"Out of this, Mathurin!" said he. "Take the wrap I have brought you,"

and he threw the shabby old cloak over the cripple's shoulders, who rising, meek as a child, followed his father without a word. The guests looked on, some mockingly, others with emotion, at the sight of the fine old man who had come that bitter night across the Marais to rescue his son from the wiles of La Seuliere. Some of the girls said to each other, "He had not a word for Felicite." Others, "How handsome he must have been as a young man." And one voice murmured, and it was that of the young girl who had sung the _ronde_, "Andre is the image of his father."

Toussaint Lumineau and his sons heard nothing of this. The door of La Seuliere had shut behind them, and they were out in the darkness and the icy wind.

The clouds were very high; as they scudded along in huge irregular bodies they formed a succession of black patches, their edges silvered by the moon. The cold was so intense it seemed to pierce through the stoutest clothing, and chill to the very marrow of the bones. It was indeed death to any but the strongest. The farmer, who knew the danger, hurriedly untied the two punts, and getting into the first motioned Mathurin to lie down in the bottom of the boat, then pushed out into the middle of the ca.n.a.l. Again the cripple obeyed, curling himself up on the boards; wrapped in his brown cloak, motionless, he looked like a ma.s.s of sea-wrack. But, unnoticed by the others, he had lain down with his face turned towards La Seuliere, and raising his cloak with one finger, was looking back towards the farm. As long as distance and the ca.n.a.l banks allowed him to distinguish the light proceeding from the c.h.i.n.ks of the door, he remained with eyes fixed upon the paling ray that recalled to him a new hope. Then the cloak fell back into its place, covering the radiant, tearful face of the crippled man.

Andre followed in the second punt. By the same d.y.k.es, past the same meadows they returned, struggling against the strong gusts of wind that blew. The storm that had burst had prevented the sheet of ice from covering the water. The farmer, unaccustomed to punting, did not make rapid progress. From time to time he would ask:

"You are not too cold, Mathurin?"

Then in a louder voice:

"Are you following, Andre?"

And in their wake a cheery voice would reply:

"I am all right."

The strain was tremendous, but with it was mingled the joy of taking back his two sons.

Although there was no apparent reason, and he had not thought of her for weeks, the farmer's thoughts flew to his dead wife: "She would be pleased with me," he mused, "for taking Mathurin away from La Seuliere." And at times in the turn of a ca.n.a.l he would seem to see a pair of blue eyes like those of his old wife smiling upon him, which gradually sank until they rested among the reeds under the punt. And he would dry his eyelids with his sleeve, shake himself free from the overmastering drowsiness, and say again to his youngest son:

"Are you following?"

The younger son was not dreaming. He was thinking over what he had seen and heard: Mathurin's senseless infatuation, his violence, which, when their father should be no more, would make life very difficult to the head at La Fromentiere. The events of that evening had increased the temptation of pastures new to this disturbed mind. In course of time both punts had reached the duck meadow.

CHAPTER XII.

ROUSILLE'S LOVE DREAM.

Sunday afternoon had become Rousille's hour for solitude. She could only go to vespers when the farm-servant was left in charge of the house; and he had stipulated that he should go once a fortnight to Saint Jean-de-Mont to his sister, a deaf-mute. Mathurin, who formerly had not left La Fromentiere, now never missed attending High Ma.s.s at Sallertaine, where he met Felicite Gauvrit, greeted her for the most part without speaking, in order not to vex his father, watched her as she moved about the Place, then sat down at one of the inn tables to luette. As for Andre, he seemed just now to like to be away from La Fromentiere as much as possible, and on Sundays would be off as early as he could to the villages on the sea coast, where he sought out old sailors and travellers who could tell him of the countries where fortunes were to be made.

Rousille knew nothing of the attraction that led her brother so far afield. One day she affectionately reproached him with leaving her so much alone. At first he had laughed, then suddenly had grown serious and said:

"Don't reproach me with leaving you so much alone, Rousille. Perhaps you will reap the benefit of my tramps one of these days; I am acting in your interests."

Thus on the fourth Sunday in January La Fromentiere was in charge of Rousille. But Rousille did not find time hang heavy on her hands; she had taken refuge in the thres.h.i.+ng-floor at the back of the farm, and was sitting at the foot of a great heap of straw, her face turned towards the Marais, visible through a break in the hedge. She would have been frozen in the north wind that was blowing, had not the straw all about her kept in the warmth like a nest. Leaning her head back against it, she had buried her elbows in the soft depths of some loose straw that had been forked out from the compact ma.s.s and not yet taken away.

The air was so clear that she could see away to the clock tower of Perrier, to the most remote farmsteads of the Marais, and even to the ruddy streaks, but rarely visible, of the pine-grown downs that bordered the sea more than three leagues distant. She was looking before her, but her mind was travelling beyond her father's meadows, beyond the great Marais, beyond the horizon--for Jean Nesmy had written to her. Rousille had the letter in her pocket--was feeling it with the tips of her fingers. Since morning she had known it by heart, had said it over to herself many a time, that letter of Jean Nesmy; the smile it called forth did not leave her lips, save to light up her eyes. All care was driven away, forgotten. Little Rousille was still loved by someone; the letter testified to it. It said:

"Le Chateau, Parish des Chatelliers, "January 25th.

"MY DEAR FRIEND,

"We are all in good health, and I hope it is the same with you, though one is never sure when so far away. I have hired myself as labourer in a farm on the back of a hill as you leave the moor of Nouzillac, about which I have told you. In fine weather one can see six clock towers round about, and I think that but for the Mount of Saint Michel one might see the trees of the Marais where you are. Despite that, I see you always before my eyes. On Sat.u.r.days I generally go home to La Mere Nesmy, and so does my brother next in age to myself, who also has hired himself to one of the farmers of La Flocelliere. We talk of you at mother's, and I often say that I am not as happy as I was before I knew you, or as I should be if they all at home knew you. At any rate, they know your name! My sister Noemi and the little ones, when they come along the road to meet me on Sat.u.r.day evenings, always call out to make me laugh: 'Any news of Rousille?' But Mother Nesmy will not believe that you care for me, because we are too poor.

If only she saw you, she would understand that it is for life.

And I spend my time on Sundays telling her all about La Fromentiere.

"Rousille, it is now four months since I have seen you, according to your desire. It was only at the fair at Pouzanges that, through a man from the Marais who came to buy wood, I heard that your brother Andre had come home, and that he was working on the land as the master of La Fromentiere likes those about him to work; so it will not be very long before I come back to see you.

Some evening I shall come, when the men are still out in the fields, and you, perhaps, are thinking of me as you boil the soup in the big room. I shall come round by the barn, and when you hear or see me, open the window, Rousille, and tell me with one of your little smiles, tell me that you still care for me. Then La Mere Nesmy will make the journey in the proper manner, and will ask your hand from your father, and if he says, Yes, by my baptism! I swear to you that I will bring you home to be my wife.

You are my one thought and desire; there is no one but you that I cherish in my heart of hearts. Take care of yourself. I greet you with my whole heart.

"JEAN NESMY."

One by one, like the beads of a rosary being told, and that pa.s.s between the fingers of the devotee, the sentences of the letter pa.s.sed through the mind of Marie-Rose, and her eyes gazing intently on the landscape, saw only the image of Jean Nesmy. The young girl saw him in his coat with the horn b.u.t.tons, his high cheek-bones, his eager eyes that only laughed for her and for good work done, when at the close of day, his scythe slung on to his bare arm, he scanned the corn he had cut, and the sheaves he had tied standing upright in the stubble.

"Father no longer talks against him," thought she. "He even defended him once to Mathurin. As for me, he has never found me complain, nor refuse to do the work I had to do, and I think he is pleased with me for having done my best. If Andre were to settle down now, and to bring a wife to La Fromentiere, perhaps father would not refuse to let me marry. And I begin to think that Master Andre has his reasons for absenting himself on Sundays, and going off to Saint Jean, Perrier, and Saint Gervais, as he does...."

She smiled. Her eyes had taken the colour of the fresh straw that surrounded her. Far away, on the road to the meadows, she saw a fine strapping youth walking with swaying movement, carrying over one shoulder a pole to jump the d.y.k.es with.

"Driot," she murmured. "I will tease him about his Sunday walks."

Soon she saw Andre come up the hill, skirt the dwarf orchard, then pa.s.s between the leafless hedges in the road. When he was at a little distance, she coughed to attract his attention. He looked up. His face which had worn an anxious expression cleared; instead of continuing his way to the courtyard of La Fromentiere, he jumped over into a small field that ran beside it, pa.s.sed the row of hives where the bees were sleeping their winter sleep, and stopped beside Rousille in the thres.h.i.+ng-floor, leaning on his pole. As he did so, he endeavoured to a.s.sume the half-bantering, half-protecting air he usually adopted towards his sister, thinking himself obliged to laugh with her as with a child.

"I was looking for you," he said.

"Oh, you were looking for me very badly then. Your head was bent down.

I believe you were thinking of someone else than me."

"Indeed!"

"Yes. Where do you come from with your pole, you roamer? Not from vespers?"

"No, from Saint Jean. The water is grand, and jolly cold. On the other side of Le Perrier there are inundations on both sides of the road."

"You have been calling at the farms, I suppose. Did you stop at La Seuliere?"

"You do not know me one bit; do you think I should go against...."

He was about to say "against the intrigues of Mathurin, who has returned to his former infatuation," but he stopped short.

So happy herself that she did not notice his reticence, she resumed:

"To the Levrelles? No? Then to the mill of Moque-Souris, where there is that pretty little Marie Dieu-donnee, the prettiest miller's daughter between here and Beauvoir?"

"Still wrong."

Trying to be grave, but without succeeding in hiding the joy that pervaded her whole soul, she resumed:

"You see, I want you so much to marry, Andre. And such a dear boy as you are, I think it would be easy. Indeed, you have no idea how greatly I wish it!"

Andre's face grew careworn again as before, and he said:

"On the contrary I know very well...."