A man who can discuss an Emperor in such terms is not lightly to be passed by, but I stood as far from him as possible. I did not till then believe that anybody could be as dirty as Father Battin and live.
But he thrust himself close, looking fearfully about him, sinking his voice to a hoarse whisper.
"Did I know the truth about the Martins? That Alice had gone to Révigny? There were soldiers there." He nodded sapiently. "But Alice was la vraie Comtesse de——" He mentioned a hyphenated name. "Yes. It was true. She was married. A young man, a fool. Mon Dieu, but a fool. She might live in a shack in the Bois and her grandmother might be an old peasant woman, but she was a Comtesse, wife of the Comte de——."
I took leave to suppose that Père Battin was mad.
But he was circumstantial. "Yes. Her husband had left her. An affair of a few weeks. Every gendarme in the town knew. And Madame knew. Knew and made money out of it. Many a good franc she had put in her pocket. But the gendarmes were watching, and one day the old woman and Alice would...." Again he murmured unprintable things.
"Monsieur, you are ridiculous." Alice Martin a Comtesse! No wonder I laughed. But he insisted. He kept on repeating it.
"La vraie Comtesse de——" But now she was....
The dark sayings of the district nurse came back to my mind and I wondered. But Père Battin was offensive to ear and eye. I wished him bonjour, watching him trailing down the path, his vache ruminatingly leading, and then went on my way to the wood.
An hour later Madame Martin came running down the hill to greet me. She had seen me go by and waited. In her hand was a bunch of flowers, the best, least discouraged from her untended garden.
"For Mademoiselle," she said, and as she held them out her smile scattered gold dust upon my heart.