Béatrix

an eye on everything. Her attention having nothing to divert it, she was the woman to know without going to look, how large the pile of walnuts should be in the loft, and how much corn was left in the stable-bin without plunging her sinewy arm into its depths. She wore a boatswain’s whistle attached by a string to her waistband, and called Mariotte by whistling once, and Gasselin by whistling twice. Gasselin’s chief happiness consisted in cultivating the garden and raising fine fruit and good vegetables. He had so little to do that but for his gardening he would have been bored to death. When he had groomed the horses in the morning he polished the floors, and cleaned the two ground-floor rooms; he had little to do for his masters. So in the garden you could not have found a weed or a noxious insect. Sometimes Gasselin might be seen standing motionless and bareheaded in the sunshine, watching for a field-rat or the dreadful larvae of the cockchafer; then he would rush in with a child’s glee to show the master the creature he had spent a week in catching. On fast days it was his delight to go to le Croisic to buy fish, cheaper there than at Guérande.

Never was there a family more united, on better terms, or more inseparable, than this pious and noble household. Masters and servants seemed to have been made for each other. In five-and-twenty years there had never been a trouble or a discord. The only sorrows they had known were the child’s little ailments, and the only anxieties had come of the events of 1814, and again of 1830. If the same things were invariably done at the same hours, if the food varied only with the changes of the seasons, this monotony, like that of nature, with its alternation of cloud, rain, and sunshine, was made endurable by the affection that filled every heart, and was all the more helpful and beneficent because it was the outcome of natural laws.

When twilight was ended, Gasselin came into the room and respectfully inquired whether he were wanted.

“After prayers you can go out, or go to bed,” said the Baron, rousing himself, “unless Madame or my sister⁠—”

The two ladies nodded agreement. Gasselin, seeing them all rise to kneel on their chairs, fell on his knees. Mariotte knelt on her stool. Old Mademoiselle du Guénic said prayers aloud.

As she finished, a knock was heard at the outer gate. Gasselin went to open it.

“It is Monsieur le Curé, no doubt; he is almost always the first,” remarked Mariotte.

And, in fact, they all recognized the footstep of the parish priest on the resonant steps to the balcony entrance. The Curé bowed respectfully to the three, addressing the Baron and the two ladies with the unctuous civility that a priest has at his command. In reply to an absentminded “Good evening” from the mistress of the house, he gave her a look of priestly scrutiny.

“Are you uneasy, madame, or unwell?” he asked.

“Thank you, no!” said she.

Monsieur Grimont, a man of about fifty, of middle height, wrapped in his gown, beneath which a pair of thick shoes with silver buckles were visible, showed above his bands a fat face, on the whole fair, but sallow. His hands were plump. His abbot-like countenance had something of the Dutch burgomaster in its calm complexion and the tones of the flesh, and something, too, of the Breton peasant in its straight black hair and sparkling black eyes, which nevertheless were under the control of priestly decorum. His cheerfulness, like that of all people whose conscience is calm and pure, consented to jest. There was nothing anxious or forbidding in his look, as in that of those unhappy priests whose maintenance or power is disputed by their parishioners, and who instead of being, as Napoleon so grandly said, the moral leaders of the people and natural justices of the peace, are regarded as enemies. The most unbelieving of strangers who should see Monsieur Grimont walking through Guérande would have recognized him as the sovereign of the Catholic town; but this sovereign abdicated his spiritual rule before the feudal supremacy of the du Guénic family. In this drawing-room he was as a chaplain in the hall of his liege. In church, as he gave the blessing, his hand always turned first towards the chapel of the House, where their hand and sword and their motto were carved on the keystone of the vaulting.

“I thought that Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël was here,” said the Curé, seating himself, as he kissed the Baroness’ hand. “She is losing her good habits. Is the fashion for dissipation spreading? For I observe that Monsieur le Chevalier is at les Touches again this evening.”

“Say nothing of his visits there before Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël,” exclaimed the old lady in an undertone.

“Ah! mademoiselle,” Mariotte put in, “how can you keep the whole town from talking?”

“And what do they say?” asked the Baroness.

“All the girls and the old gossips⁠—everybody, in short⁠—is saying that he is in love with Mademoiselle des Touches.”

“A young fellow so handsome as Calyste is only following his calling by making himself loved,” said the Baron.

“Here is Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël,” said Mariotte.

The gravel in the courtyard was, in fact, heard to crunch under this lady’s deliberate steps, heralded by a lad bearing a lantern. On seeing this retainer, Mariotte transferred her stool and distaff to the large hall, where she could chat with him by the light of the rosin candle that burned at the cost of the rich and stingy old maid, thus saving her master’s.

Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël was a slight, thin woman, as yellow as the parchment of an archive, and wrinkled like a lake swept by the wind, with gray eyes, large, prominent teeth, and hands like a man’s; she was short, certainly crooked, and perhaps even humpbacked; but no one had ever been curious to study her perfections or imperfections. Dressed in the same style as Mademoiselle