At the cottage I found my host frying some salmon for supper. He was a tall, bent peasant, meagre and pallid from much thinking and under-feeding, with all the Celt’s quaint mixture of melancholy and humour in his keen blue eyes and wrinkled smile. He did the honours of his humble dwelling with stately courtesy, and was too proud and well-bred to offer futile apologies for the poverty of his shepherd fare and rude bed.
‘Your friend, sir, is not anything worse, I trust,’ he said. I gave him the doctor’s report, and said it was now a case for complete rest and care. I reddened with remorse, remembering how little I had been thinking of Trueberry.
‘Ah, ’tis he that’s in excellent hands,’ said the peasant, turning the salmon, and then dreamily rested his cheek against the closed hand that held the fork, with his elbow supported on the other wrist.
‘May I not learn to whom we are indebted for so much kindness?’ I asked tremulously.
‘Your friend, sir, is at the house of Lady Brases Fitzowen,’ he answered, and I shrank beneath the sharp look he cast on me. ‘’Tis herself, sure, we all love and delight in as if she was one of God’s angels.’
This seemed to me in my exalted mood as such an obvious statement that I received it with the same simplicity it had been uttered. Were we not brother Celts,—albeit, I a Parisianised Breton, and he an illiterate native of wild Kerry uplands? His tribute to the lady of my destiny raced a flame through me like a delicious flattery.
‘I have seen her,’ I said, striving to command my voice in unconfessing tones. ‘I can quite believe you. I should like to know something of her, if you will not deem my curiosity an impertinence. She spoke of her children. Does her husband live?’
‘He does,’ the peasant answered, I thought sullenly.
I caught a fork fiercely in my hand, and bent to trace figures with it on the cloth, hoping thereby to shield my excessive pain from his sharp scrutiny.
‘She did not mention him to me,’ I half cried.