XXI
MONSIEUR ANTOINE'S NAP
The page of Châteaubrun amused the young couple for a few moments with his ingenuous remarks; but he was speedily vanquished by the longing to run, and started off in pursuit of the goats, narrowly escaped having trouble with their keepers, and ended by making it up with them and playing at quoits on the bank of the Creuse, while Emile and Gilberte attempted to follow the course of the Sédelle on the other side of the mountain.
As the torrent has eaten away the base of the cliff in many places, they had sometimes to crawl, sometimes to retrace their steps, sometimes to step on stones that were level with the water, and all of this not without some difficulty and some danger. But youth is adventurous and love is afraid of nothing.
A special providence protects both alike, and our lovers came bravely forth from all the perils of their undertaking,—Emile trembling with an emotion very different from fear when he lifted Gilberte or held her in his arms; Gilberte laughing to conceal her confusion or to forget it.
Gilberte was strong, active and brave, like a true child of the mountain; and yet, by dint of passing over a constant succession of obstacles, she became breathless, sank on the moss beside the leaping stream, and threw her hat on the grass, having to put up her hair which had fallen over her shoulders.
"Do go and pick me that lovely digitalis over yonder," she said to Emile, thinking that she would have time to rearrange her locks before he returned. But he went and came again so quickly that he found her still inundated by the golden flood which her little hands could hardly gather up into a single braid.
Standing beside her, he gazed in admiration at those treasures which she twisted up behind her head with more impatience than pride, and which she would have cut off long before as being an annoying burden, if Antoine and Janille had not strenuously objected.
At that moment, however, she was grateful to them for refusing to allow it; for, although she was little inclined to coquetry, she saw that Emile was lost in admiration, and she had done nothing to arouse it. If there are some triumphs of beauty, which love cannot refuse to enjoy, they are those above all which are unforeseen and involuntary. That beautiful hair would have been a genuine compensation to an ugly woman, and in Gilberte's case it was a lavish outlay of nature added to all her other gifts.
It should be said that Gilberte, like her father, was industrious rather than clever with her hands, and moreover, she had lost all her pins while running and the heavy braid, hurriedly twisted, twice burst its bonds and fell to her feet.
Emile's eyes were still fixed upon her; Gilberte did not see them, but she felt them, as if the atmosphere were filled with the fire of that passionate gaze. She soon became so confused that she forgot to be merry, and finally, as ordinarily, made an effort to relieve, by a jest, their mutual emotion.