But Pierre did not seem to hear the question. He had taken off one of his wooden sabots, and had filled it with water, and, giving it to the gentleman to carry, he proceeded to fill the other also.
‘Capital!’ said the cyclist. ‘Thou art a boy of understanding. True, a sabot doth not hold much water, but there may be enough;’ and, shouting to his companion to leave his machine where it was, he proceeded to pick his way carefully over the rough grass, carrying one of the sabots with its precious contents, while Pierre followed behind him with the other.
‘Curious that the boy talks English,’ he remarked to his companion in his native tongue as they bent over the punctured tire; ‘and good English too. I wonder where he picked it up?—Here, my lad,’ he went on in the Breton patois, ‘where hast thou learned to talk English?’
Pierre hesitated; his life for the last five months had made him strangely suspicious.
‘I am an English boy,’ he said at last slowly; ‘and some day I go to England.’
The strangers glanced at one another. Certainly no one could look less English than Pierre did at that moment, with his closely cropped head and his blue tunic and trousers.
‘Poor child! his brain is touched,’ they whispered; ‘he must have picked up the phrases from some travellers. Many English artists come to live in the summer at Pont Aven, down on the way to Quimper. Perhaps he has lived there at some time. It is sad, is it not? And he is such a handsome child if he did not look so ill.’
Poor Pierre! if he had understood what they said he might have tried to talk to them, and tell them of the memories which haunted him. But their French was unintelligible; and, as he gathered from the glances that they stole at him that they were talking about him, he only grew more suspicious, and relapsed into silence, and stood rubbing one foot against the other, pretending not to hear when the strangers plied him with more questions, talking the patois as best they could.
‘Ah yes, he is quite silly,’ said the man who had spoken to him first, when at last the puncture was mended and he was blowing up his tire. ‘It is no use trying to talk to him any more. But doubtless he knows the value of money—most people do, whether their brains are strong or not; and, after all, he was marvellously quick to understand what I needed.—Here is thy sabot, my child,’ he went on, ‘and here is something inside it;’ and to Pierre’s amazement he handed him back his wooden shoe with two bright silver francs inside it.
The look of delight on the little boy’s face made both the men laugh. He had not had even a sou in his possession all the time he had been at the cottage. The time when he had had money of his own seemed to belong to the vague, shadowy life—not to the present.