“It is strange, though,” said the gardener’s wife in Flemish, standing in the doorway of the chapel and studying, while she shook her duster, the tall pigeon-house in the centre of the courtyard. “The birds have not come back yet. Not a sign of them.”
“They never like it when their house is cleaned out,” responded Philomène, the middle-aged maid-of-all-work, just within the doorway. She, too, had a duster and, perched on a step-ladder insecurely—she weighed, by our English reckoning, a good fifteen stone—was flapping the dust from a tall crucifix nailed above the lintel. “The good man told me he had collected close on two pecks.”
“He is down in the garden digging it in around the roses. He says that it will certainly rain to-night.”
“It has been raining to the southward all the afternoon,” said Philomène, heavily descending her step-ladder and shielding her eyes to stare up at the western window, through the clear quarrels of which the declining sun sent a ray from under heavy clouds. “That will be by reason of the guns.”
“Thunder,” suggested the gardener’s wife.
“The guns bring the thunder; it is well known.” In her girlhood Philomène had been affianced to a young artilleryman; she had lost him at Landrecy twenty-one years ago, and had never since owned another lover or wished for one.
“Ah, well—provided they leave us alone, this time!” sighed the gardener’s wife. She gazed across to the stable-buildings where, by a flight of cup steps leading to the hay-loft, her two children, Jean and Pauline, were busy at play with Antoine, son of a small farmer, whose homestead, scarcely a mile away, aligned the high-road running south from the capital.
The school in the neighbouring village had been closed for two days; and to-morrow, being Sunday, would make a third holiday anyhow. Yesterday Jean and Pauline had been Antoine’s guests at a picnic breakfast in the sand-pit opposite his father’s farm (there were domestic reasons why they could not be entertained in the house), and had spent four blissful hours watching the army—their army, horse, foot, and artillery, all within toss of a biscuit—march past and southward along the chaussée. To-day it was their turn to be hosts; and all the long afternoon, with intervals for light refreshment, the three children had been conducting a series of military operations from the orchard-hedge through the orchard, across a sunken ditch, through the terraced garden (with circumspection here, for the gardener was swift to detect and stern to avenge paternally any footmark on his beds), through the small fruit-garden (where it was forbidden to eat the under-ripe currants), the barnyard, among the haystacks, the outbuildings, to the courtyard and a grand finale on the stable steps. Here Napoleon (Antoine, in a cocked hat of glazed paper) was making a last desperate stand on the stair-head, with his back to the door of the loft and using the broken half of a flail en moulinet to ward off a combined “kill” by the Prince of Orange (Jean) and the British Army (Pauline). Jean wielded a hoe and carried a wooden sword in an orange-coloured scarf strapped as waistband around his blouse. But Pauline made the most picturesque figure by far. She had kilted her petticoat high, and gartered her stocking low, exposing her knees. On her head through the heat of action she carried an old muff strapped under her chin with twine. Her right hand menaced the Corsican with a broomstick; her left arm she held crooked, working the elbow against her hip while her mouth uttered discordant sounds as a bagpipe.
“Pauline—Pauline!” called her mother. “Mais, tais-toi donc—c’est à tue-tête! Et d’ailleurs nu-genoux! C’n’est pas sage, ça....”
“C’est le pibrock, maman,” called back the child, desisting for a moment. “J’suis Ecossaise, voilà!”