Between Whiles Part 6

"Indeed, that is a good song," she said to herself, "but it fitteth not my singing. I make choice for whom I sing; I am not minded so to give pleasure to all the world."

She racked her brains to recall some song which would be as pertinent a reply to Willan's song as his had been to hers; but she could think of none. She was vexed; for the romance of this conversing by means of songs pleased her mightily. At last, half in earnest and half in fun, she struck boldly into a measure on which she would hardly have ventured could she have seen the serious and tender expression on the face of her listener under the pear-tree. As Willan caught line after line of the rollicking measure, his countenance changed.

"An elfish mood is upon her," he thought. "She doth hold herself so safe in her chamber that she may venture on words she had not sung nearer at hand. She is not without mischief in her blood, no doubt." And Willan's own look began to grow less reverential and more eager as he listened.

"The bee is a fool in the summer; He knows it when summer is flown: He might, for all good of his honey, As well have let flowers alone.

"The b.u.t.terfly, he is the wiser; He uses his wings when they 're grown; He takes his delight in the summer, And dies when the summer is done.

"A heart is a weight in the bosom; A heart can be heavy as stone: Oh, what is the use of a lover?

A maiden is better alone."

Victorine was a little frightened herself, as she sang this last stanza.

However, she said to herself: "I will bear me so discreetly at supper that the man shall doubt his very ears if he have ever heard me sing such words or not. It is well to perplex a man. The more he be perplexed, the more he meditateth on thee; and the more he meditateth on thee, the more his desire will grow, if it have once taken root."

A very wise young lady in her generation was this graduate of a convent where no men save priests ever came!

Just as Victorine had sung the last verse of her song, she heard the sound of wheels and voices on the road. Victor and Jeanne were coming home. Willan heard the sounds also, and slowly arose from the ground and sauntered into the courtyard. He had an instinct that it would be better not to be seen under the pear-tree.

Great was the satisfaction of Victor and Jeanne when they found that Willan Blaycke was a guest in the inn; still greater when they learned that he would be kept there for at least two days by the lameness of his horse.

"Thou need'st not make great haste with the healing of the beast," said Victor to Benoit; "it might be a good turn to keep the man here for a s.p.a.ce." And the master exchanged one significant glance with his man, and saw that he need say no more.

There was no such specific understanding between Jeanne and Victorine.

From some perverse and roguish impulse the girl chose to take no counsel in this game she had begun to play; but each woman knew that the other comprehended the situation perfectly.

When Victorine came into the dining-room to serve Willan Blaycke's supper, she looked, to his eyes, prettier than ever. She wore the same white gown and black silk ap.r.o.n with crimson lace she had worn before.

Her cheeks and her eyes were bright from the excitement of the serenading and counter-serenading in which she had been engaged. Her whole bearing was an inimitable blending of shyness and archness, tempered by almost reverential respect. Willan Blaycke would have been either more or less than mortal man if he had resisted it. He did not,--he succ.u.mbed then and there and utterly to his love for Victorine; and the next morning when breakfast was ready he electrified Victor Dubois by saying, with a not wholly successful attempt at jocularity,--

"Look you! your man tells me I am like to be kept here a matter of some three days or more, before my horse be fit to bear me. Now, it irks me to be the cause of so much trouble, seeing that I am the only traveller in the house. I pray you that I may sit down with you all at meal-times, as is your wont, and that you make no change in the manner of your living by reason of my being in the house. I shall be better pleased so."

There was about as much command as request in Willan's manner; and after some pretended hesitancy Victor yielded, only saying, by way of breaking down the last barrier,--

"My daughter hath desired not to see thee. I know not how she may take this request of thine; it seemeth but reasonable unto me, and it will be that saving of work for her. I think she may consent."

Nothing but her love for Victorine would have induced Jeanne to sit again at meat with her stepson, but for Victorine's sake Jeanne would have done much harder things; and indeed, after the first few moments of awkwardness had pa.s.sed by, she found that she was much less uncomfortable in Willan's presence than she had antic.i.p.ated.

Willan's own manner did much to bring this about. He was so deeply in love with Victorine that it had already transformed his sentiments on most points, and on none more than in regard to Jeanne. He thought no better of her character than he had thought before; but he found himself frequently recollecting, as he had never done before, or at least had never done in a kindly way, that, after all, she had been his father's wife for ten years, and it would perhaps have been a more dignified thing in him to have attempted to make her continue in a style of living suitable to his father's name than to have relegated her, as he had done, to her original and lower social station.

Jeanne's behavior towards him was very judicious. Affection is the best teacher of tact in many an emergency in life; we see it every day among ignorant and untaught people.

Jeanne knew, or felt without knowing, that the less she appeared to be conscious of anything unusual or unpleasant in this resumption of familiar relations on the surface, between herself and Willan, the more free his mind would be to occupy itself with Victorine; and she acted accordingly. She never obtruded herself on his attention; she never betrayed any antagonism toward him, or any recollection of the former and different footing on which they had lived. A stranger sitting at the table would not have dreamed, from anything in her manner to him, that she had ever occupied any other position than that of the landlord's daughter and landlady of the inn.

A clear-sighted observer looking on at affairs in the Golden Pear for the next three days would have seen that all the energies of both Victor and Jeanne were bent to one end,--namely, leaving the coast clear for Willan Blaycke to fall in love with Victorine. But all that Willan thought was that Victor and his daughter were far quieter and modester people than he had supposed, and seemed disposed to keep themselves to themselves in a most proper fas.h.i.+on. It never crossed his mind that there was anything odd in his finding Victorine so often and so long alone in the living-room; in the uniform disappearance of both Victor and Jeanne at an early hour in the evening. Willan was too much in love to wonder at or disapprove of anything which gave him an opportunity of talking with Victorine, or, still better, of looking at her.

What he liked best was silently to watch her as she moved about, doing her light duties in her own graceful way. He was not a voluble lover; he was still too much bewildered at his own condition. Moreover, he had not yet shaken himself free from the tormenting disapproval of his conscience; he lost sight of that very fast, however, as the days sped on. Victorine played her cards most admirably. She did not betray even by a look that she understood that he loved her; she showed towards him an open and honest admiration, and an eager interest in all that he said or did,--an almost affectionate good-will, too, in serving his every want, and trying to make the time of his detention pa.s.s pleasantly to him.

"It must be a sore trial, sir, for thee to be kept in a poor place like this so many days. Benoit says that he thinks not thy horse can go safely for yet some days," she said to Willan one morning. "Would it amuse thee to ride over to Pierre Gaspard's mill to-day? If thou couldst abide the gait of my grandfather's nag, I might go on my pony, and show thee the way. The river is high now, and it is a fair sight to see the white blossoms along the banks."

Cunning Victorine! She had all sorts of motives in this proposition. She thought it would be well to show Willan Blaycke to Pierre. "He may discover that there are other men beside himself in the world," she mused; and, "It would please me much to go riding up to the door for Annette to see with the same brave rider she did so admire;" and, "There are many ways to bring a man near one in riding through the woods." All these and many more similar musings lay hid behind the innocent look she lifted to Willan's face as she suggested the ride.

It was only the third morning of Willan's stay at the inn; but the time had been put to very good use. Already it had become natural to him to come and go with Victorine,--to stay where she was, to seek her if she were missing. Already he had learned the way up the outside staircase to the platform where she kept her flowers and sometimes sat. He was living in a dream,--going the way of all men, head-long, blindfold, into a life of which he knew and could know nothing.

"Indeed, and that is what I should like best of all things," he replied to Victorine. "Will thy aunt let thee go?"

"Why not?" asked Victorine, opening her eyes wide in astonishment. "I ride all over the parish on my pony alone."

"Stupid of me!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Willan, inwardly: "as if these people could know any scruples about etiquette!"

"These people," as Willan contemptuously called them, stood at the door of the inn, and watched him riding away with Victorine with hardly disguised exultation. Not till the riders were fairly out of sight did Victor venture to turn his face toward Jeanne's. Then, bursting into a loud laugh, he clapped Jeanne on the shoulder, and said: "We'll see thee grandmother of thy husband's grandchildren yet, Jeanne. Ha! ha!"

Jeanne flushed. She was not without a sense of shame. Her love for Victorine made her sensitive to the stain on her birth.

"Thinkest thou it could ever be known?" she asked anxiously.

"Never," replied her father,--"never; 'tis as safe as if we were all dead. And for that, the living are safer than the dead, if there be tight enough lock on their mouths."

"He doth seem to be as much in love as one need," said Jeanne.

"Ay," said Victor, "more than ever his father was with thee."

"Canst thou not let that alone?" said Jeanne, angrily. "Surely it is long enough gone by, and small profit came of it."

"Not so, not so, daughter," replied Victor, soothingly; "if we can but set the girl in thy shoes, thou didst not wear thine for nought, even though they pinched thee for a time."

"That they did," retorted Jeanne; "it gives me a cramp now but to remember them."

Willan and Victorine galloped merrily along the river road. The woods were sweet with spring fragrances; great thickets of dogwood trees were white with flowers; mossy hillocks along the roadside were pink with the dainty bells of the Linnaea. The road was little more than a woodman's path, and curved now right, now left, in seeming caprice; now forded a stream, now came out into a cleared field, again plunged back into dense groves of larch and pine.

"Never knew I that the woods were so beautiful thus early in the year,"

said the honest Willan.

"Nor I, till to-day," said the artful Victorine, who knew well enough what Willan did not know himself.

"Dost thou ride here alone?" asked Willan. "It is a wild place for thee to be alone."

"If I came not alone, I could not come at all," replied Victorine, sorrowfully. "My grandfather is too busy, and my aunt likes not to ride except she must, on a market day or to go to church. No one but thou hast ever walked or ridden with me," she added in a low voice, sighing; "and now after two days or three thou wilt be gone."

Willan sighed also, but did not speak. The words, "I will always ride by thy side, Victorine," were on his lips, but he felt himself still withheld from speaking them.

The visit at the mill was unsatisfactory. The elder Gaspard was away, and young Pierre was curt and surly. The sight of Victorine riding familiarly, and with an evident joyous pride, by the side of one of the richest men in the country, and a young man at that,--and a young man, moreover, who looked and behaved as if he were in love with his companion,--how could the poor miller be expected to be cordial and unconstrained with such a sight before his eyes! Annette also was more overawed even than Victorine had desired she should be by the sight of the handsome stranger,--so overawed, and withal perhaps a little curious, that she was dumb and awkward; and as for _Mere_ Gaspard, she never under any circ.u.mstances had a word to say. So the visit was very stupid, and everybody felt ill at ease,--especially Willan, who had lost his temper in the beginning at a speech of Pierre's to Victorine, which seemed to his jealous sense too familiar.

"I thought thou never wouldst take leave," he said ill-naturedly to Victorine, as they rode away.

Victorine turned towards him with an admirably counterfeited expression of surprise. "Oh, sir," she said, "I did think I ought to wait for thee to take leave. I was dying with the desire I had to be back in the woods again; and only when I could not bear it any longer, did I bethink me to say that my aunt expected us back to dinner."

Long they lingered on the river-banks on their way home. Even the plotting brain of Victorine was not insensible to the charm of the sky, the air, the budding foliage, and the myriads of blossoms. "Oh, sir,"

she said, "I think there never was such a day as this before!"