Part 23 (1/2)

”Upstairs, making her bed--another dry day,” he muttered, half to himself, half to me.

”She will stay dry for some days,” I returned. ”The wind is well set from the northeast.”

”_Sacristi!_ a dirty time,” he growled. ”My steers are as dry as an empty cask.”

”I'd like a little rain myself,” said I, reaching for a chair--”I have a young dog to train--a spaniel Monsieur de Savignac has been good enough to give me. He is too young to learn to follow a scent on dry ground.”

Le Gros raised his bull-like head with a jerk.

”De Savignac gave you a _dog_, did he? and he has a dog to give away, has he?”

The words came out of his coa.r.s.e throat with a snarl.

I dropped the chair and faced him.

(He is the only man in Pont du Sable that I positively dislike.)

”Yes,” I declared, ”he gave me a dog. May I ask you what business it is of yours?”

A flash of sullen rage illumined for a moment the face of the cattle dealer. Then he muttered something in his peasant accent and sat glowering into his empty coffee cup as I turned and left the room, my mind reverting to Madame de Savignac's door which his coa.r.s.e hand had closed with a vicious snap.

We took the short cut across the fields often now--my yellow puppy and I. Indeed I grew to see these good friends of mine almost daily, and as frequently as I could persuade them, they came to my house abandoned by the marsh.

The Peruvian gentleman's boarding house had been a failure, and I learned from the cure that the de Savignacs were hard pressed to pay their creditors.

It was Le Gros who held the mortgage, I further gleaned.

And yet those two dear people kept a brave heart. They were still giving what they had, and she kept him in ignorance as best she could, softening the helplessness of it all, with her gentleness and her courage.

In his vague realization that the end was near, there were days when he forced himself into a gay mood and would come chuckling down the lane to open the gate for me, followed by Mirza, the tawny old mother of my puppy, who kept her faithful brown eyes on his every movement. Often it was she who sprang nimbly ahead and unlatched the gate for me with her paw and muzzle, an old trick he had taught her, and he would laugh when she did it, and tell me there were no dogs nowadays like her.

Thus now and then he forced himself to forget the swarm of little miseries closing down upon him--forgot even his aches and pains, due largely to the dampness of the vine-smothered garconniere whose old-fas.h.i.+oned interior smelt of cellar damp, for there was hardly a room in it whose wall paper had escaped the mould.

It was not until March that the long-gathering storm broke--as quick as a crackling lizard of lightning strikes. Le Gros had foreclosed the mortgage.

The Chateau of Hirondelette was up for sale.

When de Savignac came out to open the gate for me late that evening his face was as white as the palings in the moonlight.

”Come in,” said he, forcing a faint laugh---he stopped for a moment as he closed and locked the gate--labouring painfully for his breath. Then he slipped his arm under my own. ”Come along,” he whispered, struggling for his voice. ”I have found another bottle of Musigny.”

A funeral, like a wedding or an accident, is quickly over. The sale of de Savignac's chateau consumed three days of agony.

As I pa.s.sed the ”garconniere” by the lane beyond the courtyard on my way to the last day's sale, I looked over the hedge and saw that the shutters were closed--farther on, a doctor's gig was standing by the gate. From a bent old peasant woman in sabots and a white cap, who pa.s.sed, I learned which of the two was ill. It was as I had feared--his wife. And so I continued on my way to the sale.

As I pa.s.sed through the gates of the chateau, the rasping voice of the lean-jawed auctioneer reached my ears as he harangued in the drizzling rain before the steps of the chateau the group of peasants gathered before him--widows in rusty crepe veils, shrewd old Norman farmers in blue blouses looking for bargains, their carts wheeled up on the mud-smeared lawn. And a few second-hand dealers from afar, in black derbys, lifting a dirty finger to close a bid for mahogany.

Close to this sordid crowd on the mud-smeared lawn sat Le Gros, his heavy body sunk in a carved and gilded arm-chair that had once graced the boudoir of Madame de Savignac. As I pa.s.sed him, I saw that his face was purple with drink. He sat there the picture of insolent ignorance, this pig of a peasant.