They turned away to retrace their steps, and Michel rubbed the side of his head with a reflective air.
"The old one is a madman," said he. The "old one" meant Captain Stewart. "A madman. Each day he is madder, and this morning he struck me—here on the head, because I was too slow. Eh! a little more of that, and—who knows? Just a little more, a small little! Am I a dog, to be beaten? Hein? Je ne le crois pas. Hè!" He called Captain Stewart two unprintable names, and, after a moment's thought, he called him an animal, which is not so much of an anti-climax as it may seem, because to call anybody an animal in French is a serious matter.
The gardener was working himself up into something of a quiet passion, and Ste. Marie said—
"Softly, my friend! Softly!" It occurred to him that the man's resentment might be of use, later on, and he said—
"You speak the truth. The old one is an animal, and he is also a great rascal." But Michel betrayed the makings of a philosopher. He said with profound conviction—
"Monsieur, all men are great rascals. It is I who say it." And at that Ste. Marie had to laugh.
He had not consciously directed his feet, but without direction they led him round the corner of the rose gardens and towards the rond point. He knew well whom he would find there. She had not failed him during the past three days. Each morning he had found her in her place, and, for his allotted hour—which more than once stretched itself out to nearly two hours, if he had but known—they had sat together on the stone bench or, tiring of that, had walked under the trees beyond.
Long afterwards Ste. Marie looked back upon these hours with, among other emotions, a great wonder, at himself and at her. It seemed to him then one of the strangest relationships—intimacies, for it might well be so called—that ever existed between a man and a woman, and he was amazed at the ease, the unconsciousness with which it had come about.
But during this time he did not allow himself to wonder or to examine—scarcely even to think. The hours were golden hours, unrelated, he told himself, to anything else in his life or in his interest. They were like pleasant dreams, very sweet while they endured, but to be put away and forgotten upon the waking. Only, in that long afterwards, he knew that they had not been put away, that they had been with him always, that the morning hour had remained in his thoughts all the rest of the long day, and that he had waked upon the morrow with a keen and exquisite sense of something sweet to come.
It was a strange fool's paradise that the man dwelt in, and in some small vague measure he must, even at the time, have known it, for it is certain that he deliberately held himself away from thought—realisation; that he deliberately shut his eyes, held his ears, lest he should hear or see.