"My children, you are now happy, and rich for country folks; I leave you the business of this forest, which is a good one, and all I possess elsewhere is yours. You can spend the rest of the season here, and during that time you can decide on your plans for the future. You belong to different parts of the country; your tastes and habits are not alike. Try, my sons, both of you, to find what kind of life will make your wives happy and keep them from regretting their marriages now so well begun. I shall return within a year. Let me have two fine grandchildren to welcome me. You can then tell me what you have decided to do. Take your time; a thing that seems good to-day may seem worse, or better, to-morrow."
"Where are going, father?" said Thérence, clasping him in her arms in fear.
"I am going to travel about with Joseph, and play our music as we go," answered Père Bastien. "He needs it; and as for me, I have hungered for it these thirty years."
Neither tears nor entreaties could keep him, and that evening we escorted them half way to Saint Sevère. There, as we embraced Père Bastien with many tears, Joseph said to us: "Don't be unhappy. I know very well he is sacrificing the sight of your happiness to my good, for he has a father's heart for me and knows I am the most to be pitied of his children; but perhaps I shall not need him long; and I have an idea you will see him sooner than he thinks for." Then he added, kneeling before my wife and Huriel's, "Dear sisters, I have offended both of you, and I have been punished enough by my own thoughts. Will you not forgive me, so that I may forgive myself and go away more peacefully?"
They both kissed him with the utmost affection, and then he came to each of us, and said, with surprising warmth of heart, the kindest and most affectionate words he had ever said in his life, begging us to forgive his faults and to hold him in remembrance.
We stood on a hill to watch them as long as possible. Père Bastien played vigorously on his bagpipe, turning round from time to time to wave his cap and blow kisses with his hand.
Joseph did not turn round; he walked in silence, with his head down as if in thought or in grief. I could not help saying to Huriel that I saw on his face as he left us that strange look I had seen in his childhood, which, in our parts, is thought the sign of a man doomed to evil.
Our tears were dried, little by little, in the sunshine of happiness and hope. My beautiful dear wife made a greater effort than the rest of us, for never before being parted from her father, she seemed to have lost a portion of her soul in losing him; and I saw that in spite of her courage, her love for me, and the happiness she felt in the prospect of becoming a mother, there was always something lacking for which she sighed in secret. So my mind was constantly turning on how to arrange our lives to live in future with Père Bastien, were it even necessary to sell my property, give up my family, and follow my wife wherever she wished to live.
It was just the same with Brulette, who was determined to consult only her husband's tastes, specially when her old grandfather, after a brief illness, died quietly, as he had lived, protected by the care and love of his dear daughter.
"Tiennet," she often said to me, "I see plainly that Berry must give way to the Bourbonnais in you and me. Huriel is too fond of this free, strong life and change of air to endure our sleepy plains. He makes me so happy I will never let him feel a secret pain. I have no family now in our parts; all my friends there, except you, have hurt me; I live only for Huriel. Where he is happy there I am happiest."
The winter found us still in the forest of Chassin. We had stripped that beautiful region of its beauty, for the old oak wood was its finest feature. The snow covered the prostrate bodies of the noble trees, flung head-foremost into the river, which held them, cold and dead, in its ice. One morning Huriel and I were lunching beside a fire of brushwood which our wives had lighted to warm our soup, and we were looking at them with delight, for both were in a fair way to keep the promise they had made to Père Bastien to give him descendants, when suddenly they both cried out, and Thérence, forgetting she was not so light as she once was, sprang almost across the fire to kiss a man whom the smoke of damp leaves had hidden from our sight. It was her good father, who soon had neither arms nor lips enough to reply to our welcome. After the first joy was over, we asked him about Joseph, and then his face darkened and his eyes filled with tears.
"He told you that you would see me sooner than I expected," said Père Bastien, sadly; "he may have had a presentiment of his fate, and God, who softened the hard shell of his heart at that moment, no doubt counselled him to reflect upon himself."
We dared not inquire further. Père Bastien sat down, opened his sack and drew forth the pieces of a broken bagpipe.
"This is all that remains of that poor lad," he said. "He could not escape his star. I thought I had softened his pride, but, alas! in everything connected with music he grew daily more haughty and morose. Perhaps it was my fault. I tried to console him for his love troubles by proving to him the happiness of his art. From me, at least, he got the sweets of praise, but the more he sucked them the greater his thirst. We went far,—as far even as the mountains of the Morvan, where there are many bagpipers as jealous as those in these parts, not so much for their selfish interests as for their conceit in their talents. Joseph was imprudent; he used language that offended them at a supper to which they hospitably invited him with the kindest intentions. Unhappily, I was not there; not feeling very well, and having no reason to fear a misunderstanding, I stayed away. He was absent all night, but that often happened, and as I had noticed he was rather jealous of the applause people were pleased to give to my old ditties, I was apt not to go with him. In the morning I went out, still not feeling well, and I heard in the village that a broken bagpipe had been picked up at the edge of a pond. I ran to see it, and knew it at a glance. Then I went to the place where it was found, and breaking the ice of the pond, I found his poor body, quite frozen. There were no marks of violence on it, and the bagpipers swore that they had parted from him, soberly and without a quarrel, about a league from the spot. I searched in vain for the cause of his death. The place was in a very wild region, where the law fears the peasant and the peasant fears nought but the devil. I was forced to content myself with their foolish remarks and reasons. In those parts they firmly believe a great deal that we should laugh at here; for instance, they think you can't be a musician without selling your soul to hell; and that Satan tears the bagpipe from the player's hands and breaks it upon his back, which drives him wild and maddens him, and then he kills himself. That is how they explain the revenge which bagpipers often take upon each other; and the latter never contradict, for it suits them to be feared and to escape all consequences. Indeed, all musicians are held in such fear and disrepute that I could get no attention to my complaints, and if I had remained in the neighborhood I might even have been accused of summoning the devil to rid me of my companion."
"Alas!" said Brulette, weeping, "my poor José, my poor dear companion! Good God, what are we to say to his mother?"
"We must tell her," said Père Bastien, sadly, "not to let Charlot take a fancy to music. It is too harsh a mistress for folks like us; we have not head enough to stand on the heights to which it leads without turning giddy."
"Oh, father!" cried Thérence, "if you would only give it up! God knows what misfortunes it may yet bring upon you."
"Be comforted, my darling," said Père Bastien, "I have given it up! I return to live with my family, to be happy with my grandchildren, whom I dream of already as they dance at my knee. Where shall we settle ourselves, my dear children?"
"Where you wish," said Thérence.
"Where our husbands wish," said Brulette.
"Where my wife wishes," I cried.
"Where you all wish," said Huriel.
"Well," said Père Bastien, "as I know your likings and your means, and as, moreover, I bring you back a bit of money, I've been thinking; as I trudged along that we could all be satisfied. When you wish the peach to ripen you mustn't pull out the stone. The peach-stone is the property which Tiennet owns at Nohant. We will buy other land that adjoins it, and build a good house for all of us. I shall be content to watch the wheat-fields,—glad not to fell God's noble trees, but to make my little songs in the olden fashion, at evening, by my door, among mine own, instead of drinking the wine of others and making jealousies. Huriel likes to roam, and his wife, just now, is of the same turn of mind. They can undertake such enterprises as we have now finished in this forest (where I see you have worked well), and they can spend the fine season in the woods. If their young family is in the way, Thérence has strength and heart enough to manage a double nest, and you will all meet together in the autumn with increased pleasure, until my son, long after he has closed my eyes, will feel the need of resting all the year round, as I feel it now."
All that my father-in-law said came to pass, just as he advised and prophesied. The good God blessed our obedience; and as life is a pasty mixed of sadness and content, poor Mariton often came to us to weep, and the worthy monk, as often, came to laugh.
THE END.