“Well, Nic, I’m not so sure of that. Better do that than break your pretty neck on a taut rope,” was the lazy reply.
With an oath, Lavilette went out, banging the door after him. Ferrol shrugged his shoulder with a stoic ennui, and put away the pistols in the trunk. He was thinking how reckless he had been to take them out; and yet he was amused, too, at the risk he had run. A strange indifference possessed him this morning—indifference to everything. He was suffering reaction from the previous day’s excitement. He had got the five thousand dollars, and now all interest in it seemed to have departed.
Suddenly he said to himself, as he ran a brush around his coat-collar:
“‘Pon my soul, I forgot; this is my wedding day!—the great day in a man’s life, the immense event, after which comes steady happiness or the devil to pay.”
He stepped to the window and looked out. It was only six o’clock as yet. He could see the harvesters going to their labours in the fields of wheat and oats, the carters already bringing in little loads of hay. He could hear their marche-’t’-en! to the horses. Over by a little house on the river bank stood an old woman sharpening a sickle. He could see the flash of the steel as the stone and metal gently clashed.
Presently a song came up to him, through the garden below, from the house. The notes seemed to keep time to the hand of the sickle-sharpener. He had heard it before, but only in snatches. Now it seemed to pierce his senses and to flood his nerves with feeling.
The air was sensuous, insinuating, ardent. The words were full of summer and of that dramatic indolence of passion which saved the incident at Magon Farcinelle’s from being as vulgar as it was treacherous. The voice was Christine’s, on her wedding day.
“Oh, hark how the wind goes, the wind goes
(And dark goes the stream by the mill!)
Oh, see where the storm blows, the storm blows
(There’s a rider comes over the hill!)
“He went with the sunshine one morning
(Oh, loud was the bugle and drum!)
My soldier, he gave me no warning
(Oh, would that my lover might come!)
“My kisses, my kisses are waiting
(Oh, the rider comes over the hill!)
In summer the birds should be mating
(Oh, the harvest goes down to the mill!)
“Oh, the rider, the rider he stayeth
(Oh, joy that my lover hath come!)
We will journey together he sayeth
(No more with the bugle and drum!)”
He caught sight of Christine for a moment as she passed through the garden towards the stable. Her gown was of white stuff, with little spots of red in it, and a narrow red ribbon was shot through the collar. Her hat was a pretty white straw, with red artificial flowers upon it. She wore at her throat a medallion brooch: one of the two heirlooms of the Lavilette family. It had belonged to the great-grandmother of Monsieur Louis Lavilette, and was the one security that this ambitious family did not spring up, like a mushroom, in one night. It had always touched Christine’s imagination as a child. Some native instinct in, her made her prize it beyond everything else. She used to make up wonderful stories about it, and tell them to Sophie, who merely wondered, and was not sure but that Christine was wicked; for were not these little romances little lies? Sophie’s imagination was limited. As the years went on Christine finally got possession of the medallion, and held it against all opposition. Somehow, with it on this morning, she felt diminish the social distance between herself and Ferrol.
Ferrol himself thought nothing of social distance. Men, as a rule, get rather above that sort of thing. The woman: that was all that was in his mind. She was good to look at: warm, lovable, fascinating in her little daring wickednesses; a fiery little animal, full of splendid impulses, gifted with a perilous temperament: and she loved him. He had a kind of exultation at the very fierceness of her love for him, of what she had done to prove her love: her fury at Vanne Castine, the slaughter of the bear, and the intention to kill Vanne himself; and he knew that she would do more than that, if a great test came. Men feel surer of women than women feel of men.