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Go look at your face, my fanfaron, For my daughter and you would be night and day, Non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, Not for your chateau at Malmaison, Non, non, non, non, non, non, non, non, You shall not marry her, my Suzon." A better weapon than his waspish tongue was Parpon's voice, for it, before all, was persuasive. A few years before, none of them had ever heard him sing.
Through the sounds there came another inner voice, that resolved all the crude, primitive thoughts here defined; vague, elusive, in Parpon's own brain. The girl's life should be saved at any cost, even if to save it meant the awful and certain doom his mother had whispered to him over the bed an hour before. He turned and went into the house.
Parpon's pleasant ridicule was not lost on the charcoalman and the mealman; but neither was the singing wasted; and their faces were touched with admiration, while the blacksmith, with a sigh, turned to his fire and blew the bellows softly. "Blacksmith," said Parpon, "you have a bird that sings." "I've no bird that sings like that, though she has pretty notes, my bird." He sighed again.
There she brooded till she heard the voice of her mother calling across the meadow; then she got up with a sigh, and softly repeated Parpon's words: "He is a great man!" In the middle of that night she started up from a sound sleep, and, with a little cry, whispered into the silence: "Napoleon Napoleon!" She was thinking of Valmond. A revelation had come to her out of her dreams.
"Are you sure it's an angel?" said Armand. "Who ever knew Parpon do any harm?" queried the Cure. "He has always been kind to the poor," put in the Avocat. "With the miller's flour," laughed Medallion: "a pardonable sin." He sent a quizzical look at the Cure. "Do you remember the words of Parpon's song?" asked Armand. "Only a few lines; and those not easy to understand, unless one had an inkling."
Some men go to the Avocat or the Cure with great things; but I have been a pilgrimage, I have sat on the grand jury. There, Ma'm'selle!" His chest swelled, he blew out his cheeks, he pulled Parpon's ear as Napoleon pulled Murat's. "Ma'm'selle, allons!
A flush and then a peculiar soft light passed over the Cure's face, and he raised his hand over Parpon's head in benediction and said: "Go, my son, and the blessing of God and of His dear Son be with you." Then suddenly he turned to the altar, and, raising his hands, he tried to speak, but only said: "O Lord, Thou knowest our pride and our vanity, hear us, and "
A half-mad woman, without memory, knew again whence she came and whither she was going; and bewildered and happy, with a hungering tenderness, moved her hand over the head of her poor dwarf, as though she would know if he were truly her own son. A new spirit also had come into Parpon's eyes, gentler, less weird, less distant. With the advent of their joy a great yearning came to save Elise.
For minutes they knelt there, the silence clothing them about, the body of the unconscious girl between them. A lost memory was feeling blindly its way home again. By and by, out of an infinite past, something struggled to the old woman's eyes, and Parpon's heart almost burst in his anxiety. At length her look steadied. Memory, recognition, showed in her face.
"And Monsieur Valmond," said the charcoalman slyly. "And Monsieur the Emperor!" cried Lagroin almost savagely. He caught Parpon's eye, and instantly his hand went to his pocket. "Ah, he is a comrade, that! Nothing is too good for his friends, for his soldiers. See!" he added. He took from his pocket ten gold pieces.
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