The Battle of the Strong Part 33

"Dame! you know who I am."

"I know what you are," she answered quietly.

He did not quite grasp her meaning, but the tone sounded contemptuous, and that sorted little with his self-importance.

"I'm the Seigneur's bailiff--that's who I am. Gad'rabotin, don't you put on airs with me! I'm for the tribute, so off with the bag and let's see your catch."

"I have never yet paid tribute to the seigneur of the manor."

"Well, you'll begin now. I'm the new bailiff, and if you don't pay your tale, up you come to the court of the fief to-morrow."

She looked him clearly in the eyes. "If I were a man, I should not pay the tribute, and I should go to the court of the fief to-morrow, but being a woman--"

She clasped the hand of the child tightly to her for an instant, then with a sigh she took the basket from her shoulders and, opening it, added:

"But being a woman, the fish I caught in the sea that belongs to G.o.d and to all men I must divide with the Seigneur whose bailiff spies on poor fisher-folk."

The man growled an oath and made a motion as though he would catch her by the shoulder in anger, but the look in her eyes stopped him. Counting out the fish, and giving him three out of the eight she had caught, she said:

"It matters not so much to me, but there are others poorer than I, they suffer."

With a leer the fellow stooped, and, taking up the fish, put them in the pockets of his queminzolle, all slimy from the sea as they were.

"Ba su, you haven't got much to take care of, have you? It don't take much to feed two mouths--not so much as it does three, Ma'm'selle."

Before he had ended, the woman, without reply to the insult, took the child by the hand and moved along her homeward path towards Plemont.

"A bi'tot, good-bye!" the bailiff laughed brutally. Standing with his legs apart and his hands fastened on the fish in the pockets of his long queminzolle, he called after her in sneering comment: "Ma fistre, your pride didn't fall--ba su!" Then he turned on his heel.

"Eh ben, here's mackerel for supper," he added as he mounted his horse.

The woman was Guida Landresse, the child was her child, and they lived in the little house upon the cliff at Plemont. They were hastening thither now.

CHAPTER x.x.x

A visitor was awaiting Guida and the child: a man who, first knocking at the door, then looking in and seeing the room empty, save for the dog lying asleep by the fire, had turned slowly away, and going to the cliff edge, looked out over the sea. His movements were deliberate, his body moved slowly; the whole appearance was of great strength and nervous power. The face was preoccupied, the eyes were watchful, dark, penetrating. They seemed not only to watch but to weigh, to meditate, even to listen--as it were, to do the duty of all the senses at once. In them worked the whole forces of his nature; they were crucibles wherein every thought and emotion were fused. The jaw was set and strong, yet it was not hard. The face contradicted itself. While not gloomy it had lines like scars telling of past wounds. It was not despairing, it was not morbid, and it was not resentful; it had the look of one both credulous and indomitable. Belief was stamped upon it; not expectation or ambition, but faith and fidelity. You would have said he was a man of one set idea, though the head had a breadth sorting little with narrowness of purpose. The body was too healthy to belong to a fanatic, too powerful to be that of a dreamer alone, too firm for other than a man of action.

Several times he turned to look towards the house and up the pathway leading from the hillock to the doorway. Though he waited long he did not seem impatient; patience was part of him, and not the least part.

At last he sat down on a boulder between the house and the sh.o.r.e, and scarcely moved, as minute after minute pa.s.sed, and then an hour and more, and no one came. Presently there was a soft footstep beside him, and he turned. A dog's nose thrust itself into his hand.

"Biribi, Biribi!" he said, patting its head with his big hand. "Watching and waiting, eh, old Biribi?" The dog looked into his eyes as if he knew what was said, and would speak--or, indeed, was speaking in his own language. "That's the way of life, Biribi--watching and waiting, and watching--always watching."

Suddenly the dog caught its head away from his hand, gave a short joyful bark, and ran slowly up the hillock.

"Guida and the child," the man said aloud, moving towards the house--"Guida and the child!"

He saw her and the little one before they saw him. Presently the child said: "See, maman," and pointed. Guida started. A swift flush pa.s.sed over her face, then she smiled and made a step forward to meet her visitor.

"Maitre Ranulph--Ranulph!" she said, holding out her hand. "It's a long time since we met."

"A year," he answered simply, "just a year." He looked down at the child, then stooped, caught him up in his arms and said: "He's grown.

Es-tu gentiment?" he added to the child--"es-tu gentiment, m'sieu'?"

The child did not quite understand. "Please?" it said in true Jersey fashion--at which the mother was troubled.

"O Guilbert, is that what you should say?" she asked. The child looked up quaintly at her, and with the same whimsical smile which Guida had given to another so many years ago, he looked at Ranulph and said: "Pardon, monsieur."

"Coum est qu'on etes, m'sieu'?" said Ranulph in another patois greeting.

Guida shook her head reprovingly. The child glanced swiftly at his mother as though asking permission to reply as he wished, then back at Ranulph, and was about to speak, when Guida said: "I have not taught him the Jersey patois, Ranulph; only English and French."

Her eyes met his clearly, meaningly. Her look said to him as plainly as words, The child's destiny is not here in Jersey. But as if he knew that in this she was blinding herself, and that no one can escape the influences of surroundings, he held the child back from him, and said with a smile: "Coum est qu'on vos portest?"

Now the child with elfish sense of the situation replied in Jersey English: "Naicely, thenk you."

"You see," said Ranulph to Guida, "there are things in us stronger than we are. The wind, the sea, and people we live with, they make us sing their song one way or another. It's in our bones."

A look of pain pa.s.sed over Guida's face, and she did not reply to his remark, but turned almost abruptly to the doorway, saying, with just the slightest hesitation: "You will come in?"

There was no hesitation on his part. "Oui-gia!" he said, and stepped inside.

She hastily hung up the child's cap and her own, and as she gathered in the soft, waving hair, Ranulph noticed how the years had only burnished it more deeply and strengthened the beauty of the head. She had made the gesture unconsciously, but catching the look in his eye a sudden thrill of anxiety ran through her. Recovering herself, however, and with an air of bright friendliness, she laid a hand upon the great arm-chair, above which hung the ancient sword of her ancestor, the Comte Guilbert Mauprat de Chambery, and said: "Sit here, Ranulph."

Seating himself he gave a heavy sigh--one of those pa.s.sing breaths of content which come to the hardest lives now and then: as though the Spirit of Life itself, in ironical apology for human existence, gives moments of respite from which hope is born again. Not for over four long years had Ranulph sat thus quietly in the presence of Guida. At first, when Maitresse Aimable had told him that Guida was leaving the Place du Vier Prison to live in this lonely place with her newborn child, he had gone to entreat her to remain; but Maitresse Aimable had been present then, and all that he could say--all that he might speak out of his friendship, out of the old love, now deep pity and sorrow--was of no avail. It had been borne in upon him then that she was not morbid, but that her mind had a sane, fixed purpose which she was intent to fulfil.

It was as though she had made some strange covenant with a little helpless life, with a little face that was all her face; and that covenant she would keep.

So he had left her, and so to do her service had been granted elsewhere.

The Chevalier, with perfect wisdom and n.o.bility, insisted on being to Guida what he had always been, accepting what was as though it had always been, and speaking as naturally of her and the child as though there had always been a Guida and the child. Thus it was that he counted himself her protector, though he sat far away in the upper room of Elie Mattingley's house in the Rue d'Egypte, thinking his own thoughts, biding the time when she should come back to the world, and mystery be over, and happiness come once more; hoping only that he might live to see it.

Under his directions, Jean Touzel had removed the few things that Guida took with her to Plemont; and instructed by him, Elie Mattingley sold her furniture. Thus Guida had settled at Plemont, and there over four years of her life were pa.s.sed.

"Your father--how is he?" she asked presently. "Feeble," replied Ranulph; "he goes abroad but little now."

"It was said the Royal Court was to make him a gift, in remembrance of the Battle of Jersey." Ranulph turned his head away from her to the child, and beckoned him over. The child came instantly.

As Ranulph lifted him on his knee he answered Guida: "My father did not take it."

"Then they said you were to be constable--the grand monsieur." She smiled at him in a friendly way.

"They said wrong," replied Ranulph.

"Most people would be glad of it," rejoined Guida. "My mother used to say you would be Bailly one day."

"Who knows--perhaps I might have been!"