I went there again to-day; but I did not see her. It is a year now since I met her, sitting alone before her basket, in a corner of the deserted square. Her face was tanned deep russet, and wrinkled to a tragic listlessness; she had eyebrows white as clean linen, and full-veined, tremulous hands. When I first spoke to her, I did not know that she was blind. She pulled some handkerchiefs from her basket, and offered them to me in a quavering, far-away voice, explaining that she had hemmed them herself; for she had been brought up as a couturière. I asked her how long she had been blind:—
“It is forty-eight years since I saw anything, monsieur. When I was young I had a great trouble.... For eighteen months I wept, and when I went back to work, my eyes were worn out, and I could see no more.... It is forty-eight years now, monsieur, since I saw anything.... Heureusement, il n’y en a plus pour longtemps ... ce sera bientôt fini....”
She spoke simply, and with quiet dignity; though I could see that she was crying a little, as she fingered her handkerchiefs with her full-veined, tremulous hands.
CASTELSARRASIN
From afar off, high against the sky, we could see the ragged line of its roofs, like an ancient, tattered crest along the back of a precipitous, inaccessible-looking hill.
To reach it we waded the Luys de France, with the water swishing under our horses’ bellies, and climbed a mule-track, tight-paved with cobbles, waywardly winding beneath the contorted limbs of leafy, Spanish chestnuts. The track led us around the outside of the village, close under the shadow of its houses—discoloured-yellow and musty-white, fissured and bestained, battered and starved, till everywhere their bones protruded, bulging, bursting beams.
Low, sloping roofs, moss-grown, the colour of old gold, over-lapped the walls, like huge, ill-fitting caps; shading row upon row of wooden balconies, filled with a decrepid multitude of things, which, it seemed, could never have been new—broken earthenware pots; rickety rush-bottomed chairs; strips of old linen; worn-out bass brooms; stacks of dead branches....
Two geese, a yellow dog, and a little black pig had the village street all to themselves. The clock on the tower of the whitewashed church pointed half-past ten, though the twilight had not yet come. And our horses’ hoofs clattered, almost brutally, past the dank-smelling, mud-floored rooms, and the cracked, worm-eaten shutters, wearily moaning with the dull fatigue of stiff-jointed old age.
Toiling up the hill, on the other side, we met a crooked old woman, barefooted, clad in a single frayed shirt, carrying a truss of sainfoin on her head.
“Adechats,” she mumbled mechanically, and toiled on barefooted up the stony path, steadying the truss of sainfoin with both hands....