her tenderest memories.  There was something so sad in this certain retribution that must fall upon her innocent head, as the child of such a father, something so touching in her anomalous position, left all friendless and lonely in the midst of such a hard, relentless world, that Horace felt all his tenderest feelings stirred with compassion, and he could have wished to have shielded her for ever from what, he could not but fear, too surely awaited her sooner or later.