QUITE ALONE

BOOK THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.

CHAPTER XXIV. LILY IS LEFT ALONE IN A
STRANGE COUNTRY.

IN the court-yard of the post-office, not far
from the hotel, Lily was introduced to an
enormous machine—like a hackney-coach, an
omnibus, and a post-chaise, stuck together—painted
yellow, and surmounted in the front by a kind of
hackney-cab, and in the rear by a tremendous
pile of luggage covered with a tarpaulin. The
formidable edifice was mounted on very heavy
wheels, and to it were harnessed, by very ragged
looking ropes, six horses, three abreast, and as
ragged as the cords which confined them. This
was the Paris diligence belonging to the
Messageries Royales of Messrs. Lafitte, Caillard, and
Company, and such of my courteous readers who
may have attained middle-age, and went to school
in France, have probably journeyed by this same
lumbering, lagging, and comfortless conveyance.

The hackney-coach compartment, which held
six, was called the intérieur; the omnibus-
looking compartment, which afforded want of
accommodation for eight passengers, went by the name
of the rotonde; and that portion of the vehicle
which has been likened to a post-chaise, and in
which three persons could sit, sufficiently ill at
ease, was entitled the coupé. The lady had
retained the whole of this coupé: one place for
herself, another for Lily, and the third for her
temper; although it is questionable whether the
entire diligence would have been big enough
to hold that. After a time, an individual in a
semi-military uniform, with an embroidered badge
on his arm, and a laced cap and a peak to it, who
was the conducteur or guard of the machine,
came to the window and read off the passengers'
names from a way-bill; then a tall gendarme in
a cocked-hat and jack-boots, who had come, it is
to be presumed, to see Lily off, and to ascertain
by ocular inspection whether she was carrying
an infernal machine to Paris, to blow up the
Orleans dynasty withal, waved one of his
buck-skin gauntlets in token of dismissal; the
postilion, a frightful-looking creature, in monstrous
jack-boots, and with a quantity of parti-coloured
ribbons, all very dirty, streaming from his hat,
cracked his whip, and began to scream out some
abusive language to his horses, and the top-heavy
caravan jolted out of the post-office yard.

They were swaying and staggering over the
ill-paved streets of the town, when a carriage
which Lily had seen before, passed them at a
steadily rapid pace. It was the green berline
which had been lashed to the deck of the
Harlequin, and reclining in it was the invalid
gentleman with the yellow face. There was room
in the rumble for M. Franz Stimm, and there his
place properly was; but he was a confidential
courier, and, the carriage being broad, occupied
a place by his master's side.

"There is that little girl again," the sallow man
remarked, fretfully, as they passed the diligence.

"She is ver graziosa; I gif her some joggolate,
my lord generale," returned the courier.

"Don't my lord me, Stimm," peevishly exclaimed
the invalid; "nor general me either. I never was
the one, and I'm sick of having been
the other. I can't get that little girl's face out
of my head. It haunts me. Who can she be?"

"Bah! bas grand zhose," Monsieur Stimm
observed, in reply. "Za mere elle est oune
gatine; ouf! oune diablesse. I zink I zee her
somewhere in de zeatre, dancing on de cord or
jumping on de horse. Haoup-la!"

But the diligence was by this time many yards
behind, and the invalid, pettishly asking for
some orange-flower, and being, as usual,
persuaded to take what Monsieur Franz Stimm
termed "gognac," forgot, for the time, the bright
little face which, he said, had haunted him.

The occupants of the coupé travelled all that
day along dusty roads, for the most part
bordered with tall trees, like walking-sticks
surmounted by birch-brooms. The perspective
was not enchanting. The fields were of an ugly
ashen green, and divided by ditches, not hedges.
There were no pretty villages by the roadside;
what buildings there were, did not get beyond
tumbledown stone hovels, at the doors of which
toothless old women, with their heads bandaged
up, sat at spinning-wheels, or dirty children
sprawled. From time to time they met a man
walking, in a blouse and sabots, powdered with
dust from head to foot: a knapsack on his
back, and a quantity of ribbons streaming from
his hat. Sometimes he looked wobegone, and