In and out of Three Normandy Inns Part 8

This tottering structure had become one of our favorite retreats; in the poetic _mise-en-scene_ of the garden it played the part of Ruin. It was absurdly, ridiculously out of repair; its gaping beams and the sunken, dejected floor could only be due to intentional neglect.

Fouchet evidently had grasped the secrets of the laws of contrast; the deflected angle of the tumbling roof made the clean-cut garden beds doubly true. Nature had had compa.s.sion on the aged little building, however; the cl.u.s.tering, fragrant vines, in their hatred of nudity, had invested the prose of a wreck with the poetry of drapery. The tip-tilted settee beneath the odorous roof became, in time, our chosen seat; from that perch we could overlook the garden-walls, the beach, the curve of the sh.o.r.e, the gra.s.ses and hollyhocks in our neighbor's garden, the latter startlingly distinct against the great arch of the sky.

It was here Renard found us an hour later. To him, likewise, did Charm narrate our extraordinary experience of yesterday, with much adjunct of fiery comment, embellishment of gesture, and imitative pose.

"Ye G.o.ds, what a scene to paint! You were in luck--in luck; why wasn't I there?" was Renard's tribute to human pity.

"Oh, you are all alike, all--nothing moves you--you haven't common human sympathies--you haven't the rudiments of a heart! You are terrible--all of you--terrible!" A moment after she had left us, as if the narrowness of the little house stifled her. With long, swinging steps she pa.s.sed out, to air her indignation, apparently, beneath the wall of the espaliers.

"Splendid creature, isn't she?" commented Renard, following the long lines of the girl's fluttering muslin gown, as he plucked at his mustache. "She should always wear white and gold--what is that stuff?--and be lit up like that with a kind of G.o.ddess-like anger. She is wrong, however," he went on, a moment later; "those of us who live here aren't really barbarians, only we get used to things. It's the peasants themselves that force us; they wouldn't stand interference. A peasant is a kind of king on his own domain; he does anything he likes, short of murder, and he doesn't always stop at that."

"But surely the Government--at least their Church, ought to teach them--"

"Oh, their Church! they laugh at their cures--till they come to die.

He's a heathen, that's what the French peasant is--there's lots of the middle ages abroad up there in the country. Along here, in the coast villages, the nineteenth century has crept in a bit, humanizing them, but the _fonds_ is always the same; they're by nature avaricious, sordid, cruel; they'll do anything for money; there isn't anything sacred for them except their pocket."

A few days later, in our friend the cobbler we found a more sympathetic listener. "Dame! I also used to beat my wife," he said, contemplatively, as he scratched his herculean head, "but that was when I was a Christian, when I went to confession; for the confessional was made for that, _c'est pour laver le linge sale des consciences, ca_"

(interjecting his epigram). "But now--now that I am a free-thinker, I have ceased all that; I don't beat her," pointing to his old wife, "and neither do I drink or swear."

"It's true, he's good--he is, now," the old wife nodded, with her slit of a smile; "but," she added, quickly, as if even in her husband's religious past there had been some days of glory, "he was always just--even then--when he beat me."

"_C'est tres femme, ca--hein, mademoiselle?_" And the cobbler c.o.c.ked his head in critical pose, with a philosopher's smile.

The result of the interview, however, although not entirely satisfactory, was illuminating, besides this light which had been thrown on the cobbler's reformation. For the cobbler was a cousin, distant in point of kinship, but still a cousin, of the brutal farmer and father. He knew all the points of the situation, the chief of which was, as Fouchet had hinted, that the girl had refused to wed the _bon parti_, who was a connection of the step-mother. As for the step-mother's murderous outcry, "Kill her! kill her!" the cobbler refused to take a dramatic view of this outburst.

"In such moments, you understand, one loses one's head; brutality always intoxicates; she was a little drunk, you see."

When we proposed our modest little scheme, that of sending for the girl and taking her, for a time at least, into our service, merely as a change of scene, the cobbler had found nothing but admiration for the project. "It will be perfect, mesdames. They, the parents, will ask nothing better. To have the girl out at service, away, and yet not disgracing them by taking a place with any other farmer; yes, they will like that, for they are rich, you see, and wealth always respects itself. Ah, yes, it's perfect; I'll arrange all that--all the details."

Two days later the result of the arrangement stood before us. She was standing with her arms crossed, her fingers clasping her elbows--with her very best peasant manner. She was neatly, and, for a peasant, almost fashionably attired in her holiday dress--a short, black skirt, white stockings, a flowery kerchief crossed over her broad bosom, and on her pretty hair a richly tinted blue _foulard_. She was very well dressed for a peasant, and, from the point of view of two travellers, of about as much use as a plough.

"It's a beautiful scheme, and it's as dramatic as the fifth act of a play; but what shall we do with her?"

"Oh." replied Charm, carelessly, "there isn't anything in particular for her to do. I mean to buy her a lot of clothes, like those she has on, and she can walk about in the garden or in the fields."

"Ah, I see; she's to be a kind of a perambulating figure-piece."

"Yes, that's about it. I dare say she will be very useful at sunset, in a dim street; so few peasants wear anything approaching to costume nowadays."

Ernestine herself, however, as we soon discovered, had an entirely different conception of her vocation. She was a vigorous, active young woman, with the sap of twenty summers in her l.u.s.ty young veins. Her energies soon found vent in a continuous round of domestic excitements.

There were windows and floors that cried aloud to Heaven to be scrubbed; there were holes in the sheets to make mam'zelle's lying between them _une honte, une vraie honte_. As for Madame Fouchet's little weekly bill, _Dieu de Dieu_, it was filled with such extortions as to make the very angels weep. Madame and Ernestine did valiant battle over those bills thereafter. Ernestine was possessed of the courage of a true martyr; she could suffer and submit to the scourge, in the matter of personal persecution, for the religion of her own convictions; but in the service of her rescuer, she could fight with the fierceness of a common soldier.

"When Norman meets Norman--" Charm began one day, the sound of voices, in a high treble of anger, coming in to us through the windows.

But Ernestine was knocking at the door, with a note in her hand.

"An answer is asked, mesdames," she said, in a voice of honey, as she dropped her low courtesy.

This was the missive:

ALONG AN OLD POST-ROAD.

TO HONFLEUR AND TROUVILLE.

CHAPTER XI.

TO AN OLD MANOR.

"Will _ces dames_ join me in a marauding expedition? Like the poet Villon, I am about to turn marauder, house breaker, thief. I shall hope to end the excursion by one act, at least, of highway robbery. I shall lose courage without the enlivening presence of _ces dames._ We will start when the day is at its best, we will return when the moon smiles.

In case of finding none to rob, the coach of the desperadoes will be garrisoned with provisions; Henri will accompany us as counsellor, purveyor, and bearer of arms and costumes. The carriage for _ces dames_ will stop the way at the hour of eleven.

"I have the honor to sign myself their humble servant and co-conspirator.

"John Renard."

"This, in plain English," was Charm's laconic translation of this note, "means that he wishes us to be ready at eleven for the excursion to P----, to spend the day, you may remember, at that old manor. He wants to paint in a background, he said yesterday, while we stroll about and look at the old place. What shall I wear?"

In an hour we were on the road.

A jaunty yellow cart, laden with a girl on the front seat; with a man, tawny of mustache, broad of shoulder, and dark of eye, with face shining to match the spring in the air and that fair face beside him; laden also with another lady on the back seat, beside whom, upright and stiff, with folded arms, sat Henri, costumer, valet, cook, and groom.

It was in the latter capacity that Henri was now posing. The role of groom was uppermost in his orderly mind, although at intervals, when his foot chanced to touch a huge luncheon-basket with which the cart was also laden, there were betraying signs of anxiety; it was then that the chef crept back to life. This spring in the air was all very well, but how would it affect the sauces? This great question was written on Henri's brow in a network of anxious wrinkles.

"Henri," I remarked, as we were wheeling down the roadway, "I am quite certain you have put up enough luncheon for a regiment."

"Madame has said it, for a regiment; Monsieur Renard, when he works, eats with the hunger of a wolf."

"Henri, did you get in all the rags?" This came from Renard on the front seat, as he plied his steed with the whip.

"The costume of Monsieur le Marquis, and also of Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, are beneath my feet in the valise, Monsieur Renard. I have the sword between my legs," replied Henri, the costumer coming to the surface long enough to readjust the sword.

"Capital fellow, Henri, never forgets anything," said Renard, in English.

"Couldn't we offer a libation or something, on such a morning--"

"On such a morning," interrupted the painter, "one should be seated next to a charming young lady who has the genius to wear Nile green and white; even a painter with an Honorable Mention behind him and fame still ahead, in spite of the Mention, is satisfied. You know a Greek deity was nothing to a painter, modern, and of the French school, in point of fastidiousness."

"Nonsense! it's the American woman who is fastidious, when it comes to clothes."

Meanwhile, there was one of the party who was looking at the road; that also was arrayed in Nile green and white; the tall trees also held umbrellas above us, but these coverings were woven of leaves and sky.

This bit of roadway appeared to have slipped down from the upper country, and to have carried much of the upper country with it. It was highway posing as pure rustic. It had brought all its pastoral paraphernalia along. Nothing had been forgotten: neither the hawthorn and the osier hedges, nor the tree-trunks, suddenly grown modest at sight of the sea, burying their nudity in nests of vines, nor the trick which elms and beeches have, of growing arches in the sky. Timbered farm-houses were here, also thatched huts, to make the next villa-gate gain in stateliness; apple orchards were dotted about with such a knowing air of wearing the long line of the Atlantic girdled about their gnarled trunks, that one could not believe pure accident had carried them to the edge of the sea. There were several miles of this driving along beneath these green aisles. Through the screen of the hedges and the crowded tree-trunks, picture succeeded picture; bits of the sea were caught between slits of cliff; farmhouses, huts, and villas lay smothered in blossoms; above were heights whereon poplars seemed to shiver in the sun, as they wrapped about them their shroud-like foliage; meadows slipped away from the heights, plunging seaward, as if wearying for the ocean; and through the whole this line of green roadway threaded its path with sinuous grace, serpentining, coiling, braiding in land and sea in one harmonious, inextricable blending of incomparable beauty. One could quite comprehend, after even a short acquaintance with this road, that two gentlemen of Paris, as difficult to please as Daubigny and Isabey, should have seen points of excellence in it.

There are all sorts of ways of being a painter. Perhaps as good as any, if one cares at all about a trifling matter like beauty, is to know a good thing when one sees it. That poet of the brush, Daubigny, not only was gifted with this very unusual talent in a painter, but a good thing could actually be entrusted in his hands after its discovery. And herein, it appears to me, lies all the difference between good and bad painting; not only is an artist--any artist--to be judged by what he sees, but also by what he does with a fact after he's acquired it--whether he turns it into poetry or prose.

I might incautiously have sprung these views on the artist on the front seat, had he not wisely forestalled my outburst by one of his own.