“But there are other verses,” said Juliette, resting her hands on the keys of the wheezy spinet which must have been a hundred years old. “What are they about?”
“I do not know, mademoiselle,” he answered, looking down at her. “I think it is a love-song.”
She had pinned some mignonette, strong scented as autumn mignonette is, in the front of her muslin dress, and the heavy heads had dragged the stems to one side. She put the flowers in order, slowly, and then bent her head to enjoy the scent of them.
“It scarcely sounds like one,” she said, in a low and inquiring voice. The Marquis was a little deaf. “Is it all chance then?”
“Oh yes,” he answered, and as he spoke without lowering his voice she played softly on the old piano the simple melody of his song. “It is all chance, mademoiselle. Did they not teach you that at the school at Saintes?”
But she was not in a humour to join in his ready laughter. The room was rosy with the glow of the setting sun, she breathed the scent of the mignonette at every breath, the air which she had picked out on the spinet in unison with his clear and sympathetic voice had those minor tones and slow slurring from note to note which are characteristic of the gay and tearful songs of southern France and all Spain. None of which things are conducive to gaiety when one is young.
She glanced at him with one quick turn of the head and made no answer. But she played the air over again—the girls sing it to this day over their household work at Farlingford to other words—with her foot on the soft pedal. The Marquis hummed it between his teeth at the other end of the room.
“This room is hot,” she exclaimed, suddenly, and rose from her seat without troubling to finish the melody. “And that window will not open, mademoiselle; for I have tried it,” added Barebone, watching her impatient movements.
“Then I am going into the garden,” she said, with a sharp sigh and a wilful toss of the head. It was not his fault that the setting sun, against which, as many have discovered, men shut their doors, should happen to be burning hot or that the window would not open. But Juliette seemed to blame him for it or for something else, perhaps. One never knows. Barebone did not follow her at once, but stood by the window talking to the Marquis, who was in a reminiscent humour. The old man interrupted his own narrative, however.
“There,” he cried, “is Juliette on that wall overhanging the river. It is where the English effected a breach long ago, my friend—you need not smile, for you are no Englishman—and the château has only been taken twice through all the centuries of fighting. There! She ventures still farther. I have told her a hundred times that the wall is unsafe.”