Part 39 (2/2)

However, it signified little to the youthful mistress-of-the-bells, Maryette Courtray, called ”Carillonnette,” for her Yankee lover still lay in his distant hospital--her muleteer, ”Djack.” So mules might bray, and negroes fill the Sainte Lesse meadows with their shouting laughter; and the lank, hawk-nosed Yankee muleteers might saunter clanking into the White Doe in search of meat or drink or tobacco, or a glimpse of the pretty bell-mistress, for all it meant to her.

Her Djack lived; that was what occupied her mind; other men were merely men--even his comrades, Sticky Smith and Kid Glenn, a.s.sumed individuality to distinguish them from other men only because they were Djack's friends.

And as for all other muleteers, they seemed to her as alike as Chinamen, leaving upon her young mind a general impression of long, thin legs and necks and the keen eyes of hunting falcons.

She had was.h.i.+ng to do that morning. Very early she climbed up into the ancient belfry, wound the drum so that the bells would play a few bars at the quarters and before each hour struck; and also in order that the carillon might ring mechanically at noon in case she had not returned to take her place at the keyboard with her wooden gloves.

There was a light west wind rippling through the tree tops; and everywhere suns.h.i.+ne lay brilliant on pasture and meadow under the purest of cobalt skies.

In the garden her crippled father, swathed in shawls, dozed in his deep chair beside the river-wall, waking now and then to watch the quill on his long bamboo fish-pole, stemming the sparkling current of the little river Lesse.

Sticky Smith, off duty and having filled himself to repletion with cafe-au-lait at the inn, volunteered to act as nurse, attendant, remover of fish and baiter of hook, while Maryette was absent at the stone-rimmed pool where the was.h.i.+ng of all Sainte Lesse laundry had been accomplished for hundreds of years.

”You promise not to go away?” she cautioned him in the simple, first-aid French she employed in speaking to him, and pausing with both arms raised to balance the loaded clothes-basket on her head.

”Wee--wee!” he a.s.sured her with dignity. ”Je fume mong peep! Je regard le vieux pecher. Voo poovay allay, Mademoiselle Maryette.”

She hesitated, then removed the basket from her head and set it on the gra.s.s.

”You are very kind, Monsieur Steek-Smeet. I shall wash your underwear the very first garments I take out of my basket. Thank you a thousand times.”

She bent over with sweet solicitude and pressed her lips to her father's withered cheek:

”Au revoir, my father _cheri_. An hour or two at the meadow-_lavoir_ and I shall return to find thee. _Bonne chance, mon pere!_ Thou shalt surely catch a large and beautiful fish for luncheon before I return with my wash.”

She swung the basket of wash to her head again without effort, and went her way, following the deeply trodden sheep-path behind the White Doe Inn.

The path wound down through a sloping pasture, across a footbridge spanning an arm of the Lesse which washed the base of the garden wall, then ascended a gentle aclivity among hazel thicket and tall sycamores, becoming for a little distance a shaded wood-path where thrushes sang ceaselessly in the sun-flecked undergrowth.

But at the eastern edge of the copse the little hill fell away into an open, sunny meadow, fragrant with wild-flowers and clover, through which a rivulet ran deep and cold between gra.s.sy banks.

It supplied the drinking water of Sainte Lesse; and a branch of it poured bubbling into the stone-rimmed _lavoir_ where generations of Sainte Lesse maids had scrubbed the linen of the community, kneeling there amid wild flowers and fluttering b.u.t.terflies in the shade of three tall elms.

There was n.o.body at the pool; Maryette saw that as she came out of the hazel copse through the meadow. And very soon she was on her knees at the clear pool's edge, bare of arm and throat and bosom, her blue wool skirts trussed up, and elbow deep in snowy suds.

Overhead the sky was a quivering, royal blue; the earth s.h.i.+mmered in its bath of suns.h.i.+ne; the west wind blowing carried away eastward the reverberations of the distant cannonade, so that not even the vibration of the concussions disturbed Sainte Lesse.

A bullfinch was piping l.u.s.tily in a young tree as she began her task; a blackbird answered from somewhere among the hawthorns with a bewildering series of complicated trills.

As the little mistress-of-the-bells scrubbed and beat the clothes with her paddle, and rinsed and wrung them and soaped them afresh, she sang softly under her breath, to an ancient air of her _pays_, words that she improvised to fit it--_vrai chanson de laveuse_:

”A blackbird whistles I love!

Over the thistles b.u.t.terflies hover, Each with her lover In love.

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