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It is the custom, after a certain time, to dig up the bones of the dead, and preserve the skulls in little square boxes like bird-houses, with a heart-shaped opening, to show the relic within. The names and dates of the deceased are inscribed outside. Saint Ives or Yves is a favourite saint, and images of him are in all churches and over many doors.
Now, when we on the floor above offer our hospitality to Yves, we are careful to place ourselves under our mosquito-net in a more correct style! One corner, which as a last resort we inspect, inspires me with a certain amount of apprehension.
One day, in Yves de Cornault's absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol with a troop of performing dogs. Anne bought the smallest and cleverest, a white dog with a feathery coat and one blue and one brown eye. It seemed to have been ill-treated by the gypsies, and clung to her plaintively when she took it from them.
"Ah! at last, brother," said Yves, "I believe, yes, I really believe she is coming at last." I look over his shoulder, and I see a back view of a little doll the finishing touches to whose toilette are being put in the solitary street; a last maternal glance given to the enormous bows of the sash, the folds at the waist. Yes! it is undoubtedly Mdlle. Jasmin; they are bringing me my fiancée!
I am a kinsman of Monsieur de St. Yves here in his interest. Upon my word, you have put your foot in it prettily, Mr. Burchell Fenn! Come, stand up; don't grovel there. Stand up, you lump of iniquity! He scrambled to his feet. He was utterly unmanned, or it might have gone hard with me yet; and I considered him hesitating, as, indeed, there was cause.
I am very curious to see the parting between Yves and Chrysantheme; I listen with all my ears, I look with all my eyes, but it takes place in the simplest and quietest fashion: none of that heartbreaking which will be inevitable between Madame Prune and myself; I even notice in my mousme an indifference, an unconcern which puzzles me; I positively am at a loss to understand what it all means.
I feel myself in very good humor this evening, and, relieved from any absurd suspicions about my poor Yves, am quite disposed to enjoy without reserve my last days in Japan, and derive therefrom all the amusement possible.
Yves' "unheard-of probity and consideration for the sick and the poor" gained such general respect that, with his death on the nineteenth of May, 1303, there was inaugurated a great feast which to-day is yearly celebrated, and all grieving against a real or fancied wrong have recourse promptly to the supposedly just favour of this universal patron of the law.
During this whole day we Yves, Chrysantheme, Oyouki and myself have spent the time wandering through dark and dusty nooks, dragged hither and thither by four quick-footed djins, in search of antiquities in the bric-a-brac shops.
The three ladies are about to turn back home, for the night is already far advanced and, farther down, the cosmopolitan quarters near the quays are not safe at this unusual hour. The moment has therefore come for Yves who will not land again to make his last tragic farewells to his friends the little mousmes.
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