Sweethearts at Home

by S. R. Crockett

Specially interesting is the opposite side of the lake, for there the Cantons push forward their narrow necks of territory to the very lake shore—possibly as the price of their support against the Eagles of the North, whose claws have never let go their hold but this once. There, within a day's easy walk, you can pass from Canton Vaud into Canton Friburg and back again into Vaud. Then, Morat-way, you come on a little inset square of Canton Berne, whose emblematic bears also have their claws in every pie thereabout. And all the way, never a hotel for the fleecing of the foreigner! Here and there, indeed, one passes a country inn with sanded floor. More often it is only a rather superior house with a bush hung out French-fashion over the threshold.

It is best, as Sweetheart and I found, to make for one of these. Generally I had known them of old, and though since then the years had done some stiff route-marching, most of their hosts and hostesses remembered me.

How do you get there? Well, you cross the lake almost at its narrowest part. A little stream drains into it, slowly and in Dutch fashion, as if it were smoking a peaceful pipe by the way. Indeed, for a little while you might fancy yourself actually in Holland, so thickly are the flowers set. Only—only (and oh! the difference!) they are all wild. For I cannot help my heart beating faster when I set foot on any of the untrodden places of the earth, when I know that the next person I meet will be different from anybody I have ever met before—that he will be as frankly interested and very likely amused by me as I am by the moldy and the quaint about him—things that nobody in his senses has ever thought of looking at in that countryside for a hundred years! Privately there is often a quiet, widespread, wholly unspoken doubt of my entire sanity. That dry smile hovering about the mouth of the courteous mayor of the commune says as much. Just the same with the quick, intelligent glance that shoots betwixt husband and wife when you ask to see their barn—once the chapel of a long-destroyed monastery (Carthusians from the Italian valleys driven out by the religious wars). To them it is a barn, commodious—only a little damp. But it is nothing more. A new model one, now—all burnt brick, floor of concrete, with iron roof pillars—now that would be something worth crossing the lake to look at. Hold—there is one at Estavayer! The farmer there would be glad to show it, if only Monsieur and the young lady...? No! Well, there is no accounting for tastes, and that shrug from Master Pierre said quite plainly that he had the poorest opinion of our mental capacity. But all the same Master Pierre is kind to the infirm—to those (as the Catechism says) "of weaker understanding."

Yes, there is the key. We can take our own time, and when we have done we can hang it up where we got it.

But good Master Pierre is curious too. Where might we be going? If it is a fair question—or, indeed, whether or not! "To Madame Marie Brigue's!" "Yes, but certainly!" "Had we known Madame Marie long?" The Elder of us had known her for some twenty years or more.

"When she was with old Monsieur Alexander—yes, at the Upper Riffel House, and everything in her charge?" Sanity was returned to us like a passport examined doubtfully. We should not this time be committed to a House of Retreat for the mentally infirm—no, not if fifty doctors, all specialists, had so certified. We knew Madame Marie! Master Pierre would lay aside everything and come with us. It was not possible that we could know the way.

I thanked Master Pierre, but for my own reasons preferred to go alone—that is to say, alone with Sweetheart, which is the best kind of loneliness.

"There is going to be a storm!" I said to my Maid, as we paced along side by side. Sweetheart looked at the cloudless September sky, at the boldly-designed splashes of the leaf-shadows making Japanese patterns on the narrow path through the wood. Then she regarded me inquiringly. Of a storm in the heaven above or on the earth beneath there was certainly no visible sign.

Then I explained that the tempest was a moral one, and would certainly break when we met in with Madame Marie. And I set her this riddle to read, for she is fond of such.

I had always been first favorite with Madame Marie. She had spoiled me as a wandering boy. She has assisted me as a callow youth to the sweetmeats under her control. In my earlier manhood she had taken me to see her brother, who was a curé of a great parish in the Valais.