“I! What could have put that into your head?”
Madame Lemaire nodded wisely. “Perhaps it was her pretty face, perhaps it was chance. Who knows? After all it is of monsieur we are talking.”
M. Deshoulières shook his head, and went away smiling, yet with a half-hidden sadness in his tone. “You must look for romances elsewhere, madame,” he said. “I have no heart to spare except for my patients.”
No one ever entirely realises how much his life is moulded by what we call trifles. We do not want a lion in our path to turn us, a straw will do it as effectually. It is only an indifferent word occasionally that opens the floodgates and lets the torrent in. A look affects a life; perhaps such insignificant instruments are chosen to keep us humble. Looking back, when we have gone further on our journey, we dimly understand it, but at the time the influences seem too small to be admitted. Yet it is the teaching of all creation, whether physical or spiritual. In the drop of water, in the blade of grass, in the moment of time, in the thought of our heart, God teaches us the immensity of little things.
Chapter Seven.
“Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hands.”
E.B. Browning.
Max Deshoulières did not smile any more after he went away from Madame Lemaire, but he never forgot her little speech. It seemed to set all sorts of unknown strings vibrating, the words kept echoing back from his heart; things that had nothing to do with his life, as he fancied, floated up before him: children’s faces like angels’, the touch of tiny hands, sweet womanly voices, wistful grey eyes, all these strange uncalled-for visions haunted him; he could not have driven them away if he had wished it. If he had been an idle man, with time to spend in dreaming, he might have understood their meaning sooner; as it was, he wondered a little, and then flung himself heart and soul into a battle with some grim disease in a squalid room where there was the dirt without the picturesqueness of Charville. Almost unconsciously this man’s life had been one noble self-sacrifice. He seemed to use his great strength of will in setting aside all selfish aims. He worked with a single-mindedness out of which had grown a strange simplicity and tenderness. Thérèse, with all her hopefulness, had not his strong faith. If he had been more accustomed to make pictures, in which he formed a central figure, Madame Lemaire’s words might not have stirred him as they did. A hand had swept the strings, would the tones it set vibrating grow and swell into grand, beautiful chords of sweet harmony, or die away in a sad, sorrowful wail?