Joseph recovered himself quickly, and showing plainly that he did not mean to be put in the wrong, he said to Brulette, "I am glad to find you here. After a year's absence don't you mean to kiss an old friend?"
He approached her again, but she drew back, surprised at his singular manner, and said, "No, José, it is not my way to kiss any lad, no matter how old a friend he is or how glad I am to see him."
"You have grown very coy!" he said, in an angry and scoffing tone.
"I don't think I have ever been coy with you, Joseph; you never gave me any reason to be; and as you never asked me to be familiar, I never had occasion to forbid your kissing me. Nothing is changed between us and I do not know why you should now lay claim to what has never entered into our friendship."
"What an amount of talk and wry faces, all about a kiss," said Joseph, his anger rising. "If I never asked for what you were ready enough to give others it was because I was a young fool. I thought you would receive me better now that I am neither a ninny nor a coward."
"What is the matter with him?" asked Brulette, surprised and even frightened, and coming close up to me. "Is it really he, or some one who looks like him? I thought I saw our José, but this is not his speech nor his face nor his friendship."
"How have I changed, Brulette?" began José, a little disconcerted and already repentant. "Is it that I now have the courage I once lacked to tell you that you are to me the loveliest in the world, and that I have always longed for your good graces? There's no offence in that, I hope; and perhaps I am not more unworthy of them than others whom you allow to hang round you."
So saying, with a return of his vexation, he looked me in the face, and I saw he was trying to pick a quarrel with whoever would take him up. I asked nothing better than to draw his first fire. "Joseph," I said, "Brulette is right in thinking you changed. There is nothing surprising in that. We know how we part, but not how we meet again. You need not be surprised, either, if you find a little change in me. I have always been quiet and patient, standing by you in all your difficulties and consoling your vexations; but if you have grown more unjust than you used to be, I have grown more touchy, and I take it ill that you should say to my cousin before me that she is prodigal of her kisses and allows too many young men about her."
Joseph eyed me contemptuously, and put on a really devilish look of malice as he laughed in my face. Then he said, crossing his arms, and looking at me as though he were taking my measure, "Well, is it possible, Tiennet? Can this be you? However, I always did doubt you, and the friendship you professed—to deceive me."
"What do you mean by that, José?" said Brulette, much affronted and fancying he had lost his mind. "Where did you get the right to blame me, and why are you trying to see something wrong or ridiculous between my cousin and me? Are you ill or drunken, that you forget the respect you owe me and the affection that you know I deserve?"
Joseph drew in his horns, and taking Brulette's hand in his, he said to her, with his eyes full of tears, "I am to blame, Brulette; yes, I'm irritable from fatigue and the desire to get here; but I feel nothing but devotion for you, and you ought not to take it in bad part. I know very well that your manners are dignified and that you exact the respect of everybody. It is due to your beauty, which, I see, is greater, not less, than ever. But you surely will allow that you love pleasure, and that people often kiss each other when dancing. It is the custom, and I shall think it a very good one when I profit by it; which will be now, for I have learned how to dance like others, and for the first time in my life I am going to dance with you. I hear the bagpipes returning. Come, you shall see that all my ill-humor will clear off under the happiness of being your sweetheart."
"José," replied Brulette, not more than half pleased at this speech, "you are very much mistaken if you think I still have sweethearts; I may have been coquettish,—that's my way, and I am not bound to give account of my actions; but I have also the right and the will to change my ways. I no longer dance with everybody, and to-night I shall not dance again."
"I should have thought," said Joseph, piqued, "that I was not 'everybody,' as you say, to an old friend with whom I made my first communion, and under whose roof I lived."
The music and the wedding guests returning with a great racket, cut short their words, and Huriel, also entering, full of eagerness and taking no notice of Joseph, caught Brulette on his arm and carried her like a feather to his father, who was waiting outside, and who kissed her joyously, to the great annoyance of Joseph, who clenched his fists as he watched her paying the old man the filial attentions of a daughter.
Creeping up to the Head-Woodsman I whispered that Joseph was there, in a bad temper, and I proposed that he should draw Huriel aside while I persuaded Brulette to go to bed. Joseph, who was not invited to the wedding, would thus be obliged to go off and sleep at Nohant or at some other house in Chassin. The Head-Woodsman thought the suggestion good, and pretending not to see Joseph, who kept in the background, he talked apart with Huriel, while Brulette went away to see in what part of the house she could stow herself for the night. But my aunt, who had counted on lodging us, did not expect that Brulette would take it into her head to go to bed before three or four in the morning. The young men never go to bed at all on the first night of a wedding, and do their best to keep up the dance for three days and three nights running. If one of them gets tired, he goes into the hayloft and takes a nap. As to the girls and women, they all retire into one room; but generally it is only the old women and the ugly ones who abandon the dance.
So, when Brulette went up to the room where she expected to find a place next to some of her relatives, she came upon a crowd of snorers, among whom not a corner as big as the palm of her hand was vacant; and the few who woke up told her to come again towards morning, when they would be ready to go down and serve the tables. She came back to us and told her difficulty.
"Well, then," said Père Bastien, "you must go and sleep with Thérence. My son and I will spend the night here so that no talk can be made about it."
I declared that in order to avoid giving a pretext for Joseph's jealousy Brulette could easily slip out with me without saying a word; and Père Bastien going up to him and plying him with questions, I took my cousin to the old castle by a back way through my aunt's garden.
When I returned I found the Head-Woodsman, Joseph, and Huriel at table together. They called me, and I sat down to supper with them, eating, drinking, talking, and singing to avoid an explosion of anger which might follow on any talk about Brulette. Joseph, seeing us determined to keep the peace, controlled himself at first, and even seemed gay; but he could not help biting as he caressed, and every joke he made had a sting at the end of it. The Head-Woodsman tried to keep down his bile with a measure of wine, and I think Joseph might willingly have yielded in order to forget himself, if it were not that wine never affected him. He drank four times as much as the rest of us, who had no reason to wish to drown our intelligence, and yet his ideas were all the clearer and his speech, too.
At last, after some particularly spiteful remarks on the slyness of women and the treachery of friends, Huriel, striking his fist on the table and grasping his father's elbow, which for some time past had been nudging him to keep quiet, said in a decided tone:—
"No, father, excuse me, but I cannot stand any more of this, and it is much better to say so openly. I know very well that Joseph's teeth will be as sharp a year hence as they are now, and though I have closed my ears to his sayings up to this time, it is right that they should open now to his unjust remarks and reproaches. Come, Joseph, for the last hour I have seen what you mean; you have wasted a great deal of wit. Talk plain, I'm listening; say what you have on your mind, with the whys and the wherefores. I will answer you frankly."
"Well, so be it; come to an explanation," said the Head-Woodsman, reversing his glass and deciding the situation, as he well knew how to do when it became necessary; "we will have no more drinking if it is not to be in friendship, for it is ill mixing the devil's venom with the good God's wine."
"You surprise me, both of you," said Joseph, who had grown yellow to the whites of his eyes, though he still continued to laugh vindictively. "What the devil are you angry about, and why do you scratch yourselves when nothing is biting you? I have nothing against anybody; only I happen to be in the humor to jeer at everything, and I don't think you are likely to rid me of it."
"Perhaps I could," said Huriel, provoked.
"Try," said Joseph, sneering.
"That's enough!" said the Head-Woodsman, striking the table with his heavy hand, "Hold your tongues, both of you, and as there is no frankness in you, Joseph, I shall have enough for the two. You misjudged in your heart the woman you wished to love; that is a wrong that God can pardon, for it is not always easy for a man to be trustful or distrustful in his friendships; but it is, unfortunately, a wrong that cannot be repaired. You fell into that blunder; you must accept the consequences and submit to them."
"Why so, master?" said Joseph, setting up his back like an angry cat, "who will tell the wrong to Brulette? she has not known or suffered from it."
"No one," said Huriel, "I am not a blackguard."
"Then who will tell it?" demanded Joseph.
"Yourself," said Père Bastien.
"What can make me?"
"The consciousness of your love for her. Doubt never comes singly. You may get over the first twinge, but there comes a second, which will issue from your lips at the first words you say to her."
"In fact, I think it has happened already, Joseph," said I, "for this very evening you offended the person we are speaking of."
"Perhaps I did," he said haughtily, "but that is between her and me. If I choose that she shall return to me what makes you think she will not return? I remember my master's song,—the music is beautiful and the words are true,—'Gifts are for those who pray.' Well, Huriel, go ahead. Ask in words and I will ask in music, and we will see whether or no I can't win her back again. Come, play fair, you who blame what you call my crooked ways. The game is between us, and we'll have no shuffling. A fine house has more than one door, and we'll each knock at the one that suits us."
"I am willing," said Huriel, "but you will please to remember one thing. I will stand no more fault-finding, whether in jest or earnest. If I overlook the past, my good-nature does not go so far as to allow any more of it."
"What do you mean by that?" demanded Joseph, whose bile interfered with his memory.
"I forbid you to ask," said the Head-Woodsman, "and I command you to bethink yourself. If you fight my son you will be none the more innocent for that, and it will not add to your credit if I withdraw the forgiveness which, without a word of explanation, my heart has already granted you."
"Master!" cried Joseph, hot with excitement, "if you think you have anything to forgive I thank you for your forgiveness; but, in my opinion, I have done you no wrong. I never dreamed of deceiving you; and if your daughter had said yes, I should not have backed down from my offer. She is a girl without an equal for sense and uprightness; I should have loved her, ill or well, but at any rate sincerely and without betraying her. She might perhaps have saved me from much evil and much suffering; but she did not think me worthy of her. Therefore I am at liberty to court whom I will; and I consider that the man I trusted and who promised me his help has made haste to take advantage of my momentary pique to supplant me."
"Your momentary pique lasted a month, Joseph," said Huriel; "be fair about it,—one month, during which you asked my sister in marriage three times. I am forced to believe that you held her in derision; if you wish to clear yourself of that insult you must admit that I was not to blame in the matter. I believed your word; that is the only wrong I have done; don't give me reason to think it is one I must repent of."
Joseph kept silence; then, rising, he said, "Yes, you are good at argument; you are both cleverer than I at that; I have spoken and acted like a man who does not know what he wants; but you are greater fools than I if you don't know that, without being mad, we may wish for two opposite things. Leave me to be what I am, and I will leave you to be what you wish to be. If your heart is honest, Huriel, I shall soon know it, and if you win the game fairly, I will do you justice and withdraw without resentment."
"How can you tell if my heart is honest when you have been unable to judge it rightly hitherto??
"I can tell by what you now say of me to Brulette," replied Joseph. "You are in a position to prejudice her against me and I cannot do the same by you."
"Stop!" I said to Joseph, "don't blame any one unjustly. Thérence has already told Brulette that you asked her in marriage not a fortnight ago."
"But nothing further has been or will be told," added Huriel; "Joseph, we are better than you think us. We do not want to deprive you of Brulette's friendship."
The words touched Joseph, and he put out his hand as if to take Huriel's; but the good intention stopped half-way, and he went off without another word to any one.
"A hard heart!" cried Huriel, who was too kind himself not to suffer from this ingratitude.
"No, an unhappy one," said his father.
Struck by the words, I followed Joseph to either scold him or console him, for he looked as if death were in his eyes. I was quite as much displeased with him as Huriel was, but the old habit of pitying and protecting him was so strong that it carried me after him whether I would or no.
He walked so rapidly along the road to Nohant that I soon lost sight of him; but he stopped at the edge of the Lajon, a little pond on a barren heath. The place is very dreary, and without shade, except that of a few stunted trees ill-fed in the poor soil; but the swampy land around the pond abounded with wild-flowers, and as the white water-lily and other marsh plants were now in bloom, the place smelt as sweet as a garden.
Joseph had flung himself down among the reeds, and not knowing that he was followed but believing himself all alone, he was groaning and growling at the same time, like a wounded wolf. I called him, merely to let him know I was there, for I knew he would not answer me, and I went straight up to him.
"This is not the right thing at all," I said to him; "you ought to take counsel with yourself; tears are not reasons."
"I am not weeping, Tiennet," he answered, in a steady voice. "I am neither so weak nor so happy that I can find comfort that way. It is seldom, in my worst moments, that a tear gets out of my eyes, and it is fire, not water, that is forcing its way now, for it burns like live coal. But don't ask me why; I can't tell why, and I don't want to seek for the cause of it. The day of trusting in others is over with me. I know my strength, and I no longer need their help. It was only given out of pity, and I want no more of it; I can rely in future on myself. Thank you for your good intentions. Thank you, and please leave me."
"But where are you going to spend the night?"
"I am going to my mother's."
"It is very late, and it is so far from here to Saint-Chartier."
"No matter," he said, rising, "I can't stay here. We shall meet to-morrow, Tiennet."
"Yes, at home; we go back tomorrow."
"I don't care where," he said. "Wherever she is—your Brulette—I shall find her, and perhaps it will be seen that she has not made her final choice!"
He went off with a determined air, and seeing that his pride supported him I offered no further consolation. Fatigue, and the pleasure of seeing his mother, and a day or two for reflection might, I hoped, bring him to reason. I planned, therefore, to advise Brulette to stay at Chassin over the next day, and making my way back to the village with this idea in my head I came upon the Head-Woodsman and his son, in a corner of the field through which I was making a short cut. They were preparing what they called their bed-clothes; in other words, making ready to sleep on the ground, not wishing to disturb the two girls in the castle, and really preferring to lie under the stars at this sweet season of the year. I liked the idea, too, for the fresh grass seemed much nicer than the hay of a barn heated by the bodies of a score of other fellows. So I stretched myself beside Huriel, looked at the little white clouds in the clear sky, smelt the hawthorn odors, and fell asleep, thinking of Thérence in the sweetest slumber I ever had in my life.
I have always been a good sleeper, and in my youth I seldom wakened of myself. My two companions, who had walked a long distance the day before, let the sun rise without their knowing it, and woke up laughing to find him ahead of them, which didn't happen very often. They laughed still more to see how cautious I was not to tumble out of bed when I opened my eyes and looked about to see where I was.
"Come, up, my boy!" said Huriel; "we are late enough already. Do you know something? It is the last day of May, and it is the fashion in our parts to tie a nosegay to our sweetheart's door when there was no chance to do it on the first of the month. There is no fear that any one has got ahead of us, because, for one thing, no one knows where my sister and your cousin are lodging, and for another, it isn't the custom in this part of the country to leave, as we say, the call-again bunch. But we are so late I fear the girls are up, and if they leave their rooms before the May-bunch is hung to the door they will cry out upon us for laziness."
"As cousin," I answer, laughing, "I permit you to hang your bunch, and, as brother, I ask your permission to hang mine; but perhaps the father won't hear of it with your ears."
"Yes, he will," said Père Bastien. "Huriel said something to me about it. There's no difficulty in trying; succeeding is another thing. If you know how to manage it, so much the better, my lad. It is your affair."
Encouraged by his friendliness, I rushed into the adjoining copse with a light heart, and cut off the whole branch of a wild cherry-tree in full bloom, while Huriel, who had already provided himself with one of those beautiful silk and gold ribbons which the women of his country wear beneath their lace coifs, gathered a bunch of white hawthorn and a bunch of pink and tied them in a nosegay that was worthy of a queen.
We made but three strides from the field to the castle, where the silence assured us that the beauties still slept,—no doubt from having talked half the night. But imagine our amazement when, on entering the courtyard, our eyes lighted on a superb nosegay, decked with silver and white ribbons, hanging to the door we intended to garland.
"The devil!" cried Huriel, preparing to tear away the offending bunch, and looking askance at his dog whom he had stationed in the courtyard. "Is this the way you guard the house, master Satan? Have you made acquaintances already? why didn't you bite the legs of this Mayday prowler?"
"Stop," said the Head-Woodsman, preventing his son from taking down the nosegay. "There is but one person in these parts whom Satan knows and who also knows our custom of the call-again bunch, for he has seen it practised among us. Now, you pledged your word to that person not to interfere with him. You must be satisfied to make yourself acceptable and not undermine him; respect his offering, just as he, no doubt, would have respected yours."
"Yes, father," replied Huriel, "if I were sure it was he; but it may be some one else, and the bunch may be intended for Thérence."
I remarked that no one knew Thérence or had even seen her, and looking closer at the flowers I saw that a mass of white pond-lilies had been freshly gathered and tied in bunches, and I remembered that these plants were not common in the neighborhood and grew only in the Lajon, on the banks of which I had found Joseph lying. No doubt, instead of going to Saint-Chartier he had returned upon his steps; and he must even have waded into the water on the shifting sand of the pond, which is dangerous, before he could gather such an armful.
"Well, the battle has begun," said Huriel, sighing, as he fastened his May-bunch to the door with an anxious look that seemed to me very modest, for he might well have felt sure of success and feared no one. I wished I could feel as certain of his sister, and I hung up my cherry-bough with a beating heart, as if she were just behind the door all ready to fling it in my face.
And pale I was when the door opened; but it was Brulette who came first, and gave a kiss for good-morning to Père Bastien, a hand-shake to me, and a rosy blush of pleasure to Huriel, though she did not venture to speak to him.
"Oh, father!" cried Thérence, following her and clasping the Head-Woodsman in her arms; "have you been playing the young man all night? Come, come in, and let me give you some breakfast. But first, let me look at those nosegays. Three, Brulette! oh, what a girl you are! is the procession to last all day?"
"Only two for Brulette," said Huriel; "the third is for you, sister;" and he gave her my cherry-bough, so full of bloom that it had rained a white shower all round the door.
"For me?" said Thérence, surprised. "Then you did it, brother, to prevent my being jealous of Brulette?"
"Brothers are not so gallant," said Père Bastien. "Have you no suspicion of a timid and discreet lover who keeps his mouth shut instead of declaring himself?"
Thérence looked all round her as if she were trying to see some one beside me, and when at last her black eyes rested on my discomfited and idiotic face I thought she was going to laugh, which would have stabbed me to the heart. But she did nothing of the kind, and even blushed a little. Then, holding out her hand she said: "Thank you, Tiennet; you have shown that you remember me, and I accept the gift without giving it other meaning than belongs to a nosegay."
"Well," said Père Bastien, "if you accept it, my daughter, you must follow the usual custom, and fasten a spray of it to your coif."
"No," said Thérence, "that might displease some of the girls hereabouts, and I don't want my good Tiennet to repent of having done me a kindness."
"Oh, that won't displease anybody," I cried; "if it does not annoy you, it would hugely please me."
"So be it!" she said, breaking off a little twig of my flowers, which she fastened with a pin to her head. "We are here in the Chassin, Tiennet; if we were in your part of the country I should be more careful, for fear of getting you into trouble with some compatriot."
"You can get me into trouble with all of them, Thérence," I said; "I ask nothing better."
"As for that," she replied, "you go too fast. I don't know you well enough, Tiennet, to say if it would be well for either of us." Then changing the subject with that forgetfulness of herself which came so naturally to her, she said to Brulette: "It is your turn, darling; what return are you going to make for your two May bunches? which of them is to deck your cap?"
"Neither, till I know where they came from," replied my prudent cousin. "Tell me, Huriel, and keep me from making a mistake."
"I can't tell you," said Huriel, "except that this is mine."
"Then I shall carry it whole," she said, taking it down, "and as to that bunch of water-flowers, they must feel very much out of place on a door. I think they will be happier in the moat."
So saying, she adorned her cap and the front of her dress with Huriel's flowers, and took the rest into her room; then, returning, she was about to throw the lilies into the old moat which separated the courtyard from the park, when Huriel, unwilling that such an insult should be offered to his rival, stopped her hand. At this moment the sound of a bagpipe came from the shrubbery which closed the little court in front of us, and some one, who had been near enough to hear every word that had passed, played Père Bastien's air of the "Three Woodsmen."
He played it first as we knew it, next a little differently, in a softer and sadder way, then changing it throughout, varying the keys, adding music of his own, which was not less beautiful, and even seemed to sigh and to entreat in so tender a manner that we who heard it could hardly help being touched with compassion. At last the player took a stronger and louder tone,—as though it were a song of reproach and authority, and Brulette, who had gone to the edge of the moat intending to ding away the lilies, drew back as if terrified by the anger which was expressed in the sounds. Then Joseph, shoving aside the bushes with his feet and shoulders, appeared on the other side of the moat, still piping, his eyes blazing, and seeming, both by his looks and by his music, to threaten Brulette with some great disaster if she did not desist from the insult she was about to offer him.