THE BELLS OF PONT DU SABLE
The big yellow car came ripping down the road—a clean hard ribbon of a road skirting the tawny marsh that lay this sparkling August morning under a glaze of turquoise blue water at high tide.
With a devilish wail from its siren, the yellow car whizzed past my house abandoned by the marsh. I was just in time, as I raised my head above the rambling wall of my courtyard, to catch sight of my good friend the curé on the back seat, holding on tight to his saucer-like hat. In the same rapid glance I saw the fluttering ends of a bottle-green veil, in front of the curé's nose and knew Germaine was driving.
"Lucky curé!" I said to myself, as I returned to my half-finished sketch, "carried off again to luncheon by one of the dearest of little women."
No wonder during his lonely winters, when every villa or château of every friend of his for miles around is closed, and my vagabond village of Pont du Sable rarely sees a Parisian, the curé longs for midsummer. It is his gayest season, since hardly a day passes but some friend kidnaps him from his presbytery that lies snug and silent back of the crumbling wall which hides both his house and his wild garden from the gaze of the passer-by.
He is the kind of curé whom it is a joy to invite—this straight, strong curé, who is French to the backbone; with his devil-may-care geniality, his irresistible smile of a comedian, his quick wit of an Irishman, and his heart of gold.
To-day Germaine had captured him and was speeding him away to a jolly luncheon of friends at her villa, some twenty kilometres below Pont du Sable—Germaine with her trim, lithe figure and merry brown eyes, eyes that can become in a flash as calm and serious as the curé's, and in turn with her moods (for Germaine is a pretty collection of moods) gleam with the impulsive devilry of a gamine; Germaine, who teases an old vagabond painter like myself, by daubing a purple moon in the middle of my morning sketch, adds a dab on my nose when I protest, and the next instant embraces me, and begs my forgiveness.
I cannot conceive of anyone not forgiving Germaine, beneath whose firm and delicate beauty lies her warm heart, as golden in quality as the curé's.
Ah! It is gay enough in midsummer with Germaine and such other good Bohemians as Alice de Bréville, Tanrade, and his reverence to cheer my house abandoned by the marsh.
I heard the yellow car tearing back to Pont du Sable late that night. It slowed down as it neared my walled domain, and with a wrenching grunt stopped in front of my gate. The next instant the door of my den opened and in rushed the curé.