Chapter Two.
“A square-set man and honest.”
The Holy Grail.
Knots of people stood about the streets, all talking of the strange event. Charville is rich in beauty, in picturesqueness, in its magnificent Cathedral, but its events are few and orderly. People do get killed every now and then, it is true: only a few months before, young Jean Gouÿe had fallen from a scaffolding, and never spoken again. But then everybody knew Jean Gouÿe, and all about him: there was no mystery or room for speculation in his fate, poor fellow! This last was a very different matter. Who were the strangers? Where did they come from? Where were they going? What brought them to Charville? What made him fall? Was he dead? Was mademoiselle in much grief? Each person asked the other without much hope of finding out: it was something to get hold of Nannon, and hear the little she had to tell. There was no hurry of business to interfere with their curiosity. Charville took life leisurely: if a house had to be built the masons talked, laughed, joked with each other between laying on their stones; the shoemakers gossiped with their neighbours; women brought their work to the door, played with the children, scolded or chattered. It was an easy, quiet, lounging sort of existence, without much distraction from the outer world,—a magnified village life. Such an event as had occurred that morning came upon them like a new sensation. Nannon had never been made so much of. Veuve Angelin followed sulkily.
She would not accompany the triumphal progress to the door of the Cygne, but turned down a narrow, ill-paved street, which branched off by the Evêché, and ended in a small, modern square. M. Deshoulières’ house stood in the midst of it, and she entered hastily, with some fears lest he should be there, and angry at the delay of his breakfast. He was an easy-going master, just the one that Veuve Angelin liked, too much absorbed with his own thoughts and interests to interfere much with her sovereignty; but every now and then he awoke sufficiently to make her aware that she could not presume absolutely upon his absent ways. Even when she ruled most despotically she was just a little afraid of him. There was always a possibility that he might assert the prerogative of having his own way. Now she was conscious that he would have a reason for indignation, if he returned, hungry and weary, from his morning’s work, to find the house empty, no food prepared. “It is all the fault of that gossiping old Nannon!” she said crossly, as she stopped, hot and out of breath, to listen at the foot of the stairs for her master’s steps overhead. She heard nothing; but it was with the air of a martyr that she mounted, prepared, if there was need, to expatiate upon her own sufferings, and the inconveniences caused by the absence of Lisette, the fille who generally fetched the water. She need not have been afraid. It was quite two hours afterwards—the things were set out in the little salon, with its polished floor, its red curtains, its mirror, its timepiece; in the kitchen, where Veuve Angelin also slept, little pots and pans were simmering and bubbling over tiny hollows filled with charcoal, scooped out of the brick arched stove—before the doctor and little Roulleau, the notary, came round the corner with excited faces, eagerly talking as they walked.
“Man’s folly is never so apparent as in his last moments,” the doctor was saying cynically, as they turned in from the square, and began to mount the bare, uncarpeted staircase.
Veuve Angelin, standing at the top, caught the words with a certain grim satisfaction.
“So he is dead, after all, in spite of that old woman’s obstinacy,” she said volubly. “I knew it from the first: what one sees one sees, and what one hears one hears, and nobody can make it different. But as for those creatures, bah! They are imbécilles, know-nothings: one might as well waste one’s breath upon a stone wall. Monsieur has no doubt just come from the Cygne?”
“Hold your tongue, Marie,” answered the doctor, shortly; “get us something to eat, and do not kill my patients beforehand.”