The Battle of the Strong Part 31

Ditto to Madame Denise Gareau for turnips for supper after obs'quies ...................... 10 sols

"Saperlote, leave out the Madame, calf-lugs--, you!"

The apprentice did not move a finger. Obstinacy sat enthroned on him.

In a rage, the Master made a s.n.a.t.c.h at a metal flower-wreath to throw at him. "Shan't! She's my aunt. I knows my duties to my aunt--me," said the apprentice stolidly.

The Master burst out in a laugh of scorn. "Gaderabotin, here's family pride for you! I'll go stick dandelines in my old sow's ear--respe d'la compagnie."

The apprentice was still calm. "If you want to flourish yourself, don't mind me," said he, and picking up the next account, he began reading:

Mademoiselle Landresse, in the matter of the Burial of the Sieur de Mauprat, to Etienne Mahye, &c. Item--

The first words read by the apprentice had stilled the breaking storm of the Master's anger. It dissolved in a fragrant dew of proud reminiscence, profit, and scandal.

He himself had no open prejudices. He was an official of the public--or so he counted himself--and he very shrewdly knew his duty in that walk of life to which it had pleased Heaven to call him. The greater the notoriety of the death, the more in evidence was the Master and all his belongings. Death with honour was an advantage to him; death with disaster a boon; death with scandal was a G.o.dsend. It brought tears of grat.i.tude to his eyes when the death and the scandal were in high places. These were the only real tears he ever shed. His heart was in his head, and the head thought solely of Etienne Mahye. Though he wore an air of sorrow and sympathy in public, he had no more feeling than a hangman. His sympathy seemed to say to the living, "I wonder how soon you'll come into my hands," and to the dead, "What a pity you can only die once--and second-hand coffins so hard to get!"

Item: paid to me, Etienne Mahye,

droned the voice of the apprentice,

for rosewood coffin--

"O my good," interrupted the Master of Burials with a barren chuckle, and rubbing his hands with glee, "O my good, that was a day in a lifetime! I've done fine work in my time, but upon that day--not a cloud above, no dust beneath, a flowing tide, and a calm sea. The Royal Court, too, caught on a sudden marching in their robes, turns to and joins the cortegee, and the little birds a-tweeting-tweeting, and two parsons at the grave. Pardingue, the Lord was--with me that day, and--"

The apprentice laughed--a dry, mirthless laugh of disbelief and ridicule. "Ba su, master, the Lord was watching you. There was two silver bits inside that coffin, on Sieur's eyes."

"Bigre!" The Master was pale with rage. His lips drew back, disclosing long dark teeth and sickly gums, in a grimace of fury. He reached out to seize a hammer lying at his hand, but the apprentice said quickly:

"Sapri--that's the cholera hammer!"

The Master of Burials dropped the hammer as though it were at white heat, and eyed it with scared scrutiny. This hammer had been used in nailing down the coffins of six cholera patients who had died in one house at Rozel Bay a year before. The Master would not himself go near the place, so this apprentice had gone, on a promise from the Royal Court that he should have for himself--this he demanded as reward--free lodging in two small upper rooms of the Cohue Royale, just under the bell which said to the world, "Chicane--chicane! Chicane--chicane!"

This he asked, and this he got, and he alone of all Jersey went out to bury three people who had died of cholera; and then to watch three others die, to bury them scarce cold, and come back, with a leer of satisfaction, to claim his price. At first people were inclined to make a hero of him, but that only made him grin the more, and at last the island reluctantly decided that he had done the work solely for fee and reward.

The hammer used in nailing the coffins, he had carried through the town like an emblem of terror and death, and henceforth he only, in the shop of the Master, touched it.

"It won't hurt you if you leave it alone," said the apprentice grimly to the Master of Burials. "But, if you go bothering, I'll put it in your bed, and it'll do after to nail down your coffin."

Then he went on reading with a malicious calmness, as though the matter were the dullest trifle:

Item: one dozen pairs of gloves for mourners.

"Par made, that's one way of putting it!" commented the apprentice, "for what mourners was there but Ma'm'selle herself, and she quiet as a mice, and not a teardrop, and all the island necks end to end for look at her, and you, master, whispering to her: 'The Lord is the Giver and Taker,'

and the Femme de Ballast t'other side, saying 'My dee-ar, my dee-ar, bear thee up, bear thee up--thee.'"

"And she looking so steady in front of her, as if never was shame about her--and her there soon to be; and no ring of gold upon her hand, and all the world staring!" broke in the Master, who, having edged away from the cholera hammer, was launched upon a theme that stirred his very soul. "All the world staring, and good reason," he added.

"And she scarce winking, eh?" said the apprentice. "True that--her eyes didn't feel the cold," said the Master of Burials with a leer, for to his sight as to that of others, only as boldness had been Guida's bitter courage, the blank, despairing gaze, coming from eyes that turn their agony inward.

The apprentice took up the account again, and prepared to read it. The Master, however, had been roused to a genial theme. "Poor fallen child of Nature!" said he. "For what is birth or what is looks of virtue like a summer flower! It is to be brought down by hand of man." He was warmed to his text. Habit had long made him so much hypocrite, that he was sentimentalist and hard materialist in one. "Some pend'loque has brought her beauty to this pa.s.s, but she must suffer--and also his time will come, the sulphur, the torment, the worm that dieth not--and no Abraham for parched tongue--misery me! They that meet in sin here shall meet hereafter in burning fiery furnace."

The cackle of the apprentice rose above the whining voice. "Murder, too--don't forget the murder, master. The Connetable told the old Sieur de Mauprat what people were blabbing, and in half-hour dead he is--he."

"Et ben, the Sieur's blood it is upon their heads," continued the Master of Burials; "it will rise up from the ground--"

The apprentice interrupted. "A good thing if the Sieur himself doesn't rise, for you'd get naught for coffin or obs'quies. It was you tells the Connetable what folks babbled, and the Connetable tells the Sieur, and the Sieur it kills him dead. So if he rised, he'd not pay you for murdering him--no, bidemme! And 'tis a gobbly mouthful--this," he added, holding up the bill.

The undertaker's lips smacked softly, as though in truth he were waiting for the mouthful. Rubbing his hands, and drawing his lean leg up till it touched his nose, he looked over it with avid eyes, and said: "How much--don't read the items, but come to total debit--how much she pays me?"

Ma'm'selle Landresse, debtor in all for one hundred and twenty livres, eleven sols and two farthings.

"Shan't you make it one hundred and twenty-one livres?" added the apprentice.

"G.o.d forbid, the odd sols and farthings are mine--no more!" returned the Master of Burials. "Also they look exact; but the courage it needs to be honest! O my grief, if--"

"'Sh!" said the apprentice, pointing, and the Master of Burials, turning, saw Guida pa.s.s the window. With a hungry instinct for the morbid they stole to the doorway and looked down the Rue d'Driere after her. The Master was sympathetic, for had he not in his fingers at that moment a bill for a hundred and twenty livres odd? The way the apprentice craned his neck, and tightened the forehead over his large, protuberant eyes, showed his intense curiosity, but the face was implacable. It was like that of some strong fate, superior to all influences of sorrow, shame, or death. Presently he laughed--a crackling cackle like new-lighted kindling wood; nothing could have been more inhuman in sound. What in particular aroused this arid mirth probably he himself did not know. Maybe it was a native cruelty which had a sort of sardonic pleasure in the miseries of the world. Or was it only the perception, sometimes given to the dullest mind, of the futility of goodness, the futility of all? This perhaps, since the apprentice shared with Dormy Jamais his rooms at the top of the Cohue Royale; and there must have been some natural bond of kindness between the blank, sardonic undertaker's apprentice and the poor beganne, who now officially rang the bell for the meetings of the Royal Court.

The dry cackle of the apprentice as he looked after Guida roused a mockery of indignation in the Master. "Sacre matin, a back-hander on the jaw'd do you good, slubberdegullion--you! Ah, get go scrub the coffin blacking from your jowl!" he rasped out with furious contempt.

The apprentice seemed not to hear, but kept on looking after Guida, a pitiless leer on his face. "Dame, lucky for her the Sieur died before he had chance to change his will. She'd have got ni fiche ni bran from him."

"Support d'en haut, if you don't stop that I'll give you a coffin before your time, keg of nails--you. Sorrow and prayer at the throne of grace that she may have a contrite heart"--he clutched the funeral bill tighter in his fingers--"is what we must feel for her. The day the Sieur died and it all came out, I wept. Bedtime come I had to sop my eyes with elder-water. The day o' the burial mine eyes were so sore a-draining I had to put a rotten sweet apple on 'em over-night--me."

"Ah bah, she doesn't need rosemary wash for her hair!" said the apprentice admiringly, looking down the street after Guida as she turned into the Rue d'Egypte.

Perhaps it was a momentary sympathy for beauty in distress which made the Master say, as he backed from the doorway with stealthy step:

"Gatd'en'ale, 'tis well she has enough to live on, and to provide for what's to come!"

But if it was a note of humanity in the voice it pa.s.sed quickly, for presently, as he examined the bill for the funeral of the Sieur de Mauprat, he said shrilly:

"Achocre, you've left out the extra satin for his pillow--you."

"There wasn't any extra satin," drawled the apprentice.

With a snarl the Master of Burials seized a pen and wrote in the account:

Item: To extra satin for pillow, three livres.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Guida's once blithe, rose-coloured face was pale as ivory, the mouth had a look of deep sadness, and the step was slow; but the eye was clear and steady, and her hair, brushed under the black c.r.a.pe of the bonnet as smoothly as its nature would admit, gave to the broad brow a setting of rare attraction and sombre n.o.bility. It was not a face that knew inward shame, but it carried a look that showed knowledge of life's cruelties and a bitter sensitiveness to pain. Above all else it was fearless, and it had no touch of the consciousness or the consequences of sin; it was purity itself.

It alone should have proclaimed abroad her innocence, though she said no word in testimony. To most people, however, her dauntless sincerity only added to her crime and to the scandalous mystery. Yet her manner awed some, while her silence held most back. The few who came to offer sympathy, with curiousness in their eyes and as much inhumanity as pity in their hearts, were turned back gently but firmly, more than once with proud resentment.