A SKETCH WAS MADE OF HER AS SPEEDILY AS MIGHT BE.
probably been when she was eighty. She sat down on a barrel, and a sketch of her was made as speedily as might be, while the sky faded from gold to red, and the rest of the vintagers slowly tore themselves from the charms of looking over the sketcher’s shoulder to go to the excellent dinner that was waiting for them in a long vine-covered barn. Once more we tasted the vintage soup, and smacked our lips, and said, with facetious under-statement of the case, that it was pas mal, and once more we prodded at the cauldron of ragoût, and felt the hunger of gluttony rise within us as we smelt its rich and composite fragrance. We were connoisseurs in vintage cookery by this time, and had been shown the mysteries of many vintage kitchens, but as the exhibition always took place a long time after tea and a short time before dinner, it never failed to make us regret that we also were not vintagers.
We wandered back to the house through the rose-garden, and though we pretend to no horticultural knowledge, by dint of recognising ‘La France’s’ timid flush, and the orange glow of that poetically-named flower, ‘William Allan Richardson,’ we took a higher place in the estimation of their proprietor, and were encouraged to adventurous remarks on their culture as practised in Ireland, which, we fear, must have hopelessly degraded the gardeners of that country in the eyes of Monsieur A. It was hard to talk of anything else but roses and fruit at dinner, when the centre of the table was a masterpiece of both one and the other; but we were beginning to feel less restricted now in our choice of subjects. During our last flight into polite society our ideas were to us much as the creatures in the Ark must have been to Noah. Our brains were full of interesting things which we wished to plant out on the world, but when we thrust them forth, they could find no rest for the soles of their feet in the strange sea of French conversation, and they returned to sit lamentably upon the shelf, with all the other agreeable but untranslatable notions.
Now, however, we had not only enlarged our vocabulary, but we had also lost a good deal of the decent diffidence that had at first prompted us to hold our tongues, and we found ourselves conversing gaily, with a hideous disregard of the trammels of verbs and the pitfalls of gender. I had nearly finished my dinner before I realised that in asking my neighbour to pass la selle, I was unreasonably demanding a saddle, and it was almost dreadful that that neighbour gave no sign of what he felt, and merely told me that to eat du sel in such quantities as is my wont was an habitude Anglaise. It would have been consolatory to have been laughed at openly on such occasions, but I suppose such altruistic politeness would be beyond the power of most people; certainly no one we ever met soared to such heights, and I am sure we are not capable of it ourselves.
We had an expedition before us the next day, and the evening had to be short. However, after dinner we strolled out into the darkness, mellowed by the scent of many roses, and went to have a look at the vendangeuses. The ladies had a dining-room apart from the gentlemen, and when we looked in at them, were still sitting over their wine with a fine indifference to the charms of general society in the barn. Mère Mémé, at the end of the long table, with the lamplight deepening her wrinkles into trenches, and sinking her eyes into wells of ink, might have been an over-printed engraving of Rembrandt’s mother. Gathered round her were three or four hardly less ancient ladies, equally suggestive of Rembrandt’s relations, and a long array of dark-haired, white-coifed women and girls were to be seen, more or less dimly in the indifferent light, finishing their jugs of vin ordinaire, all talking at the tops of their voices, and all, after the first stare, comporting themselves as if no curious foreign eyes were observing them from the doorway.
The evening closed with one dramatic episode. A long low dark room; at one end a bare table; on one side of it an excited group of women; on the wall behind, a smoky lamp, throwing a lurid light on two resolute-looking men, who stood behind the table on which a swarthy victim lay trembling, held tightly by one, while the other hurriedly divested him of all clothing save a fur boa and two pair of boots.
Madame A. was having her black poodle clipped.
CHAPTER IX.
T was market day at Libourne. We were aware of that from a very early hour of the morning, as the complaining utterances of every class of rickety waggon and ungreased wheel were wafted in at the windows of our hotel, blended with the solid, carpet-like whacking of donkeys’ backs, and the screams of their drivers, all ladies of advanced age and leathern lung power. Monsieur and Madame A. called for us at nine, and before setting forth on the legitimate expedition allotted to the day, we drove round the market square.