Of all that _bande joyeuse_--old and young and middle-aged, from M. le
Major to Mimsey Seraskier--all are now dead but me--all except dear
Madge, who was so pretty and light-hearted; and I have never seen
her since.
* * * * *
Thus have I tried, with as much haste as I could command (being one of
the plodding sort) to sketch that happy time, which came to an end
suddenly and most tragically when I was twelve years old.
My dear and jovial happy-go-lucky father was killed in a minute by the
explosion of a safety lamp of his own invention, which was to have
superseded Sir Humphry Davy's, and made our fortune! What a brutal
irony of fate.
So sanguine was he of success, so confident that his ship had come home
at last, that he had been in treaty for a nice little old manor in Anjou
(with a nice little old castle to match), called la Mariere, which had
belonged to his ancestors, and from which we took our name (for we were
Pasquier de la Mariere, of quite a good old family); and there we were
to live on our own land, as _gentilshommes campagnards_, and be French
for evermore, under a paternal, pear-faced bourgeois king as a temporary
_pis-aller_ until Henri Cinq, Comte de Chambord, should come to his own
again, and make us counts and barons and peers of France--Heaven
knows what for!
My mother, who was beside herself with grief, went over to London, where
this miserable accident had occurred, and had barely arrived there when
she was delivered of a still-born child, and died almost immediately;
and I became an orphan in less than a week, and a penniless one.
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