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CHAPTER VII.

THE weeks drifted slowly and peacefully by. To Adrienne they had been full of happiness, and interest, and joy. Yet there were times when her husband puzzled and grieved her--times when a word, a look, a careless expression, seemed dimly to shadow forth the real nature of the man whom she had idealised into a hero, and worshipped as a lover.

Already he seemed restless and impatient--already he complained of the monotony of life at Valtours, and sighed for Paris. His wife's schemes and plans for the welfare of the peasantry, for improving their dwellings, and adding to the comforts of their toilful lives, met with good-natured contempt, but certainly won no aid from him.

"I am beyond the age of enthusiasms," he would say, and laugh, and bid her do what she pleased, so only she did not trouble him.

Adrienne did not blame him yet; that was a disloyalty of which she would have been incapable. Only a little chill sense of disappointment began to creep into her heart, and depress the ardour of her youth, the unselfishness of her desires.

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All the people adored her without doubt. Even Céline de Valtour acknowledged that her brother's wife was as nearly perfection as any woman could be, and sighed as she looked at the fair face and listened to the girlish enthusiasm, the generous impulses that moved her soul, and seemed to lift her above the petty, sordid, worldly interests of merely social life--life as it had now become to her husband, to his friends, to the circle in which they moved, and where she was soon to take her place.

Adrienne had tasted very little of the world's pleasures in the shape of gaiety and fashionable dissipation; neither would such pleasures be of any value in her eyes. She loved the simple, innocent life she now lived far better. The glare, the unrest, the irksomeness, of what the world miscalls enjoyment, were to her so utterly unattractive, that she never gave them a thought, and she listened to her husband's description of what her own share and portion of them would be with a sense of weariness and distaste that he could not comprehend.

"I should like to live here always!" she sighed, when he spoke of Paris, and painted its countless delights.

"You told me once you would be glad to see it," he said. "Do you remember that day at Trouville, when we spoke of it, and how you thought you would never be there? If I mistake not, no queen of all its beauties, no leader of its most exclusive circles, will win so great a triumph as--my wife."

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She looked at him anxiously.

"Will that please you?" she asked.

"Certainly," he said, laughing. "I should like the world to approve my taste."

The answer displeased her, but she kept silence. Already she was beginning to feel that to argue with him on some matters only roused him to a petulant irritation that lasted long and was difficult to soothe. She deemed submission and obedience a wife's first duties, and it troubled her to think she had annoyed or disturbed him. He was so much older than herself in years and experience that she was always reluctant to set up her own judgment in opposition to his, and even if she felt he was in the wrong, she would not say so; she would be silent, even if unconvinced.

"I hope she will not give me any trouble," Armand de Valtour thought sometimes. "Women of character are always hard to manage; and yet I could never have married a nonentity!"

Then he would light his cigar, and wander off into the grounds, leaving her alone with Cèline, or else turn his steps to old Manon's cottage, where little Maï would be working in the garden among her flowers or cabbages--a pretty, quaint little figure, with the white cap tossed back from her dark hair, and the sun kissing the ruddy bloom of cheeks and lips into yet richer brightness. He would lean over the gate and talk to her, while the scents of the sweet dusky garden blew to and fro, and the wind | | 89 stirred the leaves of the vines and the full-blown petals of the roses; but somehow all those talks left but one idea in the girl's young heart--that she was sacrificing André's future to her own selfishness, that it was her duty to persuade his father to let him go to Paris, and there win the fame and glory he desired.

Was she selfish--was she ungrateful? She asked herself these questions, and grew perplexed, and her little tender heart was troubled often and often, for the old Brizeaux was obstinate and obdurate as iron, and swore that never with his will should his son leave the fields and vineyards of his home to tread the dusty ways and sinful streets of that great, vile, beautiful city for which he longed.

It was market-day--the great day of the week in Valtours, and the little sleepy town was all astir with noise and excitement.

Long before sunrise the country roads leading into the town had been alive with the stir and bustle of human and animal life. The grinding of the carts on the stones, the cackling of the fowls in their baskets, the lowing of cattle, the hoarse cries of the drovers, the barking of dogs, the shadowy figures on horseback--all made up a picture of life and colour, bright and animated as the young day itself. Even before the break of dawn the moving crowd disappeared under the gateways of the ramparts, and then slowly spread themselves into the open space that encircled | | 90 the little town. Between the silvery trunks of the great plane trees the swarm of men and cattle were noiselessly and regularly arranged, so that when the sun rose to its full glory, and the sleeping town awoke, the people found an enormous market before them, populated apparently by all the peasantry of Provence, and marvellous with country riches of grain and food and cattle. Piled up in flat baskets lay golden heaps of oranges and quinces and pomegranates, green and yellow melons, and cool sorbs; peaches rested their tender bloom against the dark purple of figs and grapes; orchard spoils lay in rich luxuriance side by side with their homelier rivals of the vegetable kingdom. Sheep were bleating; little kids looked out with restless eyes from behind the wooden palings of their pens; bullocks yoked together stood patiently awaiting purchasers; bulls with smoking nostrils and fierce eyes tugged impatiently at the iron rings which fastened them to the wall. Further on, horses of all sizes and colours frisked restlessly about, or munched oats out of their owners' hands.

A little apart, the silver scales of fish were shining from the green beds of wood-fennel; poultry, tied up in couples by their red feet, lay beating their helpless wings on the ground; piles of snowy eggs peeped out from baskets, and at the end of all, like the produce of a dry wintry forest, were wooden shovels and rakes and pitchforks standing up between ploughs and harrows.

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Valtours was proud of its market, and rejoiced in its market-day. Between the double line of carts, with their tilts and high rails, and the stalls where all these bounties of Nature lay piled together, the crowd of people--buyers, sellers, and lookers-on--would move about the whole day long.

The noise was at times deafening. The town's people, as a rule, kept apart, for this country invasion was not much to their taste, though it was too characteristic and too profitable to be despised. The streets were thronged with peasants in various garbs, all laughing, chattering, staring, and bargaining in high good-humour. Life for them was an easy, joyous thing to-day; they were mirthful and content enough with the sale of their hard labours and the profits accorded. In their vineyards and cornfields all other days, this one day seemed a thing glorious and beautiful by force of contrast. The streets and shops of Valtours were all they knew of the great world lying beyond their own immediate district, and all they cared to know. For people who could neither read nor write, who went to bed with their poultry, and rose with the sun, whose lives were toilful, simple, and content, nothing could be grander or more beautiful.

The old Brizeaux was always glad when market-day arrived; he had never missed one, he was wont to say, in all his threescore years. It was but seldom he could persuade André to come, and that troubled him greatly. To the young man the noise and bustle | | 92 and chaffering were detestable, and to see the little picturesque town turned into a mass of colour and movement jarred upon his feelings. Therefore the night previous when he had answered his father's request to accompany him thither by a cold refusal, the old man had not been surprised. He had scolded and grumbled a little, as was his way, but that was all; and daybreak had seen him trudging off on foot to Valtours beside his own cart of fruit and flowers and vegetables.

The day had passed much as usual. Toward noon the chief business was over. A drowsy silence filled the air, and under the great branches of the plane trees the market people gossiped and compared notes on their successes, while others wandered off to see the shops and make purchases for friends or lovers. In one corner of the market-place was a stall filled to overflowing with rich autumn fruits and harvest spoils. It was kept by a woman of Provence, an old acquaintance of Brizeaux's. Having finished his own business, the old man strolled over to his friend, and seated himself at her stall for a gossip.

The day was hot, and the good woman produced a bottle of wine, and made an impromptu table of an empty cask turned bottom upward, and made old Brizeaux sit down and share the liquor with her. The old man was nothing loth to accept her invitation. She cut him some slices of melon, and stood there beside him, eating and drinking, and chattering of all the hundred and one things they had in | | 93 common, or had had by the association and remembrance of a score of years.

The old man talked much of his son, of the genius that was a curse rather than a blessing, since it unfitted him for his own sphere of life, and could not procure him any other; and the woman listened and nodded her head, and from time to time attended to her customers, or scolded the rosy, fat children who were examining her treasures, and tumbling over her sacks of grain and potatoes.

The old man murmured placidly on, soothed by the wine, the drowsy stillness of the air, the restfulness and peace of his comfortable nook in the shady sweet-smelling market stall. His head began to nod. His ears caught the faint buzz of buyers less distinctly, and his eyes at last closed placidly in slumber. How long he slept he never knew, nor what aroused him could he ever remember in any after-time. Only somehow, some one seemed to be speaking his name and André's.

By an effort he shook off the lethargy of sleep, and roused himself, and sat up. Before him stood little Maï. Her face was pale, her eyes wild and excited.

The woman had paused in the act of taking some seeds out of a jar, and was regarding the girl with an expression of incredulity and fear on her stout, good-humoured visage.

"What is it? What has happened?" cried the old man, sitting up, and looking sternly at Maï.

A flush rose to her face, a mist of tears seemed to | | 94 dim her sight; she strove to speak, but the words were hard to form, and harder to utter.

"Tell me, girl!" cried the old man, fiercely. "Surely I overheard something about my son. What is it? Is he here with you?"

"No," said the girl, and lifted her head proudly, and looked at him with defiant eyes; "he is not here. Of you, of me, he takes no heed now. He left this morning for Paris!"

"For Paris!"

There was a strange and long silence. The old man trembled in every limb. The market-place and all its familiar and accustomed sights seemed to sway to and fro before his eyes.

"My son! No, it cannot be!" he cried suddenly. "He would not disobey me thus! He would not forsake me in my old age!"

"He bade me give you this," said Maï, handing him a letter. "You would understand then, he said."

"Understand!" muttered the old man, putting his hand to his head in a dazed, bewildered fashion. "I--I cannot read it, Maï. Tell me what he says."

The girl took the paper from his shaking fingers, and slowly, and with difficulty, read out these lines:--

With stammering and hesitation, for she read but ill, little Maï spelt out the contents of the letter. As she finished there was a long silence.

The old man's heart felt bitter within him. The child he had loved and tended through infancy and youth--for whom he had laboured, and worked, and denied himself--that child had forsaken him now, and left him desolate and alone in his old age.

It embittered his soul; it well-nigh broke his heart. The genius that he could not comprehend--the love for an art that to him was but of small account, seemed as only a baseless, thankless passion; selfish in its isolation, foolish in its incomprehensibility, vile as a crime in the ingratitude that had thrown off love | | 96 and duty, treating them as a burden intolerable and not to be borne.

For a moment rage mastered him. He rose from his seat shaking in every limb. He snatched the paper from the girl's little brown hands, and threw it on the ground, and stamped on it, while a bitter curse hissed between his teeth--a curse that made the women tremble as they heard.

"Oh, hush!" cried Maï, weeping. "Remember, he is still your son!"

"He is no son of mine!" he cried fiercely. "He is only a beggar--a selfish ingrate. From this day let no one mention his name in my hearing."

And with no further word he left the market-place and went back to his own home.