“Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis, et ego restaurabo vos!” I said, quoting a well-known inscription over an eating-house.
He gave a sharp little squeak.
“Eh! but monsieur has the right etymology of the restaurateur; he is a man of taste and of delicacy. This poor burgundy” (he clawed up his glass)—“it might have been Clos Vougeot de Tourton if monsieur had not been so stringent in his sequestration.”
He favoured me with a leer—very arch and very anxious. I could only stare. Evidently he took me, in his wandering mind, for some other than that I was. I was to be enlightened in a moment.
It was when Georgette had left the room and we were alone. The falling sunlight came through a curtain of vine-leaves about the window, and reddened his old mad face. He bent forward, looking at me eagerly.
“Hush, monsieur! The plate—the tankards—the christening-cups! You will let me have them back? My God! there was a cross, in niello, of the twelfth century. It will bring you nothing in the markets of the Vandals. Monsieur, monsieur! I accept your terms—hot terms, brave terms for a bold wooer. But you must not seek to carry her with a high hand. She knows herself, and her pride and her beauty. Hush! I can tell you where she lies hidden. She crouches under a rosebush in the garden, and as the petals fall, they have covered and concealed her.”
Now I understood. He was again, in his lost soul, staking Carinne against his forfeited pots. He took me for Lacombe.
I jumped to my feet.
* * * * * * *
And now began my second period of wandering; but under conditions infinitely more trying than the first. Keeping to the dense woods by day, and traversing the highways only by night, I had hitherto escaped that which was to prove the cruellest usurer of my vigour—the merciless blazing sun. Here, as I travelled by desolate broomy wastes; by arid hills, from which any knob of rock projecting was hot as the handle of an oven; by choking woods and endless winding valleys,—I would sometimes ask myself in amazement what could be the nature of the infatuation that for its own sake would elect to endure these sufferings. I had not spoken to the girl. I was not authorised to champion her cause. Strangest of all, the lack of womanly sensitiveness she had displayed under the very ordeal of St Fargeau’s dying groans had not prepossessed me in her favour. Yet, slowly was I making, and would continue to make, my way to these mountains of Limosin, in the dreamy hope of happening upon a self-willed and rather heartless young woman, who—if we were to come together—would probably resent my intrusion as an affront. Truly an eccentric quest.