It was thus the miser, Garron, found his mate.
Julie proved to be a fair cook, and the two lived together, at the beginning, in comparative peace. Although it was not until days after the fête at Avelot that she managed to hold him to his promise about the blue dress, he sent her to Pont du Sable for her shoes the day after their arrival on the marsh—she bought them and they hurt her. The outcome of this was their first quarrel.
"Sacré bon Dieu!" he snarled—"thou art never content!" Then he struck her with the back of his clenched fist and, womanlike, she went whimpering to bed. Neither he nor she thought much of the blow. Her mind was on the shoes that did not fit.
When she was well asleep and snoring, he ran his sinewy arm in the hole he had made in the double wall—lifted the end of a short, heavy plank, caught it back against a nail and gripped the packet of bank notes that lay snug beneath it. Satisfied they were safe and his mate still asleep, he replaced the plank over his fortune—crossed the dirt floor to his barrier of a door, dropped an iron rod through two heavy staples, securely bolting it—blew out the tallow dip thrust in the neck of an empty bottle, and went to bed.
Months passed—months that were bleak and wintry enough on the marsh for even a hare to take to the timber for comfort. During most of that winter Garron peddled the skins of rabbits he snared on the marsh, and traded and bought their pelts, and he lived poor that no one might suspect his wealth. He and his mate rose, like the wild fowl, with the sun and went to bed with it, to save the light of the tallow dip. Though I have said she could easily have strangled him with her hands, she refrained. Twice, when she lay half awake she had seen him run his wiry arm in the wall—one night she had heard the lifting of the heavy plank and the faint crinkling sound of the package as he gripped it. She had long before this suspected he had money hidden.
Julie was no fool!
With the spring the marsh became more tenable. The smallest song birds from the woods flitted along the ditches; there were days, too, when the desolate prairie became soft—hazy—and inviting.
At daybreak, the beginning of one of these delicious spring days, Garron, hearing a sharp cry without, rose abruptly and unbolted his barrier. He would have stepped out and across his threshold had not his bare foot touched something heavy and soft. He looked down—still half asleep—then he started back in a sort of dull amazement. The thing his foot had touched was a bundle—a rolled and well-wrapped blanket, tied with a stout string. The sharp cry he had heard he now realized, issued from the folds of the blanket. Garron bent over it, his thumb and forefinger uncovering the face of a baby.
"Sacristi!" he stammered—then leaned back heavily against the old rudder of a door. Julie heard and crawled out of bed. She was peering over his shoulder at the bundle at his feet before he knew it.