"With the peasant of the Cevennes (M. Fabre tells us) the meal is what nature meant it to be—a few moments for self-recovery after fatigue, a short space of silence of a quite elevated character, almost sacred. The poor human creature has given the sweat of his brow to extort from an ungrateful soil his daily bread; and now he eats that well-savoured bread in silent self-respect.
"'It is a weary thing to be thinking always of one's work (says the grand to the somewhat sparing Norine). We must also think of our sustenance. You are too enduring, my child! it is a mistake to demand so much of your arms. In truth, le bon Dieu has cut you out after the pattern of your dead father. Every morning, in my prayers, I put in my complaint thereanent. My poor boy died from going too fast. He could never sit still when it was a question of gathering a few sous from the [128] fields; and those fields took and consumed him.'"
The boy fancies that the blind eyes are turned towards a particular spot in the landscape, as if they saw:—
"'I often turn my eyes in that direction (the old man explains) from habit. One might suppose that a peasant had the scent of the earth on which he has laboured. I have given so much of the sweat of my brow—there—towards Rocaillet! Angélique, my dead wife, was of Rocaillet; and when she married me, brought a few morsels of land in her apron. What a state they're in now!—those poor morsels of land we used to weed and rake and hoe, my boy and I! What superb crops of vetches we mowed then, for feeding, in due time, our lambs, our calves! All is gone to ruin since my blindness, and especially since Angélique left me for the churchyard, never to come back.' He paused to my great relief. For every one of those phrases he modulated under the fig-trees more sadly than the Lamentations of Jeremiah on Jeudi Saint overset me—was like death."
[129] That is good drawing, in its simple and quiet way! The actual scene, however, is cheerful enough on this early summer day—a symphony, as we said, in cherries and goldfinches, in which the higher valleys of the Cevennes abound. In fact, the boys witness the accordailles, the engagement, of Norine and Justin Lebasset. The latter is calling the birds to sing good luck to the event:—
"He had a long steady look towards the fruit-trees, and then whistled, on a note at once extremely clear and extremely soft. He paused, watched awhile, recommenced. The note became more rapid, more sonorous. What an astounding man he was, this Justin Lebasset! Upright, his red beard forward, his forehead thrown back, his eyes on the thick foliage of the cherry-trees, his hands on his haunches, in an attitude of repose, easy, superb, he was like some youthful pagan god, gilded with red gold, on his way across the country—like Pan, if he chose to amuse himself by charming birds. You should have seen the enthusiastic glances with which Norine watched him. Upright—she too, slim, at full height, inclining from [130] time to time towards Justin with a movement of irresistible fascination, she followed the notes of her mate; and sometimes, her, lips half opening, added thereto a sigh—something of a sigh, an aspiration, a prayer, towards the goldfinch, withdrawn into the shadows.
"The leaves were shaken in the clear, burning green; and, on a sudden, a multitude of goldfinches, the heads red in the wind, the wings half spread, were fluttering from branch to branch. I could have fancied, amid the quivering of the great bunches of fruit, that they were cherries on the wing. Justin suffered his pipe to die away: the birds were come at his invitation, and performed their prelude."
It is forty years afterwards that the narrator, now a man of letters in Paris, writes to his old friend, with tidings of Justin and Norine:—
"In 1842 (he observes) you were close on fifteen; I scarcely twelve. In my eyes your age made you my superior. And then, you were so strong, so tender, so amiteux, to use a word from up there—a charming word. And so God, Who had His designs for you, whereas I, in spite of my pious childhood, wandered on [131] my way as chance bade me, led you by the hand, attached, ended by keeping you for Himself. He did well truly when He chose you and rejected me!"
His finding the pair in the wilds of Paris is an adventure, in which, in fact, a goldfinch again takes an important part—a goldfinch who is found to understand the Cevenol dialect:—