"Toot! Toot!" And the little get-off-the-track goes rumbling on through the village, past the homes of the fishermen—a straggling line of low stone houses with quaint gabled roofs, and still quainter chimneys, and old doorways giving glimpses of dark interiors and dirt floors. Past the modest houses of the mayor, the baker, the butcher and Monsieur le Curé; then through the small public square, in which nothing ever happens, and up to a box of a station.
"Pont du Sable!" cries the conductor, with as much importance as if he had announced Paris.
I have arrived.
There was no doubt about my new-found home being abandoned! The low stone wall that tempered the wind from courtyard and garden was green with lichens. The wide stone gateway, with its oaken doors barred within by massive cross-hooks that could have withstood a siege; the courtyard, flanked by the house and its rambling appendages that contained within their cavernous interiors the cider-press and cellars; the stable with its long stone manger, and next it the carved wooden bunk for the groom of two centuries ago; the stone pig-sty; the tile-roofed sheds—all had about them the charm of dignified decay.
But the "château" itself!
Generations of spiders had veiled every nook and corner within, and the nooks and corners were many. These cobwebs hung in ghostly festoons from the low-beamed ceiling of the living room, opening out upon the wild garden. They continued up the narrow stone stairway leading to the old-fashioned stone-paved bedrooms; they had been spun in a labyrinth all over the generous, spooky, old stone-paved attic, whose single eye of a window looked out over the quaint gables and undulating tiled roofs of adjoining attics, whose dark interiors were still pungent with the tons of apples they had once sheltered. Beyond my rambling roofs were rich orchards and noble trees and two cool winding lanes running up to the green country beyond.
Ten days of strenuous settling passed, at the end of which my abandoned house was resuscitated, as it were. Without Suzette, my little maid-of-all-work, it would have been impossible. I may say we attacked this seemingly superhuman task together—and Suzette is so human. She has that frantic courage of youth, and a smile that is irresistible.
"To-morrow monsieur shall see," she said. "My kitchen is clean—that is something, eh? And the beds are up, and the armoires, and nearly all of monsieur's old studio furniture in place. Eh, ben! To-morrow night shall see most of the sketches hung and the rugs beaten—that is again something, eh? Then there will be only the brass and the andirons and the guns to clean."