At Last, Leaving Modestine By
Herself, I Was Constrained To Run After Them, Hailing The While.
They
stopped as I drew near, the mother still cursing; and I could see she was
a handsome, motherly, respectable-looking woman.
The son once more
answered me roughly and inaudibly, and was for setting out again. But
this time I simply collared the mother, who was nearest me, and,
apologising for my violence, declared that I could not let them go until
they had put me on my road. They were neither of them offended - rather
mollified than otherwise; told me I had only to follow them; and then the
mother asked me what I wanted by the lake at such an hour. I replied, in
the Scottish manner, by inquiring if she had far to go herself. She told
me, with another oath, that she had an hour and a half's road before her.
And then, without salutation, the pair strode forward again up the
hillside in the gathering dusk.
I returned for Modestine, pushed her briskly forward, and, after a sharp
ascent of twenty minutes, reached the edge of a plateau. The view,
looking back on my day's journey, was both wild and sad. Mount Mezenc
and the peaks beyond St. Julien stood out in trenchant gloom against a
cold glitter in the east; and the intervening field of hills had fallen
together into one broad wash of shadow, except here and there the outline
of a wooded sugar-loaf in black, here and there a white irregular patch
to represent a cultivated farm, and here and there a blot where the
Loire, the Gazeille, or the Laussonne wandered in a gorge.
Soon we were on a high-road, and surprise seized on my mind as I beheld a
village of some magnitude close at hand; for I had been told that the
neighbourhood of the lake was uninhabited except by trout. The road
smoked in the twilight with children driving home cattle from the fields;
and a pair of mounted stride-legged women, hat and cap and all, dashed
past me at a hammering trot from the canton where they had been to church
and market. I asked one of the children where I was. At Bouchet St.
Nicolas, he told me. Thither, about a mile south of my destination, and
on the other side of a respectable summit, had these confused roads and
treacherous peasantry conducted me. My shoulder was cut, so that it hurt
sharply; my arm ached like toothache from perpetual beating; I gave up
the lake and my design to camp, and asked for the auberge.
I HAVE A GOAD
The auberge of Bouchet St. Nicolas was among the least pretentious I have
ever visited; but I saw many more of the like upon my journey. Indeed,
it was typical of these French highlands. Imagine a cottage of two
stories, with a bench before the door; the stable and kitchen in a suite,
so that Modestine and I could hear each other dining; furniture of the
plainest, earthern floors, a single bedchamber for travellers, and that
without any convenience but beds.
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