"A gentleman makes no noise: a lady is serene."--EMERSON.
In May, the gentle month of May, the weather cleared up again, and green things commenced to sprout and bloom on the cliff above Villa Duval. The country-side began to bloom and blossom as the rose. From the high coast that lies facing the sea, Jersey could be discerned on clear days etched as if in India ink upon the horizon thirteen miles away. Clots of sea-samphire burst into flower, cleverly justifying its name of creste marine by just keeping out of reach of the high tides. The gorse showed dots of yellow amongst its prickles, and little brilliant blue squills stuck up their perky faces and gave out a sweet scent. All along the path to the lighthouse wild thyme came out in springy masses, and the mad Americans often went up that way for the special purpose of lying on it as on a soft, pink silk rug. It seemed to cause them a peculiar kind of joy to put their faces down in it, crying, "Oh! oh! oh!"
The garbage-hole across the road in front of Villa Duval which the dustman had been trying for many summers to transform into a building plot by filling it with empty tins and rubbish from the hotel, and which had been an eyesore all the winter, now suddenly became a place of beauty, for a lot of prickly, thistly-looking plants growing among the jam tins burst into a blaze of red and yellow. It turned out that they were poppies that had been keeping themselves secret all through the winter, and the yellow bright gold of "Our Lady's bedstraw." One day Haidee brought home some long, fragile trails of cinquefoil, one of the first spring things, and Val, worn and haggard under her blue veil, pinned it over her heart because she had read in old Elizabethan days that cinquefoil was supposed to be a cure for inflammations and fevers. She quoted to Haidee what an old herbalist had once written of such cures:
"Let no man despise them because they are plain and easy: the ways of God are all such."
Haidee flushed faintly and retired into awkward silence, shy like most girls of her age at the mention of God. She was going to make her communion the next day with the First Communion candidates, but it was not her first, for that had been made once when she was ill in New York. She was to be confirmed in June when the archbishop of a neighbouring parish intended to visit Mascaret and hold a confirmation service.
It being Saturday afternoon Hortense as well as Haidee was due at the confessional for the recital of her weekly sins, therefore she bustled over the washing-up, announcing her intention of making a bon confession, as though the one she usually made was of an inferior brand.
"What are you going to tell?" asked Haidee, drying plates. She knew very well it was forbidden to talk about your confession, but the subject was a curiously fascinating one. Hortense had a "cupful of sins" for the curé's ear. She had been reading love stories in the Petit Journal (a forbidden paper because it is "against the Church"), telling the cards, and consulting her dream book; also she had missed Vespers twice and several meetings of the "Children of Mary," of which body she was a member. She computed that her pénitence would be as long as her arm.
"He will scold me well, I know," she said cheerfully, "for he saw me talking with Léon Bourget yesterday."
"What! that awful fisherman with the hump?"
"Yes; but he is not a bad fellow, mademoiselle, only all the fishermen here are wicked towards the curé because, as you know, he would not bury the mother of Jean le Petit, and they had to go and get the mayor to do it."