Now all the bay is alive. Moreover, the sea is sweeping in, filling the bay like a bath-tub, obliterating the causeways under millions of dancing ripples of turquoise. Soon my decoys are out, and I am sunk in a sand-pit at the edge of the sea. The wind holds strong from the northeast, and I am kept busy until my gun-barrels are too hot to be pleasant. All these things happen between dawn and a late breakfast in my garden.
Suzette sang all day. It is always so with Suzette upon the days when the abandoned house is giving a dinner. The truth is, Suzette loves to cook; her pride and her happiness increase as the hour appointed for my guests to arrive approaches. With Suzette it is a delightful event.
The cracked jingle-bell over my stone gateway had jingled incessantly since early morning, summoning this good little Norman maid-of-all-work to slip her trim feet into her sabots and rush across the court to open the small door piercing my wall beside the big gates. Twice for beggars, once for the grocer's boy, three times for the baker—who had, after all, forgotten the brioche; again for the baker's boy, who invariably forgets if he thinks there is another chance in his forgetting, of paying a forgotten compliment to Suzette. I heard his mother scolding him yesterday. His bread, which he kneads and bakes himself before dawn, is losing its lightness. There is little harmony between rising yeast and a failing heart. Again the bell jingles; this time it is the Mère Marianne, with a basket of quivering, iridescent mackerel just in from the night's fishing.
Mère Marianne, who once was a village belle, is now thirty-three years of age, strong as a man, fair-haired, hatless, bronzed by the sun, salt-tanned, blue-eyed, a good mother to seven fair-haired, blue-eyed children; yet a hard, amiable drinker in her leisure hours after a good catch.
"Bonjour, my all beautiful!" she greets Suzette as the door opens.
"Bonjour, madame!" returns Suzette, her cheeks flushed from her kitchen fire.
The word "madame" seems out of place, for Mère Marianne wears her man's short tarpaulin coat cinched about her waist with a thin tarred rope. Her sinewy legs, bare to the knees, are tightly incased in a pair of sea-soaked trousers.
"So monsieur is having his friends to dinner," she rattles on garrulously, swinging her basket to the ground and kneeling before it. "I heard it as I came up the road from Blancheville's girl, who had it from the Mère Taurville. Eh ben! What do you think of these?" she adds in the same breath, as she turns up two handsful of live mackerel. "Six sous apiece to you, my pretty one. You see I came to you first; I'm giving them to you as cheap as if you were my own daughter."
"Come, be quick," returns Suzette. "I have my lobster to boil and my roast to get ready; four sous if you like, but not a sou more."