The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 4

Oh! how sweet had been the perfume exhaled by her, his sweetheart of bygone days!

Duchoux saw him to the door.

"This house is your own?" said the baron.

"Yes, monsieur; I bought it recently. And I am proud of it. I am a child of accident, monsieur, and I don't want to hide it; I am proud of it. I owe nothing to anyone; I am the son of my own efforts; I owe everything to myself."

The little boy, who remained on the threshold, kept still exclaiming, though at some distance away from them:

"Dada!"

Mordiane, shaking with a shivering fit, seized with panic, fled as one flies away from a great danger.

"He is going to guess who I am, to recognize me," he thought. "He is going to take me in his arms, and to call out to me, 'Dada,' while giving me a kiss perfumed with garlic."

"To-morrow, monsieur."

"To-morrow, at one o'clock."

The landau rolled over the white road.

"Coachman! to the railway-station!"

And he heard two voices, one far away and sweet, the faint, sad voice of the dead, saying: "My darling," and the other sonorous, sing-song, frightful, bawling out, "Dada," just as people bawl out, "Stop him!" when a thief is flying through the street.

Next evening, as he entered the club, the Count d'Etreillis said to him:

"We have not seen you for the last three days. Have you been ill?"

"Yes, a little unwell. I get headaches from time to time."

OLD AMABLE

PART I

The humid, gray sky seemed to weigh down on the vast brown plain. The odor of Autumn, the sad odor of bare, moist lands, of fallen leaves, of dead grass, made the stagnant evening air more thick and heavy. The peasants were still at work, scattered through the fields, waiting for the stroke of the Angelus to call them back to the farm-houses, whose thatched roofs were visible here and there through the branches of the leafless trees which protected the apple-gardens against the wind.

At the side of the road, on a heap of clothes, a very small male child seated with its legs apart, was playing with a potato, which he now and then let fall on his dress, while five women bent down with their rumps in the air, were picking sprigs of colza in the adjoining plain. With a slow continuous movement, all along the great cushions of earth which the plow had just turned up, they drove in sharp wooden stakes, and then cast at once into the hole so formed the plant, already a little withered, which sank on the side; then they covered over the root, and went on with their work.

A man who was passing, with a whip in his hand, and wearing wooden shoes, stopped near the child, took it up, and kissed it. Then one of the women rose up, and came across to him. She was a big, red-haired girl, with large hips, waist, and shoulders, a tall Norman woman, with yellow hair in which there was a blood-red tint.

She said, in a resolute voice:

"Here you are, Césaire – well?"

The man, a thin young fellow with a melancholy air, murmured:

"Well, nothing at all – always the same."

"He won't have it?"

"He won't have it."

"What are you going to do?"

"What do you say I ought to do?"

"Go see the curé."

"I will."

"Go at once!"

"I will."

And they stared at each other. He held the child in his arms all the time. He kissed it once more, and then put it down again on the woman's clothes.

In the distance, between two farm-houses, could be seen a plow drawn by a horse, and driven along by a man. They moved on very gently, the horse, the plow, and the laborer, under the dim evening sky.

The woman went on:

"What, then, did your father say?"

"He said he would not have it."

"Why wouldn't he have it?"

The young man pointed towards the child whom he had just put back on the ground, then with a glance he drew her attention to the man drawing the plow yonder there.

And he said emphatically:

"Because 'tis his – this child of yours."

The girl shrugged her shoulders, and in an angry tone said:

"Faith everyone knows it well – that it is Victor's. And what about it after all? I made a slip. Am I the only woman that did? My mother also made a slip before me, and then yours did the same before she married your dad! Who is it that hasn't made a slip in the country. I made a slip with Victor, because he took advantage of me while I was asleep in the barn, it's true, and afterwards it happened between us when I wasn't asleep. I certainly would have married him if he weren't a servant-man. Am I a worse woman for that?"

The man said simply:

"As for me, I like you just as you are, with or without the child. 'Tis only my father that opposes me. All the same, I'll see about settling the business."

She answered:

"Go to the curé at once."

"I'm going to him."

And he set forth with his heavy peasant's tread; while the girl, with her hands on her hips, turned round to pick her colza.