One bright October afternoon she sat upon one of the rough wooden benches facing the wall of the little harbor, watching the progress of a child’s game. There were five players, four of them hard-fisted, mop-headed urchins, with the brown skins and blue eyes that seem indigenous to the island. The fourth was a girl of nine or ten, a pale-faced, black-haired little creature, with a shrewd, selfish manner and a voice of unchildish shrillness. The game had to do with a wedding, of course—all the Guernsey children’s games deal with marriages or christenings—and the song that accompanied it was vocalized with immense vigor and zest by all the performers:
Jean, gros Jean, marryit sa fille,
Grosse et grasse et bie habille.
A un marchand d’sabots;
Radinguette, Radin got!
The verse was repeated with even more shrillness. Then the marriage procession tailed away round the corner with a clattering of little wooden shoes, the sallow-faced girl gallantly supported on the tattered jacket-sleeve of the most bullet-headed of the boys. Fenella laughed, not with the ringing, careless music of the old days, but still sweetly and clearly. She lifted her eyes and met the melancholy glance of a shabby man, a stranger whose attention, like her own, had been attracted by the children.
The man was poorly dressed. He wore an old greatcoat of gray frieze, and a peaked cap shadowed a lean, unshaven, sallow face. The fringes of his ragged trousers fell over broken boots. No scarecrow was ever more dingily attired than this strange man, who now lifted his cap and bowed with something of foreign ceremoniousness, and looked at Fenella out of melancholy, hollow eyes.
“When the heart is heavy, madame, it is good to look at the little people.” He spoke in English fluently, and with a strong French accent. “They are so gay always. They know so little of care. To sing and shout, and jump Gros Jean, that is the business of life. Well! As good a business as any other when all is said and done.”
He shrugged his shoulders and folded his arms upon his hollow chest, shivering as the keen sea breeze crept in at the loopholes of his raggedness, and nipped his gaunt body. He did not beg, or seem about to. The impulse was self-prompted that stretched Fenella’s hand to him with a silver coin in it.
“Take this. You look ill or hungry.”