Farewell | Page 5

neck. From beneath the crimson handkerchief about the woman's
head, fair matted hair escaped, something as tow hangs about a spindle.
She wore no kerchief at the throat. A coarse black-and-gray striped
woolen petticoat, too short by several inches, left her legs bare. She
might have belonged to some tribe of Redskins in Fenimore Cooper's
novels; for her neck, arms, and ankles looked as if they had been
painted brick-red. There was no spark of intelligence in her featureless
face; her pale, bluish eyes looked out dull and expressionless from
beneath the eyebrows with one or two straggling white hairs on them.
Her teeth were prominent and uneven, but white as a dog's.
"Hallo, good woman," called M. de Sucy.
She came slowly up to the railing, and stared at the two sportsmen with

a contorted smile painful to see.
"Where are we? What is the name of the house yonder? Whom does it
belong to? Who are you? Do you come from hereabouts?"
To these questions, and to a host of others poured out in succession
upon her by the two friends, she made no answer save gurgling sounds
in the throat, more like animal sounds than anything uttered by a
human voice.
"Don't you see that she is deaf and dumb?" said M. d'Albon.
"/Minorites/!" the peasant woman said at last.
"Ah! she is right. The house looks as though it might once have been a
Minorite convent," he went on.
Again they plied the peasant woman with questions, but, like a
wayward child, she colored up, fidgeted with her sabot, twisted the
rope by which she held the cow that had fallen to grazing again, stared
at the sportsmen, and scrutinized every article of clothing upon them;
she gibbered, grunted, and clucked, but no articulate word did she utter.
"Your name?" asked Philip, fixing her with his eyes as if he were trying
to bewitch the woman.
"Genevieve," she answered, with an empty laugh.
"The cow is the most intelligent creature we have seen so far,"
exclaimed the magistrate. "I shall fire a shot, that ought to bring
somebody out."
D'Albon had just taken up his rifle when the Colonel put out a hand to
stop him, and pointed out the mysterious woman who had aroused such
lively curiosity in them. She seemed to be absorbed in deep thought, as
she went along a green alley some little distance away, so slowly that
the friends had time to take a good look at her. She wore a threadbare
black satin gown, her long hair curled thickly over her forehead, and
fell like a shawl about her shoulders below her waist. Doubtless she
was accustomed to the dishevelment of her locks, for she seldom put
back the hair on either side of her brows; but when she did so, she
shook her head with a sudden jerk that had not to be repeated to shake
away the thick veil from her eyes or forehead. In everything that she
did, moreover, there was a wonderful certainty in the working of the
mechanism, an unerring swiftness and precision, like that of an animal,
well-nigh marvelous in a woman.
The two sportsmen were amazed to see her spring up into an apple-tree

and cling to a bough lightly as a bird. She snatched at the fruit, ate it,
and dropped to the ground with the same supple grace that charms us in
a squirrel. The elasticity of her limbs took all appearance of
awkwardness or effort from her movements. She played about upon the
grass, rolling in it as a young child might have done; then, on a sudden,
she lay still and stretched out her feet and hands, with the languid
natural grace of a kitten dozing in the sun.
There was a threatening growl of thunder far away, and at this she
started up on all fours and listened, like a dog who hears a strange
footstep. One result of this strange attitude was to separate her thick
black hair into two masses, that fell away on either side of her face and
left her shoulders bare; the two witnesses of this singular scene
wondered at the whiteness of the skin that shone like a meadow daisy,
and at the neck that indicated the perfection of the rest of her form.
A wailing cry broke from her; she rose to her feet, and stood upright.
Every successive movement was made so lightly, so gracefully, so
easily, that she seemed to be no human being, but one of Ossian's
maids of the mist. She went across the grass to one of the pools of
water, deftly shook off her shoe, and seemed to enjoy dipping her foot,
white as marble, in the spring; doubtless it pleased her to make the
circling ripples,