Madeleine, gray-eyed, her mouth a straight line, her hands crossed over the little bag that contained the day’s takings, stared at him between the eyes a full half-minute. Then she said:
“Ah, I sympathize with you. Good evening, Monsieur Blanquart.”
She went away thinking, and thought to some effect.
* * * *
First, a refugee Belgian family was installed in the derelict “Lion of Flanders,” where they all lived in the dining-room round the stove, boarded up the big windows, and got jobs in the village. Then Madeleine was seen in earnest consultation with Blanquart. Finally it was known that she had got a job in a Government office at Amiens, from which the men had just been combed out.
“Tiens!” said the gossips. “Cécile Blanquart first, now Madeleine Vanderlynden. Who next?”
The formalities took a week. Then Madeleine emerged with the papers of her appointment in her hands. She went first to the “Lion of Flanders” and told the refugee family in no equivocal terms, how, when and where to pay their rent to Marie. Leaving them in a state of guttural exclamation, half gratefulness, half apprehension, she turned for a moment into the church, and stood by the high-backed prie-Dieu that bore the initials V.D.—Vanderlynden-Del-place—staring at the gimcrack ornaments of the altar, the eternal childish innocence of the Catholic Church decoration. Old Justine Schact was fidgeting about her verger’s duties. Birds scuffled in the belfry as the chimes played their verse and a half of hymn tune that marked the quarter hour.
Madeleine’s lips, set by habit to utter a prayer in those surroundings, formed something like this: “Saint Madeleine, out of your divine pity, grant me that I may see him, then it will be all right!” Her lips ceased to move. In her unbowed head, her steady eyes took on the gleam of frosted marsh-pools. She squared her fine shoulders and clasped her large, capable hands on the chair-back. She might have been an allegory of indomitable Flanders. There was no mistaking the glance she bent on the altar. It said, “Saint Madeleine, if you don’t....” But the threat was never articulated. She turned and walked out, erect and sure-footed. At the farm she told her father what time to put the horse in, and when it came, appeared from her room, her canvas-covered wooden box locked and corded. She made her adieu thus shortly:
“Good-bye, Marie, what luck you came. I can go with a tranquil heart. Berthe will help you well. Good-by, Berthe. Good-by, Emilienne, I will send you a pretty postcard!” To the old house in which she and her father, and no one knows how many ancestors had been born, in which her mother had died, not a look. Either it was too familiar, or simply did not appeal to her. To the Kruysabel where she had known her brief hours of bliss—not a look. She was going to something better. Or perhaps, in her narrow personal way, she felt that these things were part of her, and that, so far as they existed, they went with her.
At the station, standing beside her box as the train came in, she turned with real affection to her father, probably the one being in the world she thoroughly understood and sympathized with. But she only said, “Au revoir, Father,” and he only replied, “Au revoir, my girl.” Then with a hoist of strong arms and legs, she was into the train, after which the old man stood a moment, staring. But she was already settling herself in her place, taking stock of her neighbors, girding herself for her new campaign.