PAGE 2
The Three Necklaces
by
He took me to it: a bleak, decayed building, half ruinated, the slated pavement uneven as the waves of the sea, the plastered walls dripping with saline ooze. From the roof depended three or four rudely carved ships, hung there ex voto by parishioners preserved from various perils of the deep. He narrated their histories at length.
“The roof leaks,” he said, “but we are to remedy that. At length the blessed Mary of Lezan will be housed, if not as befits her, at least not shamefully.” He indicated a niched statue of the Virgin, with daubed red cheeks and a robe of crude blue overspread with blotches of sea-salt. “Thanks to your England,” he added.
“Why ‘thanks to England’?”
He chuckled–or perhaps I had better say chirruped.
“Did I not say I had been visiting your country on business? Eh? You shall hear the story–only I tell no names.”
He took snuff.
“We will call them,” he said, “only by their Christian names, which are Lucien and Jeanne. . . . I am to marry them next month, when Lucien gets his relief from the lighthouse on Ile Ouessant.
“They are an excellent couple. As between them, the wits are with Lucien, who will doubtless rise in his profession. He has been through temptation, as you shall hear. For Jeanne, she is un coeur simple, as again you will discover; not clever at all–oh, by no means!–yet one of the best of my children. It is really to Jeanne that we owe it all. . . . I have said so to Lucien, and just at the moment Lucien was trying to say it to me.
“They were betrothed, you understand. Lucien was nineteen, and Jeanne maybe a year younger. From the beginning, it had been an understood thing: to this extent understood, that Lucien, instead of sailing to the fishery (whither go most of the young men of Ile Lezan and the coast hereabouts) was destined from the first to enter the lighthouse service under Government. The letters I have written to Government on his behalf! . . . I am not one of those who quarrel with the Republic. Still–a priest, and in this out-of-the-way spot–what is he?
“However, Lucien got his appointment. The pay? Enough to marry on, for a free couple. But the families were poor on both sides–long families, too. Folk live long on Ile Lezan–women-folk especially; accidents at the fishery keep down the men. Still, and allowing for that, the average is high. Lucien had even a great-grandmother alive–a most worthy soul–and on Jeanne’s side the grandparents survived on both sides. Where there are grandparents they must be maintained.
“No one builds on Ile Lezan. Luden and Jeanne–on either side their families crowded to the very windows. If only the smallest hovel might fall vacant! . . . For a week or two it seemed that a cottage might drop in their way; but it happened to be what you call picturesque, and a rich man snapped it up. He was a stranger from Paris, and called himself an artist; but in truth he painted little, and that poorly–as even I could see. He was fonder of planning what he would have, and what not, to indulge his mood when it should be in the key for painting. Happening here just when the cottage fell empty, he offered a price for it far beyond anything Lucien could afford, and bought it. For a month or two he played with this new toy, adding a studio and a veranda, and getting over many large crates of furniture from the mainland. Then by and by a restlessness overtook him–that restlessness which is the disease of the rich–and he left us, yet professing that it delighted him always to keep his little pied-a-terre in Ile Lezan. He has never been at pains to visit us since.