"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.

At times the auctioneer rallied the undecided with coa.r.s.e jokes, and the crowd roared, for they are not burdened with delicacy, these Norman farmers.

"_Allons! Allons!_ my good ladies!" croaked the auctioneer. "Forty sous for the lot. A bed quilt for a princess and a magnificent water filter de luxe that will keep your children well out of the doctor's hands.

_Allons!_ forty sous, forty-one--two?"

A merchant in hogs raised his red, puffy hand, then turned away with a leer as the shrill voice of a fisher woman cried, "Forty-five."

"Sold!" yelped the auctioneer--"sold to madame the widow Dupuis of Hirondelette," who was now elbowing her broad way through the crowd to her bargain which she struggled out with, red and perspiring, to the mud-smeared lawn, where her eldest daughter shrewdly examined the bedquilt for holes.

I turned away when it was all over and followed the crowd out through the gates. Le Gros was climbing into his cart. He was drunk and swearing over the poor result of the sale. De Savignac was still in his debt--and I continued on my way home, feeling as if I had attended an execution.

Half an hour later the sharp bark of my yellow puppy greeted me from beyond my wall. As I entered my courtyard, he came to me wriggling with joy. Suddenly I stopped, for my ear caught the sound of a tail gently patting the straw in the cavernous old stable beyond my spaniel's kennel. I looked in and saw a pair of eyes gleaming like opals in the gloom. Then the tawny body of Mirza, the mother, rose from the straw and came slowly and apologetically toward me with her head lowered.

"Suzette!" I called, "how did she get here?"

"The boy of Monsieur de Savignac brought her an hour ago, monsieur,"

answered the little maid. "There is a note for monsieur. I have left it on the table."

I went in, lighted the fire, and read the following:

"THE GARcONNIeRE, _Sat.u.r.day_.

"Take her, my friend. I can no longer keep her with me. You have the son, it is only right you should have the mother.

We leave for Paris to-morrow. We shall meet there soon, I trust. If you come here, do not bring her with you. I said good-bye to her this morning.

"Jacques de Savignac."

It was all clear to me now--pitifully clear--the garconniere had gone with the rest.

On one of my flying trips to Paris I looked them up in their refuge, in a slit of a street. Here they had managed to live by the strictest economy, in a plain little nest under the roof, composed of two rooms and a closet for a kitchen.

One night, early in June, after some persuasion, I forced him to go with me to one of those sparkling _risquee_ little comedies at the Palais Royal which he loved, and so on to supper at the Cafe de la Paix, where that great gipsy, Boldi, warms the heart with his fiddle.

The opera was just out, when we reached our table, close to the band.

Beauty and the Beast were arriving, and wraps of sheen and lace were being slipped from fair shoulders into the fat waiting hands of the garcons, while the busy maitre d'hotel beamed with his nightly smile and jotted down the orders.

The snug supper room glittered with light, clean linen and s.h.i.+ning gla.s.s. Now that the theatres were out, it had become awake with the chatter with which these little midnight suppers begin--suppers that so often end in confidences, jealousy and even tears, that need only the merriest tone of a gipsy's fiddle to turn to laughter.

Boldi is an expert at this. He watches those to whom he plays, singling out the one who needs his fiddle most, and to-night he was watching de Savignac.

We had finished our steaming dish of lobster, smothered in a spiced sauce that makes a cold dry wine only half quench one's thirst, and were proceeding with a crisp salad when Boldi, with a rus.h.i.+ng crescendo slipped into a delicious waltz. De Savignac now sat with his chin sunk heavily in his hands, drinking in the melody with its spirited accompaniment as the cymballist's flexible hammers flew over the resonant strings, the violins following the master in the red coat, with that keen alertness with which all real gipsies play. I realized now, what the playing of a gipsy meant to him. By the end of the waltz De Savignac's eyes were s.h.i.+ning.

Boldi turned to our table and bowed.