“There is one thing,” said the Curé, after a pause, “that I have never quite understood, and this is why Monsieur Jean should have been brought up by this English relation?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
“I too have wondered,” he said. “But what will you? The Comte, his guardian, married a rich wife of the bourgeoisie, and they have a large house in Paris and a big income; they have no children of their own. What more likely, it would seem, than that they should adopt Monsieur Jean? In this world, so I take it, what is likely does not happen. Instead, one fine day this English aunt arrives, who knows nothing of our tongue or of our ways, and nothing—it would seem—of children, it is to her, then, that they entrust our little Baron. For myself, I am a philosopher, I have no theories—all I believe is that in the long run nature has her way, and her way is, perhaps, the best; at any rate it is the only one I know.”
“I have always endeavoured to guard him against her errors,” said the Curé; and indeed he had done his best. He had baptized Jean, he had taught him his catechism, and prepared him for confirmation and for his first communion; he had also taught him a little Latin, a great deal of theology, and what he thought was literature. He really believed that Jean thought so too, but then he had watched Jean so carefully and incessantly for twenty years that he knew nothing about him at all. The doctor, who had not seen nearly so much of Jean, understood him a great deal better. He had kept a fresher eye for change.
Both men were silent after this. Little St. Jouin lay in the broiling sun behind them, a small, huddled town in the ancient stubble-fields of the plain. The broad white road, through which life flashed by in swift, infrequent modern traffic, divided it from a fashionable watering-place on the one side and from a commercial seaport on the other. But nobody ever stopped at St. Jouin, there was no reason why they should; it had nothing rare enough about it to ensure its ruin and there was no one to realize that in being so near modernity it had altogether escaped it. Certainly the two figures that plodded along the broad white road had no such fancies; they had no fancies at all. They had lived in St. Jouin nearly all their lives. Monsieur le Curé in particular, with his high, narrow head and irritable, unseeing eyes (the kind of eyes that are always glancing about, driven by a suspicion that there is something wrong to be observed, and overlooking everything else), was not likely to approve of fancies. Why should he? his religion was sufficient for him. He was the most important person in St. Jouin; there was no unbelief there (in spite of the newspapers) and very little faith. Everybody went to church, so that their lives were always under the Curé’s eyes; only their souls escaped him.
The doctor had his ideas, of course, but he was terribly scientific; he had spent a year in Paris thirty years ago, and he took in a Radical newspaper. He thought he was a red-hot Socialist and a cynic, but he was really a very kind-hearted man and treated all his poorest patients free of charge, only he was a little impatient about what he did not understand. He was quite sure that what did not appeal to him personally was either old-fashioned or new-fangled, and when he talked about progress, he meant his own ideas.
The great bell at the Château rang out the hour of noon; it seemed to shake the hot air round them and to keep the silence listening to its deep reverberations. The Curé stopped, crossed himself, and repeated his Ave with bowed head. The doctor, who was a stout man, was glad of the pause, but lest his friend should suppose that he was putting it to a religious purpose, he whistled—at least he tried to; but he was too much out of breath to make a success of it.
Through the opening in the trees beyond them Ucelles itself appeared. It was a long, low house, with a steep, grey roof, in which tiny round windows were thickly set. At a distance it still looked, what it had once been, the chief mansion in the district—the Château of Ucelles. The garden had been allowed to run to seed, but the long avenue of limes approaching the house made stout sentinels for its dignity.
In a small wood of fir and plane trees, close to the house, stood the family chapel; the sun shone through the leaves above it, and the priest and the doctor caught a glimpse through the open grille of a tiny altar covered with fresh flowers. In front of the house stretched an uncultivated meadow, but in the centre a square was trimmed with neat little box hedges, and in the middle of the square was a small pond covered deep with water-lilies. Around it late roses and early chrysanthemums mingled their blooms together.
“He has always kept his mother’s garden gay,” said the Curé approvingly; “and the flowers in the chapel there are fresh. I prefer myself the artificial ones, but we must be indulgent to youth; the Church has always recognized that.”