The rains, and time, had traced on that glazed surface a sort of blackish stripes, melancholy, melancholy to look at, formed like a V, or like the trembling silhouette of a hovering bird. And the young girl contemplated that wearily every day, every day.
Once, in a very warm springtime, which, in spite of the shadow of the wall, made the roses more advanced than usual, and more spreading, a young man appeared at the farther end of that court, took his place for several evenings at the table of the three ladies without fortune. Passing through the village, he had been recommended by some friends in common, not without arrière-pensée of marriage. He was handsome, with a high-spirited face, browned by the great blowings of the seas.
But he judged it too chimerical, that heritage; he found her too poor, the young girl, in whom, besides, the color began to fade for lack of sunlight.
So he departed, without return, he who had represented there for a time the sun, energy, and life. And she who already looked upon herself as his fiancée received from that departure a dumb and secret feeling as of death.
And the monotonous years continued their march, like the impassive rivers; there passed five; there passed ten, fifteen, even twenty. The freshness of the young girl without fortune finished little by little by fading away, useless and disdained; the mother took on some gray hairs; the old aunt became infirm, shaking her head, octogenarian in a faded armchair, forever seated at the same place, near the darkened window, her venerable profile cut out against the foliage of the court below that background of glazed wall where the blackish marbling accentuated itself in the form of a bird, traced by the sluggish gutters.
In the presence of the wall, of the inexorable wall, they grew old all three. And the rose bushes, the shrubs, grew old, too, with the less ominous age of plants, with their airs of rejuvenation at each return of spring.
"Oh! my daughters, my poor daughters," said the aunt continually in her broken voice that no longer finished the phrase, "provided I live long enough, even I."
And her bony hand, with a movement of menace, indicated that oppressive thing of stone.