"C'est très femme, çà—hein, mademoiselle?" And the cobbler cocked his head in critical pose, with a philosopher's smile.
The result of the interview, however, although not entirely satisfactory, was illuminating, besides this light which had been thrown on the cobbler's reformation. For the cobbler was a cousin, distant in point of kinship, but still a cousin, of the brutal farmer and father. He knew all the points of the situation, the chief of which was, as Fouchet had hinted, that the girl had refused to wed the bon parti, who was a connection of the step-mother. As for the step-mother's murderous outcry, "Kill her! kill her!" the cobbler refused to take a dramatic view of this outburst.
"In such moments, you understand, one loses one's head; brutality always intoxicates; she was a little drunk, you see."
When we proposed our modest little scheme, that of sending for the girl and taking her, for a time at least, into our service, merely as a change of scene, the cobbler had found nothing but admiration for the project. "It will be perfect, mesdames. They, the parents, will ask nothing better. To have the girl out at service, away, and yet not disgracing them by taking a place with any other farmer; yes, they will like that, for they are rich, you see, and wealth always respects itself. Ah, yes, it's perfect; I'll arrange all that—all the details."
Two days later the result of the arrangement stood before us. She was standing with her arms crossed, her fingers clasping her elbows—with her very best peasant manner. She was neatly, and, for a peasant, almost fashionably attired in her holiday dress—a short, black skirt, white stockings, a flowery kerchief crossed over her broad bosom, and on her pretty hair a richly tinted blue foulard. She was very well dressed for a peasant, and, from the point of view of two travellers, of about as much use as a plough.
"It's a beautiful scheme, and it's as dramatic as the fifth act of a play; but what shall we do with her?"
"Oh." replied Charm, carelessly, "there isn't anything in particular for her to do. I mean to buy her a lot of clothes, like those she has on, and she can walk about in the garden or in the fields."
"Ah, I see; she's to be a kind of a perambulating figure-piece."
"Yes, that's about it. I dare say she will be very useful at sunset, in a dim street; so few peasants wear anything approaching to costume nowadays."
Ernestine herself, however, as we soon discovered, had an entirely different conception of her vocation. She was a vigorous, active young woman, with the sap of twenty summers in her lusty young veins. Her energies soon found vent in a continuous round of domestic excitements. There were windows and floors that cried aloud to Heaven to be scrubbed; there were holes in the sheets to make mam'zelle's lying between them une honte, une vraie honte. As for Madame Fouchet's little weekly bill, Dieu de Dieu, it was filled with such extortions as to make the very angels weep. Madame and Ernestine did valiant battle over those bills thereafter. Ernestine was possessed of the courage of a true martyr; she could suffer and submit to the scourge, in the matter of personal persecution, for the religion of her own convictions; but in the service of her rescuer, she could fight with the fierceness of a common soldier.