“Monsieur honours us,” said Maxime simply, “but Loneliness and Sorrow are an ill pair of friends.”
Hypolite dined with Maxime and La Tristesse, under the vines, with leaves for plates; dined off bread and baked potatoes and little trout from the brook and wild raspberries. “It is poor fare,” said Maxime shyly, “but the air and the sun make it sweet.”
“It is lovely,” answered Hypolite ecstatically. “I should like to have baked potatoes in a little oven and catch little fish for my dinner always. Oh, always.”
“The bread is soft and white,” went on Maxime, “feast-day bread, such as you are used to eating.”
“It is the same as Madame Dulac’s,” said Hypolite with his mouth full.
“It is the same as Madame’s,” repeated Maxime, laughing.
Madame scolded Hypolite for the first time, when she heard where he had been. “It is an ill place,” she cried, “and those who dwell in it have an evil name. That black thing, called a dog, ran and barked at one of Gabrielle’s cows yesterday, and already the cow has sickened. Go not near that La Tristesse, I beg of you, child, nor near her master.”
“La Tristesse is a very nice dog,” repeated Hypolite in the voice of the Gibbses, presenting so stony a front to her shrill vexation that Madame broke into tears and flounced away. When she had gone, Félice slipped over to the child, and, without any change in her small, cold, beautiful face, kissed him. He gasped; feeling as if he had been kissed by a flower, so cool and soft were her lips.
Gabrielle’s cow died, and the whispers against La Tristesse changed to silence, which was a bad sign. Hypolite did not know that there were very few people in Saint Jacques who would have gone to Maxime’s door after dark.
And then the rumours began again, but this time they came from the woods. In the village there was silence and listening. But from the woods there issued a new dread,—a dread of night and loneliness and the sickness that strikes therein. Telephore first put it into words.