She would tell how her little brother Albert, when minding the sheep of a stern uncle, fell asleep one hot summer afternoon, and on waking up found that two of the lambs were missing.
‘Then, poor, pretty man, he fell to crying bitterly, for any loss to his pocket my uncle takes but ill, when lo! on a sudden, there stood before him a damsel of heroic stature, fair as the fleurs de lys on a royal banner, in antic tire and her hair clipped short like a lad’s, and quoth she, smiling: “Petit paysan, voilà tes agneaux!” and laying the two lost lambs by his side, she vanished. And in telling what had befallen him he called her just “the good Shepherdess,” but the curé said she could be no other than Jeanne, la Pucelle, plying, as in the days before she took to arms, the business of a shepherdess.’
Then she would tell of the little, far-away inn kept by her father, with its changing, motley company; of the rustic mirth on the Nuit des Rois; of games of Colin-maillard in the garret sweet with the smell of apples; of winter nights round the fire when tales were told of the Fairy Magloire, brewer of love-potions; of the sotret, the fairy barber of Lorraine, who curled the hair of maidens for wakes and marriages, or (if the curé happened to drop in) more guileless legends of the pretty prowess of the petit Jésus.
Madeleine saw it all as if through the wrong end of a telescope—tiny and far-away.
CHAPTER XX
FRESH HOPE
One afternoon Madame Troqueville called Madeleine in an eager voice. Madeleine listlessly came to her.
‘I have a piece of news for you,’ she said, looking at her with smiling eyes.
‘What is it?... Doubtless some one has invited us to a Comedy,’ she said wearily.
‘No! I came back by the Île and there I chanced on Monsieur Conrart walking with a friend’—Madeleine went deadly white—‘And I went up and accosted him. He has such a good-natured look! I told him how grievously chagrined you had been when his project came to naught of driving you to wait upon Mademoiselle de Scudéry, indeed I told him it had worked on you so powerfully you had fallen ill.’