Sweethearts at Home

There is something curiously dreamy about the Lake of Neuchatel. I knew it and the school down by the pier long ago, when the little town still preserved distinct traces of the hundred and fifty years of Prussian drill-sergeants. Here and there the arms of Brandenburg were to be seen curiously mixed, and almost entwined, with the strong red cross of the Swiss Confederation.

Specially interesting is the opposite side of the lake, for there the Cantons push forward their narrow necks of territory to the very lake shore--possibly as the price of their support against the Eagles of the North, whose claws have never let go their hold but this once. There, within a day's easy walk, you can pass from Canton Vaud into Canton Friburg and back again into Vaud. Then, Morat-way, you come on a little inset square of Canton Berne, whose emblematic bears also have their claws in every pie thereabout. And all the way, never a hotel for the fleecing of the foreigner! Here and there, indeed, one passes a country inn with sanded floor. More often it is only a rather superior house with a bush hung out French-fashion over the threshold.

It is best, as Sweetheart and I found, to make for one of these. Generally I had known them of old, and though since then the years had done some stiff route-marching, most of their hosts and hostesses remembered me.

How do you get there? Well, you cross the lake almost at its narrowest part. A little stream drains into it, slowly and in Dutch fashion, as if it were smoking a peaceful pipe by the way. Indeed, for a little while you might fancy yourself actually in Holland, so thickly are the flowers set. Only--only (and oh! the difference!) they are all wild. For I cannot help my heart beating faster when I set foot on any of the untrodden places of the earth, when I know that the next person I meet will be different from anybody I have ever met before--that he will be as frankly interested and very likely amused by me as I am by the moldy and the quaint about him--things that nobody in his senses has ever thought of looking at in that countryside for a hundred years! Privately there is often a quiet, widespread, wholly unspoken doubt of my entire sanity. That dry smile hovering about the mouth of the courteous mayor of the commune says as much. Just the same with the quick, intelligent glance that shoots betwixt husband and wife when you ask to see their barn--once the chapel of a long-destroyed monastery (Carthusians from the Italian valleys driven out by the religious wars). To them it is a barn, commodious--only a little damp. But it is nothing more. A new model one, now--all burnt brick, floor of concrete, with iron roof pillars--now that would be something worth crossing the lake to look at. Hold--there is one at Estavayer! The farmer there would be glad to show it, if only Monsieur and the young lady...? No! Well, there is no accounting for tastes, and that shrug from Master Pierre said quite plainly that he had the poorest opinion of our mental capacity. But all the same Master Pierre is kind to the infirm--to those (as the Catechism says) "of weaker understanding."

Yes, there is the key. We can take our own time, and when we have done we can hang it up where we got it.

But good Master Pierre is curious too. Where might we be going? If it is a fair question--or, indeed, whether or not! "To Madame Marie Brigue's!" "Yes, but certainly!" "Had we known Madame Marie long?" The Elder of us had known her for some twenty years or more.

"When she was with old Monsieur Alexander--yes, at the Upper Riffel House, and everything in her charge?" Sanity was returned to us like a passport examined doubtfully. We should not this time be committed to a House of Retreat for the mentally infirm--no, not if fifty doctors, all specialists, had so certified. We knew Madame Marie! Master Pierre would lay aside everything and come with us. It was not possible that we could know the way.

I thanked Master Pierre, but for my own reasons preferred to go alone--that is to say, alone with Sweetheart, which is the best kind of loneliness.

"There is going to be a storm!" I said to my Maid, as we paced along side by side. Sweetheart looked at the cloudless September sky, at the boldly-designed splashes of the leaf-shadows making Japanese patterns on the narrow path through the wood. Then she regarded me inquiringly. Of a storm in the heaven above or on the earth beneath there was certainly no visible sign.

Then I explained that the tempest was a moral one, and would certainly break when we met in with Madame Marie. And I set her this riddle to read, for she is fond of such.

I had always been first favorite with Madame Marie. She had spoiled me as a wandering boy. She has assisted me as a callow youth to the sweetmeats under her control. In my earlier manhood she had taken me to see her brother, who was a cure of a great parish in the Valais.

Yes, boy and man, she had always scolded me, railed upon me, declared to my face that I was of a surety "the Last of the Last," and that, altogether apart from my being a heretic, my misdeeds would inevitably render my future far from enviable! According to Madame Marie I was certainly bound for an ice-free port!

"And what had you done to her, father, to make her so angry with you--or at least scold you so much?"

"Only come in late for my meals!" I said. Sweetheart took one look at me, as one who would say, "Pray remember that I am no more a simple child!" But what she said aloud was, "Did all this happen before I was born?"

And I knew instantly that I was underlying an unjust suspicion, from which the very first glimpse of Madame Marie would instantly free me. For even when I knew her Madame had long passed the canonical age, and must now be verging on the three-score years and ten.

It was, however, quiet unlikely that she would ever refrain from scolding me, even in the presence of my eldest daughter.

By and by we came in sight of a little white house, and upon the path which passed beneath it. Over the door, half hidden by the yellow splashes of Canariensis, was the sign, "_Madame Marie Brigue ... Restaurant_." There was a great quiet everywhere about the place. Some pigeons were coo-cooing in the Basse Cour. A cat regarded us with the sleepy dispassion of its race. However, there was certainly a stirring among earthenware somewhere towards the entrance of the cellar. We could make out the grating of carrots, or, as it might be, the scraping of potatoes. I motioned Sweetheart to get behind me--which she did, eager to take a hand in one of "father's ploys."

Then I went to the front door, and in the loud, confident voice of one who, after a short absence, has come back at the proper hour, to find his dinner not ready, I called out, "Marie, are those chops not done yet?"

A dish clattered on the floor. We could hear the splash of the fragments on the cool flagstones of the inner kitchen.

"Marie, old Lazybones! Here have I been twelve hours on the mountains, and not even an omelette ready!"

"It is the Herr-with-the-Long-Legs--the Herr who kept my good dinner waiting while he ran about the '_bergen_'! And now--oh, the Good-for-Nothing, the Vaurien, he come back to old Marie crying hunger--just as he used to do more than a score of years ago up in the Riffel House!"

And before I knew it I was embraced and kissed on both cheeks by this tall, gaunt old woman--greatly, of course, to the joy of Sweetheart. But her turn was yet to come. Madame Marie continued scolding me even in the utmost expansion of her greeting. She held me at arm's length and scolded. She scolded because I had come without warning, and because I had not come sooner. Scolded because I had let the years slip past till her hair was white like the snow on the mountains, on which I had so often tarried till my dinner was burnt to a cinder! While mine--but there--who was this with me? Was I married? "Your daughter!" A daughter like that, and old Marie getting so blind that she had called me bad names--the names of the old time--in her hearing. But Mademoiselle would understand! She would pardon a poor old woman who had known her father, and been a mother to him, years and years before the young lady was born, or even thought of!

So, indeed, Mademoiselle understood very well. No forgiveness was necessary. She was all too happy. And while the dinner was preparing, she set down all these facts in her notebook, so that when Madame Marie came to the door to say that the omelette was ready to be put before us on the table, she called to Sweetheart that she was indeed her father's own daughter. For that in the old days at the Riffel House he had always been like that, sitting down on the very glacier to scribble in his notebook all about nothing, and so letting good food spoil because of his foolishness!

And so it happened that on our way back from Madame Marie's, Sweetheart let me see the first pages of her Diary. I found them so interesting that we arranged on the spot how they were to be published. And so here they are, ready (if you be simple) to please you as well as they pleased me.