Félicie Louise Marie Joyselle was sitting in her bedroom, darning her
husband's socks.
She sat in a straight-backed chair near the dressing-table, and a huge
basket of mending of different kinds stood on the floor by her side. The
room was very simple, for she loved the well-polished black-walnut
furniture among which she had lived all her married life, and nothing
would have induced her to change it for new, however beautiful.
The walls were adorned with religious prints, but on the space over the
dressing-table, with its array of ebony and silver hair-brushes, was a
group of old, faded photographs, evidently all of the same
person--Joyselle; and over the chimney-piece hung four large oval
photographs, in varnished black frames, picked out with narrow red
stripes; quite evidently four middle-aged peasants in their best attire.
Near the door a coloured crayon of Théo at the age of five, in plaid
trousers, a short jacket, and a wide collar of crochetted lace, smiled
sheepishly down at the world. There was a table covered with books of
the kind whose gilt edges invariably stick together, because they are
never opened, and on the little table on the left of the broad bed, with
its scarlet counterpane and huge, soft-looking pillows, were an old
black crucifix and two shabby prayer-books.
It was a plain, inartistic room, and the middle-aged woman whose holy
of holies it had been for fifteen years was as old-fashioned and
unbeautiful as it; yet there was, somehow, about the place a certain
atmosphere of goodness and peace that cannot be described in words.
When Brigit Mead came in that afternoon she kissed Madame Joyselle as
usual, and then taking off her hat and coat, drew up another
stiff-backed chair and sat down.
"How are you, _petite mère_?" she asked gently, in French.
"I am well, as I always am, thank God. And you? And Tommy?"
"Tommy has a bad throat, but it is nothing. He sent his love. I am very
fit."
Madame Joyselle cut her cotton, scrutinised her work closely, and laid
the sock down and took up another.
"Such a man for wearing out socks. And always the heels," she remarked.
"It would try the patience of anyone!"
"Does it try even yours?" asked Brigit.
The little woman looked up, her shrewd black eyes twinkling under their
well-defined brows. "You have observed, then, that I am patient? But
yes, my dear, God help the wife of an artist if she is not! He is
terrible, my man, at times, but luckily I was born long-suffering. He
has, too, a way of wrenching at button-holes in collars that tears them
to bits, and desolates me."
"But----" began the girl, and then stopped.
All things considered, there was remarkably little constraint in her
feelings for this good woman, but somehow at that moment she wished to
change the subject.
Madame Joyselle, however, gave a gentle chuckle, and continued: "He was
his most terrific yesterday! Like a lion with no self-control; it was
very ridiculous."
Brigit started. Terrible, yes, but--it struck her as very unfitting for
the great man's plain little wife to find him ridiculous. And Félicité,
as her husband always called her, saw her start, and understood.
"Ah, yes, to you he is the great artist as well as Théo's
father--_hein_? To me he is, of course, just--my husband. All men are,
they say, different, but surely all husbands are much alike."
"There are certainly very few men like--_him_." Brigit took a sock out
of the basket and looked at it absently. There was a short silence,
during which Félicité did not speak, but she was watching her visitor in
the glass. Then she said suddenly, with a certain briskness in her
voice, "Shall I tell you about him? About my husband, you know, not
about the great artist of--all you others."