A Dozen Ways Of Love Part 13

'Is it that mademoiselle desires the ends cut?' asked the hairdresser, resuming his professional manner.

'Which ends?'

'Which ends?' he exclaimed, baffled. 'Mon Dieu! these ends,' and he lifted a handful of the hair on the floor and held it before the eyes of the girl.

'Good Heavens, no! Do you think I am going to pay you for cutting those ends? It's the ends at the top I want cut. Lighten it; that's what I want. Do you think I am a woman in a hairdresser's advertis.e.m.e.nt to sit all day looking at my hair? I have to get my father's dinner. Lighten it, Mr. Saintou; cut it off; that's what I want.'

'Mon Dieu, no!' Saintou again relapsed from the hairdresser into the man. He too could have decision. He leant against the next chair and set his lips very firmly together. 'By all that is holy, no,' he said; 'you may get some villain Englishman to cut that hair, but me, never.'

'You speak English very well, Mr. Saintou. Have you been long in the country? Well, wash the hair then, and be done. Don't put the soap in my eyes.'

Saintou was in ecstasies. He touched the hair reverently as one would touch the garments of a saint. He laid aside his ordinary brushes and sponges, and going into the shop he brought thence what was best and newest. Do not laugh at him. Have we not all at some time in our lives met with what seemed the embodiment of our ideal; have we not set aside for the time our petty economies and reserves, and brought forth whatever we had that was best, of thought, or smiles, or vesture?

'Ah, mademoiselle,' he said, 'to take care of such hair for ever--that would be heaven. I am a Frenchman; I have a soul; I can feel.'

'Should you be afraid to die a sudden death, Mr. Saintou?' said the quick voice from the depths of a shower of water.

'Ciel! We do not speak of such things, mademoiselle. There will come a time, I know, when my hair will turn grey; then for the sake of my profession I shall be obliged to dye it. There will come a time after that when I shall die; but we do not even think of these things, it is better not.'

'But should you be afraid to die now?' persisted the girl.

'Very much afraid,' said the hairdresser candidly.

'Then don't feel, Mr. Saintou. I never feel. I make it the business of my life not to feel. They tell me there is something wrong at my heart, and that if I ever feel either glad or sorry I shall go off, pop, like a crow from a tree when it is shot, like a spark that falls into water.'

The hairdresser meditated upon this for some time. He did not believe her. He had drawn the bright hair back now from the water, and was fondling it with his whitest and softest towels.

'Who was it that said to mademoiselle that her heart was bad?'

'Good gracious, Mr. Saintou, my heart is not bad. I know my catechism and go to church, and cook my father's dinner every day, and a very good dinner it is too. What put it into your head that I had a bad heart?'

'Pardon! mademoiselle; I mistake. Who told mademoiselle that she was sick at heart?'

'Good gracious heavens! I am not sick at heart. To be sure my mother is dead, and my sister is ill, and my father is as cross as two sticks, but for all that I am not heart-sick. I like this world very well, and when I feel sad I put more onions into the soup.'

Saintou went on with his work for some time in silence, then he tried again. 'You say I speak good English, and I flatter myself I have the accent very well, but what avails if I cannot make you understand? Was it a good doctor who said mademoiselle's heart was affected; touched, I might say?'

There was a shout of laughter from under the shower of gold.

'My heart touched! One would think I was in love. No, my heart is not touched yet; least of all by you, Mr. Saintou.

'Least of all by you, Mr. Saintou.'

She repeated this last rhyming couplet with a quaint musical intonation, as though it was the refrain of a song, and after her voice and laughter had died away she went on nodding her head in time to the brushing as if she were singing it over softly to herself. This distressed the hairdresser not a little, and he remained silent.

'What shall I pay you, Mr. Saintou?' said the little lady, when the large hat was once more on the head.

'If mademoiselle would but come again,' said the hairdresser, putting both hands resolutely behind his back.

'When I come again I shall pay you both for that time and this,' she said, with perhaps more tact than could have been expected of her. 'And if you want to live long, Mr. Saintou, don't feel. If I should feel I should die off, quick, sharp, like a moth that flies into the candle.'

She made a little gesture with her hand, as if to indicate the ease and suddenness with which the supposed catastrophe was to take place, and hobbled down the street. Saintou stood in the doorway looking after her, and his heart went from him.

He sent her flowers--flowers that a d.u.c.h.ess might have been proud to receive. He sent them more than once, and they were accepted; he argued much from that. He made friends with the baker in order that he might bow to him morning and evening. Then he waited. He said to himself, 'She is English. If I go to see her, if I put my hand on my heart and weep, she will jeer at me; but if I wait and work for her in silence, then she will believe.' He made a parlour for her in the room above his shop; and every week, as he had time and money, he went out to choose some ornament for it. His maiden sister watched these actions with suspicion, threw scornful looks at when he observed her watchfulness, and lent a kindly helping hand when he was out of sight. The parlour grew into a shrine ready for its divinity, and the hairdresser worked and waited in silence. In this he made a mistake, but he feared her laughter.

Meanwhile the girl also waited. She could not go back to the hairdresser's shop lest she should seem to invite a renewal of those attentions which had given her the sweet surprise of love. The law of her woman's nature stood like a lion in the path. She waited through the months of the dreary winter till the one gleam of sunshine which had come into her hard young life had faded, till the warmth it had kindled in her heart died--as a lamp's flame dies for lack of oil; died--as a flower dies in the drought; died into anger for the man who had disturbed her peace, and when she thought she cared for him no more she went again to get her hair cut.

'You have come,' said Saintou; but the very strength of his feeling made him grave.

'Good gracious, yes, I have come to have my hair cut. You would not cut it when I was here, and I have been very poorly these three months. I could not come out, so the other day I had my sister cut it off. My father wanted to send for you, but I said "no," and, oh, my! it looks just as if a donkey had come behind and mistaken it for hay.'

How quickly a train of thought can flash through the brain! Saintou asked himself if he loved the girl or the hair, and his heart answered very sincerely that the hair, divine as it was, had been but the outward sign which led him to love the inward grace of the girl.

'Mademoiselle ought not to have said "no"; I should have come very willingly and would have cut her hair, if I had known it must be so.'

'I made my sister cut it, but it's frightful. It looks as if one had tried to mow a lawn with a pair of scissors, or shear a sheep with a penknife.'

'I will make all that right,' said Saintou soothingly; 'I will make it all right. Just in a moment I will make it very nice.'

Yes, it was too true, the hair was gone; and very barbarously it had been handled. 'I shall make it all right,' he said cheerfully; 'I shall trim it beautifully for mademoiselle. Ah, the beautiful colour is there all the same.'

'As red as a sunset or a geranium,' she said.

'You do not believe that,' sighed Saintou. He trimmed the hair very tenderly, and curled it softly round the white face, till it looked like a great fair marigold just beginning to curl in its petals for the night. He worked slowly, for he had something he wanted to say, and when his work was done he summoned up courage and said it. He told her his hopes and fears. He told her the story blunderingly enough, but it had its effect.

'Mon Dieu!' said Saintou, but he said it in a tone that made his sister, who was listening to every word through the door, leave that occupation and dart in to his a.s.sistance.

'Qu'elle est morte,' was her brief stern comment. And so it was. The baker's daughter had felt, and she had died.

'This is not wholly unexpected,' said the baker sadly, when he came to carry away the corpse of his daughter. 'We all expected it,' said the neighbours; 'she had heart disease.' And they talked their fill, and never discovered the truth it would have pleased them best to talk about.

The short hair curled softly about the face of the dead girl as she lay in her coffin, and Saintou paid heavily for ma.s.ses for her sweet soul.

When they had laid her in the churchyard he came home, and took the key, and went into the little parlour all alone. She had never seen it. She had never even heard of it. It is sad to bury a baby that is dead; it is sadder, if we but knew it, to bury in darkness and silence a child that has never lived. A joy that has gone from us for ever is a jewel that trembles like a tear on Sorrow's breast, but the brightest stars in her diadem are the memories of hopes that have pa.s.sed away unrealised and untold. Ah well, perhaps the gay trappings of the little room, by their daily influence on his life, drew him nearer to heaven. He gave the key to his sister afterwards, and they used the room as their own; but that day he locked himself in alone, and, hiding his face in the cushions of her chair, he wept as only a strong man can weep.

VI

A COMMERCIAL TRAVELLER

Mam'selle Zilda Chaplot keeps the station hotel at St. Armand, in the French country.

The hotel is like a wooden barn with doors and windows, not a very large barn either. The station is merely a platform of planks between the hotel and the rails. The railroad is roughly made; it lies long and straight in a flat land, snow-clad in winter, very dusty in the summer sun, and its line is only softened by a long row of telegraph poles, which seem to waver and tremble as the eye follows their endless repet.i.tion into the distance. In some curious way their repet.i.tion lends to the stark road a certain grace.

When Zilda Chaplot was young there were fewer wires on these telegraph poles, fewer railway-lines opposite the station, fewer houses in St.