"Tout d' suite!" answered a shrill voice from some remoter portion of the edifice; and a moment later an old woman with straggling white hair, toothless gums, and penetrating, humorous eyes, deepset under a forehead of infinite wrinkles, would come shuffling up the pebble walk from the basement.
"Me voila!" she would ejaculate, panting. "Me ol' man, he always know how to git me in a leetle minute, hé?"
On Sundays Caroline and Maximen would drive to chapel in a queer, heavy, antiquated road-cart that had been built especially for his use, hung almost as low between the axles as a chariot.
"We go mak' our respec' to the bon Dieu," he would laugh, as he took the reins in hand and waited for Célestine, the chunky little mare, to start—which she did when the mood took her.
The small shop is closed and beginning to fall to pieces. Maximen has been making his respects amid other surroundings for some four or five years, and Caroline, at the end of a twelvemonth of lonely waiting, followed after.
"It seem lak I need t'e ol' man to look out for," she used to say. "All t'e day I listen to hear t'at bell again. 'Tout d' suite! I used to call, no matter what I do—maybe over the stove or pounding my bread; and den, 'Me voila, mon homme!' I would be at t'e shop, ready to help."
I suppose that wherever a man looks in the world, if he but have the eyes to see, he finds as much of gayety and pathos, of failure and courage, as in any particular section of it; yet so much at least is true: that in a little community like this, so removed from the larger, more spectacular conflicts of life, so face to face, all the year, with the inveterate and domineering forces of nature, one seems to discover a more poignant relief in all the homely, familiar, universal episodes of the human comedy.
