“He’s very bad. When he goes there’ll be no tailor--ah, old Trudel will be missed for sure, M’sieu’!”
Jo spread the clothes out on the table--a coat, waistcoat, and trousers of fulled cloth, grey and bulky, and smelling of the loom and the tailor’s iron. Charley looked at them interestedly, then glanced at the clothes he had on, the suit that had belonged to him last year--grave-clothes.
He drew himself up as though rousing from a dream. “Come, Jo, clear out, and you shall have your new habitant in a minute,” he said. Portugais left the room, and when he came back, Charley was dressed in the suit of grey fulled cloth. It was loose, but comfortable, and save for the refined face--on which a beard was growing now--and the eye-glass, he might easily have passed for a farmer. When he put on the dog-skin fur cap and a small muffler round his neck, it was the costume of the habitant complete.
Yet it was no disguise, for it was part of the life that Charles Mallard, once Charley Steele, should lead henceforth.
He turned to the door and opened it. “Good-bye, Portugais,” he said.
Jo was startled. “Where are you going, M’sieu’?”
“You will come back?” Jo asked anxiously.
This was the first long walk he had taken since he had become himself again. The sweet, cold air, with a bracing wind in his face, gave peace to the nerves but now strained and fevered in the fight with appetite. His mind cleared, and he drank in the sunny air and the pungent smell of the balsams. His feet light with moccasins, he even ran a distance, enjoying the glow from a fast-beating pulse.
As he came into the high-road, people passed him in carioles and sleighs. Some eyed him curiously. What did he mean to do? What object had he in coming to the village? What did he expect? As he entered the village his pace slackened. He had no destination, no object. He was simply aware that his new life was beginning.
He passed a little house on which was a sign, “Narcisse Dauphin, Notary.” It gave him a curious feeling. It was the old life before him. “Charles Mallard, Notary?”--No, that was not for him. Everything that reminded him of the past, that brought him in touch with it, must be set aside. He moved on. Should he go to the Cure? No; one thing at a time, and today he wanted his thoughts for himself. More people passed him, and spoke of him to each other, though there was no coarse curiosity--the habitant has manners.