Merry-Garden and Other Stories Part 23

"Hey?"

"Henceforth I've a-got you, an' all to yourself."

"Seems a funny thing," mused the Elder; "an' you at this moment owin' me no less than seventy-five pound!"

Sam Tregenza settled himself down in his chair and nodded as he lit pipe.

"Nothin' like friendship, after all," he said. "Now you're talkin'

comfortable!"

[1] Playing truant.

A JEST OF AMBIALET.

He who has not seen Ambialet, in the Albigeois, has missed a wonder of the world. The village rests in a saddle of crystalline rock between two rushing streams, which are yet one and the same river; for the Tarn (as it is called), pouring down from the Cevennes, is met and turned by this harder ridge, and glances along one flank of Ambialet, to sweep around a wooded promontory and double back on the other. So complete is the loop that, while it measures a good two miles in circuit, across the neck of it, where the houses cl.u.s.ter, you might fling a pebble over their roofs from stream to stream.

High on the crupper of this saddle is perched a ruined castle, with a church below it, and a cross and a graveyard on the cliff's edge; high on the pommel you climb to another cross, beside a dilapidated house of religion, the Priory of Notre Dame de l'Oder.

From the town--for Ambialet was once a town, and a flourishing one--you mount to the Priory by a Via Crucis, zigzagging by cl.u.s.ters of purple marjoram and golden St. John's wort. Above these come broom and heather and bracken, dwarf oaks and junipers, box-trees and stunted chestnut-trees; and, yet above, on the summit, short turf and thyme, which the wind keeps close-trimmed about the base of the cross.

The Priory, hard by, houses a number of lads whom Pere Philibert does his best to train for the religious life; but its church has been closed by order of the Government, and tall mulleins sprout between the broad steps leading to the porch. Pere Philibert will tell you of a time when these steps were worn by thousands of devout feet, and of the cause which brought them.

A little below the summit you pa.s.sed a railed box-tree, with an image of the Virgin against it. Here a palmer, travelling homeward from the Holy Land, planted his staff, which took root and threw out leaves and flourished; and in time the plant, called _oder_ in the Languedoc, earned so much veneration that Our Lady of Ambialet changed her t.i.tle and became Our Lady of the Oder.

This should be Ambialet's chief pride. But the monks of the Priory boast rather of Ambialet's natural marvel--the river looped round their demesne.

"There is nothing like it, not in the whole of France!"

Pere Philibert said it with a wave of the hand. Brother Marc Antoine's pig, stretched at ease with her snout in the cool gra.s.s, grunted, as who should say _Bien entendu!_

We were three in the orchard below the Priory; or four, counting the pig-- who is a sow, by the way, and by name Zephirine. Brother Marc Antoine looks after her; a gleeful old fellow of eighty, with a twinkling eye, a scandalously dirty soutane, and a fund of anecdote not always sedate.

The Priory excuses him on the ground that his intellectuals are not strong--he has spent most of his life in Africa, and there taken a couple of sunstrokes. Zephirine follows him about like a dog. The pair are mighty hunters of truffles, in the season.

"--Not in the whole of France!" repeated Pere Philibert with conviction, nodding from the dappled shade of the orchard-boughs towards the river, where it ran sparkling far below, by grey willows and a margin of mica-strewn sand; not 'apples of gold in a network of silver,' but a landscape all silver seen through a frame of green foliage starred with golden fruit.

The orchard-gate clicked behind us. Brother Marc Antoine, reclining beside the sow with his back against an apple-tree bole, slewed himself round for a look. Pere Philibert and I, turning together, saw a man and a woman approaching, with hangdog looks, and a priest between them--the Cure of Ambialet--who seemed to be exhorting them by turns to keep up their courage.

"Pouf!" said the Curd, letting out a big sigh as he came to a standstill and mopped his brow. "Had ever poor man such trouble with his flock?-- and the thermometer at twenty-eight, too! Advance, my children--you first, Maman Vacher; and Heaven grant the good father here may compose your differences!"

Here the Cure--himself a peasant--flung out both hands as if resigning the case. Pere Philibert, finger on chin, eyed the two disputants with an air of grave abstraction, waiting for one or the other to begin. Brother Marc Antoine leaned back against the apple-tree, and took snuff. His eyes twinkled. Clearly he expected good sport, and I gathered that this was not the first of Ambialet's social difficulties to be brought up to the Priory for solution.

But for the moment both disputants hung back. The woman--an old crone, with a face like a carved nutcracker--dropped an obeisance and stood with her eyes fixed on the ground. The man shifted his weight from foot to foot while he glanced furtively from one to the other of us. I recognised him for Ambialet's only baker, a black-avised fellow on the youthful side of forty. Clearly, the grave dignity of Pere Philibert abashed them.

"_Mais allez, donc! Allez!_" cried the Curd, much as one starts a team of horses.

Pere Philibert turned slowly on his heel, and, waving a hand once more toward the river, continued his discourse as though it had not been interrupted.

"One might say almost the whole world cannot show its like! To be sure, the historian Herodotus tells us that, when Babylon stood in danger of the Medes, Queen Nitocris applied herself to dig new channels for the Euphrates to make it run crookedly. And in one place she made it wind so that travellers down the river came thrice to the same village on three successive days."

"_Te-te!_" interrupted Brother Marc Antoine, with a chuckle. "Wake up, Zephirine--wake up, old lady, and listen to this." Zephirine, smitten affectionately on the ham, answered only with a short squeal like a bagpipe, and buried her snout deeper in the gra.s.s.

"I like that," the old man went on. "To think of travelling down a river three days' journey, and putting up each night at the same _auberge!_ _Vieux drole d'Herodote!_ But does he really pitch that yarn, my father?"

"The village, if I remember, was called Arderica, and doubtless its inhabitants were proud of it. Yet we of Ambialet have a better right to be proud, since the wonder that encircles us is not of man's making but a miracle of G.o.d: although,"--and here Pere Philibert swung about and fixed his eyes on the baker--"our local pride in Ambialet and its history, and its inst.i.tutions and its immemorial customs, are of no moment to M. Champollion, who comes, I think, from Rodez or thereabouts."

In an instant the old woman had seized on this cue.

"_Te!_ Listen, then, to what the good father calls you!" she shrilled, advancing on the baker and snapping finger and thumb under his nose; "an interloper, a scoundrel from the Rouergue, where all are scoundrels!

You with your yeast from Germany! It is such fellows as you that gave the Prussians our provinces, and now you must settle here, turning our stomachs upside down--honest stomachs of Ambialet."

"Bah!" exclaimed Champollion defiantly. "You!--a _sage femme--qui ne fonctionne pas, d'ailleurs!_"

So the storm broke, and so for ten good minutes it raged. In the hurly-burly, from the clash and din of winged words, I disengaged something of the true quarrel. Champollion (it seemed) had bought a business and settled down as baker in Ambialet. Now, his predecessor had always bought yeast from the Widow Vacher, next door, who prepared it by an ancient family recipe; but this new-comer had introduced some new yeast of commerce--_levure viennoise_--and so deprived her of her small earnings. In revenge--so he a.s.serted, and she did not deny it--she had bribed a travelling artist from Paris to decorate the bakery sign with certain scurrilities, and the whole village had conned next morning a list of the virtues of the Champollion yeast and of the things--mostly unmentionable--it was warranted _a faire sauter_. There were further charges and counter-charges--as that the widow's Cochin-China c.o.c.k had been found with its neck wrung; and that she, as _sage femme_, and the only one in Ambialet, had denied her services to Madame Champollion at a time when humanity should override all private squabbles. Brother Marc Antoine rubbed his hands and repeatedly smote Zephirine on the flank.

"The pity of it--the treat you are missing!"--but Zephirine snored on, contemptuous.

After this had lasted, as I say, some ten minutes, Pere Philibert held up a hand.

"I was about to tell you," said he, "something of this Ambialet of which you two are citizens. It is a true tale; and if you can pierce to the instruction it holds for you both, you will go away determined to end this scandal of our town and live in amity. Shall I proceed?"

Champollion twirled his cap uneasily. The widow fell back a pace, panting from her onslaught. Neither broke the sudden peace that had fallen on the orchard.

"Very well! You must know, then, to begin with, that this Ambialet--which you occupy with your petty broils--was once an important burg with its charters and liberties, its consul and council of _prud'hommes_ and its own court of justice. It had its guilds, too--of midwives for instance, Maman Vacher, who were bound to obey any reasonable summons--"

"You, there, just listen to that!" put in the baker.

"And of bakers, M. Champollion, who sold bread at a price regulated by law, with a committee of five _prohomes_ to see that they sold by just weight."

"Eh? Eh? And I warrant the law allowed no yeast from Germany!"--This from the widow.

"Beyond doubt, my daughter, it would have countenanced no such invention; for the town held its charter from the Viscounts of Beziers and Albi, and might consume only such corn and wine as were grown in the Viscounty."

"_Parbleu!_"--the baker shrugged his shoulders--"in the matter of wine we should fare well nowadays under such a rule!"

"In these times Ambialet grew its own wine, and by the tun. Had you but used your eyes on the way hither they might have counted old vine-stocks by the score; they lie this way and that amid the heather on either side of the calvary. Many of the inhabitants yet alive can remember the phylloxera destroying them."

"Which came, moreover, from the Rouergue!" snapped Maman Vacher.

"Be silent, my daughter. Yes! these were thriving times for Ambialet before ever the heresy infected the Albigeois, and when every year brought the Great Pilgrimage and the Retreat. For three days before the Retreat, while yet the inns were filling, the whole town made merry under a president called the King of Youth--_rex juventutis_--who appointed his own officers, levied his own fines, and was for three days a greater man even than the Viscount of Beziers, from whom he derived his power by charter: '_E volem e auctreiam quo lo Rei del Joven d'Ambilet puesco far sas fastas, tener ses senescals e sos jutges e sos sirvens_ . . .' h'm, h'm." Pere Philibert cast about to continue the quotation, but suddenly recollected that to his hearers its old French must be as good as Greek.

"--Well, as I was saying, this King of Youth held his merrymaking once in every year, at the time of the Great Pilgrimage. And on a certain year there came to Ambialet among the pilgrims one Tibbald, a merchant of Cahors, and a man (as you shall see) of unrighteous mind, in that he s.n.a.t.c.hed at privy gain under cover of his soul's benefit. This man, having arrived at Ambialet in the dusk, had no sooner sought out an inn than he inquired, 'Who regulated this feast?' The innkeeper directed him to the place, where he found the King of Youth setting up a maypole by torchlight; whom he plucked by the sleeve and drew aside for a secret talk.

"Now the fines and forfeits exacted by the King of Youth during his festival were always paid in wine--a pail of wine apiece from the newest married couple in the Viscounty, a pail of wine from anyone proved to have cut or plucked so much as a leaf from the great elm-tree in the place, a pail for damaging the Maypole, or stumbling in the dance, or hindering any of the processions. 'We have granted this favour to our youth,' says the charter, 'because, having been witness of their merrymaking, we have taken great pleasure and satisfaction therein.' You may guess, then, that in one way and another the King and his seneschals acc.u.mulated good store of wine by the end of the festival, when they shared it among the populace in a great carouse; nor were they held too strictly to account for the justice of particular fines by which the whole commonalty profited.

"This Tibbald, then, having drawn the King aside, began cautiously and anfractuously and _per ambages_ to unfold his plan. He had brought with him (said he) on muleback twelve half-hogsheads of right excellent wine which he had picked up as a bargain in the Rhone Valley. The same he had smuggled into Ambialet after dusk, covering his mules' panniers with cloths and skins of Damas and Alexandria, and it now lay stored in the stables at the back of his inn. This excellent wine (which in truth was an infamous _tisane_ of the last pressings, and had never been nearer the Rhone than Caylus) he proposed to barter secretly for that collected during the feast, and to pay the King of Youth, moreover, a bribe of one livre in money on every hogshead exchanged. The populace (he promised) would be too well drunken to discover the trick; or, if they detected any difference in the wine would commend it as better and stronger than ordinary.