Hypolite ran about the straggling village and made friends with the children; and climbed the little hill beyond the Calvary, and looked at the great river running to the sea, wishing he might follow it.
“There are many nice things here,” he said, invading the kitchen for cakes, “and nice people. André is nice and Telephore is nice, and so is m’sieur le curé. But Maxime is nicest. I went to-day to see him. He lives in a little cabin all covered with vines, and he has two fields covered with mustard and flowers. He is tall and he has blue eyes. I picked some of his flowers and he came out and talked to me, and told me his name and I told him mine. Then his dog came out, his black big dog he calls Sorrow,—La Tristesse. Why does he call it La Tristesse? It is a nice dog and licked my hands.”
Madame looked up from her cake and crossed herself, with wide eyes. “Hast thou made friends with Sorrow, mon petit?” she asked, gazing at him strangely. “I am grieved. Maxime and La Tristesse are not for thee.”
“It is a very nice dog,” said Hypolite, in the gruff tone that was his sole heritage from the Gibbses. Félice was beating eggs at the table. Her long gray eyes turned lazily towards the child, and then were bent upon her bowl again. Her wrists fascinated Hypolite as she whipped the froth, they were so small and strong and firm, sunburned to a creamy brown. He watched them while he ate the cake, and wondered what her cold eyes had tried to tell him.
“Why am I not to make friends with Maxime’s La Tristesse?” he demanded of old Telephore.
Telephore stared at him as Madame had done, and made the little sign against evil. “La Tristesse?” he said. “La Tristesse? If you make friends with Sorrow, Sorrow will abide with you.”
“But she has not abided with me,” put in Hypolite patiently, “she abides with Maxime.”
Telephore crossed his scarred, knotted hands upon the haft of the axe and leaned his chin upon them. “Not always,” he said in a low voice, “ah! not always. Henri l’Ecossais, he was a strong man last Michaelmas. He stopped to speak with Maxime at his door, and patted on the head that La Tristesse, brute of ill name and ill omen. And she, that La Tristesse, she follows him home, beating with her tail and begging him to look at her, as some dogs will. And he laughs, and gives her bones, and she sleeps a night in his stable. In the morning she goes home, drifting like a black ghost down the road. And Henri, little monsieur, what of Henri? In three days, look you, he is seized with a chill and a weariness, and in a week he is dead,—mon Dieu!—dead! And that is not all. If I had my will, Maxime and La Tristesse should be—eh! sent from here.”
Telephore’s face was as superstitious and cruel as the faces of some of Millett’s peasants, and he muttered to himself as the bright blade of his axe fell upon the wood, and the sweet white chips flew in showers like a tiny snowstorm.
“But that is all foolishness,” said the round-eyed Hypolite, in the lordly tone Saint Jacques de Kilkenny had taught him. “La Tristesse is a nice dog, though she is long and black and cries with her eyes. Once I had a little guinea-pig, un cochon d’Inde, black as Sorrow; but it died of an indigestion.”