STORIES BY ENGLISH AUTHORS

FRANCE

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A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT, By Robert Louis Stevenson

It was late in November, 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous,
relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it
in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake
descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To
poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it
all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that
afternoon, at a tavern window: was it only pagan Jupiter plucking geese
upon Olympus? or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a poor Master
of Arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity,
he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who
was among the company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in
honour of the jest and grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore
on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog
when he was Villon’s age.

The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the flakes
were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up. An army
might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given the alarm. If
there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the island like a large
white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars on the black ground of
the river. High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the
cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long
white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been
transformed into great false noses, drooping toward the point. The
crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals
of the wind there was a dull sound dripping about the precincts of the
church.

The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of the snow. All the
graves were decently covered; tall white housetops stood around in grave
array; worthy burghers were long ago in bed, be-nightcapped like their
domiciles; there was no light in all the neighbourhood but a little peep
from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir, and tossed the shadows
to and fro in time to its oscillations. The clock was hard on ten when the
patrol went by with halberds and a lantern, beating their hands; and they
saw nothing suspicious about the cemetery of St. John.

Yet there was a small house, backed up against the cemetery wall, which
was still awake, and awake to evil purpose, in that snoring district.
There was not much to betray it from without; only a stream of warm vapour
from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow melted on the roof, and a few
half-obliterated footprints at the door. But within, behind the shuttered
windows, Master Francis Villon, the poet, and some of the thievish crew
with whom he consorted, were keeping the night alive and passing round the
bottle.

A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from the
arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy monk, with
his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable warmth. His
dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the firelight only escaped on
either side of his broad person, and in a little pool between his
outspread feet. His face had the beery, bruised appearance of the
continual drinker’s; it was covered with a network of congested veins,
purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his
back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half
fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his
bull-neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the
shadow of his portly frame.

On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a scrap of
parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to call the “Ballade of
Roast Fish,” and Tabary sputtering admiration at his shoulder. The poet
was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and thin
black locks. He carried his four and twenty years with feverish animation.
Greed had made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his mouth.
The wolf and pig struggled together in his face. It was an eloquent,
sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and prehensile,
with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually flickering in
front of him in violent and expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad,
complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and
slobbering lips; he had become a thief, just as he might have become the
most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of
human geese and human donkeys.

At the monk’s other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game of
chance. About the first there clung some flavour of good birth and
training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in
the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor
soul, was in great feather; he had done a good stroke of knavery that
afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining
from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone
rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook
with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains.

“Doubles or quits?” said Thevenin.

Montigny nodded grimly.

“Some may prefer to dine in state,” wrote Villon, “on bread and cheese on
silver plate. Or, or—help me out, Guido!”

Tabary giggled.

“Or parsley on a golden dish,” scribbled the poet.

The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and
sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral
grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper as the night went
on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something between
a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent of the
poet’s, much detested by the Picardy monk.

“Can’t you hear it rattle in the gibbet?” said Villon. “They are all
dancing the devil’s jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my gallants;
you’ll be none the warmer. Whew, what a gust! Down went somebody just now!
A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree! I say, Dom Nicolas,
it’ll be cold to-night on the St. Denis Road?” he asked.

Dom Nicholas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon his Adam’s
apple. Montfaucon, the great, grisly Paris gibbet, stood hard by the St.
Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the raw. As for Tabary, he
laughed immoderately over the medlars; he had never heard anything more
light-hearted; and he held his sides and crowed. Villon fetched him a
fillip on the nose, which turned his mirth into an attack of coughing.

“Oh, stop that row,” said Villon, “and think of rhymes to ‘fish’!”

“Doubles or quits? Said Montigny, doggedly.

“With all my heart,” quoth Thevenin.

“Is there any more in that bottle?” asked the monk.

“Open another,” said Villon. “How do you ever hope to fill that big
hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And how do you
expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you fancy, can be spared to
carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or do you think yourself another
Elias—and they’ll send the coach for you?”

“Hominibus impossible,” replied the monk, as he filled his glass.

Tabary was in ecstasies.

Villon filliped his nose again.

“Laugh at my jokes, if you like,” he said.

Villon made a face at him. “Think of rhymes to ‘fish,’ “ he said. “What
have you to do with Latin? You’ll wish you knew none of it at the great
assizes, when the devil calls for Guido Tabary, clericus—the
devil with the humpback and red-hot fingernails. Talking of the devil,” he
added, in a whisper, “look at Montigny!”

All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be enjoying
his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril nearly shut, and
the other much inflated. The black dog was on his back, as people say, in
terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard under the gruesome
burden.

“He looks as if he could knife him,” whispered Tabary, with round eyes.

The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open hands to the
red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas, and not any
excess of moral sensibility.

“Come now,” said Villon—“about this ballade. How does it run so
far?” And beating time with his hand, he read it aloud to Tabary.

They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal movement
among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin was just
opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny leaped up, swift
as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow took effect before he
had time to utter a cry, before he had time to move. A tremor or two
convulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut, his heels rattled on the
floor; then his head rolled backward over one shoulder, with eyes wide
open; and Thevenin Pensete’s spirit had returned to Him who made it.

Every one sprang to his feet; but the business was over in two twos. The
four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly fashion, the
dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a singular and ugly leer.

“My God!” said Tabary, and he began to pray in Latin.

Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a step forward and
ducked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, and laughed still louder. Then he sat
down suddenly, all of a heap, upon a stool, and continued laughing
bitterly, as though he would shake himself to pieces.

Montigny recovered his composure first.

“Let’s see what he has about him,” he remarked; and he picked the dead
man’s pockets with a practised hand, and divided the money into four equal
portions on the table. “There’s for you,” he said.

The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a single stealthy glance
at the dead Thevenin, who was beginning to sink into himself and topple
sideways off the chair.

“We’re all in for it,” cried Villon, swallowing his mirth. “It’s a hanging
job for every man Jack of us that’s here—not to speak of those who
aren’t.” He made a shocking gesture in the air with his raised right hand,
and put out his tongue and threw his head on one side, so as to
counterfeit the appearance of one who has been hanged. Then he pocketed
his share of the spoil, and executed a shuffle with his feet as if to
restore the circulation.

Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money, and
retired to the other end of the apartment.

Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out the dagger,
which was followed by a jet of blood.

“You fellows had better be moving,” he said, as he wiped the blade on his
victim’s doublet.

“I think we had,” returned Villon, with a gulp. “Damn his fat head!” he
broke out. “It sticks in my throat like phlegm. What right has a man to
have red hair when he is dead?” And he fell all of a heap again upon the
stool, and fairly covered his face with his hands.

Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly chiming in.

“Cry-baby!” said the monk.

“I always said he was a woman,” added Montigny, with a sneer. “Sit up,
can’t you?” he went on, giving another shake to the murdered body. “Tread
out that fire, Nick!”

But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking Villon’s purse, as the
poet sat, limp and trembling, on the stool where he had been making a
ballade not three minutes before. Montigny and Tabary dumbly demanded a
share of the booty, which the monk silently promised as he passed the
little bag into the bosom of his gown. In many ways an artistic nature
unfits a man for practical existence.

No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook himself,
jumped to his feet, and began helping to scatter and extinguish the
embers. Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into the
street. The coast was clear; there was no meddlesome patrol in sight.
Still it was judged wiser to slip out severally; and as Villon was himself
in a hurry to escape from the neighbourhood of the dead Thevenin, and the
rest were in a still greater hurry to get rid of him before he should
discover the loss of his money, he was the first by general consent to
issue forth into the street.

The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a few
vapours, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It was
bitter cold; and, by a common optical effect, things seemed almost more
definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was absolutely
still; a company of white hoods, a field full of little alps, below the
twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing!
Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the
glittering streets; wherever he went, he was still tethered to the house
by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went, he must weave, with his own
plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to
the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with new
significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits,
and, choosing a street at random, stepped boldly forward in the snow.

Two things preoccupied him as he went: the aspect of the gallows at
Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase of the night’s existence, for one;
and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald head and garland
of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept quickening his
pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by mere fleetness of
foot. Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder with a sudden nervous
jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the white streets, except when
the wind swooped round a corner and threw up the snow, which was beginning
to freeze, in spouts of glittering dust.

Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple of
lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as though
carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though it was merely crossing
his line of march he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot as speedily as
he could. He was not in the humour to be challenged, and he was conscious
of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow. Just on his left hand
there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a large porch before the
door; it was half ruinous, he remembered, and had long stood empty; and so
he made three steps of it, and jumped into the shelter of the porch. It
was pretty dark inside, after the glimmer of the snowy streets, and he was
groping forward with outspread hands, when he stumbled over some substance
which offered an indescribable mixture of resistances, hard and soft, firm
and loose. His heart gave a leap, and he sprang two steps back and stared
dreadfully at the obstacle. Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It was
only a woman, and she dead. He knelt beside her to make sure upon this
latter point. She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A little
ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her cheeks had
been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets were quite empty; but
in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon found two of the small
coins that went by the name of whites. It was little enough, but it was
always something; and the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos that
she should have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a
dark and pitiable mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand to the
dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle
of man’s life. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he had
conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great
man’s doorway before she had time to spend her couple of whites—it
seemed a cruel way to carry on the world. Two whites would have taken such
a little while to squander; and yet it would have been one more good taste
in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul,
and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to use all his
tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling, half
mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped beating; a feeling
of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow seemed to
fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment; then he felt again
with one feverish movement; then his loss burst upon him, and he was
covered at once with perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living and
actual—it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures!
There is only one limit to their fortune—that of time; and a
spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are
spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking
reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath.
And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for it; if he may be
hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so dearly earned, so foolishly
departed! Villon stood and cursed; he threw the two whites into the
street; he shook his fist at heaven; he stamped, and was not horrified to
find himself trampling the poor corpse. Then he began rapidly to retrace
his steps toward the house beside the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear
of the patrol, which was long gone by at any rate, and had no idea but
that of his lost purse. It was in vain that he looked right and left upon
the snow; nothing was to be seen. He had not dropped it in the streets.
Had it fallen in the house? He would have liked dearly to go in and see;
but the idea of the grisly occupant unmanned him. And he saw besides, as
he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire had been
unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful
light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived his terror for
the authorities and Paris gibbet.

He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the snow
for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But he could
only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and sunk
deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his projects for a
rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And it was not
only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; positive discomfort,
positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch. His
perspiration had dried upon him; and although the wind had now fallen, a
binding frost was setting in stronger with every hour, and he felt
benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done? Late as was the hour,
improbable as was his success, he would try the house of his adopted
father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.

He ran all the way, and knocked timidly. There was no answer. He knocked
again and again, taking heart with every stroke; and at last steps were
heard approaching from within. A barred wicket fell open in the
iron-studded door, and emitted a gush of yellow light.

“Hold up your face to the wicket,” said the chaplain from within.

“It’s only me,” whimpered Villon.

“Oh, it’s only you, is it?” returned the chaplain; and he cursed him with
foul, unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour, and bade him be
off to hell, where he came from.

“My hands are blue to the wrist,” pleaded Villon; “my feet are dead and
full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold lies at my
heart. I may be dead before morning. Only this once, father, and, before
God, I will never ask again!”

“You should have come earlier,” said the ecclesiastic, coolly. “Young men
require a lesson now and then.” He shut the wicket and retired
deliberately into the interior of the house.

Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and feet,
and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.

“Wormy old fox!” he cried. “If I had my hand under your twist, I would
send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit.”

A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long
passages. He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath. And then the
humour of the situation struck him, and he laughed and looked lightly up
to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking over his discomfiture.

What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the frosty streets.
The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination, and gave him a
hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early night might very well
happen to him before morning. And he so young! And with such immense
possibilities of disorderly amusement before him! He felt quite pathetic
over the notion of his own fate, as if it had been some one else’s, and
made a little imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning when they
should find his body.

He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between his
thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was on bad terms with some old
friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a plight. He had
lampooned them in verses; he had beaten and cheated them; and yet now,
when he was in so close a pinch, he thought there was at least one who
might perhaps relent. It was a chance. It was worth trying at least, and
he would go and see.

On the way, two little accidents happened to him which coloured his
musings in a very different manner. For, first, he fell in with the track
of a patrol, and walked in it for some hundred yards, although it lay out
of his direction. And this spirited him up; at least he had confused his
trail; for he was still possessed with the idea of people tracking him all
about Paris over the snow, and collaring him next morning before he was
awake. The other matter affected him quite differently. He passed a
street-corner where, not so long before, a woman and her child had been
devoured by wolves. This was just the kind of weather, he reflected, when
wolves might take it into their heads to enter Paris again; and a lone man
in these deserted streets would run the chance of something worse than a
mere scare. He stopped and looked upon the place with an unpleasant
interest—it was a centre where several lanes intersected each other;
and he looked down them all, one after another, and held his breath to
listen, lest he should detect some galloping black things on the snow or
hear the sound of howling between him and the river. He remembered his
mother telling him the story and pointing out the spot, while he was yet a
child. His mother! If he only knew where she lived, he might make sure at
least of shelter. He determined he would inquire upon the morrow; nay, he
would go and see her, too, poor old girl! So thinking, he arrived at his
destination—his last hope for the night.

The house was quite dark, like its neighbours; and yet after a few taps he
heard a movement overhead, a door opening, and a cautious voice asking who
was there. The poet named himself in a loud whisper, and waited, not
without some trepidation, the result. Nor had he to wait long. A window
was suddenly opened, and a pailful of slops splashed down upon the
door-step. Villon had not been unprepared for something of the sort, and
had put himself as much in shelter as the nature of the porch admitted;
but for all that he was deplorably drenched below the waist. His hose
began to freeze almost at once. Death from cold and exposure stared him in
the face; he remembered he was of phthisical tendency, and began coughing
tentatively. But the gravity of the danger steadied his nerves. He stopped
a few hundred yards from the door where he had been so rudely used, and
reflected with his finger to his nose. He could only see one way of
getting a lodging, and that was to take it. He had noticed a house not far
away, which looked as if it might be easily broken into; and thither he
betook himself promptly, entertaining himself on the way with the idea of
a room still hot, with a table still loaded with the remains of supper,
where he might pass the rest of the black hours, and whence he should
issue, on the morrow, with an armful of valuable plate. He even considered
on what viands and what wines he should prefer; and as he was calling the
roll of his favourite dainties, roast fish presented itself to his mind
with an odd mixture of amusement and horror.

“I shall never finish that ballade,” he thought to himself; and then, with
another shudder at the recollection, “Oh, damn his fat head!” he repeated,
fervently, and spat upon the snow.

The house in question looked dark at first sight; but as Villon made a
preliminary inspection in search of the handiest point of attack, a little
twinkle of light caught his eye from behind a curtained window.

“The devil!” he thought. “People awake! Some student or some saint,
confound the crew! Can’t they get drunk and lie in bed snoring like their
neighbours? What’s the good of curfew, and poor devils of bell-ringers
jumping at a rope’s end in bell-towers? What’s the use of day, if people
sit up all night? The gripes to them!” He grinned as he saw where his
logic was leading him. “Every man to his business, after all,” added he,
“and if they’re awake, by the Lord, I may come by a supper honestly for
once, and cheat the devil.”

He went boldly to the door and knocked with an assured hand. On both
previous occasions he had knocked timidly and with some dread of
attracting notice; but now when he had just discarded the thought of a
burglarious entry, knocking at a door seemed a mighty simple and innocent
proceeding. The sound of his blows echoed through the house with thin,
phantasmal reverberations, as though it were quite empty; but these had
scarcely died away before a measured tread drew near, a couple of bolts
were withdrawn, and one wing was opened broadly, as though no guile or
fear of guile were known to those within. A tall figure of a man, muscular
and spare, but a little bent, confronted Villon. The head was massive in
bulk, but finely sculptured; the nose blunt at the bottom, but refining
upward to where it joined a pair of strong and honest eyebrows; the mouth
and eyes surrounded with delicate markings; and the whole face based upon
a thick white beard, boldly and squarely trimmed. Seen as it was by the
light of a flickering hand-lamp, it looked perhaps nobler than it had a
right to do; but it was a fine face, honourable rather than intelligent,
strong, simple, and righteous.

“You knock late, sir,” said the old man, in resonant, courteous tones.

Villon cringed, and brought up many servile words of apology; at a crisis
of this sort, the beggar was uppermost in him, and the man of genius hid
his head with confusion.

“You are cold,” repeated the old man, “and hungry? Well, step in.” And he
ordered him into the house with a noble enough gesture.

“Some great seigneur,” thought Villon, as his host, setting down the lamp
on the flagged pavement of the entry, shot the bolts once more into their
places.

“You will pardon me if I go in front,” he said, when this was done; and he
preceded the poet upstairs into a large apartment, warmed with a pan of
charcoal and lit by a great lamp hanging from the roof. It was very bare
of furniture; only some gold plate on a sideboard, some folios, and a
stand of armour between the windows. Some smart tapestry hung upon the
walls, representing the crucifixion of our Lord in one piece, and in
another a scene of shepherds and shepherdesses by a running stream. Over
the chimney was a shield of arms.

“Will you seat yourself,” said the old man, “and forgive me if I leave
you? I am alone in my house to-night, and if you are to eat I must forage
for you myself.”

No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from the chair on which he
had just seated himself, and began examining the room with the stealth and
passion of a cat. He weighed the gold flagons in his hand, opened all the
folios, and investigated the arms upon the shield, and the stuff with
which the seats were lined. He raised the window curtains, and saw that
the windows were set with rich stained glass in figures, so far as he
could see, of martial import. Then he stood in the middle of the room,
drew a long breath, and retaining it with puffed cheeks, looked round and
round him, turning on his heels, as if to impress every feature of the
apartment on his memory.

“Seven pieces of plate,” he said. “If there had been ten, I would have
risked it. A fine house, and a fine old master, so help me all the
saints!”

And just then, hearing the old man’s tread returning along the corridor,
he stole back to his chair, and began humbly toasting his wet legs before
the charcoal pan.

His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a jug of wine in the
other. He set down the plate upon the table, motioning Villon to draw in
his chair, and going to the sideboard, brought back two goblets, which he
filled.

“I drink your better fortune,” he said gravely, touching Villon’s cup with
his own.

“To our better acquaintance,” said the poet, growing bold. A mere man of
the people would have been awed by the courtesy of the old seigneur, but
Villon was hardened in that matter; he had made mirth for great lords
before now, and found them as black rascals as himself. And so he devoted
himself to the viands with a ravenous gusto, while the old man, leaning
backward, watched him with steady, curious eyes.

“You have blood on your shoulder, my man,” he said.

Montigny must have laid his wet right hand upon him as he left the house.
He cursed Montigny in his heart.

“It was none of my shedding,” he stammered.

“I had not supposed so,” returned his host, quietly. “A brawl?”

“Well, something of that sort,” Villon admitted, with a quaver.

“Perhaps a fellow murdered?”

“Oh no, not murdered,” said the poet, more and more confused. “It was all
fair play—murdered by accident. I had no hand in it, God strike me
dead!” he added, fervently.

“One rogue the fewer, I dare say,” observed the master of the house.

“You may dare to say that,” agreed Villon, infinitely relieved. “As big a
rogue as there is between here and Jerusalem. He turned up his toes like a
lamb. But it was a nasty thing to look at. I dare say you’ve seen dead men
in your time, my lord?” he added, glancing at the armour.

“Many,” said the old man. “I have followed the wars, as you imagine.”

Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just taken up again.

“Were any of them bald?” he asked.

“Oh yes, and with hair as white as mine.”

“I don’t think I should mind the white so much,” said Villon. “His was
red.” And he had a return of his shuddering and tendency to laughter,
which he drowned with a great draught of wine. “I’m a little put out when
I think of it,” he went on. “I knew him—damn him! And then the cold
gives a man fancies—or the fancies give a man cold, I don’t know
which.”

“Have you any money?” asked the old man.

“I have one white,” returned the poet, laughing. “I got it out of a dead
jade’s stocking in a porch. She was as dead as Caesar, poor wench, and as
cold as a church, with bits of ribbon sticking in her hair. This is a hard
winter for wolves and wenches and poor rogues like me.”

“I,” said the old man, “am Enguerrand de la Feuillee, seigneur de
Brisetout, bailie du Patatrac. Who and what may you be?”

Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. “I am called Francis Villon,”
he said, “a poor Master of Arts of this university. I know some Latin, and
a deal of vice. I can make Chansons, ballades, lais, virelais, and
roundels, and I am very fond of wine. I was born in a garret, and I shall
not improbably die upon the gallows. I may add, my lord, that from this
night forward I am your lordship’s very obsequious servant to command.”

“No servant of mine,” said the knight. “My guest for this evening, and no
more.”

“A very grateful guest,” said Villon, politely, and he drank in dumb show
to his entertainer.

“You are shrewd,” began the old man, tapping his forehead, “very shrewd;
you have learning; you are a clerk; and yet you take a small piece of
money off a dead woman in the street. Is it not a kind of theft?”

“It is a kind of theft much practised in the wars, my lord.”

“The wars are the field of honour,” returned the old man, proudly. “There
a man plays his life upon the cast; he fights in the name of his lord the
king, his Lord God, and all their lordships the holy saints and angels.”

“Put it,” said Villon, “that I were really a thief, should I not play my
life also, and against heavier odds?”

“For gain, but not for honour.”

“Gain?” repeated Villon, with a shrug. “Gain! The poor fellow wants
supper, and takes it. So does the soldier in a campaign. Why, what are all
these requisitions we hear so much about? If they are not gain to those
who take them, they are loss enough to the others. The men-at-arms drink
by a good fire, while the burgher bites his nails to buy them wine and
wood. I have seen a good many ploughmen swinging on trees about the
country; ay, I have seen thirty on one elm, and a very poor figure they
made; and when I asked some one how all these came to be hanged, I was
told it was because they could not scrape together enough crowns to
satisfy the men-at-arms.”

“These things are a necessity of war, which the low-born must endure with
constancy. It is true that some captains drive overhard; there are spirits
in every rank not easily moved by pity; and indeed many follow arms who
are no better than brigands.”

“You see,” said the poet, “you cannot separate the soldier from the
brigand; and what is a thief but an isolated brigand with circumspect
manners? I steal a couple of mutton-chops, without so much as disturbing
people’s sleep; the farmer grumbles a bit, but sups none the less
wholesomely on what remains. You come up blowing gloriously on a trumpet,
take away the whole sheep, and beat the farmer pitifully into the bargain.
I have no trumpet; I am only Tom, Dick, or Harry; I am a rogue and a dog,
and hanging’s too good for me—with all my heart; but just ask the
farmer which of us he prefers, just find out which of us he lies awake to
curse on cold nights.”

“Look at us two,” said his lordship. “I am old, strong, and honoured. If I
were turned from my house to-morrow, hundreds would be proud to shelter
me. Poor people would go out and pass the night in the streets with their
children, if I merely hinted that I wished to be alone. And I find you up,
wandering homeless, and picking farthings off dead women by the wayside! I
fear no man and nothing; I have seen you tremble and lose countenance at a
word. I wait God’s summons contentedly in my own house, or, if it please
the king to call me out again, upon the field of battle. You look for the
gallows; a rough, swift death, without hope or honour. Is there no
difference between these two?”

“As far as to the moon,” Villon acquiesced. “But if I had been born lord
of Brisetout, and you had been the poor scholar Francis, would the
difference have been any the less? Should not I have been warming my knees
at this charcoal pan, and would not you have been groping for farthings in
the snow? Should not I have been the soldier, and you the thief?”

“A thief?” cried the old man. “I a thief! If you understood your words,
you would repent them.”

Villon turned out his hands with a gesture of inimitable impudence. “If
your lordship had done me the honour to follow my argument!” he said.

“I do you too much honour in submitting to your presence,” said the
knight. “Learn to curb your tongue when you speak with old and honourable
men, or some one hastier than I may reprove you in a sharper fashion.” And
he rose and paced the lower end of the apartment, struggling with anger
and antipathy. Villon surreptitiously refilled his cup, and settled
himself more comfortably in the chair, crossing his knees and leaning his
head upon one hand and the elbow against the back of the chair. He was now
replete and warm; and he was in no wise frightened for his host, having
gauged him as justly as was possible between two such different
characters. The night was far spent, and in a very comfortable fashion
after all; and he felt morally certain of a safe departure on the morrow.

“Tell me one thing,” said the old man, pausing in his walk. “Are you
really a thief?”

“I claim the sacred rights of hospitality,” returned the poet. “My lord, I
am.”

“You are very young,” the knight continued.

“I should never have been so old,” replied Villon, showing his fingers,
“if I had not helped myself with these ten talents. They have been my
nursing mothers and my nursing fathers.”

“You may still repent and change.”

“I repent daily,” said the poet. “There are few people more given to
repentance than poor Francis. As for change, let somebody change my
circumstances. A man must continue to eat, if it were only that he may
continue to repent.”

“The change must begin in the heart,” returned the old man, solemnly.

“My dear lord,” answered Villon, “do you really fancy that I steal for
pleasure? I hate stealing, like any other piece of work or of danger. My
teeth chatter when I see a gallows. But I must eat, I must drink; I must
mix in society of some sort. What the devil! Man is not a solitary animal—cui
Deus foeminam tradit. Make me king’s pantler, make me Abbot of St.
Denis, make me bailie of the Patatrac, and then I shall be changed indeed.
But as long as you leave me the poor scholar Francis Villon, without a
farthing, why, of course, I remain the same.”

“The grace of God is all powerful.”

“I should be a heretic to question it,” said Francis. “It has made you
lord of Brisetout and bailie of the Patatrac; it has given me nothing but
the quick wits under my hat and these ten toes upon my hands. May I help
myself to wine? I thank you respectfully. By God’s grace, you have a very
superior vintage.”

The lord of Brisetout walked to and fro with his hands behind his back.
Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in his mind about the parallel
between thieves and soldiers; perhaps Villon had interested him by some
cross-thread of sympathy; perhaps his wits were simply muddled by so much
unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever the cause, he somehow yearned to
convert the young man to a better way of thinking, and could not make up
his mind to drive him forth again into the street.

“There is something more than I can understand in this,” he said at
length. “Your mouth is full of subtleties, and the devil has led you very
far astray; but the devil is only a very weak spirit before God’s truth,
and all his subtleties vanish at a word of true honour, like darkness at
morning. Listen to me once more. I learned long ago that a gentleman
should live chivalrously and lovingly to God and the king and his lady;
and though I have seen many strange things done, I have still striven to
command my ways upon that rule. It is not only written in all noble
histories, but in every man’s heart, if he will take care to read. You
speak of food and wine, and I know very well that hunger is a difficult
trial to endure; but you do not speak of other wants; you say nothing of
honour, of faith to God and other men, of courtesy, of love without
reproach. It may be that I am not very wise,—and yet I think I am,—but
you seem to me like one who has lost his way and made a great error in
life. You are attending to the little wants, and you have totally
forgotten the great and only real ones, like a man who should be doctoring
toothache on the judgment day. For such things as honour and love and
faith are not only nobler than food and drink, but indeed I think we
desire them more, and suffer more sharply for their absence. I speak to
you as I think you will most easily understand me. Are you not, while
careful to fill your belly, disregarding another appetite in your heart,
which spoils the pleasure of your life and keeps you continually
wretched?”

Villon was sensibly nettled under all this sermonising. “You think I have
no sense of honour!” he cried. “I’m poor enough, God knows! It’s hard to
see rich people with their gloves, and you blowing in your hands. An empty
belly is a bitter thing, although you speak so lightly of it. If you had
had as many as I, perhaps you would change your tune. Anyway, I’m a thief,—make
the most of that,—but I’m not a devil from hell, God strike me dead!
I would have you to know I’ve an honour of my own, as good as yours,
though I don’t prate about it all day long, as if it was a God’s miracle
to have any. It seems quite natural to me; I keep it in its box till it’s
wanted. Why, now, look you here, how long have I been in this room with
you? Did you not tell me you were alone in the house? Look at your gold
plate! You’re strong, if you like, but you’re old and unarmed, and I have
my knife. What did I want but a jerk of the elbow and here would have been
you with the cold steel in your bowels, and there would have been me,
linking in the streets, with an armful of golden cups! Did you suppose I
hadn’t wit enough to see that? and I scorned the action. There are your
damned goblets, as safe as in a church; there are you, with your heart
ticking as good as new; and here am I, ready to go out again as poor as I
came in, with my one white that you threw in my teeth! And you think I
have no sense of honour—God strike me dead!”

The old man stretched out his right arm. “I will tell you what you are,”
he said. “You are a rogue, my man, an impudent and black-hearted rogue and
vagabond. I have passed an hour with you. Oh, believe me, I feel myself
disgraced! And you have eaten and drunk at my table. But now I am sick at
your presence; the day has come, and the night-bird should be off to his
roost. Will you go before, or after?”

“Which you please,” returned the poet, rising. “I believe you to be
strictly honourable.” He thoughtfully emptied his cup. “I wish I could add
you were intelligent,” he went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles.
“Age! age! the brains stiff and rheumatic.”

The old man preceded him from a point of self-respect; Villon followed,
whistling, with his thumbs in his girdle.

“God pity you,” said the lord of Brisetout at the door.

“Good-bye, papa,” returned Villon, with a yawn. “Many thanks for the cold
mutton.”

The door closed behind him. The dawn was breaking over the white roofs. A
chill, uncomfortable morning ushered in the day. Villon stood and heartily
stretched himself in the middle of the road.

“A very dull old gentleman,” he thought. “I wonder what his goblets may be
worth?”

A LEAF IN THE STORM, By Ouida

The Berceau de Dieu was a little village in the valley of the Seine. As a
lark drops its nest among the grasses, so a few peasant people had dropped
their little farms and cottages amid the great green woods on the winding
river. It was a pretty place, with one steep, stony street, shady with
poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose thatch a cloud of white
and gray pigeons fluttered all day long; a little aged chapel with a
conical red roof; and great barns covered with ivy and thick creepers, red
and purple, and lichens that were yellow in the sun. All around it were
the broad, flowering meadows, with the sleek cattle of Normandy fattening
in them, and the sweet dim forests where the young men and maidens went on
every holy day and feast-day in the summer-time to seek for wood-anemones,
and lilies of the pools, and the wild campanula, and the fresh dog-rose,
and all the boughs and grasses that made their house-doors like garden
bowers, and seemed to take the cushat’s note and the linnet’s song into
their little temple of God.

The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed. Men said that the hamlet had been
there in the day of the Virgin of Orleans; and a stone cross of the
twelfth century still stood by the great pond of water at the bottom of
the street under the chestnut-tree, where the villagers gathered to gossip
at sunset when their work was done. It had no city near it, and no town
nearer than four leagues. It was in the green care of a pastoral district,
thickly wooded and intersected with orchards. Its produce of wheat and
oats and cheese and fruit and eggs was more than sufficient for its simple
prosperity. Its people were hardy, kindly, laborious, happy; living round
the little gray chapel in amity and good-fellowship. Nothing troubled it.
War and rumours of war, revolutions and counter-revolutions, empires and
insurrections, military and political questions—these all were for
it things unknown and unheard of, mighty winds that arose and blew and
swept the lands around it, but never came near enough to harm it, lying
there, as it did in its loneliness like any lark’s nest. Even in the great
days of the Revolution it had been quiet. It had had a lord whom it loved
in the old castle on the hill at whose feet it nestled; it had never tried
to harm him, and it had wept bitterly when he had fallen at Jemmapes, and
left no heir, and the chateau had crumbled into ivy-hung ruins. The
thunder-heats of that dread time had scarcely scorched it. It had seen a
few of its best youth march away to the chant of the Marseillaise to fight
on the plains of Champagne; and it had been visited by some patriots in bonnets
rouges and soldiers in blue uniforms, who had given it tricoloured
cockades and bade it wear them in the holy name of the Republic one and
indivisible. But it had not known what these meant, and its harvests had
been reaped without the sound of a shot in its fields or any gleam of
steel by its innocent hearths; so that the terrors and the tidings of
those noble and ghastly years had left no impress on its generations.

Reine Allix, indeed, the oldest woman among them all, numbering more than
ninety years, remembered when she was a child hearing her father and his
neighbours talk in low, awe-stricken tones one bitter wintry night of how
a king had been slain to save the people; and she remembered likewise—remembered
it well, because it had been her betrothal night and the sixteenth
birthday of her life—how a horseman had flashed through the startled
street like a comet, and had called aloud, in a voice of fire, “Gloire!
gloire! gloire!—Marengo! Marengo! Marengo!” and how the village
had dimly understood that something marvellous for France had happened
afar off, and how her brothers and her cousins and her betrothed, and she
with them, had all gone up to the high slope over the river, and had piled
up a great pyramid of pine wood and straw and dried mosses, and had set
flame to it, till it had glowed in its scarlet triumph all through that
wondrous night of the sultry summer of victory.

These and the like memories she would sometimes relate to the children at
evening when they gathered round her begging for a story. Otherwise, no
memories of the Revolution or the Empire disturbed the tranquility of the
Berceau; and even she, after she had told them, would add, “I am not sure
now what Marengo was. A battle, no doubt, but I am not sure where nor why.
But we heard later that little Claudis, my aunt’s youngest-born, a
volunteer not nineteen, died at it. If we had known, we should not have
gone up and lit the bonfire.”

This woman, who had been born in that time of famine and flame, was the
happiest creature in the whole hamlet of the Berceau. “I am old; yes, I am
very old,” she would say, looking up from her spinning-wheel in her
house-door, and shading her eyes from the sun, “very old—ninety-two
last summer. But when one has a roof over one’s head, and a pot of soup
always, and a grandson like mine, and when one has lived all one’s life in
the Berceau de Dieu, then it is well to be so old. Ah, yes, my little
ones,—yes, though you doubt it, you little birds that have just
tried your wings,—it is well to be so old. One has time to think,
and thank the good God, which one never seemed to have a minute to do in
that work, work, work when one was young.”

Reine Allix was a tall and strong woman, very withered and very bent and
very brown, yet with sweet, dark, flashing eyes that had still light in
them, and a face that was still noble, though nearly a century had bronzed
it with its harvest suns and blown on it with its winter winds. She wore
always the same garb of homely dark-blue serge, always the same tall white
head-gear, always the same pure silver ear-rings that had been at once an
heirloom and a nuptial gift. She was always shod in her wooden sabots, and
she always walked abroad with a staff of ash. She had been born in the
Berceau de Dieu; had lived there and wedded there; had toiled there all
her life, and never left it for a greater distance than a league, or for a
longer time than a day. She loved it with an intense love. The world
beyond it was nothing to her; she scarcely believed in it as existing. She
could neither read nor write. She told the truth, reared her offspring in
honesty, and praised God always—had praised Him when starving in a
bitter winter after her husband’s death, when there had been no field
work, and she had had five children to feed and clothe; and praised Him
now that her sons were all dead before her, and all she had living of her
blood was her grandson Bernadou.

Her life had been a hard one. Her parents had been hideously poor. Her
marriage had scarcely bettered her condition. She had laboured in the
fields always, hoeing and weeding and reaping and carrying wood and
driving mules, and continually rising with the first streak of daybreak.
She had known fever and famine and all manner of earthly ills. But now in
her old age she had peace. Two of her dead sons, who had sought their
fortunes in the other hemisphere, had left her a little money, and she had
a little cottage and a plot of ground, and a pig, and a small orchard. She
was well-to-do, and could leave it all to Bernadou; and for ten years she
had been happy, perfectly happy, in the coolness and the sweetness and the
old familiar ways and habits of the Berceau.

Bernadou was very good to her. The lad, as she called him, was five and
twenty years old, tall and straight and clean-limbed, with the blue eyes
of the North, and a gentle, frank face. He worked early and late in the
plot of ground that gave him his livelihood. He lived with his
grandmother, and tended her with a gracious courtesy and veneration that
never altered. He was not very wise; he also could neither read nor write;
he believed in his priest and his homestead, and loved the ground that he
had trodden ever since his first steps from the cradle had been guided by
Reine Allix. He had never been drawn for the conscription, because he was
the only support of a woman of ninety; he likewise had never been half a
dozen kilometres from his birthplace. When he was bidden to vote, and he
asked what his vote of assent would pledge him to do, they told him, “It
will bind you to honour your grandmother so long as she shall live, and to
get up with the lark, and to go to mass every Sunday, and to be a loyal
son to your country. Nothing more.” And thereat he had smiled and
straightened his stalwart frame, and gone right willingly to the
voting-urn.

He was very stupid in these things; and Reine Allix, though clear-headed
and shrewd, was hardly more learned in them than he.

“Look you,” she had said to him oftentimes, “in my babyhood there was the
old white flag upon the chateau. Well, they pulled that down and put up a
red one. That toppled and fell, and there was one of three colours. Then
somebody with a knot of white lilies in his hand came one day and set up
the old white one afresh; and before the day was done that was down again
and the tricolour again up where it is. Now, some I know fretted
themselves greatly because of all these changes of the flags; but as for
me, I could not see that any one of them mattered: bread was just as dear
and sleep was just as sweet whichever of the three was uppermost.”

Bernadou, who had never known but the flag of three colours, believed her,
as indeed he believed every word that those kindly and resolute old lips
ever uttered to him.

He had never been in a city, and only once, on the day of his first
communion, in the town four leagues away. He knew nothing more than this
simple, cleanly, honest life that he led. With what men did outside his
little world of meadow-land and woodland he had no care nor any concern.
Once a man had come through the village of the Berceau, a travelling
hawker of cheap prints,—a man with a wild eye and a restless brain,—who
told Bernadou that he was a downtrodden slave, a clod, a beast like a
mule, who fetched and carried that the rich might fatten, a dolt, an
idiot, who cared nothing for the rights of man and the wrongs of the poor.
Bernadou had listened with a perplexed face; then with a smile, that had
cleared it like sunlight, he had answered, in his country dialect, “I do
not know of what you speak. Rights? Wrongs? I cannot tell, But I have
never owned a sou; I have never told a lie; I am strong enough to hold my
own with any man that flouts me; and I am content where I am. That is
enough for me.”

The peddler had called him a poor-spirited beast of burden, but had said
so out of reach of his arm, and by night had slunk away from the Berceau
de Dieu, and had been no more seen there to vex the quiet contentment of
its peaceful and peace-loving ways.

At night, indeed, sometimes, the little wine-shop of the village would be
frequented by some half-dozen of the peasant proprietors of the place, who
talked communism after their manner, not a very clear one, in excited
tones and with the feverish glances of conspirators. But it meant little,
and came to less. The weather and the price of wheat were dearer matters
to them; and in the end they usually drank their red wine in amity, and
went up the village street arm in arm, singing patriotic songs until their
angry wives flung open their lattices and thrust their white head-gear out
into the moonlight, and called to them shrewishly to get to bed and not
make fools of themselves in that fashion; which usually silenced and
sobered them all instantly; so that the revolutions of the Berceau de
Dieu, if not quenched in a wine-pot, were always smothered in a nightcap,
and never by any chance disturbed its repose.

But of these noisy patriots Bernadou was never one. He had the instinctive
conservatism of the French peasant, which is in such direct and tough
antagonism with the feverish socialism of the French artisan. His love was
for the soil—a love deep-rooted as the oaks that grew in it. Of
Paris he had a dim, vague dread, as of a superb beast continually draining
and devouring. Of all forms of government he was alike ignorant. So long
as he tilled his little angle of land in peace, so long as the sun ripened
his fruits and corn, so long as famine was away from his door and his
neighbours dwelt in good-fellowship with him, so long he was happy, and
cared not whether he was thus happy under a monarchy, an empire, or a
republic. This wisdom, which the peddler called apathy and cursed, the
young man had imbibed from nature and the teachings of Reine Allix. “Look
at home and mind thy word,” she had said always to him. “It is labour
enough for a man to keep his own life clean and his own hands honest. Be
not thou at any time as they are who are for ever telling the good God how
He might have made the world on a better plan, while the rats gnaw at
their hay-stacks and the children cry over an empty platter.”

And he had taken heed to her words, so that in all the country-side there
was not any lad truer, gentler, braver, or more patient at labour than was
Bernadou; and though some thought him mild even to foolishness, and meek
even to stupidity, he was no fool; and he had a certain rough skill at
music, and a rare gift at the culture of plants, and made his little home
bright within the winter-time with melody, and in the summer gay without
as a king’s parterre.

At any rate, Reine Allix and he had been happy together for a quarter of a
century under the old gray thatch of the wayside cottage, where it stood
at the foot of the village street, with its great sycamores spread above
it. Nor were they less happy when in mid-April, in the six and twentieth
year of his age, Bernadou had come in with a bunch of primroses in his
hand, and had bent down to her and saluted her with a respectful
tenderness, and said softly and a little shyly, “Gran’mere, would
it suit you if I were ever—to marry?”

Reine Allix was silent a minute and more, cherishing the primroses and
placing them in a little brown cupful of water. Then she looked at him
steadily with her clear, dark eyes. “Who is it, my child?” He was always a
child to her, this last-born of the numerous brood that had once dwelt
with her under the spreading branches of the sycamores, and had now all
perished off the face of the earth, leaving himself and her alone.

Bernadou’s eyes met hers frankly. “It is Margot Dal. Does that please you,
gran’mere, or no?”

“It pleases me well,” she said, simply. But there was a little quiver
about her firm-set mouth, and her aged head was bent over the primroses.
She had foreseen it; she was glad of it; and yet for the instant it was a
pang to her.

“I am very thankful,” said Bernadou, with a flash of joy on his face. He
was independent of his grandmother; he could make enough to marry upon by
his daily toil, and he had a little store of gold and silver in his bank
in the thatch, put by for a rainy day; but he would have no more thought
of going against her will than he would have thought of lifting his hand
against her. In the primitive homesteads of the Berceau de Dieu filial
reverence was still accounted the first of virtues, yet the simplest and
the most imperative.

“I will go see Margot this evening,” said Reine Allix, after a little
pause. “She is a good girl and a brave, and of pure heart and fair name.
You have chosen well, my grandson.”

Bernadou stooped his tall, fair, curly head, and she laid her hands on him
and blessed him.

That evening, as the sun set, Reine Allix kept her word, and went to the
young maiden who had allured the eyes and heart of Bernadou. Margot was an
orphan; she had not a penny to her dower; she had been brought up on
charity, and she dwelt now in the family of the largest landowner of the
place, a miller with numerous offspring, and several head of cattle, and
many stretches of pasture and of orchard. Margot worked for a hard master,
living indeed as one of the family, but sharply driven all day long at all
manner of housework and field work. Reine Allix had kept her glance on
her, through some instinctive sense of the way that Bernadou’s thoughts
were turning, and she had seen much to praise, nothing to chide, in the
young girl’s modest, industrious, cheerful, uncomplaining life. Margot was
very pretty, too, with the brown oval face and the great black soft eyes
and the beautiful form of the Southern blood that had run in the veins of
her father, who had been a sailor of Marseilles, while her mother had been
a native of the Provencal country. Altogether, Reine Allix knew that her
beloved one could not have done better or more wisely, if choose at all he
must. “Some people, indeed,” she said to herself as she climbed the street
whose sharp-set flints had been trodden by her wooden shoes for ninety
years—“Some people would mourn and scold because there is no store
of linen, no piece of silver plate, no little round sum in money with the
poor child. But what does it matter? We have enough for three. It is
wicked indeed for parents to live so that they leave their daughter
portionless, but it is no fault of the child’s. Let them say what they
like, it is a reason the more that she should want a roof over her head
and a husband to care for her good.”

So she climbed the steep way and the slanting road round the hill, and
went in by the door of the mill-house, and found Margot busy in washing
some spring lettuces and other green things in a bowl of bright water.
Reine Allix, in the fashion of her country and her breeding, was about to
confer with the master and mistress ere saying a word to the girl, but
there was that in Margot’s face and in her timid greeting that lured
speech out of her. She looked long and keenly into the child’s downcast
countenance, then touched her with a tender smile. “Petite Margot, the
birds told me a little secret to-day. Canst guess what it is? Say?”

Margot coloured and then grew pale. True, Bernadou had never really spoken
to her, but still, when one is seventeen, and has danced a few times with
the same person, and has plucked the leaves of a daisy away to learn one’s
fortune, spoken words are not very much wanted.

At sight of her the eyes of the old woman moistened and grew dimmer than
age had made them; she smiled still, but the smile had the sweetness of a
blessing in it, and no longer the kindly banter of humour. “You love him,
my little one?” she said, in a soft, hushed voice.

“Ah, madame!” Margot could not say more. She covered her face with her
hands, and turned to the wall, and wept with a passion of joy.

Down in the Berceau there were gossips who would have said, with wise
shakes of their heads, “Tut, tut! how easy it is to make believe in a
little love when one is a serving-maid, and has not a sou, nor a roof, nor
a friend in the world, and a comely youth well-to-do is willing to marry
us!”

But Reine Allix knew better. She had not lived ninety years in the world
not to be able to discern between true feeling and counterfeit. She was
touched, and drew the trembling frame of Margot into her arms, and kissed
her twice on the closed, blue-veined lids of her black eyes. “Make him
happy, only make him happy,” she murmured; “for I am very old, Margot, and
he is alone, all alone.”

And the child crept to her, sobbing for very rapture that she, friendless,
homeless, and penniless, should be thus elected for so fair a fate, and
whispered through her tears, “I will.”

Reine Allix spoke in all form to the miller and his wife, and with as much
earnestness in her demand as though she had been seeking the hand of rich
Yacobe, the tavern-keeper’s only daughter. The people assented; they had
no pretext to oppose; and Reine Allix wrapped her cloak about her and
descended the hill and the street just as the twilight closed in and the
little lights began to glimmer through the lattices and the shutters and
the green mantle of the boughs, while the red fires of the smithy forge
glowed brightly in the gloom, and a white horse waited to be shod, a boy
in a blue blouse seated on its back and switching away with a branch of
budding hazel the first gray gnats of the early year.

“It is well done, it is well done,” she said to herself, looking at the
low rosy clouds and the pale gold of the waning sky. “A year or two, and I
shall be in my grave. I shall leave him easier if I know he has some
creature to care for him, and I shall be quiet in my coffin, knowing that
his children’s children will live on and on and on in the Berceau, and
sometimes perhaps think a little of me when the nights are long and they
sit round the fire.”

She went in out of the dewy air, into the little low, square room of her
cottage, and went up to Bernadou and laid her hands on his shoulders.

“Be it well with thee, my grandson, and with thy sons’ sons after thee,”
she said solemnly. “Margot will be thy wife. May thy days and hers be long
in thy birthplace!”

A month later they were married. It was then May. The green nest of the
Berceau seemed to overflow with the singing of birds and the blossoming of
flowers. The corn-lands promised a rare harvest, and the apple orchards
were weighed down with their red and white blossoms. The little brown
streams in the woods brimmed over in the grass, and the air was full of
sweet mellow sunlight, a cool fragrant breeze, a continual music of
humming bees and soaring larks and mule-bells ringing on the roads, and
childish laughter echoing from the fields.

In this glad springtime Bernadou and Margot were wedded, going with their
friends one sunny morning up the winding hill-path to the little gray
chapel whose walls were hidden in ivy, and whose sorrowful Christ looked
down through the open porch across the blue and hazy width of the river.
Georges, the baker, whose fiddle made merry melody at all the village
dances, played before them tunefully; little children, with their hands
full of wood-flowers, ran before them; his old blind poodle smelt its way
faithfully by their footsteps; their priest led the way upward with the
cross held erect against the light; Reine Allix walked beside them, nearly
as firmly as she had trodden the same road seventy years before in her own
bridal hour. In the hollow below lay the Berceau de Dieu, with its red
gables and its thatched roofs hidden beneath leaves, and its peaceful
pastures smiling under the serene blue skies of France.

They were happy—ah, heaven, so happy!—and all their little
world rejoiced with them.

They came home and their neighbours entered with them, and ate and drank,
and gave them good wishes and gay songs, and the old priest blessed them
with a father’s tenderness upon their threshold; and the fiddle of Georges
sent gladdest dance-music flying through the open casements, across the
road, up the hill, far away to the clouds and the river.

At night, when the guests had departed and all was quite still within and
without, Reine Allix sat alone at her window in the roof, thinking of
their future and of her past, and watching the stars come out, one by
another, above the woods. From her lattice in the eaves she saw straight
up the village street; saw the dwellings of her lifelong neighbours, the
slopes of the rich fields, the gleam of the broad gray water, the
whiteness of the crucifix against the darkened skies. She saw it all—all
so familiar, with that intimate association only possible to the peasant
who has dwelt on one spot from birth to age. In that faint light, in those
deep shadows, she could trace all the scene as though the brightness of
the moon shone on it; it was all, in its homeliness and simplicity,
intensely dear to her. In the playtime of her childhood, in the courtship
of her youth, in the joys and woes of her wifehood and widowhood, the
bitter pains and sweet ecstasies of her maternity, the hunger and
privation of struggling desolate years, the contentment and serenity of
old age—in all these her eyes had rested only on this small, quaint,
leafy street, with its dwellings close and low, like bee-hives in a
garden, and its pasture-lands and corn-lands, wood-girt and water-fed,
stretching as far as the sight could reach. Every inch of its soil, every
turn of its paths, was hallowed to her with innumerable memories; all her
beloved dead were garnered there where the white Christ watched them; when
her time should come, she thought, she would rest with them nothing loath.
As she looked, the tears of thanksgiving rolled down her withered cheeks,
and she bent her feeble limbs and knelt down in the moonlight, praising
God that He had given her to live and die in this cherished home, and
beseeching Him for her children that they likewise might dwell in honesty,
and with length of days abide beneath that roof.

“God is good,” she murmured, as she stretched herself to sleep beneath the
eaves,—“God is good. Maybe, when He takes me to Himself, if I be
worthy, He will tell His holy saints to give me a little corner in His
kingdom, that He shall fashion for me in the likeness of the Berceau.” For
it seemed to her that, than the Berceau, heaven itself could hold no
sweeter or fairer nook of Paradise.

The year rolled on, and the cottage under the sycamores was but the
happier for its new inmate. Bernadou was serious of temper, though so
gentle, and the arch, gay humour of his young wife was like perpetual
sunlight in the house. Margot, too, was so docile, so eager, so bright,
and so imbued with devotional reverence for her husband and his home, that
Reine Allix day by day blessed the fate that had brought to her this
fatherless and penniless child. Bernadou himself spoke little; words were
not in his way; but his blue, frank eyes shone with an unclouded radiance
that never changed, and his voice, when he did speak, had a mellow
softness in it that made his slightest speech to the two women with him
tender as a caress.

“Thou art a happy woman, my sister,” said the priest, who was well-nigh as
old as herself.

Reine Allix bowed her head and made the sign of the cross. “I am, praise
be to God!”

And being happy, she went to the hovel of poor Madelon Dreux, the
cobbler’s widow, and nursed her and her children through a malignant
fever, sitting early and late, and leaving her own peaceful hearth for the
desolate hut with the delirious ravings and heartrending moans of the
fever-stricken. “How ought one to dare to be happy if one is not of use?”
she would say to those who sought to dissuade her from running such peril.

Madelon Dreux and her family recovered, owing to her their lives; and she
was happier than before, thinking of them when she sat on the settle
before the wood fire roasting chestnuts and spinning flax on the wheel,
and ever and again watching the flame reflected on the fair head of
Bernadou or in the dark, smiling eyes of Margot.

Another spring passed and another year went by, and the little home under
the sycamores was still no less honest in its labours or bright in its
rest. It was one among a million of such homes in France, where a sunny
temper made mirth with a meal of herbs, and filial love touched to poetry
the prose of daily household tasks.

A child was born to Margot in the springtime with the violets and daisies,
and Reine Allix was proud of the fourth generation, and, as she caressed
the boy’s healthy, fair limbs, thought that God was indeed good to her,
and that her race would live long in the place of her birth. The child
resembled Bernadou, and had his clear, candid eyes. It soon learned to
know the voice of “gran’mere,” and would turn from its young
mother’s bosom to stretch its arms to Reine Allix. It grew fair and
strong, and all the ensuing winter passed its hours curled like a dormouse
or playing like a puppy at her feet in the chimney-corner. Another spring
and summer came, and the boy was more than a year old, with curls of gold,
and cheeks like apples, and a mouth that always smiled. He could talk a
little, and tumbled like a young rabbit among the flowering grasses. Reine
Allix watched him, and her eyes filled. “God is too good,” she thought.
She feared that she should scarce be so willing to go to her last sleep
under the trees on the hillside as she used to be. She could not help a
desire to see this child, this second Bernadou, grow up to youth and
manhood; and of this she knew it was wild to dream.

It was ripe midsummer. The fields were all russet and amber with an
abundance of corn. The little gardens had seldom yielded so rich a
produce. The cattle and the flocks were in excellent health. There had
never been a season of greater promise and prosperity for the little
traffic that the village and its farms drove in sending milk and sheep and
vegetable wealth to that great city which was to it as a dim, wonderful,
mystic name without meaning.

One evening in this gracious and golden time the people sat out as usual
when the day was done, talking from door to door, the old women knitting
or spinning, the younger ones mending their husbands’ or brothers’ blouses
or the little blue shirts of their infants, the children playing with the
dogs on the sward that edged the stones of the street, and above all the
great calm heavens and the glow of the sun that had set.

Reine Allix, like the others, sat before the door, for once doing nothing,
but with folded hands and bended head dreamily taking pleasure in the
coolness that had come with evening, and the smell of the limes that were
in blossom, and the blithe chatter of Margot with the neighbours. Bernadou
was close beside them, watering and weeding those flowers that were at
once his pride and his recreation, making the face of his dwelling bright
and the air around it full of fragrance.

The little street was quiet in the evening light, only the laughter of the
children and the gay gossip of their mothers breaking the pleasant
stillness; it had been thus at evening with the Berceau centuries before
their time; they thought that it would thus likewise be when the centuries
should have seen the youngest-born there in his grave.

Suddenly came along the road between the trees an old man and a mule; it
was Mathurin, the miller, who had been that day to a little town four
leagues off, which was the trade-mart and the corn-exchange of the
district. He paused before the cottage of Reine Allix; he was dusty,
travel-stained, and sad. Margot ceased laughing among her flowers as she
saw her old master. None of them knew why, yet the sight of him made the
air seem cold and the night seem near.

“There is terrible news,” he said, drawing a sheet of printed words from
his coat-pocket—“terrible news! We are to go to war.”

“War!” The whole village clustered round him. They had heard of war,
far-off wars in Africa and Mexico, and some of their sons had been taken
off like young wheat mown before its time; but it still remained to them a
thing remote, impersonal, inconceivable, with which they had nothing to
do, nor ever would have anything.

“Read!” said the old man, stretching out his sheet. The only one there who
could do so, Picot, the tailor, took it and spelled the news out to their
wondering ears. It was the declaration of France against Prussia.

There arose a great wail from the mothers whose sons were conscripts. The
rest asked in trembling, “Will it touch us?”

“Us!” echoed Picot, the tailor, in contempt. “How should it touch us? Our
braves will be in Berlin with another fortnight. The paper says so.”

The people were silent; they were not sure what he meant by Berlin, and
they were afraid to ask.

“My boy! my boy!” wailed one woman, smiting her breast. Her son was in the
army.

“Marengo!” murmured Reine Allix, thinking of that far-off time in her dim
youth when the horseman had flown through the dusky street and the bonfire
had blazed on the highest hill above the river.

“Bread will be dear,” muttered Mathurin, the miller, going onward with his
foot-weary mule. Bernadou stood silent, with his roses dry and thirsty
round him.

“Why art thou sad?” whispered Margot, with wistful eyes. “Thou art exempt
from war service, my love?”

Bernadou shook his head. “The poor will suffer somehow,” was all he
answered.

Yet to him, as to all the Berceau, the news was not very terrible, because
it was so vague and distant—an evil so far off and shapeless.

Monsieur Picot, the tailor, who alone could read, ran from house to house,
from group to group, breathless, gay, and triumphant, telling them all
that in two weeks more their brethren would sup in the king’s palace at
Berlin; and the people believed and laughed and chattered, and, standing
outside their doors in the cool nights, thought that some good had come to
them and theirs.

Only Reine Allix looked up to the hill above the river and murmured, “When
we lit the bonfire there, Claudis lay dead;” and Bernadou, standing musing
among his roses, said, with a smile that was very grave, “Margot, see
here! When Picot shouted, ‘A Berlin!’ he trod on my Gloire de Dijon
rose and killed it.”

The sultry heats and cloudless nights of the wondrous and awful summer of
the year 1870 passed by, and to the Berceau de Dieu it was a summer of
fair promise and noble harvest, and never had the land brought forth in
richer profusion for man and beast. Some of the youngest and ablest-bodied
labourers were indeed drawn away to join those swift trains that hurried
thousands and tens of thousands to the frontier by the Rhine. But most of
the male population were married, and were the fathers of young children;
and the village was only moved to a thrill of love and of honest pride to
think how its young Louis and Jean and Andre and Valentin were gone full
of high hope and high spirit, to come back, maybe,—who could say
not?—with epaulets and ribbons of honour. Why they were gone they
knew not very clearly, but their superiors affirmed that they were gone to
make greater the greatness of France; and the folk of the Berceau believed
it, having in a corner of their quiet hearts a certain vague, dormant, yet
deep-rooted love, on which was written the name of their country.

News came slowly and seldom to the Berceau. Unless some one of the men
rode his mule to the little town, which was but very rarely, or unless
some peddler came through the village with a news-sheet or so in his pack
or rumours and tidings on his lips, nothing that was done beyond its
fields and woods came to it. And the truth of what it heard it had no
means of measuring or sifting. It believed what it was told, without
questioning; and as it reaped the harvests in the rich hot sun of August,
its peasants laboured cheerily in the simple and firm belief that mighty
things were being done for them and theirs in the far eastern provinces by
their great army, and that Louis and Jean and Andre and Valentin and the
rest—though indeed no tidings had been heard of them—were safe
and well and glorious somewhere, away where the sun rose, in the sacked
palaces of the German king. Reine Allix alone of them was serious and
sorrowful, she whose memories stretched back over the wide space of near a
century.

“Why art thou anxious, gran’mere?” they said to her. “There is no
cause. Our army is victorious everywhere; and they say our lads will send
us all the Prussians’ corn and cattle, so that the very beggars will have
their stomachs full.”

But Reine Allix shook her head, sitting knitting in the sun. “My children,
I remember the days of my youth. Our army was victorious then; at least,
they said so. Well, all I know is that little Claudis and the boys with
him never came back; and as for bread, you could not get it for love or
money, and the people lay dead of famine out on the public roads.”

“But that is so long ago, gran’mere!” they urged.

Reine Allix nodded. “Yes, it is long ago, my dears. But I do not think
that things change very much.”

They were silent out of respect for her, but among themselves they said,
“She is very old. Nothing is as it was in her time.”

One evening, when the sun was setting red over the reapen fields, two
riders on trembling and sinking horses went through the village using whip
and spur, and scarcely drew rein as they shouted to the cottagers to know
whether they had seen go by a man running for his life. The people replied
that they had seen nothing of the kind, and the horsemen pressed on,
jamming their spurs into their poor beasts’ steaming flanks. “If you see
him, catch and hang him,” they shouted, as they scoured away; “he is a
Prussian spy!”

“A Prussian!” the villagers echoed, with a stupid stare—“a Prussian
in France!”

One of the riders looked over his shoulder for a moment. “You fools! do
you not know? We are beaten,—beaten everywhere,—and the
Prussian pigs march on Paris.”

The spy was not seen in the Berceau, but the news brought by his pursuers
scared sleep from the eyes of every grown man that night in the little
village. “It is the accursed Empire!” screamed the patriots of the
wine-shop. But the rest of the people were too terrified and down-stricken
to take heed of empires or patriots; they only thought of Louis and Jean
and Andre and Valentin; and they collected round Reine Allix, who said to
them, “My children, for love of money all our fairest fruits and flowers—yea,
even to the best blossoms of our maidenhood—were sent to be bought
and sold in Paris. We sinned therein, and this is the will of God.”

This was all for a time that they heard. It was a place lowly and obscure
enough to be left in peace. The law pounced down on it once or twice and
carried off a few more of its men for army service, and arms were sent to
it from its neighbouring town, and an old soldier of the First Empire
tried to instruct its remaining sons in their use. But he had no apt pupil
except Bernadou, who soon learned to handle a musket with skill and with
precision, and who carried his straight form gallantly and well, though
his words were seldom heard and his eyes were always sad.

“You will not be called till the last, Bernadou,” said the old soldier;
“you are married, and maintain your grandam and wife and child. But a
strong, muscular, well-built youth like you should not wait to be called;
you should volunteer to serve France.”

“I will serve France when my time comes,” said Bernadou, simply, in
answer. But he would not leave his fields barren, and his orchard uncared
for, and his wife to sicken and starve, and his grandmother to perish
alone in her ninety-third year. They jeered and flouted and upbraided him,
those patriots who screamed against the fallen Empire in the wine-shop;
but he looked them straight in the eyes, and held his peace, and did his
daily work.

“If he is called, he will not be found wanting,” said Reine Allix, who
knew him better than did even the young wife whom he loved.

Bernadou clung to his home with a dogged devotion. He would not go from it
to fight unless compelled, but for it he would have fought like a lion.
His love for his country was only an indefinite, shadowy existence that
was not clear to him; he could not save a land that he had never seen, a
capital that was only to him as an empty name; nor could he comprehend the
danger that his nation ran, nor could he desire to go forth and spend his
life-blood in defence of things unknown to him. He was only a peasant, and
he could not read nor greatly understand. But affection for his birthplace
was a passion with him, mute indeed, but deep-seated as an oak. For his
birthplace he would have struggled as a man can only struggle when supreme
love as well as duty nerves his arm. Neither he nor Reine Allix could see
that a man’s duty might lie from home, but in that home both were alike
ready to dare anything and to suffer everything. It was a narrow form of
patriotism, yet it had nobleness, endurance, and patience in it; in song
it has been oftentimes deified as heroism, but in modern warfare it is
punished as the blackest crime.

So Bernadou tarried in his cottage till he should be called, keeping watch
by night over the safety of his village, and by day doing all he could to
aid the deserted wives and mothers of the place by the tilling of their
ground for them and the tending of such poor cattle as were left in their
desolate fields. He and Margot and Reine Allix, between them, fed many
mouths that would otherwise have been closed in death by famine, and
denied themselves all except the barest and most meagre subsistence, that
they might give away the little they possessed.

And all this while the war went on, but seemed far from them, so seldom
did any tidings of it pierce the seclusion in which they dwelt. By-and-by,
as the autumn went on, they learned a little more. Fugitives coming to the
smithy for a horse’s shoe; women fleeing to their old village homes from
their base, gay life in the city; mandates from the government of defence
sent to every hamlet in the country; stray news-sheets brought in by
carriers or hawkers and hucksters—all these by degrees told them of
the peril of their country, vaguely indeed, and seldom truthfully, but so
that by mutilated rumours they came at last to know the awful facts of the
fate of Sedan, the fall of the Empire, the siege of Paris. It did not
alter their daily lives; it was still too far off and too impalpable. But
a foreboding, a dread, an unspeakable woe settled down on them. Already
their lands and cattle had been harassed to yield provision for the army
and large towns; already their best horses had been taken for the
siege-trains and the forage-waggons; already their ploughshares were
perforce idle, and their children cried because of the scarcity of
nourishment; already the iron of war had entered their souls.

The little street at evening was mournful and very silent; the few who
talked spoke in whispers, lest a spy should hear them, and the young ones
had no strength to play—they wanted food.

“It is as it was in my youth,” said Reine Allix, eating her piece of black
bread and putting aside the better food prepared for her, that she might
save it, unseen, for the “child.”

It was horrible to her and to all of them to live in that continual terror
of an unknown foe, that perpetual expectation of some ghastly, shapeless
misery. They were quiet,—so quiet!—but by all they heard they
knew that any night, as they went to their beds, the thunder of cannon
might awaken them; any morning, as they looked on their beloved fields,
they knew that ere sunset the flames of war might have devoured them. They
knew so little too; all they were told was so indefinite and garbled that
sometimes they thought the whole was some horrid dream—thought so,
at least, until they looked at their empty stables, their untilled land,
their children who cried from hunger, their mothers who wept for the
conscripts.

But as yet it was not so very much worse than it had been in times of bad
harvest and of dire distress; and the storm which raged over the land had
as yet spared this little green nest among the woods on the Seine.

November came. “It is a cold night, Bernadou; put on some more wood,” said
Reine Allix. Fuel at the least was plentiful in that district, and
Bernadou obeyed.

He sat at the table, working at a new churn for his wife; he had some
skill at turnery and at invention in such matters. The child slept soundly
in its cradle by the hearth, smiling while it dreamed. Margot spun at her
wheel. Reine Allix sat by the fire, seldom lifting her head from her long
knitting-needles, except to cast a look on her grandson or at the sleeping
child. The little wooden shutter of the house was closed. Some winter
roses bloomed in a pot beneath the little crucifix. Bernadou’s flute lay
on a shelf; he had not had heart enough to play it since the news of the
war had come.

Suddenly a great sobbing cry rose without—the cry of many voices,
all raised in woe together. Bernadou rose, took his musket in his hand,
undid his door, and looked out. All the people were turned out into the
street, and the women, loudly lamenting, beat their breasts and strained
their children to their bosoms. There was a sullen red light in the sky to
the eastward, and on the wind a low, hollow roar stole to them.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The Prussians are on us!” answered twenty voices in one accord. “That red
glare is the town burning.”

Then they were all still—a stillness that was more horrible than
their lamentations.

Reine Allix came and stood by her grandson. “If we must die, let us die here,”
she said, in a voice that was low and soft and grave.

He took her hand and kissed it. She was content with his answer.

Margot stole forth too, and crouched behind them, holding her child to her
breast. “What can they do to us?” she asked, trembling, with the rich
colours of her face blanched white.

Bernadou smiled on her. “I do not know, my dear. I think even they can
hardly bring death upon women and children.”

“They can, and they will,” said a voice from the crowd.

None answered. The street was very quiet in the darkness. Far away in the
east the red glare glowed. On the wind was still that faint, distant,
ravening roar, like the roar of famished wolves; it was the roar of fire
and of war.

In the silence Reine Allix spoke: “God is good. Shall we not trust in
Him?”

With one great choking sob the people answered; their hearts were
breaking. All night long they watched in the street—they who had
done no more to bring this curse upon them than the flower-roots that
slept beneath the snow. They dared not go to their beds; they knew not
when the enemy might be upon them. They dared not flee; even in their own
woods the foe might lurk for them. One man indeed did cry aloud, “Shall we
stay here in our houses to be smoked out like bees from their hives? Let
us fly!”

But the calm, firm voice of Reine Allix rebuked him: “Let who will, run
like a hare from the hounds. For me and mine, we abide by our homestead.”

And they were ashamed to be outdone by a woman, and a woman of ninety
years old, and no man spoke any more of flight. All the night long they
watched in the cold and the wind, the children shivering beneath their
mothers’ skirts, the men sullenly watching the light of the flames in the
dark, starless sky. All night long they were left alone, though far off
they heard the dropping shots of scattered firing, and in the leafless
woods around them the swift flight of woodland beasts startled from their
sleep, and the hurrying feet of sheep terrified from their folds in the
outlying fields.

The daybreak came, gray, cheerless, very cold. A dense fog, white and raw,
hung over the river; in the east, where the sun, they knew, was rising,
they could only see the livid light of the still towering flames and
pillars of black smoke against the leaden clouds.

“We will let them come and go in peace if they will,” murmured old
Mathurin. “What can we do? We have no arms, no powder hardly, no soldiers,
no defence.”

Bernadou said nothing, but he straightened his tall limbs, and in his
grave blue eyes a light gleamed.

Reine Allix looked at him as she sat in the doorway of her house. “Thy
hands are honest, thy heart pure, thy conscience clear. Be not afraid to
die if need there be,” she said to him.

He looked down and smiled on her. Margot clung to him in a passion of
weeping. He clasped her close and kissed her softly, but the woman who
read his heart was the woman who had held him at his birth.

By degrees the women crept timidly back into their houses, hiding their
eyes so that they should not see that horrid light against the sky, while
the starving children clung to their breasts or to their skirts, wailing
aloud in terror. The few men there were left, for the most part of them
very old or else mere striplings, gathered together in a hurried council.
Old Mathurin, the miller, and the patriots of the wine-shop were agreed
that there should be no resistance, whatever might befall them; that it
would be best to hide such weapons as they had and any provisions that
still remained to them, and yield up themselves and their homes with
humble grace to the dire foe. “If we do otherwise,” they said, “the
soldiers will surely slay us, and what can a miserable little hamlet like
this achieve against cannon and steel and fire?”

Bernadou alone raised his voice in opposition. His eye kindled, his cheek
flushed, his words for once sprang from his lips like fire. “What!” he
said to them, “shall we yield up our homes and our wives and our infants
without a single blow? Shall we be so vile as to truckle to the enemies of
France and show that we can fear them? It were a shame, a foul shame; we
were not worthy of the name of men. Let us prove to them that there are
people in France who are not afraid to die. Let us hold our own so long as
we can. Our muskets are good, our walls strong, our woods in this weather
morasses that will suck in and swallow them if only we have tact to drive
them there. Let us do what we can. The camp of the francs-tireurs is but
three leagues form us. They will be certain to come to our aid. At any
rate, let us die bravely. We can do little, that may be; but if every man
in France does that little that he can, that little will be great enough
to drive the invaders off the soil.”

Mathurin and the others screamed at him and hooted. “You are a fool!” they
shouted. “You will be the undoing of us all. Do you not know that one shot
fired, nay, only one musket found, and the enemy puts a torch to the whole
place?”

“I know,” said Bernadou, with a dark radiance in his azure eyes. “But then
it is a choice between disgrace and the flames; let us only take heed to
be clear of the first—the last must rage as God wills.”

But they screamed and mouthed and hissed at him: “Oh yes! fine talk, fine
talk! See your own roof in flames if you will; you shall not ruin ours. Do
what you will with your own neck; keep it erect or hang by it, as you
choose. But you have no right to give your neighbours over to death,
whether they will or no.”

He strove, he pleaded, he conjured, he struggled with them half the night,
with the salt tears running down his cheeks, and all his gentle blood
burning with righteous wrath and loathing shame, stirred for the first
time in all his life to a rude, simple, passionate eloquence. But they
were not persuaded. Their few gold pieces hidden in the rafters, their few
feeble sheep starving in the folds, their own miserable lives, all hungry,
woe-begone, and spent in daily terrors—these were still dear to
them, and they would not imperil them. They called him a madman; they
denounced him as one who would be their murderer; they threw themselves on
him and demanded his musket, to bury it with the rest under the altar in
the old chapel on the hill.

Bernadou’s eyes flashed fire; his breast heaved; his nerves quivered; he
shook them off and strode a step forward. “As you live,” he muttered, “I
have a mind to fire on you, rather than let you live to shame yourselves
and me!”

Reine Allix, who stood by him silent all the while, laid her hand on his
shoulder. “My boy,” she said in his ear, “you are right, and they are
wrong. Yet let not dissension between brethren open the door for the enemy
to enter thereby into your homes. Do what you will with your own life,
Bernadou,—it is yours,—but leave them to do as they will with
theirs. You cannot make sheep into lions, and let not the first blood shed
here be a brother’s.”

Bernadou’s head dropped on his breast. “Do as you will,” he muttered to
his neighbours. They took his musket from him, and in the darkness of the
night stole silently up the wooded chapel hill and buried it, with all
their other arms, under the altar where the white Christ hung. “We are
safe now,” said Mathurin, the miller, to the patriots of the tavern. “Had
that madman had his way, he had destroyed us all.”

Reine Allix softly led her grandson across his own threshold, and drew his
head down to hers, and kissed him between the eyes. “You did what you
could, Bernadou,” she said to him; “let the rest come as it will.”

Then she turned from him, and flung her cloak over her head, and sank
down, weeping bitterly; for she had lived through ninety-three years only
to see this agony at the last.

Bernadou, now that all means of defence was gone from him, and the only
thing left to him to deal with was his own life, had become quiet and
silent and passionless, as was his habit. He would have fought like a
mastiff for his home, but this they had forbidden him to do, and he was
passive and without hope. He shut to his door, and sat down with his hand
in that of Reine Allix and his arm around his wife. “There is nothing to
do but to wait,” he said, sadly. The day seemed very long in coming.

The firing ceased for a while; then its roll commenced afresh, and grew
nearer to the village. Then again all was still.

At noon a shepherd staggered into the place, pale, bleeding, bruised,
covered with mire. The Prussians, he told them, had forced him to be their
guide, had knotted him tight to a trooper’s saddle, and had dragged him
with them until he was half dead with fatigue and pain. At night he had
broken from them and had fled. They were close at hand, he said, and had
burned the town from end to end because a man had fired at them from a
housetop. That was all he knew. Bernadou, who had gone out to hear his
news, returned into the house and sat down and hid his face within his
hands. “If I resist you are all lost,” he muttered. “And yet to yield like
a cur!” It was a piteous question, whether to follow the instinct in him
and see his birthplace in flames and his family slaughtered for his act,
or to crush out the manhood in him and live, loathing himself as a coward
for evermore.

Reine Allix looked at him, and laid her hand on his bowed head, and her
voice was strong and tender as music: “Fret not thyself, my beloved. When
the moment comes, then do as thine own heart and the whisper of God in it
bid thee.”

A great sob answered her; it was the first since his earliest infancy that
she had ever heard from Bernadou.

It grew dark. The autumn day died. The sullen clouds dropped scattered
rain. The red leaves were blown in millions by the wind. The little houses
on either side the road were dark, for the dwellers in them dared not show
any light that might be a star to allure to them the footsteps of their
foes. Bernadou sat with his arms on the table, and his head resting on
them. Margot nursed her son. Reine Allix prayed.

Suddenly in the street without there was the sound of many feet of horses
and of men, the shouting of angry voices, the splashing of quick steps in
the watery ways, the screams of women, the flash of steel through the
gloom. Bernadou sprang to his feet, his face pale, his blue eyes dark as
night. “They are come!” he said, under his breath. It was not fear that he
felt, nor horror; it was rather a passion of love for his birthplace and
his nation—a passion of longing to struggle and to die for both. And
he had no weapon!

He drew his house-door open with a steady hand, and stood on his own
threshold and faced these his enemies. The street was full of them, some
mounted, some on foot; crowds of them swarmed in the woods and on the
roads. They had settled on the village as vultures on a dead lamb’s body.
It was a little, lowly place; it might well have been left in peace. It
had had no more share in the war than a child still unborn, but it came in
the victors’ way, and their mailed heel crushed it as they passed. They
had heard that arms were hidden and francs-tireurs sheltered there, and
they had swooped down on it and held it hard and fast. Some were told off
to search the chapel; some to ransack the dwellings; some to seize such
food and bring such cattle as there might be left; some to seek out the
devious paths that crossed and recrossed the fields; and yet there
remained in the little street hundreds of armed men, force enough to awe a
citadel or storm a breach.

The people did not attempt to resist. They stood passive, dry-eyed in
misery, looking on while the little treasures of their household lives
were swept away for ever, and ignorant what fate by fire or iron might be
their portion ere the night was done. They saw the corn that was their
winter store to save their offspring from famine poured out like
ditch-water. They saw oats and wheat flung down to be trodden into a
slough of mud and filth. They saw the walnut presses in their kitchens
broken open, and their old heirlooms of silver, centuries old, borne away
as booty. They saw the oak cupboards in their wives’ bed-chambers
ransacked, and the homespun linen and the quaint bits of plate that had
formed their nuptial dowers cast aside in derision or trampled into a
battered heap. They saw the pet lamb of their infants, the silver
ear-rings of their brides, the brave tankards they had drunk their
marriage wine in, the tame bird that flew to their whistle, all seized for
food or seized for spoil. They saw all this, and had to stand by with mute
tongues and passive hands, lest any glance of wrath or gesture of revenge
should bring the leaden bullet in their children’s throats or the yellow
flame amid their homesteads. Greater agony the world cannot hold.

Under the porch of the cottage, by the sycamores, one group stood and
looked, silent and very still: Bernadou, erect, pale, calm, with a fierce
scorn burning in his eyes; Margot, quiet because he wished her so, holding
to her the rosy and golden beauty of her son; Reine Allix, with a patient
horror on her face, her figure drawn to its full height, and her hands
holding to her breast the crucifix. They stood thus, waiting they knew not
what, only resolute to show no cowardice and meet no shame.

Behind them was the dull, waning glow of the wood fire on the hearth which
had been the centre of all their hopes and joys; before them the dim, dark
country, and the woe-stricken faces of their neighbours, and the moving
soldiery with their torches, and the quivering forms of the half-dying
horses.

Suddenly a voice arose from the armed mass: “Bring me the peasant hither.”

Bernadou was seized by several hands and forced and dragged from his door
out to the place where the leader of the uhlans sat on a white charger
that shook and snorted blood in its exhaustion. Bernadou cast off the
alien grasp that held him, and stood erect before his foes. He was no
longer pale, and his eyes were clear and steadfast.

“You look less a fool than the rest,” said the Prussian commander. “You
know this country well?”

“Well!” The country in whose fields and woodlands he had wandered from his
infancy, and whose every meadow-path and wayside tree and flower-sown
brook he knew by heart as a lover knows the lines of his mistress’s face!

“You have arms here?” pursued the German.

“We had.”

“What have you done with them?”

“If I had had my way, you would not need ask. You would have felt them.”

The Prussian looked at him keenly, doing homage to the boldness of the
answer. “Will you confess where they are?”

“No.”

“You know the penalty for concealment of arms is death?”

“You have made it so.”

“We have, and Prussian will is French law. You are a bold man; you merit
death. But still, you know the country well?”

Bernadou smiled, as a mother might smile were any foolish enough to ask
her if she remembered the look her dead child’s face had worn.

“If you know it well,” pursued the Prussian, “I will give you a chance.
Lay hold of my stirrup-leather and be lashed to it, and show me straight
as the crow flies to where the weapons are hidden. If you do, I will leave
you your life. If you do not—”

“If I do not?”

“You will be shot.”

Bernadou was silent; his eyes glanced through the mass of soldiers to the
little cottage under the trees opposite. The two there were straining to
behold him, but the soldiers pushed them back, so that in the flare of the
torches they could not see, nor in the tumult hear. He thanked God for it.

“Your choice?” asked the uhlan, impatiently, after a moment’s pause.

Bernadou’s lips were white, but they did not tremble as he answered, “I am
no traitor.” And his eyes, as he spoke, went softly to the little porch
where the light glowed from that hearth beside which he would never again
sit with the creatures he loved around him.

The German looked at him. “Is that a boast, or a fact?”

“I am no traitor,” Bernadou answered, simply, once more.

The Prussian gave a sign to his troopers. There was the sharp report of a
double shot, and Bernadou fell dead. One bullet had pierced his brain, the
other was bedded in his lungs. The soldiers kicked aside the warm and
quivering body. It was only a peasant killed!

With a shriek that rose above the roar of the wind, and cut like steel to
every human heart that beat there, Reine Allix forced her way through the
throng, and fell on her knees beside him, and caught him in her arms, and
laid his head upon her breast, where he had used to sleep his softest
sleep in infancy and childhood. “It is God’s will! it is God’s will!” she
muttered; and then she laughed—a laugh so terrible that the blood of
the boldest there ran cold.

Margot followed her and looked, and stood dry-eyed and silent; then flung
herself and the child she carried in her arms beneath the hoof of the
white charger. “End your work!” she shrieked to them. “You have killed him—kill
us. Have you not mercy enough for that?”

The horse, terrified and snorting blood, plunged and trampled the ground;
his fore foot struck the child’s golden head and stamped its face out of
all human likeness. Some peasants pulled Margot from the lashing hoofs;
she was quite dead, though neither wound nor bruise was on her.

Reine Allix neither looked nor paused. With all her strength she had begun
to drag the body of Bernadou across the threshold of his house. “He shall
lie at home, he shall lie at home,” she muttered. She would not believe
that already he was dead. With all the force of her earliest womanhood she
lifted him, and half drew, half bore him into the house that he had loved,
and laid him down upon the hearth, and knelt by him, caressing him as
though he were once more a child, and saying softly, “Hush!”—for her
mind was gone, and she fancied that he only slept.

Without, the tumult of the soldiery increased. They found the arms hidden
under the altar on the hill; they seized five peasants to slay them for
the dire offence. The men struggled, and would not go as the sheep to the
shambles. They were shot down in the street, before the eyes of their
children. Then the order was given to fire the place in punishment, and
leave it to its fate. The torches were flung with a laugh on the dry
thatched roofs; brands snatched from the house fires on the hearths were
tossed among the dwelling-houses and the barns. The straw and timber
flared alight like tow.

An old man, her nearest neighbour, rushed to the cottage of Reine Allix
and seized her by the arm. “They fire the Berceau,” he screamed. “Quick!
quick! or you will be burned alive!”

Reine Allix looked up with a smile. “Be quiet! Do you not see! He sleeps.”

The old man shook her, implored her, strove to drag her away; in
desperation pointed to the roof above, which was already in flames.

Reine Allix looked. At that sight her mind cleared, and regained
consciousness; she remembered all, she understood all; she knew that he
was dead. “Go in peace and save yourself,” she said, in the old, sweet,
strong tone of an earlier day. “As for me, I am very old. I and my dead
will stay together at home.”

The man fled, and left her to her choice.

The great curled flames and the livid vapours closed around her; she never
moved. The death was fierce, but swift, and even in death she and the one
whom she had loved and reared were not divided. The end soon came. From
hill to hill the Berceau de Dieu broke into flames. The village was a lake
of fire, into which the statue of the Christ, burning and reeling, fell.
Some few peasants, with their wives and children, fled to the woods, and
there escaped one torture to perish more slowly of cold and famine. All
other things perished. The rapid stream of the flame licked up all there
was in its path. The bare trees raised their leafless branches, on fire at
a thousand points. The stores of corn and fruit were lapped by millions of
crimson tongues. The pigeons flew screaming from their roosts, and sank
into the smoke. The dogs were suffocated on the thresholds they had
guarded all their lives. The sheep ran bleating with the wool burning on
their living bodies. The little caged birds fluttered helpless, and then
dropped, scorched to cinders. The aged and the sick were stifled in their
beds. All things perished.

The Berceau de Dieu was as one vast furnace, in which every living
creature was caught and consumed and changed to ashes. The tide of war has
rolled on, and left it a blackened waste, a smoking ruin, wherein not so
much as a mouse may creep or a bird may nestle. It is gone, and its place
can know it nevermore.

Nevermore. But who is there to care? It was but as a leaf which the great
storm swept away as it passed.

THE TRAVELLER’S STORY OF A TERRIBLY STRANGE BED, By Wilkie Collins

PROLOGUE TO THE FIRST STORY

Before I begin, by the aid of my wife’s patient attention and ready pen,
to relate any of the stories which I have heard at various times from
persons whose likenesses I have been employed to take, it will not be
amiss if I try to secure the reader’s interest in the following pages by
briefly explaining how I became possessed of the narrative matter which
they contain.

Of myself I have nothing to say, but that I have followed the profession
of a travelling portrait-painter for the last fifteen years. The pursuit
of my calling has not only led me all through England, but has taken me
twice to Scotland and once to Ireland. In moving from district to
district, I am never guided beforehand by any settled plan. Sometimes the
letters of recommendation which I get from persons who are satisfied with
the work I have done for them determine the direction in which I travel.
Sometimes I hear of a new neighbourhood in which there is no resident
artist of ability, and remove thither on speculation. Sometimes my friends
among the picture-dealers say a good word on my behalf to their rich
customers, and so pave the way for me in the large towns. Sometimes my
prosperous and famous brother artists, hearing of small commissions which
it is not worth their while to accept, mention my name, and procure me
introductions to pleasant country houses. Thus I get on, now in one way
and now in another, not winning a reputation or making a fortune, but
happier, perhaps, on the whole, than many men who have got both the one
and the other. So, at least, I try to think now, though I started in my
youth with as high an ambition as the best of them. Thank God, it is not
my business here to speak of past times and their disappointments. A
twinge of the old hopeless heartache comes over me sometimes still, when I
think of my student days.

One peculiarity of my present way of life is, that it brings me into
contact with all sorts of characters. I almost feel, by this time, as if I
had painted every civilised variety of the human race. Upon the whole, my
experience of the world, rough as it has been, has not taught me to think
unkindly of my fellow-creatures. I have certainly received such treatment
at the hands of some of my sitters as I could not describe without
saddening and shocking any kind-hearted reader; but, taking one year and
one place with another, I have cause to remember with gratitude and
respect, sometimes even with friendship and affection, a very large
proportion of the numerous persons who have employed me.

Some of the results of my experience are curious in a moral point of view.
For example, I have found women almost uniformly less delicate in asking
me about my terms, and less generous in remunerating me for my services,
than men. On the other hand, men, within my knowledge, are decidedly
vainer of their personal attractions, and more vexatiously anxious to have
them done full justice to on canvas, than women. Taking both sexes
together, I have found young people, for the most part, more gentle, more
reasonable, and more considerate than old. And, summing up, in a general
way, my experience of different ranks (which extends, let me premise, all
the way down from peers to publicans), I have met with most of my formal
and ungracious receptions among rich people of uncertain social standing;
the highest classes and the lowest among my employers almost always
contrive—in widely different ways, of course—to make me feel
at home as soon as I enter their houses.

The one great obstacle that I have to contend against in the practice of
my profession is not, as some persons may imagine, the difficulty of
making my sitters keep their heads still while I paint them, but the
difficulty of getting them to preserve the natural look and the every-day
peculiarities of dress and manner. People will assume an expression, will
brush up their hair, will correct any little characteristic carelessness
in their apparel—will, in short, when they want to have their
likenesses taken, look as if they were sitting for their pictures. If I
paint them under these artificial circumstances, I fail, of course, to
present them in their habitual aspect; and my portrait, as a necessary
consequence, disappoints everybody, the sitter always included. When we
wish to judge of a man’s character by his handwriting, we want his
customary scrawl dashed off with his common workaday pen, not his best
small text traced laboriously with the finest procurable crow-quill point.
So it is with portrait-painting, which is, after all, nothing but a right
reading of the externals of character recognisably presented to the view
of others.

Experience, after repeated trials, has proved to me that the only way of
getting sitters who persist in assuming a set look to resume their
habitual expression is to lead them into talking about some subject in
which they are greatly interested. If I can only beguile them into
speaking earnestly, no matter on what topic, I am sure of recovering their
natural expression; sure of seeing all the little precious every-day
peculiarities of the man or woman peep out, one after another, quite
unawares. The long maundering stories about nothing, the wearisome
recitals of petty grievances, the local anecdotes unrelieved by the
faintest suspicion of anything like general interest, which I have been
condemned to hear, as a consequence of thawing the ice off the features of
formal sitters by the method just described, would fill hundreds of
volumes and promote the repose of thousands of readers. On the other hand,
if I have suffered under the tediousness of the many, I have not been
without my compensating gains from the wisdom and experience of the few.
To some of my sitters I have been indebted for information which has
enlarged my mind, to some for advice which has lightened my heart, to some
for narratives of strange adventure which riveted my attention at the
time, which have served to interest and amuse my fireside circle for many
years past, and which are now, I would fain hope, destined to make kind
friends for me among a wider audience than any that I have yet addressed.

Singularly enough, almost all the best stories that I have heard from my
sitters have been told by accident. I only remember two cases in which a
story was volunteered to me; and, although I have often tried the
experiment, I cannot call to mind even a single instance in which leading
questions (as lawyers call them) on my part, addressed to a sitter, ever
produced any result worth recording. Over and over again I have been
disastrously successful in encouraging dull people to weary me. But the
clever people who have something interesting to say seem, so far as I have
observed them, to acknowledge no other stimulant than chance. For every
story, excepting one, I have been indebted, in the first instance, to the
capricious influence of the same chance. Something my sitter has seen
about me, something I have remarked in my sitter, or in the room in which
I take the likeness, or in the neighbourhood through which I pass on my
way to work, has suggested the necessary association, or has started the
right train of recollections, and then the story appeared to begin of its
own accord. Occasionally the most casual notice, on my part, of some very
unpromising object has smoothed the way for the relation of a long and
interesting narrative. I first heard one of the most dramatic stories
merely through being carelessly inquisitive to know the history of a
stuffed poodle-dog.

It is thus not without reason that I lay some stress on the desirableness
of prefacing the following narrative by a brief account of the curious
manner in which I became possessed of it. As to my capacity for repeating
the story correctly, I can answer for it that my memory may be trusted. I
may claim it as a merit, because it is, after all, a mechanical one, that
I forget nothing, and that I can call long-past conversations and events
as readily to my recollection as if they had happened but a few weeks ago.
Of two things at least I feel tolerably certain before-hand, in meditating
over its contents: first, that I can repeat correctly all that I have
heard; and, secondly, that I have never missed anything worth hearing when
my sitters were addressing me on an interesting subject. Although I cannot
take the lead in talking while I am engaged in painting, I can listen
while others speak, and work all the better for it.

So much in the way of general preface to the pages for which I am about to
ask the reader’s attention. Let me now advance to particulars, and
describe how I came to hear the story. I begin with it because it is the
story that I have oftenest “rehearsed,” to borrow a phrase from the stage.
Wherever I go, I am sooner or later sure to tell it. Only last night I was
persuaded into repeating it once more by the inhabitants of the farm-house
in which I am now staying.

Not many years ago, on returning from a short holiday visit to a friend
settled in Paris, I found professional letters awaiting me at my agent’s
in London, which required my immediate presence in Liverpool. Without
stopping to unpack, I proceeded by the first conveyance to my new
destination; and, calling at the picture-dealer’s shop where
portrait-painting engagements were received for me, found to my great
satisfaction that I had remunerative employment in prospect, in and about
Liverpool, for at least two months to come. I was putting up my letters in
high spirits, and was just leaving the picture-dealer’s shop to look out
for comfortable lodgings, when I was met at the door by the landlord of
one of the largest hotels in Liverpool—an old acquaintance whom I
had known as manager of a tavern in London in my student days.

“Mr. Kerby!” he exclaimed, in great astonishment. “What an unexpected
meeting! the last man in the world whom I expected to see, and yet the
very man whose services I want to make use of!”

“What! more work for me?” said I. “Are all the people in Liverpool going
to have their portraits painted?”

“I only know of one,” replied the landlord, “a gentleman staying at my
hotel, who wants a chalk drawing done of him. I was on my way here to
inquire for any artist whom our picture-dealing friend could recommend.
How glad I am that I met you before I had committed myself to employing a
stranger!”

“Is this likeness wanted at once?” I asked, thinking of the number of
engagements that I had already got in my pocket.

“Immediately—to-day—this very hour, if possible,” said the
landlord. “Mr. Faulkner, the gentleman I am speaking of, was to have
sailed yesterday for the Brazils from this place; but the wind shifted
last night to the wrong quarter, and he came ashore again this morning. He
may, of course, be detained here for some time; but he may also be called
on board ship at half an hour’s notice, if the wind shifts back again in
the right direction. This uncertainty makes it a matter of importance that
the likeness should be begun immediately. Undertake it if you possibly
can, for Mr. Faulkner is a liberal gentleman, who is sure to give you your
own terms.”

I reflected for a minute or two. The portrait was only wanted in chalk,
and would not take long; besides, I might finish it in the evening, if my
other engagements pressed hard upon me in the daytime. Why not leave my
luggage at the picture-dealer’s, put off looking for lodgings till night,
and secure the new commission boldly by going back at once with the
landlord to the hotel? I decided on following this course almost as soon
as the idea occurred to me; put my chalks in my pocket, and a sheet of
drawing-paper in the first of my portfolios that came to hand; and so
presented myself before Mr. Faulkner, ready to take his likeness,
literally at five minutes’ notice.

I found him a very pleasant, intelligent man, young and handsome. He had
been a great traveller, had visited all the wonders of the East, and was
now about to explore the wilds of the vast South American continent. Thus
much he told me good-humouredly and unconstrainedly while I was preparing
my drawing materials.

As soon as I had put him in the right light and position, and had seated
myself opposite to him, he changed the subject of conversation, and asked
me, a little confusedly as I thought, if it was not a customary practice
among portrait-painters to gloss over the faults in their sitters’ faces,
and to make as much as possible of any good points which their features
might possess.

“Certainly,” I answered. “You have described the whole art and mystery of
successful portrait-painting in a few words.”

“May I beg, then,” said he, “that you will depart from the usual practice
in my case, and draw me with all my defects, exactly as I am? The fact
is,” he went on, after a moment’s pause, “the likeness you are now
preparing to take is intended for my mother; my roving disposition makes
me a great anxiety to her, and she parted from me this last time very
sadly and unwillingly. I don’t know how the idea came into my head, but it
struck me this morning that I could not better employ the time while I was
delayed here on shore than by getting my likeness done to send to her as a
keepsake. She has no portrait of me since I was a child, and she is sure
to value a drawing of me more than anything else I could send to her. I
only trouble you with this explanation to prove that I am really sincere
in my wish to be drawn unflatteringly, exactly as I am.”

Secretly respecting and admiring him for what he had just said, I promised
that his directions should be implicitly followed, and began to work
immediately. Before I had pursued my occupation for ten minutes, the
conversation began to flag, and the usual obstacle to my success with a
sitter gradually set itself up between us. Quite unconsciously, of course,
Mr. Faulkner stiffened his neck, shut his mouth, and contracted his
eyebrows—evidently under the impression that he was facilitating the
process of taking his portrait by making his face as like a lifeless mask
as possible. All traces of his natural animated expression were fast
disappearing, and he was beginning to change into a heavy and rather
melancholy-looking man.

This complete alteration was of no great consequence so long as I was only
engaged in drawing the outline of his face and the general form of his
features. I accordingly worked on doggedly for more than an hour; then
left off to point my chalks again, and to give my sitter a few minutes’
rest. Thus far the likeness had not suffered through Mr. Faulkner’s
unfortunate notion of the right way of sitting for his portrait; but the
time of difficulty, as I well knew, was to come. It was impossible for me
to think of putting any expression into the drawing unless I could
contrive some means, when he resumed his chair, of making him look like
himself again. “I will talk to him about foreign parts,” thought I, “and
try if I can’t make him forget that he is sitting for his picture in that
way.”

While I was pointing my chalks, Mr. Faulkner was walking up and down the
room. He chanced to see the portfolio I had brought with me leaning
against the wall, and asked if there were any sketches in it. I told him
there were a few which I had made during my recent stay in Paris. “In
Paris?” he repeated, with a look of interest; “may I see them?”

I gave him the permission he asked as a matter of course. Sitting down, he
took the portfolio on his knee, and began to look through it. He turned
over the first five sketches rapidly enough; but when he came to the sixth
I saw his face flush directly, and observed that he took the drawing out
of the portfolio, carried it to the window, and remained silently absorbed
in the contemplation of it for full five minutes. After that he turned
round to me, and asked very anxiously if I had any objection to parting
with that sketch.

It was the least interesting drawing of the collection—merely a view
in one of the streets running by the backs of the houses in the Palais
Royal. Some four or five of these houses were comprised in the view, which
was of no particular use to me in any way, and which was too valueless, as
a work of art, for me to think of selling it. I begged his acceptance of
it at once. He thanked me quite warmly; and then, seeing that I looked a
little surprised at the odd selection he had made from my sketches,
laughingly asked me if I could guess why he had been so anxious to become
possessed of the view which I had given him.

“Probably,” I answered, “there is some remarkable historical association
connected with that street at the back of the Palais Royal, of which I am
ignorant.”

“No,” said Mr. Faulkner; “at least none that I know of. The only
association connected with the place in my mind is a purely
personal association. Look at this house in your drawing—the house
with the water-pipe running down it from top to bottom. I once passed a
night there—a night I shall never forget to the day of my death. I
have had some awkward travelling adventures in my time; but that
adventure! Well, never mind, suppose we begin the sitting. I make but a
bad return for your kindness in giving me the sketch by thus wasting your
time in mere talk.”

“Come! come!” thought I, as he went back to the sitter’s chair, “I shall
see your natural expression on your face if I can only get you to talk
about that adventure.” It was easy enough to lead him in the right
direction. At the first hint from me, he returned to the subject of the
house in the back street. Without, I hope, showing any undue curiosity, I
contrived to let him see that I felt a deep interest in everything he now
said. After two or three preliminary hesitations, he at last, to my great
joy, fairly started on the narrative of his adventure. In the interest of
his subject he soon completely forgot that he was sitting for his
portrait,—the very expression that I wanted came over his face,—and
my drawing proceeded toward completion, in the right direction, and to the
best purpose. At every fresh touch I felt more and more certain that I was
now getting the better of my grand difficulty; and I enjoyed the
additional gratification of having my work lightened by the recital of a
true story, which possessed, in my estimation, all the excitement of the
most exciting romance.

This, as I recollect it, is how Mr. Faulkner told me his adventure.

THE TRAVELLER’S STORY OF A TERRIBLY STRANGE BED

Shortly after my education at college was finished, I happened to be
staying at Paris with an English friend. We were both young men then, and
lived, I am afraid, rather a wild life, in the delightful city of our
sojourn. One night we were idling about the neighbourhood of the Palais
Royal, doubtful to what amusement we should next betake ourselves. My
friend proposed a visit to Frascati’s; but his suggestion was not to my
taste. I knew Frascati’s, as the French saying is, by heart; had lost and
won plenty of five-franc pieces there, merely for amusement’s sake, until
it was amusement no longer, and was thoroughly tired, in fact, of all the
ghastly respectabilities of such a social anomaly as a respectable
gambling-house. “For Heaven’s sake,” said I to my friend, “let us go
somewhere where we can see a little genuine, blackguard, poverty-stricken
gaming with no false gingerbread glitter thrown over it all. Let us get
away from fashionable Frascati’s, to a house where they don’t mind letting
in a man with a ragged coat, or a man with no coat, ragged or otherwise.”
“Very well,” said my friend, “we needn’t go out of the Palais Royal to
find the sort of company you want. Here’s the place just before us; as
blackguard a place, by all report, as you could possibly wish to see.” In
another minute we arrived at the door and entered the house, the back of
which you have drawn in your sketch.

When we got upstairs, and had left our hats and sticks with the
doorkeeper, we were admitted into the chief gambling-room. We did not find
many people assembled there. But, few as the men were who looked up at us
on our entrance, they were all types—lamentably true types—of
their respective classes.

We had come to see blackguards; but these men were something worse. There
is a comic side, more or less appreciable, in all blackguardism—here
there was nothing but tragedy—mute, weird tragedy. The quiet in the
room was horrible. The thin, haggard, long-haired young man, whose sunken
eyes fiercely watched the turning up of the cards, never spoke; the
flabby, fat-faced, pimply player, who pricked his piece of pasteboard
perseveringly, to register how often black won, and how often red—never
spoke; the dirty, wrinkled old man, with the vulture eyes and the darned
great-coat, who had lost his last sou, and still looked on desperately,
after he could play no longer—never spoke. Even the voice of the
croupier sounded as if it were strangely dulled and thickened in the
atmosphere of the room. I had entered the place to laugh, but the
spectacle before me was something to weep over. I soon found it necessary
to take refuge in excitement from the depression of spirits which was fast
stealing on me. Unfortunately I sought the nearest excitement, by going to
the table and beginning to play. Still more unfortunately, as the event
will show, I won—won prodigiously; won incredibly; won at such a
rate that the regular players at the table crowded round me; and staring
at my stakes with hungry, superstitious eyes, whispered to one another
that the English stranger was going to break the bank.

The game was Rouge et Noir. I had played at it in every city in Europe,
without, however, the care or the wish to study the Theory of Chances—that
philosopher’s stone of all gamblers! And a gambler, in the strict sense of
the word, I had never been. I was heart-whole from the corroding passion
for play. My gaming was a mere idle amusement. I never resorted to it by
necessity, because I never knew what it was to want money. I never
practised it so incessantly as to lose more than I could afford, or to
gain more than I could coolly pocket without being thrown off my balance
by my good luck. In short, I had hitherto frequented gambling-tables—just
as I frequented ball-rooms and opera-houses—because they amused me,
and because I had nothing better to do with my leisure hours.

But on this occasion it was very different—now, for the first time
in my life, I felt what the passion for play really was. My success first
bewildered, and then, in the most literal meaning of the word, intoxicated
me. Incredible as it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that I only lost
when I attempted to estimate chances, and played according to previous
calculation. If I left everything to luck, and staked without any care or
consideration, I was sure to win—to win in the face of every
recognized probability in favour of the bank. At first some of the men
present ventured their money safely enough on my colour; but I speedily
increased my stakes to sums which they dared not risk. One after another
they left off playing, and breathlessly looked on at my game.

Still, time after time, I staked higher and higher, and still won. The
excitement in the room rose to fever pitch. The silence was interrupted by
a deep-muttered chorus of oaths and exclamations in different languages,
every time the gold was shovelled across to my side of the table—even
the imperturbable croupier dashed his rake on the floor in a (French) fury
of astonishment at my success. But one man present preserved his
self-possession, and that man was my friend. He came to my side, and
whispering in English, begged me to leave the place, satisfied with what I
had already gained. I must do him the justice to say that he repeated his
warnings and entreaties several times, and only left me and went away
after I had rejected his advice (I was to all intents and purposes
gambling drunk) in terms which rendered it impossible for him to address
me again that night.

Shortly after he had gone, a hoarse voice behind me cried: “Permit me, my
dear sir—permit me to restore to their proper place two napoleons
which you have dropped. Wonderful luck, sir! I pledge you my word of
honour, as an old soldier, in the course of my long experience in this
sort of thing, I never saw such luck as yours—never! Go on, sir—Sacre
mille bombes! Go on boldly, and break the bank!”

I turned round and saw, nodding and smiling at me with inveterate
civility, a tall man, dressed in a frogged and braided surtout. If I had
been in my senses, I should have considered him, personally, as being
rather a suspicious specimen of an old soldier. He had goggling bloodshot
eyes, mangy moustaches, and a broken nose. His voice betrayed a
barrack-room intonation of the worst order, and he had the dirtiest pair
of hands I ever saw—even in France. These little personal
peculiarities exercised, however, no repelling influence on me. In the mad
excitement, the reckless triumph of that moment, I was ready to
“fraternize” with anybody who encouraged me in my game. I accepted the old
soldier’s offered pinch of snuff; clapped him on the back, and swore he
was the honestest fellow in the world—the most glorious relic of the
Grand Army that I had ever met with. “Go on!” cried my military friend,
snapping his fingers in ecstasy—“Go on, and win! Break the bank—Mille
tonnerres! my gallant English comrade, break the bank!”

And I did go on—went on at such a rate, that in another
quarter of an hour the croupier called out, “Gentlemen, the bank has
discontinued for to-night.” All the notes, and all the gold in that “bank”
now lay in a heap under my hands; the whole floating capital of the
gambling-house was waiting to pour into my pockets!

“Tie up the money in your pocket-handkerchief, my worthy sir,” said the
old soldier, as I wildly plunged my hands into my heap of gold. “Tie it
up, as we used to tie up a bit of dinner in the Grand Army; your winnings
are too heavy for any breeches-pockets that ever were sewed. There! that’s
it—shovel them in, notes and all! Credie! what luck! Stop!
another napoleon on the floor! Ah! sacre petit polisson de Napoleon!
have I found thee at last? Now then, sir—two tight double knots each
way with your honourable permission, and the money’s safe. Feel it! feel
it, fortunate sir! hard and round as a cannon-ball—Ah, bah!
if they had only fired such cannon-balls at us at Austerlitz—nom
d’une pipe! if they only had! And now, as an ancient grenadier, as an
ex-brave of the French army, what remains for me to do? I ask what? Simply
this: to entreat my valued English friend to drink a bottle of champagne
with me, and toast the goddess Fortune in foaming goblets before we part!”

“Excellent ex-brave! Convivial ancient grenadier! Champagne by all means!
An English cheer for an old soldier! Hurrah! hurrah! Another English cheer
for the goddess Fortune! Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!”

“Bravo! the Englishman; the amiable, gracious Englishman, in whose veins
circulates the vivacious blood of France! Another glass? Ah, bah!—the
bottle is empty! Never mind! Vive le vin! I, the old soldier, order
another bottle, and half a pound of bonbons with it!”

“No, no, ex-brave; never—ancient grenadier! Your bottle last
time; my bottle this. Behold it! Toast away! The French Army! the great
Napoleon! the present company! the croupier! the honest croupier’s wife
and daughters—if he has any! the Ladies generally! everybody in the
world!”

By the time the second bottle of champagne was emptied, I felt as if I had
been drinking liquid fire—my brain seemed all aflame. No excess in
wine had ever had this effect on me before in my life. Was it the result
of a stimulant acting upon my system when I was in a highly excited state?
Was my stomach in a particularly disordered condition? Or was the
champagne amazingly strong?

“Ex-brave of the French Army!” cried I, in a mad state of exhilaration, “I
am on fire! how are you? You have set me on fire. Do you hear, my hero of
Austerlitz? Let us have a third bottle of champagne to put the flame out!”

The old soldier wagged his head, rolled his goggle-eyes, until I expected
to see them slip out of their sockets; placed his dirty forefinger by the
side of his broken nose; solemnly ejaculated “Coffee!” and immediately ran
off into an inner room.

The word pronounced by the eccentric veteran seemed to have a magical
effect on the rest of the company present. With one accord they all rose
to depart. Probably they had expected to profit by my intoxication; but
finding that my new friend was benevolently bent on preventing me from
getting dead drunk, had now abandoned all hope of thriving pleasantly on
my winnings. Whatever their motive might be, at any rate they went away in
a body. When the old soldier returned, and sat down again opposite to me
at the table, we had the room to ourselves. I could see the croupier, in a
sort of vestibule which opened out of it, eating his supper in solitude.
The silence was now deeper than ever.

A sudden change, too, had come over the “ex-brave”. He assumed a
portentously solemn look; and when he spoke to me again, his speech was
ornamented by no oaths, enforced by no finger-snapping, enlivened by no
apostrophes or exclamations.

“Listen, my dear sir,” said he, in mysteriously confidential tones—“listen
to an old soldier’s advice. I have been to the mistress of the house (a
very charming woman, with a genius for cookery!) to impress on her the
necessity of making us some particularly strong and good coffee. You must
drink this coffee in order to get rid of your little amiable exaltation of
spirits before you think of going home—you must, my good and
gracious friend! With all that money to take home to-night, it is a sacred
duty to yourself to have your wits about you. You are known to be a winner
to an enormous extent by several gentlemen present to-night, who, in a
certain point of view, are very worthy and excellent fellows; but they are
mortal men, my dear sir, and they have their amiable weaknesses. Need I
say more? Ah, no, no! you understand me! Now, this is what you must do—send
for a cabriolet when you feel quite well again—draw up all the
windows when you get into it—and tell the driver to take you home
only through the large and well-lighted thoroughfares. Do this; and you
and your money will be safe. Do this; and to-morrow you will thank an old
soldier for giving you a word of honest advice.”

Just as the ex-brave ended his oration in very lachrymose tones, the
coffee came in, ready poured out in two cups. My attentive friend handed
me one of the cups with a bow. I was parched with thirst, and drank it off
at a draught. Almost instantly afterwards, I was seized with a fit of
giddiness, and felt more completely intoxicated than ever. The room
whirled round and round furiously; the old soldier seemed to be regularly
bobbing up and down before me like the piston of a steam-engine. I was
half deafened by a violent singing in my ears; a feeling of utter
bewilderment, helplessness, idiocy, overcame me. I rose from my chair,
holding on by the table to keep my balance; and stammered out that I felt
dreadfully unwell—so unwell that I did not know how I was to get
home.

“My dear friend,” answered the old soldier—and even his voice seemed
to be bobbing up and down as he spoke—“my dear friend, it would be
madness to go home in your state; you would be sure to lose your
money; you might be robbed and murdered with the greatest ease. I
am going to sleep here; do you sleep here, too—they make up capital
beds in this house—take one; sleep off the effects of the wine, and
go home safely with your winnings to-morrow—to-morrow, in broad
daylight.”

I had but two ideas left: one, that I must never let go hold of my
handkerchief full of money; the other, that I must lie down somewhere
immediately, and fall off into a comfortable sleep. So I agreed to the
proposal about the bed, and took the offered arm of the old soldier,
carrying my money with my disengaged hand. Preceded by the croupier, we
passed along some passages and up a flight of stairs into the bedroom
which I was to occupy. The ex-brave shook me warmly by the hand, proposed
that we should breakfast together, and then, followed by the croupier,
left me for the night.

I ran to the wash-hand stand; drank some of the water in my jug; poured
the rest out, and plunged my face into it; then sat down in a chair and
tried to compose myself. I soon felt better. The change for my lungs, from
the fetid atmosphere of the gambling-room to the cool air of the apartment
I now occupied, the almost equally refreshing change for my eyes, from the
glaring gaslights of the “salon” to the dim, quiet flicker of one bedroom
candle, aided wonderfully the restorative effects of cold water. The
giddiness left me, and I began to feel a little like a reasonable being
again. My first thought was of the risk of sleeping all night in a
gambling-house; my second, of the still greater risk of trying to get out
after the house was closed, and of going home alone at night through the
streets of Paris with a large sum of money about me. I had slept in worse
places than this on my travels; so I determined to lock, bolt, and
barricade my door, and take my chance till the next morning.

Accordingly, I secured myself against all intrusion; looked under the bed,
and into the cupboard; tried the fastening of the window; and then,
satisfied that I had taken every proper precaution, pulled off my upper
clothing, put my light, which was a dim one, on the hearth among a
feathery litter of wood-ashes, and got into bed, with the handkerchief
full of money under my pillow.

I soon felt not only that I could not go to sleep, but that I could not
even close my eyes. I was wide awake, and in a high fever. Every nerve in
my body trembled—every one of my senses seemed to be preternaturally
sharpened. I tossed and rolled, and tried every kind of position, and
perseveringly sought out the cold corners of the bed, and all to no
purpose. Now I thrust my arms over the clothes; now I poked them under the
clothes; now I violently shot my legs straight out down to the bottom of
the bed; now I convulsively coiled them up as near my chin as they would
go; now I shook out my crumpled pillow, changed it to the cool side,
patted it flat, and lay down quietly on my back; now I fiercely doubled it
in two, set it up on end, thrust it against the board of the bed, and
tried a sitting posture. Every effort was in vain; I groaned with vexation
as I felt that I was in for a sleepless night.

What could I do? I had no book to read. And yet, unless I found out some
method of diverting my mind, I felt certain that I was in the condition to
imagine all sorts of horrors; to rack my brain with forebodings of every
possible and impossible danger; in short, to pass the night in suffering
all conceivable varieties of nervous terror.

I raised myself on my elbow, and looked about the room—which was
brightened by a lovely moonlight pouring straight through the window—to
see if it contained any pictures or ornaments that I could at all clearly
distinguish. While my eyes wandered from wall to wall, a remembrance of Le
Maistre’s delightful little book, “Voyage autour de ma Chambre,” occurred
to me. I resolved to imitate the French author, and find occupation and
amusement enough to relieve the tedium of my wakefulness, by making a
mental inventory of every article of furniture I could see, and by
following up to their sources the multitude of associations which even a
chair, a table, or a wash-hand stand may be made to call forth.

In the nervous unsettled state of my mind at that moment, I found it much
easier to make my inventory than to make my reflections, and thereupon
soon gave up all hope of thinking in Le Maistre’s fanciful track—or,
indeed, of thinking at all. I looked about the room at the different
articles of furniture, and did nothing more.

There was, first, the bed I was lying in; a four-post bed, of all things
in the world to meet with in Paris—yes, a thoroughly clumsy British
four-poster, with the regular top lined with chintz—the regular
fringed valance all round—the regular stifling, unwholesome
curtains, which I remembered having mechanically drawn back against the
posts without particularly noticing the bed when I first got into the
room. Then there was the marble-topped wash-hand stand, from which the
water I had spilled, in my hurry to pour it out, was still dripping,
slowly and more slowly, on to the brick floor. Then two small chairs, with
my coat, waistcoat, and trousers flung on them. Then a large elbow-chair
covered with dirty-white dimity, with my cravat and shirt collar thrown
over the back. Then a chest of drawers with two of the brass handles off,
and a tawdry, broken china inkstand placed on it by way of ornament for
the top. Then the dressing-table, adorned by a very small looking-glass,
and a very large pincushion. Then the window—an unusually large
window. Then a dark old picture, which the feeble candle dimly showed me.
It was a picture of a fellow in a high Spanish hat, crowned with a plume
of towering feathers. A swarthy, sinister ruffian, looking upward, shading
his eyes with his hand, and looking intently upward—it might be at
some tall gallows at which he was going to be hanged. At any rate, he had
the appearance of thoroughly deserving it.

This picture put a kind of constraint upon me to look upward too—at
the top of the bed. It was a gloomy and not an interesting object, and I
looked back at the picture. I counted the feathers in the man’s hat—they
stood out in relief—three white, two green. I observed the crown of
his hat, which was of conical shape, according to the fashion supposed to
have been favoured by Guido Fawkes. I wondered what he was looking up at.
It couldn’t be at the stars; such a desperado was neither astrologer nor
astronomer. It must be at the high gallows, and he was going to be hanged
presently. Would the executioner come into possession of his conical
crowned hat and plume of feathers? I counted the feathers again—three
white, two green.

While I still lingered over this very improving and intellectual
employment, my thoughts insensibly began to wander. The moonlight shining
into the room reminded me of a certain moonlight night in England—the
night after a picnic party in a Welsh valley. Every incident of the drive
homeward, through lovely scenery, which the moonlight made lovelier than
ever, came back to my remembrance, though I had never given the picnic a
thought for years; though, if I had tried to recollect it, I could
certainly have recalled little or nothing of that scene long past. Of all
the wonderful faculties that help to tell us we are immortal, which speaks
the sublime truth more eloquently than memory? Here was I, in a strange
house of the most suspicious character, in a situation of uncertainty, and
even of peril, which might seem to make the cool exercise of my
recollection almost out of the question; nevertheless, remembering, quite
involuntarily, places, people, conversations, minute circumstances of
every kind, which I had thought forgotten for ever; which I could not
possibly have recalled at will, even under the most favourable auspices.
And what cause had produced in a moment the whole of this strange,
complicated, mysterious effect? Nothing but some rays of moonlight shining
in at my bedroom window.

I was still thinking of the picnic—of our merriment on the drive
home—of the sentimental young lady who would quote “Childe
Harold” because it was moonlight. I was absorbed by these past scenes and
past amusements, when, in an instant, the thread on which my memories hung
snapped asunder; my attention immediately came back to present things more
vividly than ever, and I found myself, I neither knew why nor wherefore,
looking hard at the picture again.

Looking for what?

Good God! the man had pulled his hat down on his brows! No! the hat itself
was gone! Where was the conical crown? Where the feathers—three
white, two green? Not there! In place of the hat and feathers, what dusky
object was it that now hid his forehead, his eyes, his shading hand?

Was the bed moving?

I turned on my back and looked up. Was I mad? drunk? dreaming? giddy
again? or was the top of the bed really moving down—sinking slowly,
regularly, silently, horribly, right down throughout the whole of its
length and breadth—right down upon me, as I lay underneath?

My blood seemed to stand still. A deadly paralysing coldness stole all
over me as I turned my head round on the pillow and determined to test
whether the bedtop was really moving or not, by keeping my eye on the man
in the picture.

The next look in that direction was enough. The dull, black, frowzy
outline of the valance above me was within an inch of being parallel with
his waist. I still looked breathlessly. And steadily and slowly—very
slowly—I saw the figure, and the line of frame below the figure,
vanish, as the valance moved down before it.

I am, constitutionally, anything but timid. I have been on more than one
occasion in peril of my life, and have not lost my self-possession for an
instant; but when the conviction first settled on my mind that the bed-top
was really moving, was steadily and continuously sinking down upon me, I
looked up shuddering, helpless, panic-stricken, beneath the hideous
machinery for murder, which was advancing closer and closer to suffocate
me where I lay.

I looked up, motionless, speechless, breathless. The candle, fully spent,
went out; but the moonlight still brightened the room. Down and down,
without pausing and without sounding, came the bedtop, and still my panic
terror seemed to bind me faster and faster to the mattress on which I lay—down
and down it sank, till the dusty odour from the lining of the canopy came
stealing into my nostrils.

At that final moment the instinct of self-preservation startled me out of
my trance, and I moved at last. There was just room for me to roll myself
sideways off the bed. As I dropped noiselessly to the floor, the edge of
the murderous canopy touched me on the shoulder.

Without stopping to draw my breath, without wiping the cold sweat from my
face, I rose instantly on my knees to watch the bedtop. I was literally
spellbound by it. If I had heard footsteps behind me, I could not have
turned round; if a means of escape had been miraculously provided for me,
I could not have moved to take advantage of it. The whole life in me was,
at that moment, concentrated in my eyes.

It descended—the whole canopy, with the fringe round it, came down—down—close
down; so close that there was not room now to squeeze my finger between
the bedtop and the bed. I felt at the sides, and discovered that what had
appeared to me from beneath to be the ordinary light canopy of a four-post
bed was in reality a thick, broad mattress, the substance of which was
concealed by the valance and its fringe. I looked up and saw the four
posts rising hideously bare. In the middle of the bedtop was a huge wooden
screw that had evidently worked it down through a hole in the ceiling,
just as ordinary presses are worked down on the substance selected for
compression. The frightful apparatus moved without making the faintest
noise. There had been no creaking as it came down; there was now not the
faintest sound from the room above. Amid a dead and awful silence I beheld
before me—in the nineteenth century, and in the civilized capital of
France—such a machine for secret murder by suffocation as might have
existed in the worst days of the Inquisition, in the lonely inns among the
Harz Mountains, in the mysterious tribunals of Westphalia! Still, as I
looked on it, I could not move, I could hardly breathe, but I began to
recover the power of thinking, and in a moment I discovered the murderous
conspiracy framed against me in all its horror.

My cup of coffee had been drugged, and drugged too strongly. I had been
saved from being smothered by having taken an overdose of some narcotic.
How I had chafed and fretted at the fever-fit which had preserved my life
by keeping me awake! How recklessly I had confided myself to the two
wretches who had led me into this room, determined, for the sake of my
winnings, to kill me in my sleep by the surest and most horrible
contrivance for secretly accomplishing my destruction! How many men,
winners like me, had slept, as I had proposed to sleep, in that bed, and
had never been seen or heard of more! I shuddered at the bare idea of it.

But, ere long, all thought was again suspended by the sight of the
murderous canopy moving once more. After it had remained on the bed—as
nearly as I could guess—about ten minutes, it began to move up
again. The villains who worked it from above evidently believed that their
purpose was now accomplished. Slowly and silently, as it had descended,
that horrible bedtop rose towards its former place. When it reached the
upper extremities of the four posts, it reached the ceiling, too. Neither
hole nor screw could be seen; the bed became in appearance an ordinary bed
again—the canopy an ordinary canopy—even to the most
suspicious eyes.

Now, for the first time, I was able to move—to rise from my knees—to
dress myself in my upper clothing—and to consider of how I should
escape. If I betrayed by the smallest noise that the attempt to suffocate
me had failed, I was certain to be murdered. Had I made any noise already?
I listened intently, looking towards the door.

No! no footsteps in the passage outside—no sound of a tread, light
or heavy, in the room above—absolute silence everywhere. Besides
locking and bolting my door, I had moved an old wooden chest against it,
which I had found under the bed. To remove this chest (my blood ran cold
as I thought of what its contents might be!) without making some
disturbance was impossible; and, moreover, to think of escaping through
the house, now barred up for the night, was sheer insanity. Only one
chance was left me—the window. I stole to it on tiptoe.

My bedroom was on the first floor, above an entresol, and looked into a
back street. I raised my hand to open the window, knowing that on that
action hung, by the merest hairbreadth, my chance of safety. They keep
vigilant watch in a house of murder. If any part of the frame cracked, if
the hinge creaked, I was a lost man! It must have occupied me at least
five minutes, reckoning by time—five hours, reckoning by
suspense—to open that window. I succeeded in doing it silently—in
doing it with all the dexterity of a house-breaker—and then looked
down into the street. To leap the distance beneath me would be almost
certain destruction! Next, I looked round at the sides of the house. Down
the left side ran a thick water-pipe—it passed close by the outer
edge of the window. The moment I saw the pipe I knew I was saved. My
breath came and went freely for the first time since I had seen the canopy
of the bed moving down upon me!

To some men the means of escape which I had discovered might have seemed
difficult and dangerous enough—to me the prospect of slipping
down the pipe into the street did not suggest even a thought of peril. I
had always been accustomed, by the practice of gymnastics, to keep up my
school-boy powers as a daring and expert climber; and knew that my head,
hands, and feet would serve me faithfully in any hazards of ascent or
descent. I had already got one leg over the window-sill, when I remembered
the handkerchief filled with money under my pillow. I could well have
afforded to leave it behind me, but I was revengefully determined that the
miscreants of the gambling-house should miss their plunder as well as
their victim. So I went back to the bed and tied the heavy handkerchief at
my back by my cravat.

Just as I had made it tight and fixed it in a comfortable place, I thought
I heard a sound of breathing outside the door. The chill feeling of horror
ran through me again as I listened. No! dead silence still in the passage—I
had only heard the night air blowing softly into the room. The next moment
I was on the window-sill, and the next I had a firm grip on the water-pipe
with my hands and knees.

I slid down into the street easily and quietly, as I thought I should, and
immediately set off at the top of my speed to a branch “prefecture” of
Police, which I knew was situated in the immediate neighbourhood. A
“subprefect,” and several picked men among his subordinates, happened to
be up, maturing, I believe, some scheme for discovering the perpetrator of
a mysterious murder which all Paris was talking of just then. When I began
my story, in a breathless hurry and in very bad French, I could see that
the subprefect suspected me of being a drunken Englishman who had robbed
somebody; but he soon altered his opinion as I went on, and before I had
anything like concluded, he shoved all the papers before him into a
drawer, put on his hat, supplied me with another (for I was bareheaded),
ordered a file of soldiers, desired his expert followers to get ready all
sorts of tools for breaking open doors and ripping up brick flooring, and
took my arm, in the most friendly and familiar manner possible, to lead me
with him out of the house. I will venture to say that when the subprefect
was a little boy, and was taken for the first time to the play, he was not
half as much pleased as he was now at the job in prospect for him at the
gambling-house!

Away we went through the streets, the subprefect cross-examining and
congratulating me in the same breath as we marched at the head of our
formidable posse comitatus. Sentinels were placed at the back and front of
the house the moment we got to it; a tremendous battery of knocks was
directed against the door; a light appeared at a window; I was told to
conceal myself behind the police; then came more knocks and a cry of “Open
in the name of the law!” At that terrible summons bolts and locks gave way
before an invisible hand, and the moment after the subprefect was in the
passage, confronting a waiter half dressed and ghastly pale. This was the
short dialogue which immediately took place:

“We want to see the Englishman who is sleeping in this house.”

“He went away hours ago.”

“He did no such thing. His friend went away; he remained. Show us
to his bedroom!”

“I swear to you, Monsieur le Sous-prefet, he is not here! he—”

“I swear to you, Monsieur le Garcon, he is. He slept here; he didn’t find
your bed comfortable; he came to us to complain of it; here he is among my
men; and here am I ready to look for a flea or two in his bedstead.
Renaudin!” (calling to one of the subordinates, and pointing to the
waiter), “collar that man, and tie his hands behind him. Now then,
gentlemen, let us walk upstairs!”

Every man and woman in the house was secured—the “old soldier” the
first. Then I identified the bed in which I had slept, and then we went
into the room above.

No object that was at all extraordinary appeared in any part of it. The
subprefect looked round the place, commanded everybody to be silent,
stamped twice on the floor, called for a candle, looked attentively at the
spot he had stamped on, and ordered the flooring there to be carefully
taken up. This was done in no time. Lights were produced, and we saw a
deep raftered cavity between the floor of this room and the ceiling of the
room beneath. Through this cavity there ran perpendicularly a sort of case
of iron, thickly greased; and inside the case appeared the screw, which
communicated with the bedtop below. Extra lengths of screw, freshly oiled;
levers covered with felt; all the complete upper works of a heavy press—constructed
with infernal ingenuity so as to join the fixtures below, and when taken
to pieces again to go into the smallest possible compass—were next
discovered and pulled out on the floor. After some little difficulty the
subprefect succeeded in putting the machinery together, and, leaving his
men to work it, descended with me to the bedroom. The smothering canopy
was then lowered, but not so noiselessly as I had seen it lowered. When I
mentioned this to the subprefect, his answer, simple as it was, had a
terrible significance. “My men,” said he, “are working down the bedtop for
the first time; the men whose money you won were in better practice.”

We left the house in the sole possession of two police agents, every one
of the inmates being removed to prison on the spot. The subprefect, after
taking down my proces verbal in his office, returned with me to my
hotel to get my passport. “Do you think,” I asked, as I gave it to him,
“that any men have really been smothered in that bed, as they tried to
smother me?”

“I have seen dozens of drowned men laid out at the morgue,” answered the
subprefect, “in whose pocket-books were found letters stating that they
had committed suicide in the Seine, because they had lost everything at
the gaming-table. Do I know how many of those men entered the same
gambling-house that you entered? won as you won? took that
bed as you took it? slept in it? were smothered in it? and were
privately thrown into the river, with a letter of explanation written by
the murderers and placed in their pocket-books? No man can say how many or
how few have suffered the fate from which you have escaped. The people of
the gambling-house kept their bedstead machinery a secret from us—even
from the police! The dead kept the rest of the secret for them.
Good-night, or rather good-morning, Monsieur Faulkner! Be at my office
again at nine o’clock; in the meantime, au revoir!”

The rest of my story is soon told. I was examined and reexamined; the
gambling-house was strictly searched all through from top to bottom; the
prisoners were separately interrogated, and two of the less guilty among
them made a confession. I discovered that the old soldier was master of
the gambling-house—justice discovered that he had been
drummed out of the army as a vagabond years ago; that he had been guilty
of all sorts of villainies since; that he was in possession of stolen
property, which the owners identified; and that he, the croupier, another
accomplice, and the woman who had made my cup of coffee were all in the
secret of the bedstead. There appeared some reason to doubt whether the
inferior persons attached to the house knew anything of the suffocating
machinery; and they received the benefit of that doubt, by being treated
simply as thieves and vagabonds. As for the old soldier and his two head
myrmidons, they went to the galleys; the woman who had drugged my coffee
was imprisoned for I forget how many years; the regular attendants at the
gambling-house were considered “suspicious,” and placed under
“surveillance”; and I became, for one whole week (which is a long time),
the head “lion” in Parisian society. My adventure was dramatised by three
illustrious play-makers, but never saw theatrical daylight; for the
censorship forbade the introduction on the stage of a correct copy of the
gambling-house bedstead.

One good result was produced by my adventure, which any censorship must
have approved: it cured me of ever again trying rouge-et-noir as an
amusement. The sight of a green cloth, with packs of cards and heaps of
money on it, will henceforth be for ever associated in my mind with the
sight of a bed canopy descending to suffocate me in the silence and
darkness of the night.

Just as Mr. Faulkner pronounced these words he started in his chair, and
resumed his stiff, dignified position in a great hurry. “Bless my soul!”
cried he, with a comic look of astonishment and vexation, “while I have
been telling you what is the real secret of my interest in the sketch you
have so kindly given to me, I have altogether forgotten that I came here
to sit for my portrait. For the last hour or more I must have been the
worst model you ever had to draw from!”

“On the contrary, you have been the best,” said I. “I have been trying to
catch your likeness; and, while telling your story, you have unconsciously
shown me the natural expression I wanted to insure my success.”

NOTE BY MRS. KERBY

I cannot let this story end without mentioning what the chance saying was
which caused it to be told at the farmhouse the other night. Our friend
the young sailor, among his other quaint objections to sleeping on shore,
declared that he particularly hated four-post beds, because he never slept
in one without doubting whether the top might not come down in the night
and suffocate him. I thought this chance reference to the distinguishing
feature of William’s narrative curious enough, and my husband agreed with
me. But he says it is scarcely worth while to mention such a trifle in
anything so important as a book. I cannot venture, after this, to do more
than slip these lines in modestly at the end of the story. If the printer
should notice my few last words, perhaps he may not mind the trouble of
putting them into some out-of-the-way corner, in very small type.

L. K.

MICHEL LORIO’S CROSS, By Hesba Stretton

In the southwest point of Normandy, separated from Brittany only by a
narrow and straight river, like the formal canals of Holland, stands the
curious granite rock which is called Mont St. Michel. It is an isolated
peak, rising abruptly out of a vast plain of sand to the height of nearly
four hundred feet, and so precipitous toward the west that scarcely a root
of grass finds soil enough in its weather-beaten clefts. At the very
summit is built that wonderful church, the rich architecture and flying
buttresses of which strike the eye leagues and leagues away, either on the
sea or the mainland. Below the church, and supporting it by a solid
masonry, is a vast pile formerly a fortress, castle, and prison; with
caverns and dungeons hewn out of the living rock, and vaulted halls and
solemn crypts; all desolate and solitary now, except when a party of
pilgrims or tourists pass through them, ushered by a guide. Still lower
down the rock, along its eastern and southern face, there winds a dark and
narrow street, with odd, antique houses on either side. The only
conveyance that can pass along it is the water-cart which supplies the
town with fresh water from the mainland. The whole place is guarded by a
strong and high rampart, with bastions and battlemented walls; and the
only entrance is through three gateways, one immediately behind the other,
with a small court between. The second of these strong gateways is
protected by two old cannon, taken from the English in 1423, and still
pointed out to visitors with inextinguishable pride by the natives of
Mont. St. Michel.

A great plain of sand stretches around the Mont for miles every way—of
sand or sea, for the water covers it at flood-tides, beating up against
the foot of the granite rocks and the granite walls of the ramparts. But
at neap tides and eaux mortes, as the French say, there is nothing
but a desert of brown, bare sand, with ripple-marks lying across it, and
with shallow, ankle-deep pools of salt water here and there. Afar off on
the western sky-line a silver fringe of foam, glistening in the sunshine,
marks the distant boundary to which the sea has retreated. On every other
side of the horizon rises a belt of low cliffs, bending into a semicircle,
with sweeping outlines of curves miles in length, drawn distinctly against
the clear sky.

The only way to approach the Mont is across the sands. Each time the tide
recedes a fresh track must be made, like the track along snowy roads; and
every traveller, whether on foot or in carriage, must direct his steps by
this scarcely beaten path. Now and then he passes a high, strong post,
placed where there is any dangerous spot upon the plain; for there are
perilous quicksands, imperceptible to any eye, lurking in sullen and
patient treachery for any unwary footstep. The river itself, which creeps
sluggishly in a straight black line across the brown desert, has its banks
marked out by rows of these high stakes, with a bush of leafless twigs at
the top of each. A dreary, desolate, and barren scene it is, with no life
in it except the isolated life upon the Mont.

This little family of human beings, separated from the great tide of life
like one of the shallow pools which the ebbing sea has left upon its
sands, numbers scarcely a hundred and a half. The men are fishers, for
there is no other occupation to be followed on the sterile rock. Every day
also the level sweep of sands is wandered over by the women and children,
who seek for cockles in the little pools; the babble of whose voices
echoes far through the quiet air, and whose shadows fall long and unbroken
on the brown wilderness. Now and then the black-robed figure of a priest,
or of one of the brothers dwelling in the monument on the top of the rock,
may be seen slowly pacing along the same dead level, and skirting the
quicksands where the warning posts are erected. In the summer months bands
of pilgrims are also to be seen marching in a long file like travellers
across the desert; but in winter these visits cease almost wholly, and the
inhabitants of the Mont are left to themselves.

Having so little intercourse with the outer world, and living on a rock
singled out by supernatural visitants, the people remain more
superstitious than even the superstitious Germans and Bretons who are
their neighbours. Few of them can read or write. The new thoughts,
opinions, and creeds of the present century do not reach them. They are
contented with the old faith, bound up for them in the history of their
patron, the archangel St. Michel, and with the minute interest taken in
every native of the rock. Each person knows the history of every other
inhabitant, but knows little else.

From Pontorson to the Mont the road lies along the old Bay of St. Michel,
with low hedge-rows of feathery tamarind-trees on each side as far as the
beach. It is not at all a solitary road, for hundreds of long, heavy
carts, resembling artillery waggons, encumber it, loaded with a gray shaly
deposit dug out of the bay: a busy scene of men and women digging in the
heavy sand, while the shaggy horses stand by, hanging their heads
patiently under the blue-stained sheepskins about their necks.

Two or three persons are at work at every cart; one of them, often a
woman, standing on the rising pile, and beating it flat with a spade,
while a cheerful clatter of voices is heard on every hand.

But at one time a man might have been seen there working alone, quite
alone. Even a space was left about him, as if an invisible circle were
drawn, within which no person would venture. If a word were flung at him
across this imaginary cordon, it was nothing but a taunt or a curse, and
it was invariably spoken by a man. No woman so much as glanced at him. He
toiled on doggedly, and in silence, with a weary-looking face, until his
task was ended, and the waggon driven off by the owner, who had employed
him at a lower rate than his comrades. Then he would throw his blue blouse
over his shoulders, and tramp away with heavy tread along the faintly
marked trail leading across the beach to Mont St. Michel.

Neither was there any voice to greet him as he gained the gateway, where
the men of the Mont congregated, as they always congregate about the
entrance to a walled town. Rather, the scornful silence which had
surrounded him at his work was here deepened into a personal hatred.
Within the gate the women, who were chattering over their nets of cockles,
shrank away from him, or broke into a contemptuous laugh. Along the narrow
street the children fled at the sight of him, and hid behind their
mothers, from whose protection they could shout after him. If the cure met
him, he would turn aside into the first house rather than come in contact
with him. He was under a ban which no one dared to defy.

The only voice that spoke to him was the fretful, querulous voice of an
old, bedridden woman as he lifted the latch and opened the door of a poor
house upon the ramparts, which had no entrance into the street; and where
he lived alone with his mother, cut off from all accidental intercourse
with his neighbours.

“Michel! Michel! how late thou art!” she exclaimed; “if thou hadst been a
good son thou wouldst have returned before the hour it is.”

“I returned as soon as my work was finished,” he answered, in a patient
voice; “I have not lost a minute by the way.”

“Bah! because no one will ask thee to turn in with them anywhere!” she
continued. “If thou wert like everybody else thou wouldst have many a
friend to pass thy time with. It is hard for me, thy mother, to have
brought thee into the world that all the world should despise and hate
thee, as they do this day. Monsieur le Cure says there is no hope for thee
if thou art so obstinate; thou must go to hell, though I named thee after
our great archangel St. Michel, and brought thee up as a good Christian.
Quel malheur! How hard it is for me to lie in bed all day, and
think of my son in the flames of hell!”

Very quietly, as if he had heard such complainings hundreds of times
before, did Michel set about kindling a few sticks upon the open hearth.
This was so common a welcome home that he scarcely heard it, and had
ceased to heed it. The room, as the flickering light fell upon it, was one
of the cheerless and comfortless chambers to be seen in any peasant’s
house: a pile of wood in one corner, a single table with a chair or two, a
shelf with a few pieces of brown crockery, and the bed on which the
paralytic woman was lying, her hands crossed over her breast, and her
bright black eyes glistening in the gloom. Michel brought her the soup he
had made, and fed her carefully and tenderly, before thinking of
satisfying his own hunger.

“It is of no good, Michel,” she said, when he laid her down again upon the
pillow he had made smooth for her; “it is of no good. Thou mayest as well
leave me to perish; it will not weigh for thee. Monsieur le Cure says if
thou hadst been born a heretic perhaps the good God might have taken it
into account. But thou wert born a Christian, as good a Christian as all
the world, and thou hast sold thy birthright to the devil. Leave me then,
and take thy pleasure in this life, for thou wilt have nothing but misery
in the next.”

“I will not leave thee—never!” he answered, briefly. “I have no fear
of the next world.”

He was a man of few words evidently. Perhaps the silence maintained around
him had partly frozen his power of speech. Even to his mother he spoke but
little, though her complaining went on without ceasing, until he
extinguished both fire and lamp, and climbed the rude ladder into the loft
overhead, where her voice never failed to rouse him from his sleep, if she
only called “Michel!” He could not clearly explain his position even to
himself. He had gone to Paris many years before, where he came across some
Protestants, who had taught him to read the Testament, and instructed him
in their religion. The new faith had taken hold of him, and thrust deep
roots into his simple and constant nature; though he had no words at
command to express the change to others, and scarcely to himself. So long
as he had been in Paris there had been no need of this.

But now his father’s death had compelled him to return to his native
place, and to the little knot of people who knew him as old Pierre Lorio’s
son, a fisherman like themselves, with no more right to read or think than
they had. The fierceness of the persecution he encountered filled him with
dismay, though it had not shaken his fidelity to his new faith. But often
a dumb, inarticulate longing possessed him to make known to his old
neighbours the reason of the change in him, but speech failed him. He
could only stammer out his confession, “I am no longer a Catholic, I am a
Protestant, I cannot pray to the saints, not even to the archangel St.
Michel or the Blessed Virgin. I pray only to God.” For anything else, for
explanation, and for all argument, he had no more language than the mute,
wistful language one sees in the eyes of dumb creatures, when they gaze
fully at us.

Perhaps there is nothing more pitiful than the painful want of words to
express that which lies deepest within us; a want common to us all, but
greatest in those who have had no training in thus shaping and expressing
their inmost thoughts.

There was not much to fear from a man like this. Michel Lorio was a living
lesson against apostasy. As he went up and down the street, and in and out
of the gate, his loneliness and dejection spoke more eloquently for the
old faith than any banishment could have done. Michel was suffered to
remain under a ban, not formal and ceremonial, but a tacit ban, which
quite as effectively set him apart, and made his life more solitary than
if he had been dwelling alone on a desert rock out at sea.

Michel accepted his lot without complaint and without bitterness. He never
passed Monsieur le Cure without a salutation. When he went daily for water
to the great cistern of the monastery, he was always ready to carry the
brimful pails too heavy for the arms of the old women and children. If he
had leisure he mounted the long flights of grass-grown steps three or four
times for his neighbours, depositing his burden at their doors, without a
word of thanks for his help being vouchsafed to him. Now and then he
overheard a sneer at his usefulness; and his mother taunted him often for
his patience and forbearance. But he went on his way silently with deeper
yearning for human love and sympathy than he could make known.

If it had not been that, when he was kneeling at the rude dormer-window of
his loft and gazing dreamily across the wide sweep of sand, with the moon
shining across it and the solemn stars lighting up the sky, he was at
times vaguely conscious of an influence, almost a presence, as of a hand
that touched him and a voice that spoke to him, he must have sunk under
this intense longing for love and fellowship. Had he been a Catholic
still, he would have believed that the archangel St. Michel was near and
about to manifest himself as in former times in his splendid shrine upon
the Mont. The new faith had not cast out all the old superstitious nature;
yet it was this vague spiritual presence which supported him under the
crushing and unnatural conditions of his social life. He endured, as
seeing one who is invisible.

Yet at other times he could not keep his feet away from the little street
where all the life there was might be found. At night he would creep
cautiously along the ramparts and descend by a quiet staircase into an
angle of the walls, where he could look on unseen upon the gathering of
townsfolk in the inn where he had often gone with his father in earlier
days. The landlord, Nicolas, was a most bitter enemy now. There was the
familiar room filled with bright light from an oil-lamp and the brighter
flicker of a wood fire where the landlord’s wife was cooking. A deep, low
recess in the corner, with a crimson valance stretched across it, held a
bed with snow-white pillows, upon one of which rested a child’s curly head
with eyes fast sealed against the glare of the lamp. At a table close by
sat the landlord and three or four of the wealthier men of the Mont busily
and seriously eating the omelets and fried fish served to them from the
pan over the fire.

The copper and brass cooking utensils glittered in the light from the
walls where they hung. It was a cheery scene, and Michel would stand in
his cold, dark corner, watching it until all was over and the guests ready
to depart.

“Thou art Michel le diable!” said a childish voice to him one
evening, and he felt a small, warm hand laid for an instant upon his own.
It was Delphine, Nicolas’s eldest girl, a daring child, full of spirit and
courage; yet even she shrank back a step or two after touching him, and
stood as if ready to take flight.

“I am Michel Lorio,” he answered, in a quiet, pleasant voice, which won
her back to his side. “Why dost thou call me Michel le diable?”

“All the world calls thee that,” answered Delphine; “thou art a heretic.
See, I am a good Christian. I say my ave and paternoster every night; if
thou wilt do the same thing, no one will call thee Michel le diable.”

“Thou art not afraid of me?” he asked, for the child put her hand again on
his.

“No, no! thou art not the real devil!” she said, “and maman has put
my name on the register of the monument; so the great archangel St. Michel
will deliver me from all evil. What canst thou do? Canst thou turn
children into cats? or canst thou walk across the sea without being
drowned? or canst thou stand on the highest pinnacle of the church, where
the golden image of St. Michel used to be, and cast thyself down without
killing thyself? I will go back with thee to thy house and see what thou
canst do.”

“I can do none of these things,” answered Michel, “not one; but thou shalt
come home with me if thou wilt.”

“Carry me,” she said, “that I may feel how strong thou art.”

He lifted her easily into his arms, for he was strong and accustomed to
bear heavier burdens. His heart beat fast as the child’s hand stole round
his neck and her soft cheek touched his own. Delphine had never been upon
the ramparts before when the stars were out and the distant circle of the
cliffs hidden by the night, and several times he was compelled to stop and
answer her eager questions; but she would not go into the house when they
reached the door.

“Carry me back again, Michel,” she demanded. “I do not like thy mother.
Thou shalt bring me again along the ramparts to-morrow night. I will
always come to thee, always when I see thee standing in the dark corner by
our house. I love thee much, Michel le diable.”

It was a strange friendship carried on stealthily. Michel could not put
away from himself this one little tie of human love and fellowship. As for
Delphine, she was as silent about her new friend as children often are of
such things which affect them deeply. There was a mingling of
superstitious feeling in her affection for Michel—a half-dread that
gave their secret meetings a greater charm to the daring spirit of the
child. The evening was a busy time at the inn, and if Delphine had been
missed, but little wonder and no anxiety would have been aroused at her
absence. The ramparts were deserted after dark, and no one guessed that
the two dark figures sauntering to and fro were Michel and Delphine. When
the nights were too cold they took refuge in a little overhanging turret
projecting from one of the angles of the massive walls—a darksome
niche with nothing but the sky to be seen through a narrow embrasure in
the shape of a cross. In these haunts Michel talked in his simple untaught
way of his thoughts and of his new faith, pouring into the child’s ear
what he could never tell to any other. By day Delphine never seemed to see
him; never cast a look toward him as he passed by amid the undisguised ill
will of the town. She ceased to speak of him even, with the unconscious
and natural dissimulation by which children screen themselves from
criticism and censure.

The people of the Mont St. Michel are very poor, and the women and
children are compelled to seek some means of earning money as well as the
men. As long as the summer lasts the crowds of pilgrims and tourists,
flocking to the wonderful fortress and shrine upon the summit, bring
employment and gain to some portion of them; but in the winter there is
little to do except when the weather is fine enough to search for
shell-fish about the sands, and sell them in the villages of the mainland.
As the tide goes down, bands of women and children follow it out for
miles, taking care to retrace their steps before the sea rises again. From
Michel’s cottage on the ramparts the whole plain toward Avranches was
visible, and he could hear the busy hum of voices coming to his ear from
afar through the quiet air. But on the western side of the Mont, where the
black line of the river crosses the sands, they are more dangerous; and in
this direction only the more venturesome seekers go—boys who love
any risk, and widows who are the more anxious to fill their nets because
they have no man to help them in getting their daily bread.

The early part of the winter is not cold in Normandy, especially by the
sea. As long as the westerly winds sweep across the Atlantic, the air is
soft though damp, with fine mists hanging in it, which shine with rainbow
tints in the sunlight. Sometimes Christmas and the New Year find the air
still genial, in spite of the short days and the long rainy nights. Strong
gales may blow, but so long as they do not come from the dry east or
frosty north there is no real severity of weather.

It was such a Christmas week that year. Not one of the women or children
had yet been forced to stay away from the sands on account of the cold.
Upon Christmas eve there was a good day, though, a short one, before them,
for it was low water about noon, and the high tide would not be in before
six. All the daylight would be theirs. It was a chance not to be missed,
for as the tides grew later in the day their time for fishing would be cut
shorter. Almost every woman and child turned out through the gate with
their nets in their hands. By midday the plain was dotted over by them,
and the wintry sun shone pleasantly down, and the quiet rock caught the
echo of their voices. Farther away, out of sight and hearing, the men also
were busy, Michel among them, casting nets upon the sea. As the low sun
went down in the southern sky, the scattered groups came home by twos and
threes, anxious to bring in their day’s fishing in time for the men to
carry them across to the mainland before the Mont should be shut in by the
tide.

A busy scene was that in the gateway.

All the town was there; some coming in from the sands, and those who had
been left at home with babies or old folks running down from their houses.
There was chaffing and bartering; exchanges agreed upon, and commissions
innumerable to be intrusted to the men about to set out for Pontorson, the
nearest town. Michel Lorio was going to sell his own fish, for who would
carry it for him? Yet though he was the first who was ready to start, not
a soul charged him with a single commission. He lingered wistfully and
loitered just outside the gateway; but neither man, woman, nor child said,
“Michel, bring me what I want from the town.”

He was treading slowly down the rough causeway under the walls of the
town, when a woman’s shrill voice startled him. It was not far from
sunset, and the sun was sinking round and red behind a bank of fog. A thin
gray mist was creeping up from the sea. The latest band of stragglers, a
cluster of mere children, were running across the sand to the gate. Michel
turned round and saw Nicolas’s wife, a dark, stern-looking woman,
beckoning vehemently to these children. He paused for a moment to look at
his little Delphine. “Not there!” he said to himself, and was passing on,
when the shrill voice again caught his attention.

“Where is Phine?” called the mother.

What was it the children said? What answer had they shouted back? Michel
stood motionless, as if all strength had failed him suddenly. The children
rushed past him in a troop. He lifted up his eyes, looking fearfully
toward the sea hidden behind the deepening fog. Was it possible that he
had heard them say that Delphine was lost?

“Where is Phine?” asked the mother; but though her voice was lower now,
Michel heard every syllable loudly. It seemed as if he could have heard a
whisper, though the chattering in the gateway was like the clamour of a
fair. The eldest girl in the little band spoke in a hurried and frightened
tone.

“Phine is so naughty, madame,” she said, “we could not keep her near us.
She would go on and on to the sea. We could not wait for her. We heard her
calling, but it was so far, we dared not go back. But she cannot be far
behind us, for we shouted as we came along. She will be here soon,
madame.”

“Mon Dieu!” cried the mother, sinking down on one of the great
stones, either rolled up by the tide, or left by the masons who built the
ramparts. “Call her father to me.”

It was Michel Lorio who found Nicolas, his greatest enemy. Nicolas had a
number of errands to be done in the town, and he was busy impressing them
on the memory of his messenger, who, like every one else, could neither
read nor write. When Michel caught his arm in a sharp, fast grip, he
turned round with a scowl, and tried, but in vain, to shake off his grasp.

“Come to thy wife,” said Michel, dragging him toward the gate; “Delphine,
thy little one, is lost on the sands.”

The whole crowd heard the words, for Michel’s voice was pitched in a high,
shrill key, which rang above the clamour and the babel. There was an
instant hush, every one listening to Michel, and every eye fastened upon
him. Nicolas stared blankly at him, as if unable to understand him, yet
growing passive under his sense of bewilderment.

“The children who went out with Delphine this morning are come back,”
continued Michel, in the same forced tone; “they are come back without
her. She is lost on the sands. The night is falling, and there is a fog. I
tell you the little one is alone, quite alone, upon the sands; and it will
be high water at six o’clock. Delphine is alone and lost upon the sands!”

The momentary hush of the crowd was at an end. The children began crying,
and the women calling loudly upon St. Michel and the Holy Virgin. The men
gathered about Nicolas and Michel, and went down in a compact group to the
causeway beyond the gate. There the lurid sun, shining dimly through the
fog, made the most sanguine look grave and shake their heads hopelessly
behind the father and mother. The latter sat motionless, looking out with
straining eyes to see if Delphine were not coming through the thickening
mist.

“Mais que faire! que faire!” cried Nicolas, catching at somebody’s
shoulder for support without seeing whose it was. It was Michel’s, who had
not stirred from his side since he had first clasped his arm. Michel’s
face was as white as the mother’s; but there was a resolute light in his
eyes that was not to be seen in hers.

“Nothing can be done,” answered one of the oldest men in answer to
Nicolas’s cry, “nothing, nothing! We do not know where the child is lost.
See! there are leagues and leagues of sand; and one might wander miles
away from where the poor little creature is at this instant. The great
archangel St. Michel protect her!”

“I will go,” said the mother, lifting herself up; and, raising her voice,
she called loudly, with a cry that rang and echoed against the walls,
“Phine! Phine! my little Phine, come back to thy poor mother!” But there
was no answer, except the sobs and prayers of the women and children
clustering behind her.

“Thou canst not go!” exclaimed Nicolas; “there are our other little ones
to think of; nor can I leave thee and them. My God! is there then no one
who will go and seek my little Delphine?”

“I will go,” answered Michel, standing out from among the crowd, and
facing it with his white face and resolute eyes; “there is only one among
you all upon the Mont who will miss me. I leave my mother to your care.
There is no time for me to bid her adieu. If I come back alive, well! if I
perish, that will be well also!”

Even then there was no cordiality of response on the hearts of his old
friends and neighbours. The superstition and prejudice of long years could
not be broken down in one moment and by one act of self-sacrifice. They
watched Michel as he laid his full creel down from his shoulders, and
threw across them the strong square net with which he fished in the ebbing
tide. His silence was no less expressive than theirs. Without a sound he
passed away barefooted down the rude causeway. His face, as the sun shone
on it, was set and resolute with a determination to face the end, whatever
the end might be. He might have so trodden the path to Calvary.

He longed to speak to them, to say adieu to them; but he waited in vain
for one voice to break the silence. He turned round before he was too far
away, and saw them still clustered without the gate; every one of them
known to him from his boyhood, the story of whose lives had been bound up
with his own and formed a part of his history. They were all there, except
his mother, who would soon hear what peril of the sea and peril of the
night he was about to face. Tears dimmed his eyes, and made the group grow
indistinct, as though the mist had already gathered between him and them.
Then he quickened his steps, and the people of Mont St. Michel lost sight
of him behind a great buttress of the ramparts.

But for a time Michel could still see the Mont as he hurried along its
base, going westward, where the most treacherous sands lie. His home was
on the eastern side, and he could see nothing of it. But the great rock
rose up precipitously above him, and the noble architecture upon its
highest point glowed with a ruddy tint in the setting light. As he
trampled along no sound could be heard but the distant sigh of the sea,
and the low, sad sough of the sand as his bare feet trod it. The fog
before him was not dense, only a light haze, deceptive and beguiling; for
here and there he turned aside, fancying he could see Delphine, but as he
drew nearer to the spot he discovered nothing but a post driven into the
sand. There was no fear that he should lose himself upon the bewildering
level, for he knew his way as well as if the sand had been laid out in
well-defined tracks. His dread was lest he should not find Delphine soon
enough to escape from the tide, which would surely overwhelm them both.

He scarcely knew how the time sped by, but the sun had sunk below the
horizon, and he had quite lost the Mont in the fog. The brown sand and the
gray dank mist were all that he could see, yet still he plodded on
westward, toward the sea, calling into the growing darkness. At last he
caught the sound of a child’s sobs and crying, which ceased for a moment
when he turned in that direction and shouted, “Phine!” Calling to one
another, it was not long before he saw the child wandering forlornly and
desolately in the mist. She ran sobbing into his open arms, and Michel
lifted her up and held her to his heart with a strange rapture.

“It is thou that hast found me,” she said, clinging closely to him. “Carry
me back to my mother. I am safe now, quite safe. Did the archangel St.
Michel send thee?”

There was not a moment to be lost; Michel knew that full well. The moan of
the sea was growing louder every minute, though he could not see its
advancing line. There was no spot upon the sand that would not be covered
before another hour was gone, and there was barely time, if enough, to get
back to the Mont. He could not waste time or breath in talking to the
child he held fast in his arms. A pale gleam of moonlight shone through
the vapour, but of little use to him save to throw a ghostly glimmer
across the sands. He strode hurriedly along, breathing hardly through his
teeth and clasping Delphine so fast that she grew frightened at his
silence and haste.

“Where art thou taking me, Michel le diable?” she said, beginning
to struggle in his arms. “Let me down; let me down, I tell thee! Maman
has said I must never look at thee. Thou shalt not carry me any farther.”

There was strength enough in the child and her vehement struggles to free
herself to hinder Michel in his desperate haste. He was obliged to stand
still for a minute or two to pacify her, speaking in his quiet, patient
voice, which she knew so well.

“Be tranquil, my little Phine,” he said. “I am come to save thee. As the
Lord Jesus came to seek and to save those who are lost, so am I come to
seek thee and carry thee back to thy mother. It is dark here, my child,
and the sea is rising quickly, quickly. But thou shalt be safe. Be
tranquil, and let me make haste back to the Mont.”

“Did the Lord save thee in this manner?” asked Delphine, eagerly.

“Yes, He saved me like this,” answered Michel. “He laid down His life for
mine. Now thou must let me save thee.”

“I will be good and wise,” said the child, putting her arms again about
his neck, while he strode on, striving if possible to regain the few
moments that had been lost. But it was not possible. He knew that before
he had gone another kilometre, when through the mist there rose before him
the dark, colossal form of the Mont, but too far away still for them both
to reach it in safety. Thirty minutes were essential for him to reach the
gates with his burden, but in little more than twenty the sea would be
dashing round the walls. The tide was yet out of sight and the sands were
dry, but it would rush in before many minutes, and the swiftest runner
with no weight to carry could not outrun it. Both could not be saved;
could either of them? He had foreseen this danger and provided for it.

“My little Phine,” he said, “thou wilt not be afraid if I place thee where
thou wilt be quite safe from the sea? See, here is my net! I will put thee
within it, and hang it on one of these strong stakes, and I will stand
below thee. Thou wilt be brave and good. Let us be quick, very quick. It
will be like a swing for thee, and thou wilt not be afraid so long as I
stand below thee.”

Even while he spoke he was busy fastening the corners of his net securely
over the stake, hanging it above the reach of the last tide-mark. Delphine
watched him laughing. It seemed only another pleasant adventure, like
wandering with him upon the ramparts, or taking shelter in the turret. The
net held her comfortably, and by stooping down she could touch with her
outstretched hand the head of Michel. He stood below her, his arms fast
locked about the stake, and his face uplifted to her in the faint light.

“Phine,” he said, “thou must not be afraid when the water lies below thee,
even if I do not speak. Thou art safe.”

“Art thou safe also, Michel?” she asked.

“Yes, I am quite safe also,” he answered; “but I shall be very quiet. I
shall not speak to thee. Yes; the Lord Christ is caring for me, as I for
thee. He bound Himself to the cross as I bind myself here. This is my
cross, Delphine. I understand it better now. He loved us and gave Himself
for us. Tell them to-morrow what I say to thee. I am as safe as thou art,
tranquil and happy.”

“We shall not be drowned!” said Delphine, half in confidence and half in
dread of the sea, which was surging louder and louder through the
darkness.

“Not thou!” he answered, cheerily. “But, Phine, tell them to-morrow that I
shall nevermore be solitary and sad. I leave thee now, and then I shall be
with Christ. I wish I could have spoken to them, but my heart and tongue
were heavy. Hark! there is the bell ringing.”

The bell which is tolled at night, when travellers are crossing the sands,
to guide them to the Mont, flung its clear, sharp notes down from the
great indistinct rock, looming through the dusk.

“It is like a voice to me, the voice of a friend; but it is too late!”
murmured Michel. “Art thou happy, Delphine, my little one? When I cease to
speak to thee wilt thou not be afraid? I shall be asleep, perhaps. Say thy
paternoster now, for it is growing late with me.”

The bell was still toiling, but with a quick, hurried movement, as if
those who rang it were fevered with impatience. The roaring of the tide,
as it now poured in rapidly over the plain, almost drowned its clang.

“Touch me with thy little hand, touch me quickly!” cried Michel. “Remember
to tell them to-morrow that I loved them all always, and I would have
given myself for them as I do for thee. Adieu, my little Phine. Come
quickly, Lord Jesus!”

The child told afterward that the water rose so fast that she dared not
look at it, but shut her eyes as it spread, white and shimmering, in the
moonlight all around her. She began to repeat her paternoster, but she
forgot how the words came. But she heard Michel, in a loud clear voice,
saying “Our Father”; only he also seemed to forget the words, for he did
not say more than “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive—.” Then
he became quite silent, and when she spoke to him, after a long while, he
did not answer her. She supposed he had fallen asleep, as he had said, but
she could not help crying and calling to him again and again. The
sea-gulls flew past her screaming, but there was no sound of any voice to
speak to her. In spite of what he had said to her beforehand she grew
frightened, and thought it was because she had been unkind to Michel le
diable that she was left there alone, with the sea swirling to and fro
beneath her.

It was not for more than two or three hours that Delphine hung cradled in
Michel’s net, for the tide does not lie long round the Mont St. Michel,
and flows out again as swiftly as it comes in. The people followed it out,
scattering over the sands in the forlorn hope of finding the dead bodies
of Michel Lorio and the child, for they had no expectation of meeting with
either of them alive. At last two or three of them heard the voice of
Delphine, who saw the glimmer of their lanterns upon the sands, and called
shrilly and loudly for succour.

They found her swinging safely in her net, untouched by the water. But
Michel had sunk down upon his knees, though his arms were still fastened
about the stake. His head had fallen forward upon his breast, and his
thick wet hair covered his face. They lifted him without a word spoken. He
had saved Delphine’s life at the cost of his own.

All the townspeople were down at the gate, waiting for the return of those
who had gone out to seek for the dead. The moon had risen above the fog,
and shone clearly down upon them. Delphine’s mother, with her younger
children about her, sat on the stone where she had been sitting when
Michel set out on his perilous quest. She and the other women could see a
crowd of the men coming back, carrying some burden among them. But as they
drew near to the gate, Delphine sprang forward from among them and ran and
threw herself into her mother’s arms. “A miracle!” cried some voices amid
the crowd; a miracle wrought by their patron St. Michel. If Michel Lorio
were safe, surely he would become again a good Christian, and return to
his ancient faith. But Michel Lorio was dead, and all that could be done
for him was to carry his dead body home to his paralytic mother, and lay
it upon his bed in the little loft where he had spent so many hours of
sorrowful loneliness.

It was a perplexing problem to the simple people. Some said that Michel
had been permitted to save the child by a diabolic agency which had failed
him when he sought to save himself. Others maintained that it was no other
than the great archangel St. Michel who had securely fastened the net upon
the stake and so preserved Delphine, while the heretic was left to perish.
A few thought secretly, and whispered it in fear, that Michel had done a
noble deed, and won heaven thereby. The cure, who came to look upon the
calm dead face, opened his lips after long and profound thought:

“If this man had been a Christian,” he said, “he would have been a saint
and a martyr.”

A PERILOUS AMOUR, By S. J. Weyman

AN EPISODE ADAPTED FROM THE MEMOIRS OF MAXIMILIAN DE BETHUNE, DUKE OF
SULLY

Such in brief were the reasons which would have led me, had I followed the
promptings of my own sagacity, to oppose the return of the Jesuits. It
remains for me only to add that these arguments lost all their weight when
set in the balance against the safety of my beloved master. To this plea
the king himself for once condescended, and found those who were most
strenuous to dissuade him the least able to refute it; since the more a
man abhorred the Jesuits, the more ready he was to allow that the king’s
life could not be safe from their practices while the edict against them
remained in force. The support which I gave to the king on this occasion
exposed me to the utmost odium of my co-religionists, and was in later
times ill-requited by the order. But a remarkable incident that occurred
while the matter was still under debate, and which I now for the first
time make public, proved beyond question the wisdom of my conduct.

Fontainebleau being at this time in the hands of the builders, the king
had gone to spend his Easter at Chantilly, whither Mademoiselle
d’Entragues had also repaired. During his absence from Paris I was seated
one morning in my library at the Arsenal, when I was informed that Father
Cotton, the same who at Metz had presented a petition from the Jesuits,
and who was now in Paris pursuing that business under a safe-conduct,
craved leave to pay his respects to me. I was not surprised, for I had
been a little before this of some service to him. The pages of the court,
while loitering outside the Louvre, had raised a tumult in the streets,
and grievously insulted the father by shouting after him, “Old Wool! Old
Cotton!” in imitation of the Paris street cry. For this the king, at my
instigation, had caused them to be soundly whipped, and I supposed that
the Jesuit now desired to thank me for advice—given, in truth,
rather out of regard to discipline than to him. So I bade them admit him.

His first words, uttered before my secretaries could retire, indicated
that this was indeed his errand; and for a few moments I listened to such
statements from him and made such answers myself as became our several
positions. Then, as he did not go, I began to conceive the notion that he
had come with a further purpose; and his manner, which seemed on this
occasion to lack ease, though he was well gifted with skill and address,
confirmed the notion. I waited, therefore, with patience, and presently he
named his Majesty with many expressions of devotion to his person. “I
trust,” said he, “that the air of Fontainebleau agrees with him, M. de
Rosny?”

“You mean, good father, of Chantilly?” I answered.

“Ah, to be sure!” he rejoined, hastily. “He is, of course, at Chantilly.”

After that he rose to depart, but was delayed by the raptures into which
he fell at sight of the fire, which, the weather being cold for the time
of year, I had caused to be lit. “It burns so brightly,” said he, “that it
must be of boxwood, M. de Rosny.”

“Of boxwood?” I exclaimed, in surprise.

“Ay, is it not of boxwood?” quoth he, looking at me with much simplicity.

“Certainly not!” I made answer, rather peevishly. “Who ever heard of
people burning boxwood in Paris, father?”

He apologised for his ignorance—which was indeed matter of wonder—on
the ground of his southern birth, and took his departure, leaving me in
much doubt as to the real purport of his visit. I was indeed more troubled
by the uncertainty I felt than another less conversant with the methods of
the Jesuits might have been, for I knew that it was their habit to let
drop a word where they dared not speak plainly, and I felt myself put on
my mettle to interpret the father’s hint. My perplexities were increased
by the belief that he would not have intervened in any matter of small
moment, and by the conviction, which grew upon me apace, that while I
stood idle before the hearth my dearest interests and those of France were
at stake.

“Michel,” I said at last, addressing the doyen of my secretaries,
who chanced to be a Provencal, “have you ever seen a boxwood fire?”

He replied respectfully, but with some show of surprise, that he had not,
adding that that wood was rendered so valuable to the turner by its
hardness that few people would be extravagant enough to use it for fuel. I
assented, and felt the more certain that the Jesuit’s remark contained a
hidden meaning. The only other clue I had consisted in the apparent
mistake the father had made as to the king’s residence, and this might
have been dropped from him in pure inadvertence. Yet I was inclined to
think it intentional, and construed it as implying that the matter
concerned the king personally. Which the more alarmed me.

I passed the day in great anxiety, but toward evening, acting on a sudden
inspiration, I sent La Trape, my valet, a trusty fellow who had saved my
life at Cahors, to the Three Pigeons, a large inn in the suburbs, at which
such travellers from North to South as did not wish to enter the city were
accustomed to change horses and sometimes to sleep. Acquitting himself of
the commission I had given him with his usual adroitness, he quickly
returned with the news that a traveller of rank had passed through three
days before, having sent in advance to order relays there and at Essonnes.
La Trape reported that the gentleman had remained in his coach, and that
none of the inn servants had seen his face.

“And he had companions?” I said. My mind had not failed already to
conceive a natural suspicion.

“Only one, your Grace. The rest were servants.”

“And that one?”

“A man in the yard fancied that he recognised M. de la Varenne.”

“Ah!” I said no more. My agitation was indeed such that, before giving
reins to it, I bade La Trape withdraw. I could scarcely believe that,
perfectly acquainted as the king was with the plots which Spain and the
Catholics were daily weaving for his life, and possessing such unavowed
but powerful enemies among the great lords as Tremouille and Bouillon, to
say nothing of Mademoiselle d’Entragues’s half-brother, the Count of
Auvergne—I could hardly believe that with this knowledge his Majesty
had been so foolhardy as to travel without guards or attendance to
Fontainebleau. And yet I now felt an absolute certainty that this was the
case. The presence of La Varenne also, the confidant of his intrigues,
informed me of the cause of this wild journey, convincing me that his
Majesty had given way to the sole weakness of his nature, and was bent on
one of those adventures of gallantry which had been more becoming in the
Prince of Bearn than in the king of France. Neither was I at a loss to
guess the object of his pursuit. It had been lately whispered in the court
that the king had seen and fallen in love with his mistress’s younger
sister, Susette d’Entragues, whose home at Malesherbes lay but three
leagues from Fontainebleau, on the edge of the forest. This placed the
king’s imprudence in a stronger light, for he had scarcely in France a
more dangerous enemy than her brother Auvergne; nor had the immense sums
which he had settled on the elder sister satisfied the mean avarice or
conciliated the brutish hostility of her father.

Apprised of all this, I saw that Father Cotton had desired to communicate
it to me. But his motive I found it less easy to divine. It might have
been a wish to balk this new passion through my interference, and at the
same time to expose me to the risk of his Majesty’s anger. Or it might
simply have been a desire to avert danger from the king’s person. At any
rate, constant to my rule of ever preferring my master’s interest to his
favour, I sent for Maignan, my equerry, and bade him have an equipage
ready at dawn.

Accordingly at that hour next morning, attended only by La Trape, with a
groom, a page, and four Swiss, I started, giving out that I was bound for
Sully to inspect that demesne, which had formerly been the property of my
family, and of which the refusal had just been offered to me. Under cover
of this destination I was enabled to reach La Ferte Alais unsuspected.
There, pretending that the motion of the coach fatigued me, I mounted the
led horse, without which I never travelled, and bidding La Trape accompany
me, gave orders to the others to follow at their leisure to Pethiviers,
where I proposed to stay the night.

La Ferte Alais, on the borders of the forest, is some five leagues
westward of Fontainebleau, and as far north of Malesherbes, with which
last it is connected by a highroad. Having disclosed my intentions to La
Trape, however, I presently left this road and struck into a path which
promised to conduct us in the right direction. But the denseness of the
undergrowth, and the huge piles of gray rocks which lie everywhere strewn
about the forest, made it difficult to keep for any time in a straight
line. After being two hours in the saddle we concluded that we had lost
our way, and were confirmed in this on reaching a clearing, and seeing
before us a small inn, which La Trape recognised as standing about a
league and a half on the forest side of Malesherbes.

We still had ample time to reach Fontainebleau by nightfall, but before
proceeding it was absolutely necessary that our horses should have rest.
Dismounting, therefore, I bade La Trape see the sorrel well baited.
Observing that the inn was a poor place, and no one coming to wait upon
me, I entered it of my own motion, and found myself at once in a large
room better furnished with company than accommodation. Three men, who had
the appearance of such reckless swaggering blades as are generally to be
found drinking in the inns on the outskirts of Paris, and who come not
unfrequently to their ends at Montfaucon, were tippling and playing cards
at a table near the door. They looked up sullenly at my entrance, but
refrained from saluting me, which, as I was plainly dressed and much
stained by travel, was in some degree pardonable. By the fire, partaking
of a coarse meal, was a fourth man of so singular an appearance that I
must needs describe him. He was of great height and extreme leanness. His
face matched his form, for it was long and thin, terminating in a small
peaked beard which, like his hair and mustachios, was as white as snow.
With all this, his eyes glowed with much of the fire of youth, and his
brown complexion and sinewy hands seemed still to indicate robust health.
He was dressed in garments which had once been fashionable, but now bore
marks of long and rough usage, and I remarked that the point of his sword,
which, as he sat, trailed on the stones behind him, had worn its way
through the scabbard. Notwithstanding these signs of poverty, he saluted
me with the ease and politeness of a gentleman, and bade me with much
courtesy to share his table and the fire. Accordingly I drew up, and
called for a bottle of the best wine, being minded to divert myself with
him.

I was little prepared, however, for the turn his conversation took, and
the furious tirade into which he presently broke, the object of which
proved to be no other than myself! I do not know that I have ever cut so
whimsical a figure as while hearing my name loaded with reproaches; but,
being certain that he did not know me, I waited patiently, and soon
learned both who he was, and the grievance which he was on his way to lay
before the king. His name was Boisrose, and he had been the leader in that
gallant capture of Fecamp, which took place while I was in Normandy as the
king’s representative. His grievance was that, notwithstanding promises in
my letters, he had been deprived of the government of the place.

“He leads the king by the ear!” he declaimed loudly, in an accent which
marked him for a Gascon. “That villain of a De Rosny! But I will show him
up! I will trounce him!” With that he drew the hilt of his long rapier to
the front with a gesture so truculent that the three bullies, who had
stopped to laugh at him, resumed their game in disorder.

Notwithstanding his hatred for me, I was pleased to meet with a man of so
singular a temper, whom I also knew to be truly courageous; and I was
willing to amuse myself further with him. “But,” I said, modestly, “I have
had some affairs with M. de Rosny, and I have never found him cheat me.”

“Do not deceive yourself!” he roared, slapping the table. “He is a
rascal!”

“Yet,” I ventured to reply, “I have heard that in many respects he is not
a bad minister.”

“He is a villain!” he repeated, so loudly as to drown what I would have
added. “Do not tell me otherwise. But rest assured! be happy, sir! I will
make the king see him in his true colours! Rest content, sir! I will
trounce him! He has to do with Armand de Boisrose!”

Seeing that he was not open to argument,—for, indeed, being opposed,
he grew exceedingly warm,—I asked him by what channel he intended to
approach the king, and learned that here he felt a difficulty, since he
had neither a friend at court nor money to buy one. Being assured that he
was an honest fellow, and knowing that the narrative of our rencontre and
its sequel would vastly amuse his Majesty, who loved a jest of this kind,
I advised Boisrose to go boldly to the king, which, thanking me as
profusely as he had before reproached me, he agreed to do. With that I
rose to depart.

At the last moment it occurred to me to try upon him the shibboleth which
in Father Cotton’s mouth had so mystified me.

“This fire burns brightly,” I said, kicking the logs together with my
riding-boot. “It must be of boxwood.”

“Of what, sir?” quoth he, politely.

“Of boxwood, to be sure,” I replied, in a louder tone.

“My certes!” he exclaimed. “They do not burn boxwood in this country.
Those are larch trimmings—neither more nor less!”

While he wondered at my ignorance, I was pleased to discover his, and so
far I had lost my pains. But it did not escape me that the three gamesters
had ceased to play and were listening intently to our conversation.
Moreover, as I moved to the door, they followed me with their eyes; and
when I turned, after riding a hundred yards, I found that they had come to
the door and were still gazing after us.

This prevented me at once remarking that a hound which had which had been
lying before the fire had accompanied us, and was now running in front,
now gambolling round us, as the manner of dogs is. When, however, after
riding about two thirds of a league, we came to a place where the roads
forked, I had occasion particularly to notice the hound, for, choosing one
of the paths, it stood in the mouth of it, wagging its tail, and inviting
us to take that road; and this so pertinaciously that, though the
directions we had received at the inn would have led us to prefer the
other, we determined to follow the dog as the more trustworthy guide.

We had proceeded about four hundred paces when La Trape pointed out that
the path was growing more narrow and showed few signs of being used. So
certain did it seem—though the dog still ran confidently ahead—that
we were again astray, that I was about to draw rein and return, when I
discovered with some emotion that the undergrowth on the right of the path
had assumed the character of a thick hedge of box. Though less prone than
most men to put faith in omens, I accepted this as one, and,
notwithstanding that it wanted but an hour of sunset, I rode on steadily,
remarking that, with each turn in the woodland path, the scrub on my left
also gave place to the sturdy tree which had been in my mind all day.
Finally we found ourselves passing through an alley of box,—which,
no long time before, had been clipped and dressed,—until a final
turn brought me into a cul-de-sac, a kind of arbor, carpeted with grass,
and so thickly set about as to afford no exit save by the entrance. Here
the dog placidly stood and wagged its tail, looking up at us.

I must confess that this termination of the adventure seemed so
surprising, and the evening light shining on the walls of green round us
was so full of a solemn quiet, that I was not surprised to hear La Trape
mutter a short prayer. For my part, assured that something more than
chance had brought me hither, I dismounted, and spoke encouragement to the
hound; but it only leaped upon me. Then I walked round the enclosure, and
presently remarked, close to the hedge, three small patches where the
grass was slightly trodden down. Another glance told me much, for I saw
that at these places the hedge, about three feet from the ground, bore
traces of the axe. Choosing the nearest spot, I stooped, until my eyes
were level with the hole thus made, and discovered that I was looking
through a funnel skilfully cut in the wall of box. At my end the opening
was rather larger than a man’s face; at the other end about as large as
the palm of the hand. The funnel rose gradually, so that I took the
further extremity of it to be about seven feet from the ground, and here
it disclosed a feather dangling on a spray. From the light falling
strongly on this, I judged it to be not in the hedge, but a pace or two
from it on the hither side of another fence of box. On examining the
remaining loopholes I discovered that they bore upon the same feather.

My own mind was at once made up, but I bade my valet go through the same
investigation, and then asked him whether he had ever seen an ambush of
this kind laid for game. He replied at once that the shot would pass over
the tallest stag; and, fortified by this, I mounted without saying more,
and we retraced our steps. The hound presently slipped away, and without
further adventure we reached Fontainebleau a little after sunset.

I expected to be received by the king with coldness and displeasure, but
it chanced that a catarrh had kept him within doors all day, and, unable
to hunt or to visit his new flame, he had been at leisure in this palace
without a court to consider the imprudence he was committing. He received
me, therefore, with the hearty laugh of a school-boy detected in a petty
fault; and as I hastened to relate to him some of the things which M. de
Boisrose had said of the Baron de Rosny, I soon had the gratification of
perceiving that my presence was not taken amiss. His Majesty gave orders
that bedding should be furnished for my pavilion, and that his household
should wait on me, and himself sent me from his table a couple of chickens
and a fine melon, bidding me at the same time to come to him when I had
supped.

I did so, and found him alone in his closet, awaiting me with impatience,
for he had already divined that I had not made this journey merely to
reproach him. Before informing him, however, of my suspicions, I craved
leave to ask him one or two questions, and, in particular, whether he had
been in the habit of going to Malesherbes daily.

“Daily,” he admitted, with a grimace. “What more, grand master?”

“By what road, sire?”

“I have commonly hunted in the morning and visited Malesherbes at midday.
I have returned as a rule by the bridle-path, which crosses the Rock of
the Serpents.”

“Patience, sir, one moment,” I said. “Does that path run anywhere through
a plantation of box?”

“To be sure,” he answered, without hesitation. “About half a mile on this
side of the rock it skirts Madame Catherine’s maze.”

Thereon I told the king without reserve all that had happened. He listened
with the air of apparent carelessness which he always assumed when the
many plots against his life were under discussion; but at the end he
embraced me again and again with tears in his eyes.

“France is beholden to you,” he said. “I have never had, nor shall have,
such another servant as you, Rosny! The three ruffians at the inn,” he
continued, “are the tools, of course, and the hound has been in the habit
of accompanying them to the spot. Yesterday, I remember, I walked by that
place with the bridle on my arm.”

“By a special providence, sire,” I said, gravely.

“It is true,” he answered, crossing himself, a thing I had never yet known
him to do in private. “But now, who is the craftsman who has contrived
this pretty plot? Tell me that, grand master.”

On this point, however, though I had my suspicions, I begged leave to be
excused speaking until I had slept upon it. “Heaven forbid,” I said, “that
I should expose any man to your Majesty’s resentment without cause. The
wrath of kings is the forerunner of death.”

“I have not heard,” the king answered, drily, “that the Duke of Bouillon
has called in a leech yet.”

Before retiring I learned that his Majesty had with him a score of light
horse, whom La Varenne had requisitioned from Melun, and that some of
these had each day awaited him at Malesherbes, and returned with him.
Further, that Henry had been in the habit of wearing, when riding back in
the evening, a purple cloak over his hunting-suit; a fact well known, I
felt sure, to the assassins, who, unseen and in perfect safety, could fire
at the exact moment when the cloak obscured the feather, and could then
make their escape, secured by the stout wall of box, from immediate
pursuit.

I was aroused in the morning by La Varenne coming to my bedside and
bidding me hasten to the king. I did so, and found his Majesty already in
his boots and walking on the terrace with Coquet, his master of the
household, Vitry, La Varenne, and a gentleman unknown to me. On seeing me
he dismissed them, and, while I was still a great way off, called out,
chiding me for my laziness; then taking me by the hand in the most
obliging manner, he made me walk up and down with him, while he told me
what further thoughts he had of this affair; and, hiding nothing from me,
even as he bade me speak to him whatever I thought without reserve, he
required to know whether I suspected that the Entragues family were
cognizant of this.

“I cannot say, sire,” I answered, prudently.

“But you suspect?”

“In your Majesty’s cause I suspect all,” I replied.

He sighed, and seeing that my eyes wandered to the group of gentlemen who
had betaken themselves to the terrace steps, and were thence watching us,
he asked me if I would answer for them. “For Vitry, who sleeps at my feet
when I lie alone? For Coquet?”

“For three of them I will, sire,” I answered, firmly. “The fourth I do not
know.”

“He is M. Louis d’Entragues.”

“Ah! the count of Auvergne’s half-brother?” I muttered. “And lately
returned from service in Savoy? I do not know him, your Majesty. I will
answer to-morrow.”

“And to-day?” the king asked, with impatience.

Thereupon I begged him to act as he had done each day since his arrival at
Fontainebleau—to hunt in the morning, to take his midday meal at
Malesherbes, to talk to all as if he had no suspicion; only on his return
to take any road save that which passed the Rock of the Serpents.

The king turning to rejoin the others, I found that their attention was no
longer directed to us, but to a singular figure which had made its
appearance on the skirts of the group, and was seemingly prevented from
joining it outright only by the evident merriment with which three of the
four courtiers regarded it. The fourth, M. d’Entragues, did not seem to be
equally diverted with the stranger’s quaint appearance, nor did I fail to
notice, being at the moment quick to perceive the slightest point in his
conduct, that, while the others were nudging one another, his countenance,
darkened by an Italian sun, gloomed on the new-comer with an aspect of
angry discomfiture. On his side, M. de Boisrose—for he it was, the
aged fashion of his dress more conspicuous than ever—stood eyeing
the group in mingled pride and resentment, until, aware of his Majesty’s
approach, and seeing me in intimate converse with him, he joyfully stepped
forward, a look of relief taking place of all others on his countenance.

“Ha, well met!” quoth the king in my ear. “It is your friend of yesterday.
Now we will have some sport.”

Accordingly, the old soldier approaching with many low bows, the king
spoke to him graciously, and bade him say what he sought. It happened then
as I had expected. Boisrose, after telling the king his name, turned to me
and humbly begged that I would explain his complaint, which I consented to
do, and did as follows:

“This, sire,” I said, gravely, “is an old and brave soldier, who formerly
served your Majesty to good purpose in Normandy; but he has been cheated
out of the recompense which he there earned by the trickery and chicanery
of one of your Majesty’s counsellors, the Baron de Rosny.”

I could not continue, for the courtiers, on hearing this from my mouth,
and on discovering that the stranger’s odd appearance was but a prelude to
the real diversion, could not restrain their mirth. The king, concealing
his own amusement, turned to them with an angry air, and bade them be
silent; and the Gascon, encouraged by this, and by the bold manner in
which I had stated his grievance, scowled at them gloriously.

“He alleges, sire,” I continued, with the same gravity, “that the Baron de
Rosny, after promising him the government of Fecamp, bestowed it on
another, being bribed to do so, and has besides been guilty of many base
acts which make him unworthy of your Majesty’s confidence. That, I think,
is your complaint, M. de Boisrose?” I concluded, turning to the soldier,
whom my deep seriousness so misled that he took up the story, and, pouring
out his wrongs, did not fail to threaten to trounce me, or to add that I
was a villain!

He might have said more, but at this the courtiers, perceiving that the
king broke into a smile, lost all control over themselves, and, giving
vent suddenly to loud peals of laughter, clasped one another by the
shoulders, and reeled to and fro in an ecstasy of enjoyment. This led the
king to give way also, and he laughed heartily, clapping me again and
again on the back; so that, in fine, there were only two serious persons
present—the poor Boisrose, who took all for lunatics, and myself,
who began to think that perhaps the jest had been carried far enough.

My master presently saw this, and, collecting himself, turned to the
amazed Gascon.

“Your complaint is one,” he said, “which should not be lightly made. Do
you know the Baron de Rosny?”

Boisrose, by this time vastly mystified, said he did not.

“Then,” said the king, “I will give you an opportunity of becoming
acquainted with him. I shall refer your complaint to him, and he will
decide upon it. More,” he continued, raising his hand for silence as
Boisrose, starting forward, would have appealed to him, “I will introduce
you to him now. This is the Baron de Rosny.”

The old soldier glared at me for a moment with starting eyeballs, and a
dreadful despair seemed to settle on his face. He threw himself on his
knees before the king.

“Then, sire,” said he, in a heartrending voice, “am I ruined! My six
children must starve, and my young wife die by the roadside!”

“That,” answered the king, gravely, “must be for the Baron de Rosny to
decide. I leave you to your audience.”

He made a sign to the others, and, followed by them, walked slowly along
the terrace; the while Boisrose, who had risen to his feet, stood looking
after him like one demented, shaking, and muttering that it was a cruel
jest, and that he had bled for the king, and the king made sport of him.

Presently I touched him on the arm.

“Come, have you nothing to say to me, M. de Boisrose?” I asked, quietly.
“You are a brave soldier, and have done France service; why then need you
fear? The Baron de Rosny is one man, the king’s minister is another. It is
the latter who speaks to you now. The office of lieutenant-general of the
ordnance in Normandy is empty. It is worth twelve thousand livres by the
year. I appoint you to it.”

He answered that I mocked him, and that he was going mad, so that it was
long before I could persuade him that I was in earnest. When I at last
succeeded, his gratitude knew no bounds, and he thanked me again and again
with the tears running down his face.

“What I have done for you,” I said, modestly, “is the reward of your
bravery. I ask only that you will not another time think that they who
rule kingdoms are as those gay popinjays yonder.”

In a transport of delight he reiterated his offers of service, and,
feeling sure that I had now gained him completely, I asked him on a sudden
where he had seen Louis d’Entragues before. In two words the truth came
out. He had observed him on the previous day in conference at the forest
inn with the three bullies whom I had remarked there. I was not surprised
at this; D’Entragues’s near kinship to the Count of Auvergne, and the
mingled feelings with which I knew that the family regarded Henry,
preparing me to expect treachery in that quarter. Moreover, the nature of
the ambush was proof that its author resided in the neighbourhood and was
intimately acquainted with the forest. I should have carried this
information at once to my master, but I learned that he had already
started, and thus baffled, and believing that his affection for
Mademoiselle d’Entragues, if not for her sister, would lead him to act
with undue leniency, I conceived and arranged a plan of my own.

About noon, therefore, I set out as if for a ride, attended by La Trape
only, but at some distance from the palace we were joined by Boisrose,
whom I had bidden to be at that point well armed and mounted. Thus
reinforced, for the Gascon was still strong, and in courage a Grillon, I
proceeded to Malesherbes by a circuitous route which brought me within
sight of the gates about the middle of the afternoon. I then halted under
cover of the trees, and waited until I saw the king, attended by several
ladies and gentlemen, and followed by eight troopers, issue from the
chateau. His Majesty was walking, his horse being led behind him; and
seeing this I rode out and approached the party as if I had that moment
arrived to meet the king.

It would not ill become me on this occasion to make some reflections on
the hollowness of court life, which has seldom been better exemplified
than in the scene before me. The sun was low, but its warm beams, falling
aslant on the gaily dressed group at the gates and on the flowered
terraces and gray walls behind them, seemed to present a picture at once
peaceful and joyous. Yet I knew that treachery and death were lurking in
the midst, and it was only by an effort that, as I rode up, I could make
answer to the thousand obliging things with which I was greeted, and of
which not the least polite were said by M. d’Entragues and his son. I took
pains to observe Mademoiselle Susette, a beautiful girl not out of her
teens, but noways comparable, as it seemed to me, in expression and
vivacity, with her famous sister. She was walking beside the king, her
hands full of flowers, and her face flushed with excitement and timidity,
and I came quickly to the conclusion that she knew nothing of what was
intended by her family, who, having made the one sister the means of
gratifying their avarice, were now baiting the trap of their revenge with
the other.

Henry parted from her at length, and mounted his horse amid a ripple of
laughter and compliments, D’Entragues holding the stirrup and his son the
cloak. I observed that the latter, as I had expected, was prepared to
accompany us, which rendered my plan more feasible. Our road lay for a
league in the direction of the Rock of the Serpents, the track which
passed the latter presently diverging from it. For some distance we rode
along in easy talk, but, on approaching the point of separation, the king
looked at me with a whimsical air, as though he would lay on me the burden
of finding an excuse for avoiding the shorter way home. I had foreseen
this, and looked round to ascertain the position of our company. I found
that La Varenne and D’Entragues were close behind us, while the troopers,
with La Trape and Boisrose, were a hundred paces farther to the rear, and
Vitry and Coquet had dropped out of sight. This being so, I suddenly
reined in my horse so as to back it into that of D’Entragues, and then
wheeled round on the latter, taking care to be between him and the king.

“M. Louis d’Entragues,” I said, dropping the mask and addressing him with
all the scorn and detestation which I felt, and which he deserved, “your
plot is discovered! If you would save your life confess to his Majesty
here and now all you know, and throw yourself on his mercy!”

I confess that I had failed to take into account the pitch to which his
nerves would be strung at such a time, and had expected to produce a
greater effect than followed my words. His hand went indeed to his breast,
but it was hard to say which was the more discomposed, La Varenne or he.
And the manner in which, with scorn and defiance, he flung back my
accusation in my teeth, lacked neither vigour nor the semblance of
innocence. While Henry was puzzled, La Varenne was appalled. I saw that I
had gone too far, or not far enough, and at once calling into my face and
form all the sternness in my power, I bade the traitor remain where he
was, then turning to his Majesty I craved leave to speak to him apart.

He hesitated, looking from me to D’Entragues with an air of displeasure
which embraced us both, but in the end, without permitting M. Louis to
speak, he complied, and, going aside with me, bade me, with coldness,
speak out.

As soon, however, as I had repeated to him Boisrose’s words, his face
underwent a change, for he, too, had remarked the discomfiture which the
latter’s appearance had caused D’Entragues in the morning.

“Ha! the villain!” he said. “I do not now think you precipitate. Arrest
him at once, but do him no harm!”

“If he resist, sire?” I asked.

“He will not,” the king answered. “And in no case harm him! You understand
me?”

I bowed, having my own thoughts on the subject, and the king, without
looking again at D’Entragues, rode quickly away. M. Louis tried to follow,
and cried loudly after him, but I thrust my horse in the way, and bade him
consider himself a prisoner; at the same time requesting La Varenne, with
Vitry and Coquet, who had come up and were looking on like men
thunderstruck, to take four of the guards and follow the king.

“Then, sir, what do you intend to do with me?” D’Entragues asked, the air
of fierceness with which he looked from me to the six men who remained
barely disguising his apprehensions.

“That depends, M. Louis,” I replied, recurring to my usual tone of
politeness, “on your answers to three questions.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Ask them,” he said, curtly.

“Do you deny that you have laid an ambush for the king on the road which
passes the Rock of the Serpents?”

“Absolutely.”

“Or that you were yesterday at an inn near here in converse with three
men?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do you deny that there is such an ambush laid?”

“Absolutely,” he repeated, with scorn. “It is an old wives’ story. I would
stake my life on it.”

“Enough,” I answered, slowly. “You have been your own judge. The evening
grows cold, and as you are my prisoner I must have a care of you. Kindly
put on this cloak and precede me, M. d’Entragues. We return to
Fontainebleau by the Rock of the Serpents.”

His eyes meeting mine, it seemed to me that for a second he held his
breath and hesitated, while a cold shadow fell and dwelt upon his sallow
face. But the stern, gloomy countenances of La Trape and Boisrose, who had
ridden up to his rein, and were awaiting his answer with their swords
drawn, determined him. With a loud laugh he took the cloak. “It is new, I
hope?” he said, lightly, as he threw it over his shoulders.

It was not, and I apologised, adding, however, that no one but the king
had worn it. On this he settled it about him; and having heard me strictly
charge the two guards who followed with their arquebuses ready, to fire on
him should he try to escape, he turned his horse’s head into the path and
rode slowly along it, while we followed a few paces behind in double file.

The sun had set, and such light as remained fell cold and gray between the
trees. The crackling of a stick under a horse’s hoof, or the ring of a
spur against a scabbard, were the only sounds which broke the stillness of
the wood as we proceeded. We had gone some little way when M. Louis
halted, and, turning in his saddle, called to me.

“M. de Rosny,” he said,—the light had so far failed that I could
scarcely see his face,—“I have a meeting with the Viscount de Caylus
on Saturday about a little matter of a lady’s glove. Should anything
prevent my appearance—”

“I will see that a proper explanation is given,” I answered, bowing.

“Or if M. d’Entragues will permit me,” eagerly exclaimed the Gascon, who
was riding by my side, “M. de Boisrose of St. Palais, gently born, through
before unknown to him, I will appear in his place and make the Viscount de
Caylus swallow the glove.”

“You will?” said M. Louis, with politeness. “You are a gentleman. I am
obliged to you.”

He waved his hand with a gesture which I afterward well remembered, and,
giving his horse the rein, went forward along the path at a brisk walk. We
followed, and I had just remarked that a plant of box was beginning here
and there to take the place of the usual undergrowth, when a sheet of
flame seemed to leap out through the dusk to meet him, and, his horse
rearing wildly, he fell headlong from the saddle without word or cry. My
men would have sprung forward before the noise of the report had died
away, and might possibly have overtaken one or more of the assassins; but
I restrained them. When La Trape dismounted and raised the fallen man, the
latter was dead.

Such were the circumstances, now for the first time made public, which
attended the discovery of this, the least known, yet one of the most
dangerous, of the many plots which were directed against the life of my
master. The course which I adopted may be blamed by some, but it is enough
for me that after the lapse of years it is approved by my conscience and
by the course of events. For it was ever the misfortune of that great king
to treat those with leniency whom no indulgence could win; and I bear with
me to this day the bitter assurance that, had the fate which overtook
Louis d’Entragues embraced the whole of that family, the blow which ten
years later cut short Henry’s career would never have been struck.