THEIR TRUE LOVE
Even Zabette, with her thousand wrinkles, was young once. They say her lips were red as wild strawberries and her hair as sleek as the wing of a blackbird in spring. All the old people of St. Esprit remember how she used to swing along the street on her way to mass of a Sunday, straight, proud, agile as a goat, with her dark head flung back, and a disdainful smile on her lips that kept young men from being unduly forward. The country people, who must have their own name for everything and everybody, used to call her "la belle orgueilleuse," and sometimes, "the highstepper"; and though they had to laugh at her a little for her lofty ways, they found it quite natural to address her as mademoiselle.
But all these things one only knows by hearsay. Zabette does not talk much herself. So far as she is concerned, you might never guess that she had a story at all. She lives there in the little dormer-windowed cottage beyond the post-office with Suzanne Benoît. For thirty-three years now the two women have lived together; and it is the earnest prayer of both of them that when the time for going arrives, they may go together.
These two good souls have the reputation, all over the country, of immense industry and thrift. Suzanne keeps three cows, and her butter is famous. Zabette—she was a Fuseau, from the Grande Anse—takes in washing of the better class. Nobody in St. Esprit can do one of those stiff white linen collars so well as she. Positively, it shines in the sun like a looking-glass. If you notice the men going to church, you can always pick out those who have their shirts and collars done by Zabette Fuseau. By comparison, the others appear dull and very commonplace.
"But why must Zabette do collars for her living?" you are asking. "Why has she not a man of her own to look out for her, and half a dozen grown up children? Did she never marry, then—this belle orgueilleuse?"
No. Never. But not on account of that pride of hers; at least not directly. If you go into the pretty little living-room of the second cottage beyond the post-office—the one with such a show of geraniums in the front windows—you will guess half the secret, for just above the mantelpiece, between two vases of artificial asters, hangs the daguerreotype portrait of a young man in mariner's slops. The lineaments have so faded with the years that it is difficult to make them out with any assurance. It is as if the portrait itself were seeking to escape from life, retreating little by little, imperceptibly, into the dull shadows of the ground, so that only as you look at it from a certain angle can you still clearly distinguish the small dark eyes, the full moustache, the round chin, the square stocky shoulders of the subject. Only the two rosy spots added by the daguerreotypist to the cheeks defy time and change, indestructible token of youth and ardor.
A little frame of immortelles encloses the portrait. And directly in front of it, on the mantelpiece, stands a pretty shell box, with the three words on the mother-of-pearl lid: "À ma chérie." What is in the box—if anything—no one can tell you for a certainty, though there are plenty of theories. "Love letters," say some; and others, with a pitying laugh, "Old maid's tears."