The gig passed by a lordly iron gate, ruddy with rust, and lined inside with a layer of boards.  The wide dry thoats were black with brambles.  A hundred yards further on was the lodge inhabited by Jeanbernat.  It stood within the park, which it overlooked.  But the old keeper had apparently blocked up that side of his dwelling, and had cleared a little garden by the road.  And there he lived, facing southwards, with his back turned upon the Paradou, as if unaware of the immensity of verdure that stretched away behind him.

The young priest jumped down, looking inquisitively around him and questioning the doctor, who was hurriedly fastening the horse to a ring fixed in the wall.

‘And the old man lives all alone in this out-of-the-way hole?’ he asked.

‘Yes, quite alone,’ replied his uncle, adding, however, the next minute:  ’Well, he has with him a niece whom he had to take in, a queer girl, a regular savage.  But we must make haste.  The whole place looks death-like.’

VIII

The house with its shutters closed seemed wrapped in slumber as it stood there in the midday sun, amidst the hum of the big flies that swarmed all up the ivy to the roof tiles.  The sunlit ruin was steeped in happy quietude.  When the doctor had opened the gate of the narrow garden, which was enclosed by a lofty quickset hedge, there, in the shadow cast by a wall, they found Jeanbernat, tall and erect, and calmly smoking his pipe, as in the deep silence he watched his vegetables grow.

‘What, are you up then, you humbug?’ exclaimed the astonished doctor.

‘So you were coming to bury me, were you?’ growled the old man harshly.  ‘I don’t want anybody.  I bled myself.’

He stopped short as he caught sight of the priest, and assumed so threatening an expression that the doctor hastened to intervene.

‘This is my nephew,’ he said; ’the new Cure of Les Artaud—­a good fellow, too.  Devil take it, we haven’t been bowling over the roads at this hour of the day to eat you, Jeanbernat.’

The old man calmed down a little.

‘I don’t want any shavelings here,’ he grumbled.  ’They’re enough to make one croak.  Mind, doctor, no priests, and no physics when I go off, or we shall quarrel.  Let him come in, however, as he is your nephew.’

Abbe Mouret, struck dumb with amazement, could not speak a word.  He stood there in the middle of the path scanning that strange solitaire, with scorched, brick-tinted face, and limbs all withered and twisted like a bundle of ropes, who seemed to bear the burden of his eighty years with a scornful contempt for life.  When the doctor attempted to feel his pulse, his ill-humour broke out afresh.

’Do leave me in peace!  I bled myself with my knife, I tell you.  It’s all over, now.  Who was the fool of a peasant who disturbed you?  The doctor here, and the priest as well, why not the mutes too!  Well, it can’t be helped, people will be fools.  It won’t prevent us from having a drink, eh?’