"Come, let us leave him to the funeral of his roses; he hasn't the sensibilities of an insect;" and Charm grasped my arm to lead me over the turf, across the gravel paths, toward the tea-house.
This tottering structure had become one of our favorite retreats; in the poetic mise-en-scène 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 compassion on the aged little building, however; the clustering, 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 shore, the grasses 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 gods, 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 passed 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 goddess-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 curés—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, çà" (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."