And Rene du Treilles suddenly exclaimed:
"I love this soil; I have my very roots in it."
He was a pure Norman, tall and strong, with a slight paunch, and of the old race of adventurers who went to found kingdoms on the sh.o.r.es of every ocean. He was about fifty years of age, ten years less perhaps than the farmer who was driving us.
The latter was a lean peasant, all skin and bone, one of those men who live a hundred years.
After two hours" travelling over stony roads, across that green and monotonous plain, the vehicle entered one of those orchard farmyards and drew up before in old structure falling into decay, where an old maid-servant stood waiting beside a young fellow, who took charge of the horse.
We entered the farmhouse. The smoky kitchen was high and s.p.a.cious. The copper utensils and the crockery shone in the reflection of the hearth. A cat lay asleep on a chair, a dog under the table. One perceived an odor of milk, apples, smoke, that indescribable smell peculiar to old farmhouses; the odor of the earth, of the walls, of furniture, the odor of spilled stale soup, of former wash-days and of former inhabitants, the smell of animals and of human beings combined, of things and of persons, the odor of time, and of things that have pa.s.sed away.
I went out to have a look at the farmyard. It was very large, full of apple trees, dwarfed and crooked, and laden with fruit which fell on the gra.s.s around them. In this farmyard the Norman smell of apples was as strong as that of the bloom of orange trees on the sh.o.r.es of the south of France.
Four rows of beeches surrounded this inclosure. They were so tall that they seemed to touch the clouds at this hour of nightfall, and their summits, through which the night winds pa.s.sed, swayed and sang a mournful, interminable song.
I reentered the house.
The baron was warming his feet at the fire, and was listening to the farmer"s talk about country matters. He talked about marriages, births and deaths, then about the fall in the price of grain and the latest news about cattle. The "Veularde" (as he called a cow that had been bought at the fair of Veules) had calved in the middle of June. The cider had not been first-cla.s.s last year. Apricots were almost disappearing from the country.
Then we had dinner. It was a good rustic meal, simple and abundant, long and tranquil. And while we were dining I noticed the special kind of friendly familiarity which had struck me from the start between the baron and the peasant.
Outside, the beeches continued sighing in the night wind, and our two dogs, shut up in a shed, were whining and howling in an uncanny fashion. The fire was dying out in the big fireplace. The maid-servant had gone to bed. Maitre Lebrument said in his turn:
"If you don"t mind, M"sieu le Baron, I"m going to bed. I am not used to staying up late."
The baron extended his hand toward him and said: "Go, my friend," in so cordial a tone that I said, as soon as the man had disappeared:
"He is devoted to you, this farmer?"
"Better than that, my dear fellow! It is a drama, an old drama, simple and very sad, that attaches him to me. Here is the story:
"You know that my father was colonel in a cavalry regiment. His orderly was this young fellow, now an old man, the son of a farmer. When my father retired from the army he took this former soldier, then about forty; as his servant. I was at that time about thirty. We were living in our old chateau of Valrenne, near Caudebec-en-Caux.
"At this period my mother"s chambermaid was one of the prettiest girls you could see, fair-haired, slender and sprightly in manner, a genuine soubrette of the old type that no longer exists. To-day these creatures spring up into hussies before their time. Paris, with the aid of the railways, attracts them, calls them, takes hold of them, as soon as they are budding into womanhood, these little s.l.u.ts who in old times remained simple maid-servants. Every man pa.s.sing by, as recruiting sergeants did formerly, looking for recruits, with conscripts, entices and ruins them -these foolish la.s.sies-and we have now only the sc.u.m of the female s.e.x for servant maids, all that is dull, nasty, common and ill-formed, too ugly, even for gallantry.
"Well, this girl was charming, and I often gave her a kiss in dark corners; nothing more, I swear to you! She was virtuous, besides; and I had some respect for my mother"s house, which is more than can be said of the blackguards of the present day.
"Now, it happened that my man-servant, the ex-soldier, the old farmer you have just seen, fell madly in love with this girl, perfectly daft. The first thing we noticed was that he forgot everything, he paid no attention to anything.
"My father said incessantly:
""See here, Jean, what"s the matter with you? Are you ill?"
"He replied:
""No, no, M"sieu le Baron. There"s nothing the matter with me."
"He grew thin; he broke gla.s.ses and let plates fall when waiting on the table. We thought he must have been attacked by some nervous affection, and sent for the doctor, who thought he could detect symptoms of spinal disease. Then my father, full of anxiety about his faithful man-servant, decided to place him in a private hospital. When the poor fellow heard of my father"s intentions he made a clean breast of it.
""M"sieu le Baron"
""Well, my boy?"
""You see, the thing I want is not physic."
""Ha! what is it, then?"
""It"s marriage!"
"My father turned round and stared at him in astonishment.
""What"s that you say, eh?"
""It"s marriage."
""Marriage! So, then, you jacka.s.s, you"re to love."
""That"s how it is, M"sieu le Baron."
"And my father began to laugh so immoderately that my mother called out through the wall of the next room:
""What in the world is the matter with you, Gontran?"
"He replied:
""Come here, Catherine."
"And when she came in he told her, with tears in his eyes from sheer laughter, that his idiot of a servant-man was lovesick.
"But my mother, instead of laughing, was deeply affected.
""Who is it that you have fallen in love with, my poor fellow?" she asked.
"He answered without hesitation:
""With Louise, Madame le Baronne."
"My mother said with the utmost gravity: "We must try to arrange this matter the best way we can."
"So Louise was sent for and questioned by my mother; and she said in reply that she knew all about Jean"s liking for her, that in fact Jean had spoken to her about it several times, but that she did not want him. She refused to say why.
"And two months elapsed during which my father and mother never ceased to urge this girl to marry Jean. As she declared she was not in love with any other man, she could not give any serious reason for her refusal. My father at last overcame her resistance by means of a big present of money, and started the pair of them on a farm-this very farm. I did not see them for three years, and then I learned that Louise had died of consumption. But my father and mother died, too, in their turn, and it was two years more before I found myself face to face with Jean.
"At last one autumn day about the end of October the idea came into my head to go hunting on this part of my estate, which my father had told me was full of game.
"So one evening, one wet evening, I arrived at this house. I was shocked to find my father"s old servant with perfectly white hair, though he was not more than forty-five or forty-six years of age. I made him dine with me, at the very table where we are now sitting. It was raining hard. We could hear the rain battering at the roof, the walls, and the windows, flowing in a perfect deluge into the farmyard; and my dog was howling in the shed where the other dogs are howling to-night.
"All of a sudden, when the servant-maid had gone to bed, the man said in a timid voice: