To leave him alone! To be left alone—it had never become a possibility to his mind. It did not break upon him with its full force all at once. He first got the glimmer of it, then the glimmer grew to a glow, and the glow to a great red light, in which his brain became drunk, and all his philosophy was burned up like wood-shavings in a fiery furnace.
“Did you like it so much?” Zoe had asked when her song was finished, and the Man from Outside had replied, “Ah, but splendid, splendid! It got into every corner of every one of us.”
“Into the senses—why not into the heart? Songs are meant for the heart,” said Zoe.
“Yes, yes, certainly,” was the young man’s reply, “but it depends upon the song whether it touches the heart more than the senses. Won’t you sing that perfect thing, ‘La Claire Fontaine’?” he added, with eyes as bright as passion and the hectic fires of his lung-trouble could make them.
She nodded and was about to sing, for she loved the song, and it had been ringing in her head all day; but at that point M. Fille rose, and with his glass raised high—for at that moment Seraphe Corniche and another carried round native wine and cider to the company—he said:
“To Monsieur Jean Jacques Barbille, and his fifty years, good health—bonne sante! This is his birthday. To a hundred years for Jean Jacques!”
Instantly everyone was up with glass raised, and Zoe ran and threw her arms round her father’s neck. “Kiss me before you drink,” she said.
With a touch almost solemn in its tenderness Jean Jacques drew her head to his shoulder and kissed her hair, then her forehead. “My blessed one—my angel,” he whispered; but there was a look in his eyes which only M. Fille had seen there before. It was the look which had been in his eyes at the flax-beaters’ place by the river.
“Sing—father, you must sing,” said Zoe, and motioned to the fiddler. “Sing It’s Fifty Years,” she cried eagerly. They all repeated her request, and he could but obey.
Jean Jacques’ voice was rather rough, but he had some fine resonant notes in it, and presently, with eyes fastened on the distance, and with free gesture and much expression, he sang the first verse of the haunting ballad of the man who had reached his fifty years: