I, being nearest to the footlights, beckoned to old Leà carrying the coffee, and pointed inquiringly to the blissful girl.
“What’s the meaning of all this, Leà?—what has happened? Your Mignon seemed joyous enough the other morning when she came from market, but now she is beside herself.”
The old woman lowered her voice, and, with a shake of her white cap, answered:
“Don’t ask me any questions; I am too happy to tell you any lies and I won’t tell you the truth. Ah!—see how cold monsieur’s milk is—let me run to Pierre for another”—and she was off; her flying sabots, like the upturned feet of a duck chased to cover, kicking away behind her short skirts.
Lemois, too, had heard the song and, picking up Coco, strolled toward me his fingers caressing the bird, his uneasy glance directed toward the happy girl as he walked, wondering, like the rest of us, at the change in her manner. To watch them together as I have done these many times, the old man smoothing its plumage and Coco rubbing his black beak tenderly against his master’s cheek, is to get a deeper insight into our landlord’s character and the subtle sympathy which binds the two.
The bird once settled comfortably on his wrist, Lemois looked my way.
“You should get him a mate, monsieur,” I called to him in answer to his glance, throwing this out as a general drag-net.
The old man shifted the bird to his shoulder, stopped, and looked down at me.
“He is better without one. Half the trouble in the world comes from wanting mates; the other half comes from not knowing that this is true. My good Coco is not so stupid”—and he reached up and stroked the bird’s crest and neck. “All day long he ponders over what is going on down below him. And just think, monsieur, what does go on down below him in the season! The wrong man and the wrong woman most of the time, and the pressure of the small foot under the table, and the little note slipped under the napkin. Ah!—they don’t humbug Coco! He laughs all day to himself—and I laugh too. There is nothing, if you think about it, so comical as life. It is really a Punch-and-Judy show, with one doll whacking away at the other—‘Now, will you be good!—Now, will you be good!’—and they are never good. No—no—never a mate for my Coco—never a mate for anybody if I can help it.”
“Would you have given the same advice thirty years ago to madame la marquise?” Madame was the one and only subject Lemois ever seemed to approach with any degree of hesitancy. My objective point was, of course, Mignon; but I had opened madame’s gate, hoping for a short cut.