No one ever visited at it except the little chemist, the avocat and Medallion; and Medallion, though merely an auctioneer, was the only one on terms of intimacy with its owner, an old seigneur who for many years had never stirred beyond the limits of his little garden. At rare intervals he might be seen sitting in the large stone porch which gave overweighted dignity to the house, itself not very large. An air of mystery surrounded the place: in summer the grass was rank, the trees seemed huddled together in gloom about the house, the vines appeared to ooze on the walls, and at one end, where the window-shutters were always closed and barred, a great willow drooped and shivered; in winter the stone walls showed naked and grim among the gaunt trees and furtive shrubs.
None who ever saw the seigneur could forget him--a tall figure with stooping shoulders; a pale, deeply-lined, clean-shaven face; and a forehead painfully white, with blue veins showing; the eyes handsome, penetrative, brooding, and made indescribably sorrowful by the dark skin around them. There were those in Pontiac, such as the curé, who remembered when the seigneur was constantly to be seen in the village; and then another person was with him always, a young, tall youth, his son. They were fond and proud of each other, and were religious and good citizens in a high-bred, punctilious way. Then the seigneur was all health and stalwart strength. But one day a rumor went abroad that the seigneur had quarrelled with his son because of the wife of Farette the miller. No one outside knew if the thing was true, but Julie, the miller’s wife, seemed rather to plume herself that she had made a stir in her little world. Yet the curious habitants came to know that the young man had gone, and after a good many years his having once lived there was almost a tradition. But the little chemist remembered whenever he set foot inside the tall porch; the avocat was kept in mind by papers which he was called upon to read and alter from time to time; the curé never forgot, because when the young man went he lost not one of his flock, but two; and Medallion, knowing something of the story, had it before him with gradually increasing frequency; besides, he had wormed a deal of truth out of the miller’s wife. He knew that the closed, barred rooms were the young man’s; and he knew, also, that the old man was waiting, waiting, in a hope which he never even named to himself.