Frogs
She, his mother, wished he wouldn't be so sweet. It was what she had longed for since he was a little boy, an indifferent, cold little child, and dreamed of. It made it difficult for her not to break down. And how dreary that would be for him, who was so glad to come home.
Always he had been very bored at home. He never since he was at all grown-up—he was twenty-one—had stayed an hour more than was necessary in the old dark sad castle. Now he had six days, just six days, for his own, to do with whatever he chose, away from those places of death, and it seemed that there was nothing he wanted but the old dull things that always before had so bored him.
She had been coming up from the village in the soft wet April afternoon, by the wide central avenue of the parterres between the little clipped yew trees, when he came out to the terrace. She had an instant's sick terror of thinking he was killed, and that this was her vision of him. But he was calling to her, and laughing. She had stopped, and stood quite still, and he had come eagerly, running down the steps to her.
They had six days together.
Often she had thought of the old strong castle that it was a place meant for great things to happen in, glories and disasters. Small things were of no matter in it. There had been no room bright and light enough for a little child to be gay in. Her baby's room had had stone walls and a high carved ceiling and windows four feet deep. If ever he had laughed and shouted, his little voice had been lost among old echoes. How could any child not have been afraid of the shadows that trailed and lurked along the corridors and upon the stairs.
She specially remembered her little son standing with Miss on the top of the terrace steps, under the great Watch Tower, never running to meet her as she came up through the garden, the shadow of the stern old house prisoning him, like some dark spell, in his little white sailor dress.
Now, he had come to meet her eagerly, as she had so used to wish he would.
In the six days he was all the things to her that she had ever dreamed of. He was her little boy who needed her. He had wild gay moments, when his gaiety swept her along, and moments that needed her comforting.
Then it was their last day together, a softly raining day.
In the morning they went for a long tramp through their own woods and on into the forest, deeper and deeper. All the forest ways were full of wet blue hyacinths and songs of thrushes. The little rain made music in the April branches, and the wet smells were as incense in the forest aisles. When they came home he was hungry. Nothing would do but that they should go down to the village to the Place de l'Eglise and get spice bread and barley sugar from old Madame Champenot, as he had used to do when he was a small boy to whom his mother gave five sous for being good.
They must go down the terrace steps and along the avenue to the Queen's Bosquet, where the old statues stood together dressed in ivy, and through the little stern gate in the rampart walls, and across the moat by the new bridge, that was so old, to the Place of the church.
Thatched roofs and tiled roofs were touched with spring wherever moss and lichen clung to them, green and grey and yellow.
He had gone into the little shop, and she had waited outside, not able to talk to any one.
The great Watch Tower of the castle, and the low square grey tower of the church, and all the crooked old tall black chimney-pots seemed to swim in the blue of the sky.
Waiting there she felt that the coming of spring was sad almost past bearing. She thought, soon the frogs in the castle moats would be singing their lonesome song.
Afterwards they went round to the stables, from which all the horses were gone, and he was sad to think how long he had forgotten his little old pony, scarcely bigger than a dog.
In the afternoon he must go everywhere about the house, to all the old rooms and corridors and stairways, that he never before had known he loved. She must go with him, through the great dim attics, and up the tower stairs, and out on to the battlements, to the sunset; down into the great stone-vaulted kitchens, and the cellars that had been dungeons. They went laughingly at first. But afterwards they did not laugh any more. It had come to have the sacredness of a pilgrimage, their small journeying.
He talked quite gaily while they were at dinner in the long dining-hall under the minstrel's gallery.
But when they went to her little study afterwards together, they both were very silent.
There was a fire burning, but all the windows were open.
And as they sat there, almost silently together, they heard the first frogs singing in the castle moat. He laughed, and would have her tell him the story of the Frog Princess, that he never had cared for her to tell him when he was a little boy.
She knew that she would never listen to the frogs again without remembering that night.
She wondered if the memory would become an agony to her. It seemed to her strange that, caring so much, she could not know.