Autumn Glory Part 32

"I cannot have myself drawn about in a cart, or punt a boat? Answer, if you please."

"Yes, my son."

"Then what further do I need for the management of a farm? Labourers I can hire. A wife?"

His father dared not say Yes.

"I will bring one!" Mathurin had reached the corner of the table and was now leaning upon it, the upper part of his body swaying and struggling to maintain its equilibrium. "One who has more heart than all of you put together! She knows that I shall get well. She has almost given me her promise to marry me as I am ... when I shall have persuaded her."

"Do not trust to what the girls tell you, my poor lad. It is only fathers and mothers who love and cherish those afflicted as you are.... You are ill this evening. See, your limbs are failing you.

Come to bed, I will help you."

The cripple did not try to answer. His eyes closed, his head sank on to his shoulder; the crutches slipped from under the arms that stretched out as those of a drowning man seeking help. He would have fallen to the ground had not the farmer rushed forward to support him.

The giddiness did not last long. It was a sharp but short attack.

Hardly had his father got him into a rec.u.mbent position on the chest at the foot his bed than Mathurin opened his eyes. He looked at his father, raised himself unaided, and putting hand to the back of his neck, said:

"You see, it is nothing. The pain you caused did it.... I am not ill."

All trace of anger had disappeared, but the misery in his face was the same, mingled with that kind of horror men experience when they have been at the very verge of death.

"Would you like me to help you?" asked his father.

With a shrug of the shoulders the cripple began to undress himself, and taking off his coat, folded it, and laid it on the chest.

"No. I will get to bed by myself. I want to be left in peace." His voice trembled as much as his hands. "You had better go to meet Rousille. She will have her news to tell you--and, moreover, it is pitch dark, the roads are not too safe----"

Toussaint Lumineau, who knew the danger of opposing his son in such an attack, made no demur.

"I will go as far as the road, Mathurin, and will tell the man to be at hand in the bakery in case you need him."

He did not go even as far as the road. He was too uneasy. He went some hundred yards along the wall of La Fromentiere in the rain, turned back, and then not wishing to go in too soon as to allow Mathurin time to calm down, he went into the stables to look to the animals, and see that none had broken loose.

But, all unsuspected, Mathurin had slipped out after him. The farmer had not gone ten paces beyond the gate ere the cripple had come out into the courtyard, cautiously shut the outer door, and was making his way towards the threshing-floor in order to reach the meadow by the short cut.

His marvellous energy, and the diseased state of nervous excitability he was in, sustained him. A mad fancy, born of all his misery and all his dreams, forced him out on that cruel night to his doom. He would seek his lost love; would appeal by all the slights, all the suffering, all the affronts he had endured, to her who had been and still was the arbitress of his life; would say to her: "All forsake me; I have only you. Tell me that you love me, and they will scorn me no more. Save me, Felicite Gauvrit!"

Despite the dark night, the slippery ground, the two fences he had to climb, he went quickly along the track which bordered the park. Like a naughty child fearing pursuit, he turned his head every now and then to listen. Many a sound came to him, but it was only the whistling of the wind among the elms; the rain crashing down upon the slates; the roll of a distant train, probably on the way to Chalons. Mathurin descended the sloping meadow; the darkness was so dense that he had to turn back twice before he found the landing-stage. Feeling for a punt with his crutch he threw himself into the first one, and with a stroke of the pole pushed it out, not into the ca.n.a.l which led direct to Le Perrier and La Seuliere, but to the left into a d.y.k.e rarely made use of by the occupants of the farm.

The bottom of the boat was full of water; at each movement it washed over the limbs of the cowering man, but he heeded it not. What mattered the wet boat, the icy rain that was falling, the pitch darkness, the weeds that checked his progress many a time, the length of the way, the fatigue. He must reach her, did he strain his last nerve and die in the effort.

The darkness was so great that Mathurin could scarce see the bow of his boat. Since sundown the wind had been driving the fog into the Marais; in its length and breadth it was full of it, covering whole s.p.a.ces with its swaying ma.s.s; it lay over the inundated meadows, the embankments, and islets, shrouding them all in its malarial folds. It dripped in poisonous drops down poplars and willows, from the thatched roofs of hovels on the edge of the great sea sh.o.r.e where men, condemned to live in them, drank in fever without the power of struggling against it.

On such a deadly night was it that Mathurin, already a prey to the malady hanging over him, the blood surging to his head, found his strength ebbing away. In vain he threw himself from side to side of the punt, unable to distinguish which way to go. Sometimes his breath failed, he grew unconscious, and the puntsman would sit leaning forward motionless in the boat; then the cold would restore him, and with a shake he would continue his course.

As he went on further into the wildest part of the Marais, the shades of night grew peopled with forms. Birds, more and more numerous, rose as he brushed past the quivering willows. It was the time of their flight. Plovers, wild duck, bernacles, snipe, flew up, uttering their shrill or plaintive cry, soaring in invisible flocks, now high up in the icy fog, now close down to the sides of the boat. At each flight the cripple shuddered: "Why do you cry thus at me, ye birds of ill-omen?" he thought. "Leave me in peace, I am going to Felicite--she will consent--we shall make preparation again for our wedding--we will live at La Fromentiere."

But his strength was exhausted. Little by little the torpor increased.

His efforts relaxed; his sight failed. He continued touching the banks with the punt pole but fitfully, and not knowing where it struck. All suddenly the boat, which drifted across an embankment into the middle of a submerged meadow, stopped. Water was all around. Mathurin's hands relaxed their hold of the pole, his eyes opened wide with terror; he felt Death creeping up from limbs to brain. Raising himself, he cried out into the night with a loud voice: "Felicite! Father!" Then his body swayed backwards and forwards, his hand made the sign of the cross, and with mouth still open he sank lifeless to the bottom of the boat.

Through the labyrinth of d.y.k.es another punt was being rapidly propelled; at its bow a lantern was slung, just clearing the water, its tiny flame swaying with a rapid movement, and shaken by the wind.

The farmer had discovered Mathurin's flight, and was seeking him.

Around him, too, coveys of birds arose. White wings fluttered in the light of the lantern.

"Ye birds," murmured the farmer, "tell me where to find him!"

Did the thousands of voices make answer?

At each crossway of the ca.n.a.ls the father stood in the stern of his boat, and turning successively to the four winds of heaven, he called out with all his strength the name of his son. Twice men returning to their island homes from wild duck shooting, or belated farmers, had opened their windows to cry in the darkness:

"What do you want?"

"My son."

The voices had given no reply. The third time Toussaint Lumineau thought he distinguished a feeble cry, very distant, coming through the icy fog, and leaving the ca.n.a.l which runs straight to Perrier, he turned off to the left. From time to time he called again, but hearing no further sound, and fearing to have taken a wrong direction, he unfastened the lantern, and drew up to the side to see if there were traces of a punt pole. Some hundred yards further on he detected by newly-made marks in the mud that the bank had been grazed; a punt had certainly pa.s.sed that way. Was it Mathurin's? He followed it. The punt had made the circuit of a meadow, but on which side had it gone out?

In vain the farmer, forcing his way through the rushes, tried the different ca.n.a.ls that cut it at right angles, each time he came back baffled; all traces had disappeared. He was about to turn back when, by the light of his lantern, he caught sight of a piece of floating wood. He stooped to catch it; a presentiment of the truth flashed across him; it was one of the Fromentiere punt poles, drifting, carried by the wind towards the spot where the banks under water had converted meadow and d.y.k.e into one great lake.

The farmer thought his son's boat had upset.

"Hold on, Mathurin!" he cried. "I am coming. Hold on!" and with a stroke of the pole he pushed on into the channel. "Where are you, Mathurin?"

In the chopping waves of the open water he had made some thirty yards, when he was suddenly thrown forward. Stooping over the side, he felt about, and caught hold of another boat, which he drew alongside his own. Then turning the lantern upon it, he saw at the bottom of the punt his son, lying motionless. Toussaint Lumineau threw himself on his knees, nearly sending the boat under water; he felt his son's temples, there was no pulsation; his hands, they were icy cold; he put his mouth to the dead man's ear, and twice called him by name.

"Answer me, my son," he implored. "Answer! Move but a finger to show me you are still living."

But his son's fingers did not move; the lips clothed by the tawny beard remained motionless, open as when the last cry proceeded from them.

"My G.o.d!" groaned Lumineau, still kneeling. "Grant that he may not be called away before his Easter Communion. Grant that he be not dead!"

And taking off his coat he covered his son in it, like a bed, and leaving his own punt he got into the one where Mathurin lay, and pushed off. A shade of hope sustained him, giving renewed vigour to his old arms. He must find help. Standing upright, endeavouring to find out where he was in the pitch darkness, the father had punted on some distance before he detected the light of a farmhouse. Then, to the right, a ray of light pierced through the fog. The punt glided on more rapidly through the d.y.k.e, it neared the building, and Toussaint could make out that it was a farm from the shape of the doors and the lighted windows. Alas! it was La Seuliere, and a dance was going in.

The noise of laughter, songs, the m.u.f.fled notes of an accordeon plainly audible within, died away in the wind without.

The farmer went on past the brown hillock, but even while he punted with all speed he watched to see if the great dark shade cast by Mathurin had not stirred; then seeing it motionless, thought to himself: "My son is dead!"

Some five hundred yards away on the other side of the ca.n.a.l, he knew now that there was another house, and he made all haste to reach it.

For this time it was Terre-Aymont, the farm of Ma.s.sonneau le Glorieux, his friend. And soon the farmer, throwing his boat-chain round a willow, had sprung to land, and going to the farmhouse door, was crying: "Glorieux! Glorieux! Help!"

Soon lights were moving along the muddy slopes between the farm and the willow to which the boat had been attached, and men and women were hurrying to and fro with tears, laments, and low-voiced prayers.

The whole sleeping household had been quickly roused, and were a.s.sembled on the bank. Ma.s.sonneau would have had Mathurin carried into the house-place of La Terre-Aymont and have sent to fetch the doctor of Chalons, but Toussaint Lumineau, having once more examined and felt over his son's body, said:

"No, Glorieux. His sufferings are at an end. I will take him back to La Fromentiere."

Then the farmer of La Terre-Aymont turned to two young lads standing in the background, who with arms round each other's necks, their brown heads touching, seemed to be looking on death for the first time.

"My lads," he said, "go and fetch our large punt."

Disappearing in the fog, they ran to fetch the boat which was kept in a meadow close by La Seuliere, and as they pa.s.sed they told the merrymakers what had happened.