Madame mused too. But the necessity, forced upon her early in married life with the Baron, of shutting one’s eyes and ears to what men did and said about women, prevented her connecting Madeleine’s composure with her own family. She could only fall back on her stock complaint.
“She will never be like her mother, that poor Sylvie!”
But irritation had supervened with the Baron: “You’re not obliged to receive the girl!”
“One has to do what one can for one’s people. They wouldn’t like it if one didn’t say a word to them when they come with things.”
“Do what you like so long as I have hare pâté,” yawned the Baron. “Ugh, this war, I do nothing but yawn and sleep!”
“I pray!” said Madame to herself, and rose to go to the little “chapel” in the turn of the stairs to do so.
* * * *
Madeleine had no theory of the Irony of Fate. She had a merely hard experience of it, gained from watching crops and prices. Reassured as to Georges’ safety by what she had heard at the château, she took what comfort she could.
Three days after her visit, she was sewing and mending by the kitchen stove, using the light of the dying sunset to the last glimmer. There were no English troops in the farm on that day, and outside were the sounds of her father putting up the horses, on a background of damp late-autumn silence, and behind that, the muffled vibration of the eternal battle, that made the window-panes tremble ever so little.
Suddenly there came the sound of whistling—the last bars of the well-worn tune: