Autumn Glory; Or, The Toilers of the Field

When Rose-Marie entered, they did not get up, but said both together, Adelaide at the window, Véronique a little away:

"It is you, little Lumineau! Good day, pretty one!"

"Sit down, child," said Adelaide, "you are quite out of breath."

"But not ill?" asked Véronique. "Your eyes are as bright as if you had fever?"

"Thank you, aunts," answered Marie-Rose. She called them aunts on account of a distant relationship difficult to establish, but principally on account of the old ladies' kindness. "I have been walking quickly, and I do feel a little tired. I have come for some of my money."

The sisters exchanged a side-look, laughing already at the thought of the coming marriage, and the eldest, Adelaide, drawing her needle across her lips as if to smooth out the wrinkles, asked:

"You are about to marry, then?"

"Oh, indeed no!" returned Marie-Rose, "I shall be married like you, my aunts, to my seat in church and my rosary. It is for father, who has not money to pay the rent of the farm; he is in arrears."

And as, while speaking, she did not look into her old friends' faces, but into the shade of the room, somewhere towards the two beds ranged along the side of the wall, the sisters Michelonne shook their heads as though to communicate the impression that, all the same, some disturbing element had entered into Rousille's life. But the sisters were more instinctively polite than curious. They reserved their thought for the long hours of chat together, and Adelaide, throwing down her half-finished work, clasping her white bony hands, and bending forward her thin body, said gaily:

"Well, my pretty one, you have come just at the right time! I had lent your money on interest to my nephew, who, you know, breeds foals, and very good ones, on the Marais. He is a sharp fellow, that François. Would you believe it, yesterday he actually sold his dappled grey filly – that flies like a plover, and was the envy of all the breeders and dannions that went by the meadow – and for such a big price that he would not even tell us the amount. So, you see, it will be quite easy for him to pay back a good part of the loan. How much will you want?"

"A hundred and twenty pistoles."

"You shall have them. Are they wanted at once?"

"Yes, Aunt Adelaide. I promised them by to-morrow."

"Then, Véronique, my girl, suppose you were to go to our nephew? The cloak can well wait an hour."

The younger sister rose at once; she was so short standing, that she did not reach above the head of Marie-Rose sitting. Rapidly shaking off the threads of cotton from her black apron, she kissed the girl on both cheeks:

"Good-bye, Rousille. To-morrow the money will be here, and you will only have to come and fetch it."

In the quiet of the sleepy town, Véronique's gliding steps could be heard as they went down the lane. No sooner had she gone than Adelaide went up to Marie-Rose and fixing upon the girl her clear kind eyes, her eyelids quivering with uneasiness:

"Child," she said hurriedly, "you are in trouble; you have been crying. Why, you are crying now!" The wrinkled hand seized the girl's pink palm. "What is it, my Rousille? Tell me, as you would tell your own mother. I love you as she would do."

Marie-Rose repressed her tears. She would not cry when she could speak. Trembling at the contact of the hand which touched her own, her eyes like diamonds, her face set, as though she were addressing those enemies before whom her tongue had been tied:

"They have sent away Jean Nesmy," she said rising.

"He, my dear? Such a good worker? And why?"

"Because I love him, Aunt Michelonne. They turned him out this morning. And they think that all is over between us because I shall not see him again. They little know the girls of these parts."

"Well said, Maraîchine," exclaimed the old aunt.

"I will give them all my money, yes, readily; but my love – where I have placed it there I will leave it. It is as sacred as my baptismal vows. I have no fear of poverty; no fear that he will forget me. The day he comes back, for he has promised to come back, I will go to meet him, and no one shall prevent me – had I to cross the Marais, were there snow and ice, and all the girls of the town to mock at me, did my father and my brothers forbid me to go, still I would do it!"

Erect, passionate, she made the walls of the little room unused to loud voices ring with the voice of love and bitterness. It was to herself, herself only, that she spoke, because she suffered. She was looking straight before her, vaguely, apparently unaware of the Michelonne's presence.