In Kings' Byways Part 31

IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!

On the moorland above the old grey village of Carhaix, in Finistere--Finistere, the most westerly province of Brittany--stands a cottage, built, as all the cottages in that country are, of rough-hewn stones. It is a poor, rude place to-day, but it wore an aspect still more rude and primitive a hundred years ago--on an August day in the year 1793, when a man issued from the low doorway, and, shading his eyes from the noonday sun, gazed long and fixedly in the direction of a narrow rift which a few score paces away breaks the monotony of the upland level. The man was tall and thin and unkempt, and his features, which expressed a mixture of cunning and simplicity, matched his figure.

He gazed a while in silence, but at length he uttered a grunt of satisfaction as the figure of a woman rose gradually into sight. She came slowly towards him in a stooping posture, dragging behind her a great load of straw, which completely hid the little sledge on which it rested, and which was attached to her waist by a rope of twisted hay.

The figure of a woman--rather of a girl. As she drew nearer it could be seen that her cheeks, though brown and sunburned, were as smooth as a child's. She seemed to be still in her teens. Her head was bare, and her short petticoats, of some coa.r.s.e stuff, left visible bare feet thrust into wooden shoes. She advanced with her head bent, and her shoulders strained forward, her face dull and patient. Once, and once only, when the man's eyes left her for a moment, she shot at him a look of scared apprehension; and later, when she came abreast of him, her breath coming and going with her exertions, he might have seen, had he looked closely, that her strong brown limbs were trembling under her.

But the man noticed nothing in his impatience, and only chid her for her slowness. "Where have you been dawdling, lazy-bones?" he cried.

She murmured, without halting, that the sun was hot.

"Sun hot!" he retorted. "Jeanne is lazy, that is it! _Mon Dieu_, that I should have married a wife who is tired by noon! I had better have left you to that never-do-well Pierre Bounat. But I have news for you, my girl."

He lounged after her as he spoke, his low cunning face--the face of the worst kind of French peasant--flickering with cruel pleasure, as he saw how she winced at the name he had mentioned. She made him no answer, however. Instead, she drew her load with increased vehemence towards one of the two doors which led into the building. "Well, well, I will tell you presently," he called after her. "Be quick and come to dinner."

He entered himself by the other door. The house was divided into two chambers by a breast-high part.i.tion of wood. The one room served for kitchen; the other, now half full of straw, was barn and granary, fowl-house and dove-cote, all in one. "Be quick!" he called to her.

Standing in the house-room, he could see her head as she proceeded to unload the straw.

After a few minutes she came in, her shoes clattering on the floor. The perspiration stood in great beads on her forehead, and showed how little she had deserved his reproach. She took her seat silently, avoiding his eyes with some care; but he thought nothing of this. It was no new thing. It pleased him, if anything.

He liked to be feared. "Well, my Jeanne," he said, in his gibing tone, "are you longing for my news?"

The hand she extended towards the pitcher of cider, that, with black bread and onions, made up their meal, shook a little; but she answered simply, "If you please, Michel."

"Well, the Girondins have got the worst of it, my girl, and are flying all over the country. That is the news. Your Pierre is among them, I don't doubt, if he has not been killed already. I wish he would come this way."

"Why?" she asked; and as she spoke looked up at last, a flash of light in her grey eyes.

"Why?" he repeated, grinning across the table at her, "because he would be worth five crowns to me. There is five crowns, I am told, on the head of every Girondin who has been in arms, my girl. Five crowns! It is not every day we can earn five crowns!"

The French Revolution, it will be understood, was at its height. The more moderate and const.i.tutional Republicans--the Girondins, as they were called--worsted in Paris by the Jacobins and the mob, had lately tried to raise the provinces against the capital, and to this end had drawn together at Caen, near the border of Brittany. They had been defeated, however, and the Jacobins, in this month of August, were preparing to take a fearful vengeance at once on them and on the Royalists. The Reign of Terror had begun. Even to such a boor as this, sitting over his black bread, in his remote hovel, the Revolution had come home, and, in common with many a thousand others, he wondered what he could make of it.

The girl did not answer, even by the look of contempt to which he had become accustomed, and for which he hated her, and for which he beat her; and he repeated, "Five crowns! Ah, it is money, that is! _Mon Dieu!_" Then, with a sudden exclamation, he sprang up. "What is that?"

he cried.

He had been sitting with his back to the barn, but he turned, as he spoke, so as to face it. Something had startled him--a movement, a rustling in the straw behind him. "What is that?" he asked again, his hand on the table, his face lowering and watchful.

The girl had risen also; and, as the last word pa.s.sed his lips, sprang by him with a low cry, and aimed a frantic blow with her stool at something he could not see, something low, on the floor.

"What is it?" he asked, recoiling.

"A rat!" she answered, breathless. And she aimed another blow at it.

"Where?" he asked sharply. "Where is it?" He s.n.a.t.c.hed up his stool, too, and at that moment a rat darted out of the straw, ran nimbly between his legs, and plunged into a hole by the door. He flung the wooden stool after it; but in vain. "It was a rat!" he said, as if until then he had doubted it.

"Thank G.o.d!" she muttered. She was shaking all over.

He stared at her in stupid wonder. What did she mean? What had come to her? "Have you had a sunstroke my girl?" he said suspiciously.

Her nut-brown face was a shade less brown than usual, but she met his eyes boldly. "No," she said, "I am all right." And she added an explanation that for the moment satisfied him. But he did not sit down again, and when she went out he went out also. And though, as she retired slowly to the rye fields and her work, she repeatedly looked back at him, it was always to find his eyes fixed upon her. When this had happened half a dozen times, a thought struck him. "How now?" he muttered. "The rat ran out of the straw! Why?"

Nevertheless he continued to gaze after her, with a cunning look upon his features, until she disappeared over the edge of the rift. Then he crept back to the door of the barn, and stole in, exchanging the sunlight for the cool darkness of the raftered building, across which a dozen rays of light were shooting, laden with dancing motes. A pace or two from the door he stood stock still until he had regained the use of his eyes; then he began to peer round him. In a moment, far sooner than he expected, he found what he sought. Half upon, and half hidden by, the straw in the furthest corner, lay a young man, in the deep sleep of utter exhaustion. His face, which bore traces of more than common beauty, was white and pinched; his hair hung dank about his forehead.

His clothes were in rags; and his feet, bound up with pieces torn at random from his blouse, were raw and bleeding. For a short time Michel Tellier bent over him, noting these things with glistening eyes. Then the peasant stole out again. "It is five crowns!" he muttered, blinking in the sunlight. "Ha, ha! Five crowns!"

He looked round him cautiously, but could see no sign of his wife; and after hesitating and pondering a minute or two, he took the path for Carhaix, his native astuteness leading him to saunter at a slow pace after his ordinary fashion. When he was gone the moorland about the cottage lay still and deserted. Thrice, at intervals, the girl dragged home her load of straw, but on each occasion she seemed to linger in the barn no longer than was necessary. Michel's absence, though it was unlooked-for, raised no suspicion in her breast, for he would frequently go down to the village to spend the afternoon. The sun sank lower, and the shadow of the great monolith, which, on the crest of the highest point of the moor, at a distance of a mile, rose gaunt and black against a roseate sky, grew longer and longer; and then, as twilight fell, the two coming home met a few paces from the cottage. He asked some questions about the work she had been doing, and she answered briefly.

Then, silent and uncommunicative, they went in together. The girl set the bread and cider on the table, and going to the great black pot which had been simmering all day upon the fire, poured some broth into two pitchers. It did not escape Michel's frugal eye that she was careful to leave a little broth in the bottom of the pot; and the fact induced a new feeling in him--anger. When his wife invited him by a sign to the meal, he went instead to the door, and fastened it. Then he moved to the corner and picked up the wood-chopper, and armed with this he came back to his seat.

The girl watched his movements first with surprise, then with secret terror. The twilight was come, the cottage was almost dark, and she was alone with him; or, if not alone, yet with no one near who could help her. Nevertheless she met his grin of triumph bravely. "What is this?"

she said. "Why do you want that?"

"For the rat," he answered grimly, his eyes on hers.

Her heart sank. "The rat?" she echoed.

"Ay!"

"Why not--your stool?" she strove to murmur.

"Not for this rat," he answered cunningly. "It might not do, my girl.

Oh, I know what is to do," he continued, fingering the edge of the axe.

"I have been down to the village, and seen the mayor, and he is coming up to fetch him." He nodded towards the part.i.tion, and she knew that her secret was known.

"It is Pierre," she said, trembling violently, and turning first crimson and then a dull sallow hue.

"I know it, Jeanne. It was excellent of you! Excellent! It is long since you have done such a day's work."

"You will not give him up?" she gasped.

"My faith, I shall!" he answered, affecting, and perhaps really feeling, wonder at her simplicity. "He is five crowns, my girl! You do not understand. He is worth five crowns and the risk nothing at all."

If he had been angry, if he had shown anything of the fury of the suspicious husband, if he had been about to do this out of jealousy or revenge or pa.s.sion she would have quailed before him, though she had done him no wrong, save the wrong of mercy and pity. But his spirit was too mean for the great pa.s.sions; he felt only the mean and sordid impulses, which to a woman are the most hateful. And instead of quailing, she looked at him with flashing eyes. "I shall warn him," she said.

"It will not help him," he answered, sitting still, and feeling anew the edge of the hatchet with his fingers.

"It will help him," she retorted. "He shall go. He shall escape before they come." She rose impetuously from her seat.

"I have locked the door!"

"Give me the key!" she panted. "Give me the key, I say!" She stood before him, her trembling hands outstretched, her figure drawn to its full height. Her look was such that he rose and retreated behind the table, still retaining the hatchet in his grasp.

"Stand back!" he said sullenly. "You may awaken him, if you please, my girl. It will not avail him. Do you not understand, fool, that he is worth five crowns? Five crowns? And listen! It is too late now. They are here!"

A blow fell on the door as he spoke, and he stepped towards it. But at that, seeing the last chance leaving her, despair moved her, she threw herself upon him; for a moment she wrestled with him like a wild-cat, but in the end he prevailed; he flung her off, and, brandishing his weapon in her face, kept her at bay. "You vixen!" he cried, retreating to the door, with a pale cheek and his eyes still on her, for he was an arrant coward. "You deserve to go to prison with him, you jade! I will have you in the stocks for this! I'll have you jailed!"

She leaned against the wall where he had flung her, her white despairing face seeming to shine in the darkness of the wretched room. Meanwhile the continuous murmur of men's voices outside the door could be heard mingled with the clatter of weapons; the summons for admission was repeated, and again repeated, as if those without had no mind to be kept waiting long.

"Patience! patience! I am opening!" he cried. Still keeping his face to her, he unlocked the door and called on the men to enter. "He is in the straw, M. le Maire!" he said, in a tone of triumph, his eyes still on his wife. "Cursed Girondin! He will give you no trouble, I will answer it! But first give me my five crowns, M. le Maire. My five crowns!"

He felt, craven as he was, so much fear of his wife that he did not turn to see the men enter, and he was taken by surprise when a voice at his elbow--a voice he did not know--answered, "Five crowns, my friend? For what, may I ask?"