Francis Hopkinson Smith

“ Then, turning and facing the group, Herbert said, half aloud, as if communing with himself:
“A real woman—human and big, half a dozen such would revolutionize France. And she knows—that is the best part of it”—and his voice grew stronger—“she knows! You may think you’ve reached the bottom of things—thought them all out, convinced you are right, even steer your course by your deductions—and here comes along a woman who lifts a lid uncovering a well in your soul you never dreamed of, and your conclusions go sky-high. ”

“ No wonder, then, Coco is screaming at the top of his voice; no wonder the court-yard is swept by a whirlwind of flying feet; no wonder the upstairs chamber door, with Leà as guardian angel, is opened and shut every few minutes, hiding the girl behind it; and no wonder that Herbert’s impatient car, every spoke in its wheels trembling with excitement, is puffing with eagerness to make the run to the old apple-tree in the outer lot, and so on to the church, loaded to its extra tires with a carpet of blossoms for Mignon’s pretty feet. ”

“ You have yet to come in touch with the real spirit of the Inn, and be introduced to our jewel of a dining-room, the “Marmouset,” opening flat to the ground and hidden behind a carved oaken door mounted in hammered iron: a low-ceilinged, Venetian-beamed room, with priceless furniture, tapestries, and fittings—chairs, tables, wainscoting of carved oak surmounted by Spanish leather; quaint andirons, mirrors, arms, cabinets, silver, glass, and china; all of them genuine and most of them rare, for Lemois, our landlord, has searched the Continent from end to end. ”

“ Louis, a Hercules in build, breathing health and strength at every pore.
Suddenly the tussle in the chair ceased and the young painter, wrenching himself loose, sprang to his feet.
“By thunder!” he cried, “I forgot all about it! Have you heard the news? Hats off and dead silence while I tell it! Lemois, stop that confounded racket with your dishes and listen! Let me present you to His Royal Highness, Monsieur Herbert, the Gold Medallist—his second!” and he made a low salaam to the sculptor stretched out in the Florentine. He was never so happy as when extolling Herbert’s achievements. ”

“ That his inamorata was twenty years his senior made no difference to the distinguished impressionist; that Marc was twenty years her junior made not the slightest difference to madame—nor did Marc himself, for that matter. All good men were comrades to her—and Marc was one: further she never went. Her rule of life was freedom of thought and action, and absolute deference to her whims, however daring and foolish.
Nor did the marquise herself enlighten us further as to what she thought of Mignon’s love affairs or Lemois’ narrow matrimonial views. ”

“ Louis’ eyes blazed. Unkindness to a woman was the one thing that always enraged him. Then his better judgment worked.
“Give her to me, Leà,” he said. “Come, Mignon! Don’t cry, child; he’s not hurt so bad; he’ll be all right in the morning. Move away there, all of you!” and he led the sobbing girl from the room.
A dull, paralyzing silence fell upon us all. Those of us who knew only the gentle, kind-hearted, always courteous Lemois were dumb with astonishment. Had he, too, received a crack on his head which had unsettled his judgment, or was this, after all, the real Lemois? ”

“ I do not blame madame la marquise. She is an enthusiastic woman whose heart often runs away with her head; but she is honest and sincere. She had only the child’s happiness in view, and she will be a mother to them both as long as she lives, as she is to many others I know.”
He had paused for a moment, I standing still beside him, and had then gone on, the words coming slowly, like the dropping of water:
“You remember Monsieur Herbert’s story, do you not, of the old mould-maker who lost his daughter, and who died in his chair, his clay masks grinning down at him from the skylight above? ”

“ Everybody sat up straight. How would Lemois take it? His fingers began to work, and the corners of his mouth straightened. A sudden flush crossed his habitually pale face. We were sure now of an outbreak: what would happen then none of us dared think.
“Madame la marquise,” he began slowly—too slowly for anything but ill-suppressed feeling—“there is no one that I know for whom I have a higher respect; you must yourself have seen that in the many years I have known you. You are a very good and a very noble woman; all your life people have loved you—they still love you. ”

“ The only things which could be considered furniture were a heavy oaken chest and a solid wooden bed—a box of a bed with a filling of feathers supporting two hard pillows. And that was every blessed thing the room contained except a toy pitcher and basin decorating the top of the chest; a white cotton curtain stretched across the lower sash of the single window; a nail for my towel, a row of wooden pegs for my clothes, and a square of looking-glass which once had the measles. Not a chair of any kind, no table, no wash-stand. ”

“ Gaston in his country-cut clothes (his muscles would stretch them into lines of beauty before the week was out) , his new straw hat with its gay ribbon half shading his fine, strong young face; his eyes drinking in everything about him—too supremely happy to do more than walk and breathe and look.
Everything was ready for them at the Marmouset. Lemois had not been a willing ally, but having once sworn allegiance he had gone over heart and soul. The young people and their friends—as well as his own—including the exalted lady and her band of conspirators, should want for nothing at his hands. ”

“ A shout outside sent every man to his feet; the door was flung back and a setter dog bounded in followed by the laughing face of a man who looked twenty-five of his forty years. He was clad in a leather shooting-jacket and leggings, spattered to his hips with mud, and carried a double-barrelled breech-loading gun. Howls of derision welcomed him.
“Oh!—what a spectacle!” cried Louis. “Don’t let Brierley sit down, High-Muck, until he’s scrubbed! Go and scrape yourself, you ruffian—you are the worst looking dog of the two.” ”

“ In fact, the very air seemed so charged with uncontrollable exhilaration that Coco, the oldest and most knowing of birds—he is sixty-five and has seen more love-making from his perch in the dormer overlooking that same court-yard than all the chaperones who ever lived—suddenly broke out into screams of delight, ruffling his feathers, curling up his celery sprout of a topknot, his eyes following Mignon, his head cocked on one side, when she raced back and forth from Pierre’s range to our big table. ”

“ You will forgive a woman, Monsieur Louis, who is old enough to be your great-grandmother, when she tells you that, fine as your pictures are—and I know of no painter of our time who paints water as well—there are some things in the out of doors which I am sure you will yet put into your canvases. I am a fisherman myself, and have thrashed many of the brooks you have painted, and there is nothing I love so much as to peer down into the holes where the little fellows live—way down among the pebbles and the brown moss and green of the water-plants. ”

“ At noon, the market over, they were back again for their midday breakfast, and Pierre, who had been working since daylight without a mouthful to eat, then placed on a big table in one of the open kiosks a huge earthen crock, sizzling-hot, filled with tripe, bits of pork, and chicken—the whole seasoned with onions and giving out a most seductive and inviting smell when its earthenware cover was lifted. There were great loaves of brown bread, too, which Lemois himself cut and served to the guests, besides cold pork in slices and cabbage chopped into shreds. ”

“ Only this summer something occurred which I laugh over every time I think of it. The Cabourg races were on and the court-yard outside was packed with people who had come for luncheon before the Prix Lagrange was run. They were making a good deal of noise—a thing the old gentleman hates, especially from loudly dressed women. I was at the next table, sheltered from the others, and was enjoying the curious spectacle—such people always interest me—when I noticed Monsieur Lemois rubbing his hands together, talking to himself, his eyes fixed on the group. ”

“ Her special business is to make everybody happy; to crack the great white sugar-loaf into bits with a pair of pincers—no machine-made dominoes for Lemois—and to turn the coffee-roaster—an old-fashioned, [13] sheet-iron drum swinging above a brazier of hot coals—and to cool its contents by tossing them in a pan—much as an Egyptian girl winnows wheat. It is a pity you never tasted her coffee, served in the garden—old Leà on the run with it boiling-hot to your table. ”

“ Not by any manner of means the sort of an interior the name suggests, but one all shining brass, rare pottery, copper braziers, and resplendent pewter, reflecting the dancing blaze of a huge open hearth with a spit turned by the weight of a cannon ball fired by the British, and on which—the spit, not the ball—are roasted the joints, chickens, and game for which the Inn is famous, Pierre, the sole remaining chef—there are three in the season—ineffectually cudgelling his French pate under his short-cropped, shoe-brush hair for some dish better than the last. ”

“ A woman of quality, raised as she had been, would mean dress-coats and white ties for dinner and the restraint that comes with the mingling of the sexes, and we disliked both—that is, when on our outings.
By this time the news had penetrated to the other rooms, producing various comments. Herbert, with his head again out of the window, advanced the opinion that the hospitality of madame la marquise had been so overwhelming, and her beauty and charm so compelling, that Marc’s only way out was to introduce her among us. Louis kept his nose in the air. ”

“ All this time Coco keeps up his hullabaloo, nobody paying the slightest attention. Suddenly there comes an answering cry and the cockatoo snaps his beak tight with a click and listens intently, his head on one side. It is the shriek of a siren—a long-drawn, agonizing wail that strikes the bird dumb with envy. Nearer it comes—nearer—now at the turn of the street; now just outside the gate, and in whirls Herbert’s motor, the painter beside him.
“Ah!—Lemois—the top of the morning to you and yours!” Louis’ stentorian voice rings out. “Never saw a better one come out of the skies. ”

“ We dig and sell our product; we plead to save a criminal; we toil with our hands and scheme with our heads, and when it is all done it is to get a higher place in the little world we ourselves make. Once in a while there comes a flash of lightning like this from on high and the cloud is rent in twain and we look through and are ashamed. Thank you again, Monsieur Herbert. You have widened my skull—cracked it open an inch at least, and my heart not a little. Your savage should be canonized! ”

“ Besides, love has made you a princess, or Monsieur Herbert would not insist on your sitting in his own chair, which has only held the nobility and persons of high degree, and which he has wreathed in blossoms. And you will sit at the head of the table too, with Gaston right next to you.”
As grown-ups often devote themselves to amusing children—playing blind-man’s-buff, puss-in-the-corner, and Santa Claus—so did [354] Herbert and Louis, Le Blanc, Brierley, The Architect, madame, and the others lay themselves out to entertain these simple people. ”

“ Pass me my coffee, Lemois, and give me my full share of sugar—three lumps if you please—and put four into your own to sweeten your temper, for you will need them all before I get through.
“The story I promised you is one of sheer stupidity, and always enrages me when I think of it. I have all my life set my face against this idiotic custom of my country of choosing wives and husbands for other people. In any walk of life it is a mistake; in some walks of life it is a crime. ”

“ I am alone in the world, and it’s of no use to me. I am accustomed to being starved. For fame? I have given my life to express the thoughts of my heart and nobody would listen. Now it is finished. I will keep them for the good God—perhaps He will listen.’
“A week later I found him sitting bolt upright in his chair under the skylight, dead. Above in the dull gloom hung a row of plaster models, his own handiwork—fragments of arms and hands with fists clenched ready to strike; queer torsos writhing in pain; queerer masks with hollow eyes. ”

“ He takes this child, puts a soul into her by his kindness, and then, when she becomes a woman, builds a fence around her—not for her protection but for his own pride. It will be so much more honorable, he says to himself, for the great house of Lemois to have one of his distinguished waifs honorably settled in an honorable home,” and she lifted her shoulders ever so slightly. “Not a word, you will please note, about the girl or what she wants—nothing whatever of that kind. And he is such a dear too. But I won’t have it, and I’m going to tell him so!” ”

“ But if it could be done—if the bottom as well as the surface of the water could be given—would we not uncover a fresh hiding-place of nature, and would not you—you, Monsieur Louis—be doing the world that much greater service?—the pleasure being more ours than yours—your reward being the giving of that pleasure to us. ”