Although the duty of the charlatan was to impose upon the public in every fashion that they were likely to bite at most readily, yet there was a kind heart under his motley attire. He threw his whip over the backs of the two mules, and taking the weeping girl kindly by the hands, said to her:
‘Come, come, countrywoman: I shall not leave you to your loneliness this night at least. If aught were to happen to you, I should feel that I myself had brought your body on the Grêve. My wife and myself live in a strange abode, but there is room for you; and you shall go with me.’
The girl looked at him with an expression of mistrust which his calling might well have occasioned; and murmured out a few faint words of refusal.
‘Bah!’ exclaimed the other. ‘You are from Languedoc, like myself, and therefore we are neighbours. I would wager that we have sat under the same trees, within a short half-league of Béziers.’
And he commenced humming the refrain of a ballad in the old Provençal dialect. It was evidently well known to Louise. She shook her head, and pressed her hand before her eyes as if to shut out some sad image that her ideas had conjured up.
‘You have heard that before?’ asked the man.
‘Very often—I know it well.’
‘You heard it from a man, then, I will be sworn; and perhaps a faithless one. He wrote well, long, long ago, who said that those who were gifted with music and singing loved our Languedocian romances, and travelled about the earth that they might betray women. My marotte to an old sword-belt that the tune sang itself in your ears all the way to Paris. Was it not so?’
The girl returned no answer, but remained silent, with her eyes fixed upon the ground.
‘Well, well—we will not press for a reply. But you shall come with me this night, ma bonne, for I will not leave you so. Only let me take you to where our mules’ lodging is situated, and then I will bring you back to my own.’