The Wonderful Year. William John Locke

your opinion of me——” she said, and turning swiftly walked away. Martin overtook her.

      “Do you want me to fall in love with you?” he asked.

      She halted for a second and stamped her foot. “No. Ten thousand times no. If you did I’d throw vitriol over you.”

      She marched on. Martin followed in an obfuscated frame of mind. She led the way round the ramparts and out into the narrow, cobble-paved streets of the old town, past dilapidated glories of the Renaissance, where once great nobles had entertained kings and now the proletariat hung laundry to dry over royal salamanders and proud escutcheons, past the Maison de Saint Simon, with its calm and time-mellowed ornament and exquisite oriels, past things over which, but yesterday, but that morning, they had lingered lovingly, into the Place du Mûrier. There she paused, as if seeking her bearings.

      “Where are you going?” asked Martin, somewhat breathlessly.

      “To some place where I can be alone,” she flashed.

      “Very well,” said he, and raised his cap and left her.

      In a few seconds he heard her call.

      “Martin!”

      He turned. “Yes?”

      “I’m anything you like to call me,” she said. “It’s not your fault. It’s my temper. But you’ve got to learn it’s better not to turn women down flat like that, even when they speak in jest.”

      “I’m very sorry, Corinna,” he said, smiling gravely, “but when one jests on such subjects I don’t know where I am.”

      They crossed the square slowly, side by side.

      “I suppose neither you nor anybody else could understand,” she said. “I was angry with you, but if you had played the fool I should have been angrier still.”

      “Why?” he asked.

      She looked straight ahead with a strained glance and for a minute or two did not reply. At last:

      “You remember Fortinbras mentioning the name of Camille Fargot?”

      “Oh!” said Martin.

      “That’s why,” said Corinna.

      “Is he at Brantôme?” asked Martin, with brow perplexed by the memory of the ridiculous mother.

      “No, I wish to God he was.”

      “Are you engaged?”

      “In a sort of a way,” said Corinna, gloomily.

      “I see,” said Martin.

      “You don’t see a little bit in the world, she retorted with a sudden laugh. “You’re utterly mystified.”

      “I’m not,” he declared stoutly. “Why on earth shouldn’t you have a love affair?”

      “I thought you insinuated that none of your ‘fellow men’ would look at me twice.”

      He contracted his brows and regarded her steadily. “I’m beginning to get tired of this argument,” said he.

      Her eyes drooped first. “Perhaps you really have progressed a bit since we started.”

      “I was doing my best to tell you, when you switched off onto this idiot circuit.”

      Suddenly she put out her hand. “Don’t let us quarrel, Martin. What has been joy and wonder to you has been merely an anodyne to me. I’m about the most miserable girl in France.”

      “I wish you had told me something of this before,” said Martin, “because I’ve been feeling myself the happiest man. …”

CHAPTER IV

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      THERE is six o’clock striking and those English have not yet arrived.”

      Thus spake Gaspard-Marie Bigourdin, landlord of the Hôtel des Grottes, a vast man clad in a brown holland suit and a soft straw hat with a gigantic brim. So vast was he that his person overlapped in all directions the Austrian bent-wood rocking-chair in which he was taking the cool of the evening.

      “They said they would come in time for dinner, mon oncle,” said Félise.

      She was a graceful slip of a girl, dark-eyed, refined of feature. Fortinbras with paternal fondness, if you remember, had likened her to the wild flowers from which Alpine honey was made. And indeed, she suggested wild fragrance. Her brown hair was done up on the top of her head and fastened by a comb like that of all the peasant girls of the district; but she wore the blouse and stuff skirt of the well-to-do bourgeoisie.

      “Six o’clock is already time for dinner in Brantôme,” remarked Monsieur Bigourdin.

      “They are accustomed to the hours of London and Paris, where I’ve heard they dine at eight or nine or any time that pleases them.”

      “In London and Paris they get up at midday and go to bed at dawn. They are coming here purposely to dis-habilitate themselves from the ways of London and Paris. At least so your father gives me to understand. It is a bad beginning.”

      “I am longing to see them,” said Félise.

      “Don’t you see enough English? Ten years ago an Englishman at Brantôme was a curiosity. All the inhabitants, you among them, ma petite Félise, used to run two kilometres to look at him. But now, with the automobile, they are as familiar in the eyes of the good Brantômois as truffles.”

      By this simile Monsieur Bigourdin did not mean to convey the idea that the twelve hundred inhabitants of Brantôme were all gastronomic voluptuaries. It is true that Brantôme battens on pâté de foie gras; but it is the essence of its existence, seeing that Brantôme makes it and sells it and with pigs and dogs hunts the truffles without which pâté de foie gras would be a comestible of fat absurdity.

      “But no English have been sent before by my father,” said Félise.

      “That’s true,” replied Bigourdin, with a capacious smile, showing white strong teeth.

      “They are the first people—French or English, I shall have met who know my father.”

      “That’s true also,” said Bigourdin. “And they must be droll types like your excellent father himself. Tiens, let me see again what he says about them.” He searched his pockets, a process involving convulsions of his frame which made the rocking-chair creak. “It must be in my black jacket,” said he at last.

      “I’ll get it,” said Félise, and went into the house.

      Bigourdin rolled and lit a cigarette and gave himself up to comfortable reflection. The Hôtel des Grottes was built on the slope of a rock and the loggia or verandah on which Bigourdin was taking his ease, hung over a miniature precipice. At the bottom ran the River Dronne encircling most of the old-world town and crossed here and there by flashing little bridges. Away to the northeast loomed the mountains of the Limousin where the river has its source. The tiny place slumbered in the slanting sunshine. The sight of Brantôme stretched out below him was inseparable from Bigourdin’s earliest conception of the universe. In the Hôtel des Grottes he had been born; there, save for a few years at Lyons whither he had been sent by his mother in order to widen his views on hotel keeping, he had spent all his life, and there he sincerely hoped to die full of honour and good nourishment. Brantôme contented him. It belonged to him. It was so diminutive and compact that he could take the whole of it in at once. He was familiar with all the little tragedies and comedies that enacted themselves beneath those red-tiled roofs. Did he walk down the Rue de Périgueux his hand went to his hat as often as that of the President of the Republic on his way to a review at Longchamps. He was a man of substance and consideration,