Suddenly an old peasant woman who had stayed beside
the dying man, held there by a morbid fear of what
would soon happen to herself, appeared at the window
and cried in a shrill voice:
“He’s dead! he’s dead!”
Everybody was silent. The women arose quickly
to go and see. He was indeed dead. The rattle
had ceased. The men looked at each other, looking
down, ill at ease. They hadn’t finished
eating the dumplings. Certainly the rascal had
not chosen a propitious moment. The Chicots were
no longer weeping. It was over; they were relieved.
They kept repeating:
“I knew it couldn’t ’last.
If he could only have done it last night, it would
have saved us all this trouble.”
Well, anyhow, it was over. They would bury him
on Monday, that was all, and they would eat some more
dumplings for the occasion.
The guests went away, talking the matter over, pleased
at having had the chance to see him and of getting
something to eat.
And when the husband and wife were alone, face to
face, she said, her face distorted with grief:
“We’ll have to bake four dozen more dumplings!
Why couldn’t he have made up his mind last night?”
The husband, more resigned, answered:
“Well, we’ll not have to do this every
day.”
It was after dinner, and we were talking about adventures
and accidents which happened while out shooting.
An old friend, known to all of us, M. Boniface, a
great sportsman and a connoisseur of wine, a man of
wonderful physique, witty and gay, and endowed with
an ironical and resigned philosophy, which manifested
itself in caustic humor, and never in melancholy,
suddenly exclaimed:
“I know a story, or rather a tragedy, which
is somewhat peculiar. It is not at all like those
which one hears of usually, and I have never told
it, thinking that it would interest no one.
“It is not at all sympathetic. I mean by
that, that it does not arouse the kind of interest
which pleases or which moves one agreeably.
“Here is the story:
“I was then about thirty-five years of age,
and a most enthusiastic sportsman.
“In those days I owned a lonely bit of property
in the neighborhood of Jumieges, surrounded by forests
and abounding in hares and rabbits. I was accustomed
to spending four or five days alone there each year,
there not being room enough to allow of my bringing
a friend with me.
“I had placed there as gamekeeper, an old retired
gendarme, a good man, hot-tempered, a severe disciplinarian,
a terror to poachers and fearing nothing. He
lived all alone, far from the village, in a little
house, or rather hut, consisting of two rooms downstairs,
with kitchen and store-room, and two upstairs.
One of them, a kind of box just large enough to accommodate
a bed, a cupboard and a chair, was reserved for my
use.
