It was the second week of October, when I came to Cocheforet, and, dropping down from the last wooded brow, rode quietly into the place at evening. I was alone, and had ridden all day in a glory of ruddy beech leaves, through the silence of forest roads, across clear brooks and glades still green. I had seen more of the quiet and peace of the country than had been my share since boyhood, and for that reason, or because I had no great taste for the task before me—the task now so imminent—I felt a little hipped. In good faith, it was not a gentleman’s work that I was come to do, look at it how you might.
But beggars must not be choosers, and I knew that this feeling would not last. At the inn, in the presence of others, under the spur of necessity, or in the excitement of the chase, were that once begun, I should lose the feeling. When a man is young he seeks solitude, when he is middle-aged, he flies it and his thoughts. I made therefore for the ‘Green Pillar,’ a little inn in the village street, to which I had been directed at Auch, and, thundering on the door with the knob of my riding switch, railed at the man for keeping me waiting.
Here and there at hovel doors in the street—which was a mean, poor place, not worthy of the name—men and women looked out at me suspiciously. But I affected to ignore them; and at last the host came. He was a fair-haired man, half-Basque, half-Frenchman, and had scanned me well, I was sure, through some window or peephole; for when he came out he betrayed no surprise at the sight of a well-dressed stranger—a portent in that out-of-the-way village—but eyed me with a kind of sullen reserve.
‘I can lie here to-night, I suppose?’ I said, dropping the reins on the sorrel’s neck. The horse hung its head.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered stupidly.
I pointed to the green bough which topped a post that stood opposite the door.
‘This is an inn, is it not?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he answered slowly. ‘It is an inn. But—’
‘But you are full, or you are out of food, or your wife is ill, or something else is amiss,’ I answered peevishly. ‘All the same, I am going to lie here. So you must make the best of it, and your wife too—if you have one.’
He scratched his head, looking at me with an ugly glitter in his eyes. But he said nothing, and I dismounted.