The good Colombe had already stalked into the room and with a familiar: “Eh bien! Eh bien! We did contrive to come and drink Fleurette’s health after all?” had slapped Bibi vigorously over the lean shoulders. But Amédé had come to a halt on the mat in which he was mechanically wiping his boots as if his very life depended on their cleanliness. Between his fingers he was twirling an immense posy of bright pink peonies, but his eyes were fixed on Fleurette, and on his broad, plain face, which shone with perspiration and good temper, there was a half-shy, wholly adoring look.
He gulped hard once or twice before he murmured, hoarse with emotion:
“Mam’zelle Fleurette!”
And Fleurette wiped her hot little hand against her apron before she whispered in shy response:
“M’sieu’ Amédé!”
Not for these two the new fangled “citoyen” and “citoyenne” decreed in far-off Paris. To their unsophisticated ears the clamour of a trumpet-tongued revolution only came as an unreal and distant echo.
Amédé appeared to have finished cleaning his boots, and Fleurette was able to close the door behind him before she held out her hand for the flowers which he was too bewildered to offer.
“Are these beautiful flowers for me, M’sieu’ Amédé?” she asked.
“If you will deign to accept them, Mam’zelle Fleurette,” he replied.
She was eighteen and he was just twenty. Neither of them had ever been away more than a few hours from their remote little village of Dauphiné where they were born—she in the little house with the green shutters, and he in the Rue Haute above the shop where his father Hector Colombe had sold tallow-candles and sugar, flour and salt, and lard and eggs to the neighbours, ever since he had been old enough to help his father in the business. And when Amédé was four, and Fleurette two, they had made mud pies together in the village street with water from the fountain, and Amédé had warded Fleurette against the many powerful enemies that sometimes threatened her and caused her to scream with terror, such as M’sieu’ Duflos, the butcher’s, dog, or Achille the garde-champêtre with his ferocious scowl, or M’ame Amèlie’s geese.
They had sat together—not side by side you understand, but the boys on the right of the room and the girls on the left—in the little classroom in the presbytery, where M. le Curé taught them their alphabet and subsequently the catechism; and also that two and two make four. They had knelt side by side in the little primitive church at Laragne, their little souls overburdened with emotion and religious fervour, when they made their first communion: Fleurette in a beautiful white dress, with a wreath of white roses on her fair hair, and a long tulle veil that descended right down to her feet; and Amédé in an exquisite cloth coat with brass buttons, a silk waistcoat, buckled shoes and a white ribbon sash on his left arm.
And when Amédé had been old enough to be entrusted with his father’s errands over at Serres, a couple of leagues away, Fleurette had climbed behind him on the saddle, and with her arms round his waist, so as to keep herself steady, they had ridden together along the winding road white with dust, Ginette, the good old mare, ambling very leisurely as if she knew that her riders were in no hurry to get anywhere that day.
And now Fleurette was eighteen and Amédé twenty and her hair was like ripe corn, and her eyes as blue as the sky on a midsummer morn, whilst her mouth was dewy and fragrant as a rose in June. No wonder that poor Amédé felt as if his feet were of lead and his neck too big for his cravat, and when presently she asked him to fill a vase with water out of the carafe so that she could place the beautiful flowers in it, is it a wonder that he spilt the water all over the floor, seeing that his clumsy hands met her dainty fingers around the neck of the carafe?
The good Hector pretended to be very angry with his son for his clumsiness.
“Voyez-moi cet imbécile!” he said with that gruff voice of his which had become a habit with him, because he had to use it all day in order to ward off the naughty village urchins who tried to steal the apples out of his shop.
“Mam’zelle Fleurette, why don’t you box his ears?”
Which, of course, was a very funny proposition that caused Fleurette and Amédé to laugh immoderately first and then to whisper and to chaff whilst they mopped the water off the tiled floor. And the good Hector turned once more to Bibi, and shaking his powerful fist at nothing in particular, he brought it down with a crash upon the table.
“And now those gredins, those limbs of Satan are taking him away for cannon-fodder. Ah! the devils! the pigs! the pig-devils!”
Bibi looked up inquiringly.
“Taking him away, are they?” he asked dryly. Then he added with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders: “Amédé is twenty, isn’t he?”
“What’s that to do with their dragging him away from me, when I want him to help in the shop?” Hector retorted with what he felt was unanswerable logic.
“What would be the good of keeping shop, my good Hector,” Bibi rejoined simply, “if France was invaded by foreigners as she is already ruined by traitors?”
“Well! And isn’t she ruined now by all those devils up in Paris who can think of nothing better than war or murder?” growled Hector Colombe, heedless of the quick gesture of warning which Bibi had given
