In and out of Three Normandy Inns Part 13

"Jean will repent it; he'll lose worse things than a b.u.t.ton, with Lizette. A woman who laughs like that on the threshold of marriage will cry before the cradle is rocked, and will make others weep. However, Jean won't be thinking of that--to-night."

"Where are they going--along the highroad?"

"Only a short distance. They turn in there," and he pointed with his whip to a near lane; "they go to the farm-house now--for the wedding dinner. Ah! there'll be some heavy heads to-morrow. For you know, a Norman peasant only really eats and drinks well twice in his life--when he marries himself and when his daughter marries. Lizette's father is rich--the meat and the wines will be good to-night."

Our coachman sighed, as if the thought of the excellence of the coming banquet had disturbed his own digestion.

CHAPTER XV.

GUILLAUME-LE-CONQUERANT.

The wedding party was lost in a thicket. Pierre gave his whip so resounding a snap, it was no surprise to find ourselves rolling over the cobbles of a village street.

"This is Dives, mesdames, this is the inn!"

Pierre drew up, as he spoke, before a long, low facade.

Now, no one, I take it, in this world enjoys being duped. Surely disappointment is only a civil term for the varying degrees of fraud practised on the imagination. This inn, apparently, was to be cla.s.sed among such frauds. It did not in the least, externally at least, fulfil Renard's promises. He had told us to expect the marvellous and the mediaeval in their most approved period. Yet here we were, facing a featureless exterior! The facade was built yesterday--that was writ large, all over the low, rambling structure. One end, it is true, had a gabled end; there was also an old shrine niched in gla.s.s beneath the gable, and a low Norman gateway with rude letters carved over the arch.

June was in its glory, and the barrenness of the commonplace structure was mercifully hidden by a wreath of pink and amber roses. But one scarcely drives twenty miles in the sun to look upon a facade of roses!

Chat noir, meanwhile, was becoming restless. Pierre had managed to keep his own patience well in hand. Now, however, he broke forth:

"Shall we enter, my ladies?"

Pierre drove us straight into paradise; for here, at last, within the courtyard, was the inn we had come to seek.

A group of low-gabled buildings surrounded an open court. All of the buildings were timbered, the diagonal beams of oak so old they were black in the sun, and the snowy whiteness of fresh plaster made them seem blacker still. The gabled roofs were of varying tones and tints; some were red, some mossy green, some as gray as the skin of a mouse; all were deeply, plentifully furrowed with the washings of countless rains, and they were bearded with moss. There were outside galleries, beginning somewhere and ending anywhere. There were open and covered outer stairways so laden with vines they could scarce totter to the low heights of the chamber doors on which they opened; and there were open sheds where huge farm-wagons were rolled close to the most modern of Parisian dog-carts. That not a note of contrast might be lacking, across the courtyard, in one of the windows beneath a stairway, there flashed the gleam of some rich stained gla.s.s, spots of color that were repeated, with quite a different l.u.s.tre, in the dappled haunches of rows of st.u.r.dy Percherons munching their meal in the adjacent stalls.

Add to such an ensemble a vagrant mult.i.tude of rose, honeysuckle, clematis, and wistaria vines, all blooming in full rivalry of perfume and color; insert in some of the corners and beneath some of the older cas.e.m.e.nts archaic bits of sculpture--strange barbaric features with beards of a.s.syrian correctness and forms clad in the rigid draperies of the early Jumieges period of the sculptor's art; lance above the roof ridges the quaint polychrome finials of the earlier Palissy models; and crowd the rough cobble-paved courtyard with a rare and distinguished a.s.semblage of flamingoes, peac.o.c.ks, herons, c.o.c.katoos swinging from gabled windows, and game-c.o.c.ks that strut about in company with pink doves--and you have the famous inn of Guillaume le Conquerant!

Meanwhile an individual, with fine deep-gray eyes, and a face grave, yet kindly, over which a smile was humorously breaking, was patiently waiting at our carriage door. He could be no other than Monsieur Paul, owner and inn-keeper, also artist, sculptor, carver, restorer, to whom, in truth, this miracle of an inn owed its present perfection and picturesqueness.

"We have been long expecting you, mesdames," Monsieur Paul's grave voice was saying. "Monsieur Renard had written to announce your coming.

You took the trouble to drive along the coast this fine day? It is idyllically lovely, is it not--under such a sun?"

Evidently the moment of enchantment was not to be broken by the worker of the spell. Monsieur Paul and his inn were one; if one was a poem the other was a poet. The poet was also lined with the man of the practical moment. He had quickly summoned a host of serving-people to take charge of us and our luggage.

"Lizette, show these ladies to the room of Madame de Sevigne. If they desire a sitting-room--to the Marmousets."

The inn-keeper gave his commands in the quiet, well-bred tone of a man of the world, to a woman in peasant's dress. She led us past the open court to an inner one, where we were confronted with a building still older, apparently, than those grouped about the outer quadrangle. The peasant pa.s.sed quickly beneath an overhanging gallery, draped in vines.

She was next preceding us up a spiral turret stairway; the adjacent walls were hung here and there with faded bits of tapestry. Once more she turned to lead us along an open gallery; on this several rooms appeared to open. On each door a different sign was painted in rude Gothic letters. The first was "Chambre de l'Officier;" the second, "Chambre du Cure," and the next was flung widely open. It was the room of the famous lady of the incomparable Letters. The room might have been left--in the yesterday of two centuries--by the lady whose name it bore. There was a beautiful Seventeenth century bedstead, a couple of wide arm-chairs, with down pillows for seats, and a clothes press with the carvings and bra.s.s work peculiar to the epoch of Louis XIV. The chintz hangings and draperies were in keeping, being copies of the brocades of that day. There were portraits in miniature of the courtiers and the ladies of the Great Reign on the very ewers and basins. On the flounced dressing-table, with its antique gla.s.s and a diminutive patch-box, now the receptacle of Lubin's powder, a sprig of the lovely Rose The was exhaling a faint, far-away century perfume. It was surely a stage set for a real comedy; some of these high-coiffed ladies, who knows? perhaps Madame de Sevigne herself would come to life, and give to the room the only thing it lacked--the living presence of that old world grace and speech.

Presently, we sallied forth on a further voyage of discovery. We had reached the courtyard when Monsieur Paul crossed it; it was to ask if, while waiting for the noon breakfast, we would care to see the kitchen; it was, perhaps, different to those now commonly seen in modern taverns.

The kitchen which was thus modestly described as unlike those of our own century might easily, except for the appetizing smell of the cooking fowls and the meats, have been put under lock and key and turned over to a care-taker as a full-fledged culinary museum of antiquities. One entire side of the crowded but orderly little room was taken up by a huge open fireplace. The logs resting on the great andirons were the trunks of full-grown trees. On two of the spits were long rows of fowl and legs of mutton roasting; the great chains were being slowly turned by a _chef_ in the paper cap of his profession. In deep burnished bra.s.s bowls lay water-cresses; in Caen dishes of an age to make a bric-a-brac collector turn green with envy, a _Bearnaise_ sauce was being beaten by another gallic master-hand. Along the beams hung old Rouen plates and platters; in the numberless carved Normandy cupboards gleamed rare bits of Delft and Limoges; the walls may be said to have been hung with Normandy bra.s.ses, each as burnished as a jewel.

The floor was sanded and the tables had attained that satiny finish which comes only with long usage and tireless use of the brush. There was also a shrine and a clock, the latter of antique Norman make and design.

The smell of the roasting fowls and the herbs used by the maker of the sauces, a hungry palate found even more exciting than this most original of kitchens. There was a wine that went with the sauce; this fact Monsieur Paul explained, on our sitting down to the noonday meal; one which, in remembrance of Monsieur Renard's injunctions, he would suggest our trying. He crossed the courtyard and disappeared into the bowels of the earth, beneath one of the inn buildings, to bring forth a bottle incrusted with layers of moist dirt. This Sauterne was by some, Monsieur Paul smilingly explained, considered as among the real treasures of the inn. Both it and the sauce, we were enabled to a.s.sure him a moment later, had that golden softness which make French wines and French sauces at their best the rapture of the palate.

In the courtyard, as our breakfast proceeded, a variety of incidents was happening. We were facing the open archway; through it one looked out upon the high-road. A wheelbarrow pa.s.sed, trundled by a peasant-girl; the barrow stopped, the girl leaving it for an instant to cross the court.

"_Bonjour, mere--_"

"_Bonjour, ma fille_--it goes well?" a deep guttural voice responded, just outside of the window.

"_Justement_--I came to tell you the mare has foaled and Jean will be late to-night."

"_Bien._"

"And Barbarine is still angry--"

"Make up with her, my child--anger is an evil bird to take to one's heart," the deep voice went on.

"It is my mother," explained Monsieur Paul. "It is her favorite seat, out yonder, on the green bench in the courtyard. I call it her judge's bench," he smiled, indulgently, as he went on. "She dispenses justice with more authority than any other magistrate in town. I am Mayor, as it happens, just now; but madame my mother is far above me, in real power. She rules the town and the country about, for miles. Everyone comes to her sooner or later for counsel and command. You will soon see for yourselves."

A murmur of a.s.sent from all the table accompanied Monsieur Paul's prophecy.

"_Femme vraiment remarquable_," hoa.r.s.ely whispered a stout breakfaster, behind his napkin, between two spoonsful of his soup.

"Not two in a century like her," said my neighbor.

"No--nor two in all France--_non plus_," retorted the stout man.

"She could rule a kingdom--hey, Paul?"

"She rules me--as you see--and a man is harder to govern than a province, they say," smiled Monsieur Paul with a humorous relish, obviously the offspring of experience. "In France, mesdames," he added, a sweeter look of feeling coming into the deep eyes, "you see we are always children--_toujours enfants_--as long as the mother lives. We are never really old till she dies. May the good G.o.d preserve her!" and he lifted his gla.s.s toward the green bench. The table drank the toast, in silence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHAMBRE DE LA PUCELLES--DIVES]

CHAPTER XVI.

THE GREEN BENCH.

In the course of the first few days we learned what all Dives had known for the past fifty years or so--that the focal point of interest in the inn was centred in Madame Le Mois. She drew us, as she had the country around for miles, to circle close about her green bench.

The bench was placed at the best possible point for one who, between dawn and darkness, made it the business of her life to keep her eye on her world. Not the tiniest mouse nor the most spectral shade could enter or slip away beneath the open archway without undergoing inspection from that omniscient eye, that seemed never to blink nor to grow weary. This same eye could keep its watch, also, over the entire establishment, with no need of the huge body to which it was attached moving a hair's-breadth. Was it Nitouche, the head-cook, who was grumbling because the kitchen-wench had not scoured the bra.s.s saucepans to the last point of mirrory brightness? Behold both Nitouche and the trembling peasant-girl, together with the bra.s.ses as evidence, all could be brought at an instant's call, into the open court. Were the maids--were Marianne or Lizette neglecting their work to flirt with the coachmen in the sheds yonder?

"_Allons, mes filles--doucement, la-bas--et vos lits? qui les fait--les bons saints du paradis, peut-etre?_" And Marianne and Lizette would slink away to the waiting beds. Nothing escaped this eye. If the _poule sultane_ was gone lame, limping in the inner quadrangle, madame's eye saw the trouble--a thorn in the left claw, before the feathered cripple had had time to reach her objective point, her mistress's capacious lap, and the healing touch of her skilful surgeon's fingers. Neither were the c.o.c.katoes nor the white parrots given license to make all the noise in the court-yard. When madame had an unusually loquacious moment, these more strictly professional conversationists were taught their place.

"_E'ben, toi_--and thou wishest to proclaim to the world what a gymnast thou art--swinging on thy perch? Quietly, quietly, there are also others who wish to praise themselves! And now, my child, you were telling me how good you had been to your old grandmother, and how she scolded you. Well, and how about obedience to our parents, _hein_--how about that?" This, as the old face bent to the maiden beside her.