Rose mentioned a garden which brightens her little home. Suppose it were one of these!… A woman appears over there: she is tall and fair-haired. She stoops over a well; I cannot make out her features. She draws herself up again. Oh, no, her figure is clumsy, her hair looks dull and colourless and her clothes vulgar. Rose would never dress like that, in two colours that clash! Rose would never …
I wander into a delicious reverie. How infinitely superior Rose is to all these people whose lives I can picture around me. Two women sit cackling beside me on the bench: they are at once guileless and bad, with their mania for eternally wagging tongues that know no rest. A little farther on, a good housewife is shaking her troublesome child; a stout, overdressed woman of the shop-keeping class is flaunting her finery down one of the walks; a priest passes and, while his lips mumble prayers, his eyes, held in leash by fear, prowl around me; one of his flock curtseys to the ground as she meets him.
A protest rises in my heart at each of the little incidents: is not Rose rid of all that? Rose long ago gave up going to mass and confession. She has lost the hypocritical sense of shame, knows neither envy nor malice and is a stranger to all ostentation.
I often used to reproach her with her extreme humility. How wrong I was! I now think that this humility can achieve the same result as pride itself. One looks too high, the other too low; but both pass by the petty vanities of life and either of them can keep us equally indifferent to those vanities.
2
I rose from my seat with a happy heart. The time had come for me to go in search of her. I would kiss her in all gratitude. Had she not enlarged my will to the extent of making it admit her little existence?
I went through the silent streets, in search of the charming, old-world name that was to tell me where the aged spinster lived. Rose had said that I should see it written over the door in blue letters and that it was opposite a place where they sold sportsmen's and anglers' requisites, a shop with a sign that would be certain to attract my attention.
I therefore walked along with a sure step and suddenly, at a street-corner, saw a great silver fish flashing to and fro in the breeze at the end of a long line. Soon I was in a quiet backwater of the town. There it was! Opposite me, the last gleams of the setting sun shed their radiance on a very bright little house covered with a luxuriant vine. On one side, in the same golden light, the name of Isaline Coquet smiled in sky-blue letters.
The shop was white, with pearl-grey shutters; and on the ledges were bunchy plants gay with pink, starry flowers. In the window, a few starched caps looked as if they were talking scandal on their respective stands.
I walked in. The opening of the door roused the tongue of a little rusty bell, but nobody came. On a big grandfather's chair, near the counter, were a pair of spectacles and a book. Perhaps Mlle. Coquet had run away when she caught sight of me through the panes; Rose said that she was shy and a little frightened at the thought of my coming visit. And I had the pleasure of looking for my Rose as I followed the mysterious turns of a primitive passage.
The walls were spotless and the red-tiled floor shone in the half-light. I crossed a neat little kitchen, just as a cuckoo-clock was chiming five, and found myself on the threshold of a small room opening on a garden. Rose was sitting in the wide, low window.
The noise of the clock no doubt deadened the sound of my steps, for the girl did not turn her head. The room exhaled a faint perfume as of incense and musk; and I seemed to hold all her peaceful little life in my breath and in that swift glance. All that I could see of her face was one cheek and the tips of her long eyelashes. Placed as she was in front of the light, a golden haze shaded the colours of her beautiful hair; and I lingered in contemplation of the long and graceful curve of her figure bending over her work. She was sewing in the midst of floods of stiff white muslin, which formed a chain of snow-clad peaks with blue reflections around her. I looked at the low-ceilinged room with its whitewashed wall and its rows of bodices, petticoats and shiny caps hanging on lines stretched from one side to the other. A grey tom-cat lay purring on a corner of the table; and, near it, in a well-scrubbed pot, a pink geranium displayed its sombre leaves and its bright flowers.
Rose was sewing. At regular intervals, her right arm rose, drew out the thread and returned to the spot whence it started: an even and captive movement symbolical of the amount of activity permitted to women! But was she not to choose that movement among all others?
3
We dine in her bedroom. What a surprise her room held in store for me! Rose had arranged it herself, in harmony with the simplicity which I loved.
Brightly-painted wooden shelves make patches of colour on the white walls; the furniture is rustic; and the curtains of white muslin with mauve spots complete the frank and artless harmony of the room. How little this was to be expected from Mlle. Coquet's shop!
Then, on Rose's table, the books I gave her fill the place of honour. I dare say that she never reads them; and yet I am glad to see them here.
Rose goes to and fro between our little table and the kitchen. She looks pretty, she smiles. The slowness of her movements is no longer lethargic; it simply exhales an air of repose, a perfume of peace that suits her beauty. Her eyes have fastened on me at once and, as in the old days, never leave me.
Is it the tyranny of habit that used to prevent me from reading anything in them? Now, those eyes that ingenuously drink in my life as the flowers do the light, those eyes not veiled by any shadow, constantly bring the tears to mine. She sees this and fondly lays her head on my shoulder, whispering:
"I did nothing but expect you, darling, only I had given up hoping...."
This term of endearment, which she addresses to me for the first time, as if, being no longer subject to any effort, she were at last yielding to the sweets of friendship, this expression and my Christian name, which she utters lovingly, complete the pleasantness of the evening.
I feel happy amid it all. We who were brought up in the country never lose our appreciation of its peaceful charm. It bows down our lives as we bow our forehead in our hands to think beyond our immediate surroundings; and from its narrow circle we are better able to judge the expanse which has become necessary to us.
4
The night rises, things fade away. The sky is a deep blue in the frame of the open window. Rose brings the lamp:
"It was the first companion of my solitude," she says, reminiscently; then, laughing, "the companion of my boredom, the companion of those long, long evenings...."
"But now, dearest?…"
"Ah, now, the days are too short: I have a thousand duties to perform, my dear little old woman to look after, my customers, my flowers, my animals; then, in the evening, we often have a caller: the priest, the notary, the neighbours...."
Then, suddenly fearing that she has hurt me, she adds, in a caressing tone:
"When I am with them, I am always talking about you, so as to comfort myself for the loss of you; for that is my only sorrow."
5
An hour or two later, sitting in the garden, we watched the stars appearing one by one. Our arms were round each other; our fair tresses were intermingled. We were at the far end of the town. We heard the sounds of the country ringing in the transparent air; and the crystal voice of the frogs, that small, clear note falling steadily and marking time to our thoughts. We were quiet, like everything around us, unstirred by a breath of wind.