“Are they your children?” the soldier asked the old woman.
“Asking your pardon, sir, they are charity children. They give me three francs a month and a pound’s weight of soap for each of them.”
“But it must cost you twice as much as that to keep them, good woman?”
“That is just what M. Benassis tells me, sir; but if other folk will board the children for the same money, one has to make it do. Nobody wants the children, but for all that there is a good deal of performance to go through before they will let us have them. When the milk we give them comes to nothing, they cost us scarcely anything. Besides that, three francs is a great deal, sir; there are fifteen francs coming in, to say nothing of the five pounds’ weight of soap. In our part of the world you would simply have to wear your life out before you would make ten sous a day.”
“Then you have some land of your own?” asked the commandant.
“No, sir. I had some land once when my husband was alive; since he died I have done so badly that I had to sell it.”
“Why, how do you reach the year’s end without debts?” Genestas went on, “when you bring up children for a livelihood and wash and feed them on two sous a day?”
“Well, we never go to St. Sylvester’s Day without debt, sir,” she went on without ceasing to comb the child’s hair. “But so it is – Providence helps us out. I have a couple of cows. Then my daughter and I do some gleaning at harvest-time, and in winter we pick up firewood. Then at night we spin. Ah! we never want to see another winter like this last one, that is certain! I owe the miller seventy-five francs for flour. Luckily he is M. Benassis’ miller. M. Benassis, ah! he is a friend to poor people. He has never asked for his due from anybody, and he will not begin with us. Besides, our cow has a calf, and that will set us a bit straighter.”
The four orphans for whom the old woman’s affection represented all human guardianship had come to an end of their prunes. As their foster-mother’s attention was taken up by the officer with whom she was chatting, they seized the opportunity, and banded themselves together in a compact file, so as to make yet another assault upon the latch of the door that stood between them and the tempting heap of dried plums. They advanced to the attack, not like French soldiers, but as stealthily as Germans, impelled by frank animal greediness.
“Oh! you little rogues! Do you want to finish them up?”
The old woman rose, caught the strongest of the four, administered a gentle slap on the back, and flung him out of the house. Not a tear did he shed, but the others remained breathless with astonishment.
“They give you a lot of trouble – ”
“Oh! no, sir, but they can smell the prunes, the little dears. If I were to leave them alone here for a moment, they would stuff themselves with them.”
“You are very fond of them?”
The old woman raised her head at this, and looked at him with gentle malice in her eyes.
“Fond of them!” she said. “I have had to part with three of them already. I only have the care of them until they are six years old,” she went on with a sigh.
“But where are your own children?”
“I have lost them.”
“How old are you?” Genestas asked, to efface the impression left by his last question.
“I am thirty-eight years old, sir. It will be two years come next St. John’s Day since my husband died.”
She finished dressing the poor sickly mite, who seemed to thank her by a loving look in his faded eyes.
“What a life of toil and self-denial!” thought the cavalry officer.
Beneath a roof worthy of the stable wherein Jesus Christ was born, the hardest duties of motherhood were fulfilled cheerfully and without consciousness of merit. What hearts were these that lay so deeply buried in neglect and obscurity! What wealth, and what poverty! Soldiers, better than other men, can appreciate the element of grandeur to be found in heroism in sabots, in the Evangel clad in rags. The Book may be found elsewhere, adorned, embellished, tricked out in silk and satin and brocade, but here, of a surety, dwelt the spirit of the Book. It was impossible to doubt that Heaven had some holy purpose underlying it all, at the sight of the woman who had taken a mother’s lot upon herself, as Jesus Christ had taken the form of a man, who gleaned and suffered and ran into debt for her little waifs; a woman who defrauded herself in her reckonings, and would not own that she was ruining herself that she might be a Mother. One was constrained to admit, at the sight of her, that the good upon earth have something in common with the angels in heaven; Commandant Genestas shook his head as he looked at her.
“Is M. Benassis a clever doctor?” he asked at last.
“I do not know, sir, but he cures poor people for nothing.”
“It seems to me that this is a man and no mistake!” he went on, speaking to himself.
“Oh! yes, sir, and a good man too! There is scarcely any one hereabouts that does not put his name in their prayers, morning and night!”
“That is for you, mother,” said the soldier, as he gave her several coins, “and that is for the children,” he went on, as he added another crown. “Is M. Benassis’ house still a long way off?” he asked, when he had mounted his horse.
“Oh! no, sir, a bare league at most.”
The commandant set out, fully persuaded that two leagues remained ahead of him. Yet after all he soon caught a glimpse through the trees of the little town’s first cluster of houses, and then of all the roofs that crowded about a conical steeple, whose slates were secured to the angles of the wooden framework by sheets of tin that glittered in the sun. This sort of roof, which has a peculiar appearance, denotes the nearness of the borders of Savoy, where it is very common. The valley is wide at this particular point, and a fair number of houses pleasantly situated, either in the little plain or along the side of the mountain stream, lend human interest to the well-tilled spot, a stronghold with no apparent outlet among the mountains that surround it.
It was noon when Genestas reined in his horse beneath an avenue of elm-trees half-way up the hillside, and only a few paces from the town, to ask the group of children who stood before him for M. Benassis’ house. At first the children looked at each other, then they scrutinized the stranger with the expression that they usually wear when they set eyes upon anything for the first time; a different curiosity and a different thought in every little face. Then the boldest and the merriest of the band, a little bright-eyed urchin, with bare, muddy feet, repeated his words over again, in child fashion.
“M. Benassis’ house, sir?” adding, “I will show you the way there.”
He walked along in front of the horse, prompted quite as much by a wish to gain a kind of importance by being in the stranger’s company, as by a child’s love of being useful, or the imperative craving to be doing something, that possesses mind and body at his age. The officer followed him for the entire length of the principal street of the country town. The way was paved with cobblestones, and wound in and out among the houses, which their owners had erected along its course in the most arbitrary fashion. In one place a bake-house had been built out into the middle of the roadway; in another a gable protruded, partially obstructing the passage, and yet farther on a mountain stream flowed across it in a runnel. Genestas noticed a fair number of roofs of tarred shingle, but yet more of them were thatched; a few were tiled, and some seven or eight (belonging no doubt to the cure, the justice of the peace, and some of the wealthier townsmen) were covered with slates. There was a total absence of regard for appearances befitting a village at the end of the world, which had nothing beyond it, and no connection with any other place. The people who lived in it seemed to belong to one family that dwelt beyond the limits of the bustling world, with which the collector of taxes and a few ties of the very slenderest alone served to connect them.
When Genestas had gone a step or two farther, he saw on the mountain side a broad road that rose above the village. Clearly