On the next morning Michel Voss and his son met in the kitchen, and found Marie already there. ‘Well, my girl,’ said Michel, as he patted Marie’s shoulder, and kissed her forehead, ‘you’ve been up getting a rare breakfast for these fellows, I see.’ Marie smiled, and made some good-humoured reply. No one could have told by her face that there was anything amiss with her. ‘It’s the last favour of the kind he’ll ever have at your hands,’ continued Michel, ‘and yet he doesn’t seem to be half grateful.’ George stood with his back to the kitchen fire, and did not say a word. It was impossible for him even to appear to be pleasant when such things were being said. Marie was a better hypocrite, and, though she said little, was able to look as though she could sympathise with her uncle’s pleasant mirth. The two men had soon eaten their breakfast and were gone, and then Marie was left alone with her thoughts. Would George say anything to his father of what had passed up-stairs on the previous evening?
The two men started, and when they were alone together, and as long as Michel abstained from talking about Marie and her prospects, George was able to converse freely with his father. When they left the house the morning was just dawning, and the air was fresh and sharp. ‘We shall soon have the frost here now,’ said Michel, ‘and then there will be no more grass for the cattle.’
‘I suppose they can have them out on the low lands till the end of November. They always used.’
‘Yes; they can have them out; but having them out and having food for them are different things. The people here have so much stock now, that directly the growth is checked by the frost, the land becomes almost bare. They forget the old saying —“Half stocking, whole profits; whole stocking, half profits!” And then, too, I think the winters are earlier here than they used to be. They’ll have to go back to the Swiss plan, I fancy, and carry the food to the cattle in their houses. It may be old-fashioned, as they say; but I doubt whether the fodder does not go farther so.’ Then as they began to ascend the mountain, he got on to the subject of his own business and George’s prospects. ‘The dues to the Commune are so heavy,’ he said, ‘that in fact there is little or nothing to be made out of the timber. It looks like a business, because many men are employed, and it’s a kind of thing that spreads itself, and bears looking at. But it leaves nothing behind.’
‘It’s not quite so bad as that, I hope,’ said George.
‘Upon my word then it is not much better, my boy. When you’ve charged yourself with interest on the money spent on the mills, there is not much to boast about. You’re bound to replant every yard you strip, and yet the Commune expects as high a rent as when there was no planting to be done at all. They couldn’t get it, only that men like myself have their money in the mills, and can’t well get out of the trade.’
‘I don’t think you’d like to give it up, father.’
‘Well, no. It gives me exercise and something to do. The women manage most of it down at the house; but there must be a change when Marie has gone. I have hardly looked it in the face yet, but I know there must be a change. She has grown up among it till she has it all at her fingers’ ends. I tell you what, George, she is a girl in a hundred,— a girl in a hundred. She is going to marry a rich man, and so it don’t much signify; but if she married a poor man, she would be as good as a fortune to him. She’d make a fortune for any man. That’s my belief. There is nothing she doesn’t know, and nothing she doesn’t understand.’
Why did his father tell him all this? George thought of the day on which his father had, as he was accustomed to say to himself, turned him out of the house because he wanted to marry this girl who was ‘as good as a fortune’ to any man. Had he, then, been imprudent in allowing himself to love such a girl? Could there be any good reason why his father should have wished that a ‘fortune,’ in every way so desirable, should go out of the family? ‘She’ll have nothing to do of that sort if she goes to Basle,’ said George moodily.
‘That is more than you can say,’ replied his father. ‘A woman married to a man of business can always find her share in it if she pleases. And with such a one as Adrian Urmand her side of the house will not be the least considerable.’
‘I suppose he is little better than a fool,’ said George.
‘A fool! He is not a fool at all. If you were to see him buying, you would not call him a fool. He is very far from a fool.’
‘It may be so. I do not know much of him myself.’
‘You should not be so prone to think men fools till you find them so; especially those who are to be so near to yourself. No;— he’s not a fool by any means. But he will know that he has got a clever wife, and he will not be ashamed to make use of her.’
George was unwilling to contradict his father at the present moment, as he had all but made up his mind to tell the whole story about himself and Marie before he returned to the house. He had not the slightest idea that by doing so he would be able to soften his father’s heart. He was sure, on the contrary, that were he to do so, he and his father would go back to the hotel as enemies. But he was quite resolved that the story should be told sooner or later,— should be told before the day fixed for the wedding. If it was to be told by himself, what occasion could be so fitting as the present? But, if it were to be done on this morning, it would be unwise to harass his father by any small previous contradictions.
They were now up among the scattered prostrate logs, and had again taken up the question of the business of wood-cutting. ‘No, George; it would never have done for you; not as a mainstay. I thought of giving it up to you once, but I knew that it would make a poor man of you.’
‘I wish you had,’ said George, who was unable to repress the feeling of his heart.
‘Why do you say that? What a fool you must be if you think it! There is nothing you may not do where you are, and you have got it all into your own hands, with little or no outlay. The rent is nothing; and the business is there ready made for you. In your position, if you find the hotel is not enough, there is nothing you cannot take up.’ They had now seated themselves on the trunk of a pine tree; and Michel Voss having drawn a pipe from his pocket and filled it, was lighting it as he sat upon the wood. ‘No, my boy,’ he continued, ‘you’ll have a better life of it than your father, I don’t doubt. After all, the towns are better than the country. There is more to be seen and more to be learned. I don’t complain. The Lord has been very good to me. I’ve had enough of everything, and have been able to keep my head up. But I feel a little sad when I look forward. You and Marie will both be gone; and your stepmother’s friend, M. le Cure Gondin, does not make much society for me. I sometimes think, when I am smoking a pipe up here all alone, that this is the best of it all;— it will be when Marie has gone.’ If his father thus thought of it, why did he send Marie away? If he thus thought of it, why had he sent his son away? Had it not already been within his power to keep both of them there together under his roof-tree? He had insisted on dividing them, and dismissing them from Granpere, one in one direction, and the other in another;— and then he complained of being alone! Surely his father was altogether unreasonable. ‘And now one can’t even get tobacco that is worth smoking,’ continued Michel, in a melancholy tone. ‘There used to be good tobacco, but I don’t know where it has all gone.’
‘I can send you over a little prime tobacco from Colmar, father.’
‘I wish you would, George. This is foul stuff. But I sometimes think I’ll give it up. What’s the use of it? A man sits and smokes and smokes, and nothing comes of it. It don’t feed him, nor clothe him, and it leaves nothing behind,— except a stink.’
‘You’re a little down in the mouth, father, or you wouldn’t talk of giving up smoking.’
‘I am down in the mouth,— terribly down in the mouth. Till it was all settled, I did not know how much I should feel Marie’s going. Of course it had to be, but it makes an old man of me. There will be nothing left. Of course there’s your stepmother,— as good a woman as ever lived,— and the children; but Marie was somehow the soul of us all. Give us another light, George. I’m blessed if I can keep the fire in the pipe at all.’
‘And this,’ thought George, ‘is in truth the state of my father’s mind! There are three of us concerned who are all equally dear to each other, my father, myself, and Marie Bromar. There is not one of them who doesn’t feel that the presence of the others is necessary to his happiness. Here is my father declaring that the world will no longer have any savour for him because I am away in one place, and Marie is to be away in another. There is not the slightest real reason on earth why we should have been separated. Yet he,— he alone has done it; and we,— we are to break our hearts over it! Or rather he has not done it. He is about to do it. The sacrifice is not yet made, and yet it must be made, because my father is so unreasonable that no one will dare to point out to him where lies the way to his own happiness and to the happiness of those he loves!’ It was thus that George Voss thought of it as he listened to his father’s wailings.
But he himself, though he was hot in temper, was slow, or at least deliberate, in action. He did not even now speak out at once. When his father’s pipe was finished he suggested that they should go on to a certain run for the fir-logs, which he himself — George Voss — had made — a steep grooved inclined plane by which the timber when cut in these parts could be sent down with a rush to the close neighbourhood of the saw-mill below. They went and inspected the slide, and discussed the question of putting new wood into the groove. Michel, with the melancholy tone that had prevailed with him all the morning, spoke of matters as though any money spent in mending would be thrown away. There are moments in the lives of most of us in which it seems to us that there will never be more cakes and ale. George, however, talked of the children, and reminded his father that in matters of business nothing is so ruinous as ruin. ‘If you’ve got to get your money out of a thing, it should always be in working order,’ he said. Michel acknowledged the truth of the rule, but again declared that there was no money to be got out of the thing. He yielded, however, and promised that the repairs should be made. Then they went down to the mill, which was going at that time. George, as he stood by and watched the man and boy adjusting the logs to the cradle, and listened to the apparently self-acting saw as it did its work, and observed the perfection of the simple machinery which he himself had adjusted, and smelt the sweet scent of the newly-made sawdust, and listened to the music of the little stream, when, between whiles, the rattle of the mill would cease for half a minute,— George, as he stood in silence, looking at all this, listening to the sounds, smelling the perfume, thinking how much sweeter it all was than the little room in which Madame Faragon sat at Colmar, and in which it was, at any rate for the present, his duty to submit his accounts to her, from time to time,— resolved that he would at once make an effort. He knew his father’s temper well. Might it not be that though there should be a quarrel for a time, everything would come right at last? As for Adrian Urmand, George did not believe,— or told himself that he did not believe,— that such a cur as he would suffer much because his hopes of a bride were not fulfilled.
They stayed for an hour at the saw-mill, and Michel, in spite of all that he had said about tobacco, smoked another pipe. While they were there, George, though his mind was full of other matter, continued to give his father practical advice............