“They are mine; I give them to you.”
It was a playful, unceremonious presentation. Both of us amused ourselves with the idea. And yet, in spite of our laughter, I had a very clear impression that the world did in fact belong to me. I would no longer consent to have a small, narrow place in the world.
As we were going down from our hilltop we met upon the road a young woman who lived in a villa in the neighbourhood. She wore a white gown which left her forearms and neck bare, and on her head was a hat decorated with red cherries. Her parasol, a little behind her, made an aureola or background for a face which was as clear cut and delicate as one of those magnolia flowers in the garden that I loved for their colour, odour and form as of white birds with outspread wings. Still I should not have noticed her if grandfather had not stopped, riveted to the spot with admiration, and exclaimed aloud, “How lovely she is!”
The fair face crimsoned. But the young woman smiled at the too direct homage. I looked at her then, and so fixedly that I have never forgotten that vision, not even the cherries. But I made my reservations. To me she seemed already old, perhaps thirty. That is an advanced age in the pitiless eyes of a child. Her flower-like complexion made me think of that avowal of the nightingale from which one day when I was reading the “Scenes in Animal Life,” I had drawn a fitful melancholy: I am in love with the Rose—I strain my throat all the night long for her, but she sleeps, and hears me not. And for the first time, and not without a secret anticipation, I associated an unknown woman with a yet more unknown love.
After this incident grandfather led me to a wooded slope where we had never been, and which he had represented to me as without interest when I proposed it as the object of a walk. We had to cross a little brook before reaching its foot. On the way he was self-absorbed and said not a word. At the top he turned to the east and led the way directly to a pavilion near a farm house but half-hidden in a clearing.
“There it is,” he said.
I understood that he was not speaking to me. This pavilion, one story above the ground floor, appeared to be in a miserable condition. The roof lacked slates, a surrounding gallery was rotting away. It must have been long since abandoned. Grandfather delighted in its ruinous and uninhabitable condition,—a thing which would have surprised me more if I had not grown accustomed to his whims.
“So much the better,” he murmured; “there is no one there.”
Returning to the farmhouse he perceived an old man who was warming himself upon a bench in the sun and dipping soup from a pot with a wooden spoon. With this old man he entered upon an interminable conversation which bored me, but which ended in some questions as to the pavilion.
“It is good for nothing but firewood,” said the peasant.