The Arm-Chair at the Inn

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

“I had it all now, just as plain as day; they had tricked the girl into a marriage; had maligned the young fellow in the same cowardly way, and had embittered them both for life. It was the same old game; I had seen it played a hundred times in different parts of the world. Often the cards are stacked. Sometimes it is a jewel—or a handful of them—or lands—or rank—or some other such make-believe. This trick is to be expected in the great world where success in life is a game, and where each gambler must look to the cards—but not here among our peasantry”—and again she shot her glance at Lemois—“where a girl grows up as innocent as a heifer, her nature expanding, her only ambition being to find a true mate who will help her bear the burdens her station lays upon her.

“I resolved to see her for myself. If I had been wrong in my surmises—and it were true that so sweet and innocent a creature had of her own free will married a man twenty years her senior when her heart was wholly another’s—I should lose faith in girl nature: and I have looked into many young hearts in my time. That her father—big brute as he was—would have dared force her into such an alliance without her consent I did not believe, for the mother would then have risen up. These Norman peasants fight for their children as a bear fights for her cubs—women of the right kind—and she was one.

“My own father shrugged his shoulders when I sought his counsel, and uttered the customary man-like remark: ‘Better for her, I expect, than hoeing beets. All she has to do now is to see him comfortably fixed in his chair—a great blessing, come to think of it, for she can always find him when she wants him.’

“This view of the case brought me no relief, and so the next day I mounted my horse, took my groom, and learning that her cripple of a husband had bought another and a larger farm a few kilometres away, rode over to see her.

“I shall never forget what I found. Life presents some curious spectacles, and the ironies of fate work out the unexpected. In front of the low door of a Norman farm-house of the better class sat a gray-haired, shrivelled man with a blanket across his knees—his face of that dirty, ash-colored hue which denotes disease and constant pain. My coming made some stir, for he had seen me making my way through the orchard and had recognized my groom, and at his call the wife ran out to welcome me. My young beauty was now a thin, utterly disheartened, and worn-out woman who looked twice her age, and on whose face was stamped the hall-mark of suffering and sorrow. The brown-gold hair, the white teeth, and deep-blue eyes were there, but everything else was a wreck.

“When the horses were led away, and I had expressed my sympathy for the cripple, I drew her inside the house, shut the door, and took a chair beside her.

“‘Now tell me the whole story—not your suffering, nor his—I see that in your faces—but how it could all happen. The last time you talked to me we were girls together—we are girls now.’

“‘Madame la marquise,’ she began, ‘I——’

“‘No, not madame la marquise,’ I interrupted, taking her hand in mine; ‘just one woman talking to another. Whose fault was it—yours or Henri’s?’

“‘Neither. They lied about him; they said he would never come back; then, when he did not write and no news came of him and I was wild and crazy with grief, they told me more things of which I won’t speak; and one of the old women in the village, who wanted him for her granddaughter, laughed and said the things were true and that she didn’t mind, and nobody else should; and then all the time my father was saying I must marry the other’—and she pointed in the direction of the cripple—‘and he kept coming every day, and was kind and sympathetic, and good to me I must say, and is now, and at last my heart was worn out—and they took me to the church, and it was all over. And then the next month Henri came back from Algiers, where he had been ill in the hospital, and came straight here and sat down in that chair over there, and looked about him, and then he said: “I would not have come home if I had known how things were; I would rather have been shot. I cannot give you all this”—and he pointed to the furniture—“and you did not want them when we first loved each other.”