“‘Sas, son, bileton,My grand’methe a-fishing has gone:She’ll gather the fins to scrape my jowl,And ride back home on a barnyard fowl!’
“Nannin, ma’m’selle, ‘tis plain to be seen you can’t guess what a cornfield grows besides red poppies.” Laughing in sheer delight at the mystery she was making, she broke off again into a whimsical nursery rhyme:
“‘Coquelicot, j’ai mal au deCoquelicot, qu’est qui l’a fait?Coquelicot, ch’tai mon valet.’”
She kicked off the red slipper again. Flying half-way across the room, it alighted on the table, and a little mud from the heel dropped on the clean scoured surface. With a little moue of mockery, she got slowly up and tiptoed across the floor, like a child afraid of being scolded. Gathering the dust carefully, and looking demurely askance at Guida the while, she tiptoed over again to the fireplace and threw it into the chimney.
“Naughty Carterette,” she said at herself with admiring reproach, as she looked in Guida’s mirror, and added, glancing with farcical approval round the room, “and it all shines like peacock’s feather, too!”
Guida longed to snatch the letter from Carterette’s hand and read it, but she only said calmly, though the words fluttered in her throat:
“You’re as gay as a chaffinch, Garcon Carterette.” Garcon Carterette! Instantly Carterette sobered down. No one save Ranulph ever called her Garcon Carterette. Guida used Ranulph’s name for Carterette, knowing that it would change the madcap’s mood. Carterette, to hide a sudden flush, stooped and slowly put on her slipper. Then she came back to the veille, and sat down again beside Guida, saying as she did so:
“Yes, I’m gay as a chaffinch—me.”
She unfolded the letter slowly, and Guida stopped sewing, but mechanically began to prick the linen lying on her knee with the point of the needle.
“Well,” said Carterette deliberately, “this letter’s from a pend’loque of a fellow—at least, we used to call him that—though if you come to think, he was always polite as mended porringer. Often he hadn’t two sous to rub against each other. And—and not enough buttons for his clothes.”
Guida smiled. She guessed whom Carterette meant. “Has Monsieur Detricand more buttons now?” she asked with a little whimsical lift of the eyebrows.
“Ah bidemme, yes, and gold too, all over him—like that!” She made a quick sweeping gesture which would seem to make Detricand a very spangle of buttons. “Come, what do you think—he’s a general now.
“A general!” Instantly Guida thought of Philip and a kind of envy shot into her heart that this idler Detricand should mount so high in a few months—a man whose past had held nothing to warrant such success. “A general—where?” she asked.
“In the Vendee army, fighting for the new King of France—you know the rebels cut off the last King’s head.”
At another time Guida’s heart would have throbbed with elation, for the romance of that Vendee union of aristocrat and peasant fired her imagination; but she only said in the tongue of the people: “Ma fuifre, yes, I know!”
Carterette was delighted to thus dole out her news, and get due reward of astonishment. “And he’s another name,” she added. “At least it’s not another, he always had it, but he didn’t call himself by it. Pardi, he’s more than the Chevalier; he’s the Comte Detricand de Tournay—ah, then, believe me if you choose, there it is!”
She pointed to the signature of the letter, and with a gush of eloquence explained how it all was about Detricand the vaurien and Detricand the Comte de Tournay.
“Good riddance to Monsieur Savary dit Detricand, and good welcome to the Comte de Tournay,” answered Guida, trying hard to humour Carterette, that she should sooner hear the news yet withheld. “And what follows after?”
Carterette was half sorry that her great moment had come. She wished she could have linked out the suspense longer. But she let herself be comforted by the anticipated effect of her “wonderfuls.”
“I’ll tell you what comes after—ah, but see then what a news I have for you! You know that Monsieur d’Avranche—well, what do you think has come to him?”
Guida felt as if a monstrous hand had her heart in its grasp, crushing it. Presentiment seized her. Carterette was busy running over the pages of the letter, and did not notice her colourless face. She had no thought that Guida had any vital interest in Philip, and ruthlessly, though unconsciously, she began to torture the young wife as few are tortured in this world.
She read aloud Detricand’s description of his visit to the Castle of Bercy, and of the meeting with Philip. “‘See what comes of a name!’” wrote Detricand. “‘Here was a poor prisoner whose ancestor, hundreds of years ago, may or mayn’t have been a relative of the d’Avranches of Clermont, when a disappointed duke, with an eye open for heirs, takes a fancy to the good-looking face of the poor prisoner, and voila! you have him whisked off to a palace, fed on milk and honey, and adopted into the family. Then a pedigree is nicely grown on a summer day, and this fine young Jersey adventurer is found to be a green branch from the old root; and there’s a great blare of trumpets, and the States of the duchy are called together to make this English officer a prince—and that’s the Thousand and One Nights in Arabia, Ma’m’selle Carterette.’”
Guida was sitting rigid and still. In the slight pause Carterette made, a hundred confused torturing thoughts swam through her mind and presently floated into the succeeding sentences of the letter:
“‘As for me, I’m like Rabot’s mare, I haven’t time to laugh at my own foolishness. I’m either up to my knees in grass or clay fighting Revolutionists, or I’m riding hard day and night till I’m round-backed like a wood-louse, to make up for all the good time I so badly lost in your little island. You wouldn’t have expected that, my friend with the tongue that stings, would you? But then, Ma’m’selle of the red slippers, one is never butted save by a dishorned cow—as your father used to say.”’
Carterette paused again, saying in an aside: “That is M’sieu’ all over, all so gay. But who knows? For he says, too, that the other day a-fighting Fontenay, five thousand of his men come across a cavalry as they run to take the guns that eat them up like cabbages, and they drop on their knees, and he drops with them, and they all pray to God to help them, while the cannon balls whiz-whiz over their heads. And God did hear them, for they fell down flat when the guns was fired and the cannon balls never touched ‘em.”
During this interlude, Guida, sick with anxiety, could scarcely sit still. She began sewing again, though her fingers trembled so she could hardly make a stitch. But Carterette, the little egoist, did not notice her agitation; her own flurry dimmed her sight.
She began reading again. The first few words had little or no significance for Guida, but presently she was held as by the fascination of a serpent.
“‘And Ma’m’selle Carterette, what do you think this young captain, now Prince Philip d’Avranche, heir to the title of Bercy—what do you think he is next to do? Even to marry a countess of great family the old Duke has chosen for him; so that the name of d’Avranche may not die out in the land. And that is the way that love begins.... Wherefore, I want you to write and tell me—‘”
What he wanted Carterette to tell him Guida never heard, though it concerned herself, for she gave a moan like a dumb animal in agony, and sat rigid and blanched, the needle she had been using embedded in her finger to the bone, but not a motion, not a sign of animation in face or figure.
All at once, some conception of the truth burst upon the affrighted Carterette. The real truth she imagined as little as had Detricand.
But now when she saw the blanched face, the filmy eyes and stark look, the finger pierced by the needle, she knew that a human heart had been pierced too, with a pain worse than death—truly it was worse, for she had seen death, and she had never seen anything like this in its dire misery and horror. She caught the needle quickly from the finger, wrapped her kerchief round the wound, threw away the sewing from Guida’s lap, and running an arm about her waist, made as if to lay a hot cheek against the cold brow of her friend. Suddenly, however, with a new and painful knowledge piercing her intelligence, and a face as white and scared as Guida’s own, she ran to the dresser, caught up a hanap, and brought some water. Guida still sat as though life had fled, and the body, arrested in its activity, would presently collapse.
Carterette, with all her seeming lightsomeness, had sense and self-possession. She tenderly put the water to Guida’s lips, with comforting words, though her own brain was in a whirl, and dark forebodings flashed through her mind.
“Ah, man gui, man pethe!” she said in the homely patois. “There, drink, drink, dear, dear couzaine.” Guida’s lips opened, and she drank slowly, putting her hand to her heart with a gesture of pain. Carterette put down the hanap and caught her hands. “Come, come, these cold hands—pergui, but we must stop that! They are so cold.” She rubbed them hard. “The poor child of heaven—what has come over you? Speak to me... ah, but see, everything will come all right by and by! God is good. Nothing’s as bad as what it seems. There was never a grey wind but there’s a greyer. Nanningia, take it not so to heart, my couzaine; thou shalt have love enough in the world.... Ah, grand doux d’la vie, but I could kill him!” she added under her breath, and she rubbed Guida’s hands still, and looked frankly, generously into her eyes.
Yet, try as she would in that supreme moment, Carterette could not feel all she once felt concerning Guida. There is something humiliating in even an undeserved injury, something which, to the human eye, lessens the worthiness of its victim. To this hour Carterette had looked upon her friend as a being far above her own companionship. All in a moment, in this new office of comforter the relative status was altered. The plane on which Guida had moved was lowered. Pity, while it deepened Carterette’s tenderness, lessened the gap between them.
Perhaps something of this passed through Guida’s mind, and the deep pride and courage of her nature came to her assistance. She withdrew her hands and mechanically smoothed back her hair, then, as Carterette sat watching her, folded up the sewing and put it in the work-basket hanging on the wall.
There was something unnatural in her governance of herself now. She seemed as if doing things in a dream, but she did them accurately and with apparent purpose. She looked at the clock, then went to the fire to light it, for it was almost time to get her grandfather’s tea. She did not seem conscious of the presence of Carterette, who still sat on the veille, not knowing quite what to do. At last, as the flame flashed up in the chimney, she came over to her friend, and said:
“Carterette, I am going to the Dean’s. Will you run and ask Maitresse Aimable to come here to me soon?” Her voice had the steadiness of despair—that steadiness coming to those upon whose nerves has fallen a great numbness, upon whose sensibilities has settled a cloud that stills them as the thick mist stills the ripples on the waters of a fen.
All the glamour of Guida’s youth had dropped away. She had deemed life good, and behold, it was not good; she had thought her dayspring was on high, and happiness had burnt into darkness like quick-consuming flax. But all was strangely quiet in her heart and mind. Nothing more that she feared could happen to her; the worst had fallen, and now there came down on her the impermeable calm of the doomed.
Carterette was awed by her face, and saying that she would go at once to Maitresse Aimable, she started towards the door, but as quickly stopped and came back to Guida. With none of the impulse that usually marked her actions, she put her arms round Guida’s neck and kissed her, saying with a subdued intensity:
“I’d go through fire and water for you. I want to help you every way I can—me.”
Guida did not say a word, but she kissed the hot cheek of the smuggler-pirate’s daughter, as in dying one might kiss the face of a friend seen with filmy eyes.
When she had gone Guida drew herself up with a shiver. She was conscious that new senses and instincts were born in her, or were now first awakened to life. They were not yet under control, but she felt them, and in so far as she had power to think, she used them.
Leaving the house and stepping into the Place du Vier Prison, she walked quietly and steadily up the Rue d’Driere. She did not notice that people she met glanced at her curiously, and turned to look after her as she hurried on.
It had been a hot, oppressive day, but when, a half-hour later, Guida hastened back from a fruitless visit to the house of the Dean, who was absent in England, a vast black cloud had drawn up from the south-east, dropping a curtain of darkness upon the town. As she neared the doorway of the cottage, a few heavy drops began to fall, and, in spite of her bitter trouble, she quickened her footsteps, fearing that her grandfather had come back, to find the house empty and no light or supper ready.
M. de Mauprat had preceded her by not more than five minutes. His footsteps across the Place du Vier Prison had been unsteady, his head bowed, though more than once he raised it with a sort of effort, as it were in indignation or defiance. He muttered to himself as he opened the door, and he paused in the hall-way as though hesitating to go forward. After a moment he made a piteous gesture of his hand towards the kitchen, and whispered to himself in a kind of reassurance. Then he entered the room and stood still. All was dark save for the glimmer of the fire.
“Guida! Guida!” he said in a shaking, muffled voice. There was no answer. He put by his hat and stick in the corner, and felt his way to the great chair-he seemed to have lost his sight. Finding the familiar, worn arm of the chair, he seated himself with a heavy sigh. His lips moved, and he shook his head now and then, as though in protest against some unspoken thought.
Presently he brought his clinched hand down heavily on the table, and said aloud:
“They lie—they lie! The Connetable lies! Their tongues shall be cut out. ... Ah, my little, little child!... The Connetable dared—he dared—to tell me this evil gossip—of the little one—of my Guida!”
He laughed contemptuously, but it was a crackling, dry laugh, painful in its cheerlessness. He drew his snuff-box from his pocket, opened it, and slowly taking a pinch, raised it towards his nose, but the hand paused half-way, as though a new thought arrested it.
In the pause there came the sound of the front door opening, and then footsteps in the hall.
The pinch of snuff fell from the fingers of the old man on to the white stuff of his short-clothes, but as Guida entered the room and stood still a moment, he did not stir in his seat. The thundercloud had come still lower and the room was dark, the coals in the fireplace being now covered with grey ashes.
“Grandpethe! Grandpethe!” Guida said.
He did not answer. His heart was fluttering, his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, dry and thick. Now he should know the truth, now he should be sure that they had lied about his little Guida, those slanderers of the Vier Marchi. Yet, too, he had a strange, depressing fear, at variance with his loving faith and belief that in Guida there was no wrong: such belief as has the strong swimmer that he can reach the shore through wave and tide; yet also with strange foreboding, prelude to the cramp that makes powerless, defying youth, strength, and skill. He could not have spoken if it had been to save his own life—or hers.
Getting no answer to her words, Guida went first to the hearth and stirred the fire, the old man sitting rigid in his chair and regarding her with fixed, watchful eyes. Then she found two candles and lighted them, placing them on the mantel, and turning to the crasset hanging by its osier rings from a beam, slowly lighted it. Turning round, she was full in the light of the candles and the shooting flames of the fire.
De Mauprat’s eyes had followed her every motion, unconscious of his presence as she was. This—this was not the Guida he had known! This was not his grandchild, this woman with the pale, cold face, and dark, unhappy eyes; this was not the laughing girl who but yesterday was a babe at his knee. This was not—
The truth, which had yet been before his blinded eyes how long! burst upon him. The shock of it snapped the filmy thread of being. As the escaping soul found its wings, spread them, and rose from that dun morass called Life, the Sieur de Mauprat, giving a long, deep sigh, fell back in his great arm-chair dead, and the silver snuff-box rattled to the floor.
Guida turned round with a sharp cry. Running to him, she lifted up the head that lay over on his shoulder. She felt his pulse, she called to him. Opening his waistcoat, she put her ear to his heart; but it was still—still.
A mist, a blackness, came over her own eyes, and without a cry or a word, she slid to the floor unconscious, as the black thunderstorm broke upon the Place du Vier Prison.
The rain was like a curtain let down between the prying, clattering world without and the strange peace within: the old man in his perfect sleep; the young, misused wife in that passing oblivion borrowed from death and as tender and compassionate while it lasts.
As though with merciful indulgence, Fate permitted no one to enter upon the dark scene save a woman in whom was a deep motherhood which had never nourished a child, and to whom this silence and this sorrow gave no terrors. Silence was her constant companion, and for sorrow she had been granted the touch that assuages the sharpness of pain and the love called neighbourly kindness. Maitresse Aimable came.
Unto her it was given to minister here. As the night went by, and the offices had been done for the dead, she took her place by the bedside of the young wife, who lay staring into space, tearless and still, the life consuming away within her.
In the front room of the cottage, his head buried in his hands, Ranulph Delagarde sat watching beside the body of the Sieur de Mauprat.
In the Rue d’Driere, the undertaker and his head apprentice were right merry. But why should they not be? People had to die, quoth the undertaker, and when dead they must be buried. Burying was a trade, and wherefore should not one—discreetly—be cheerful at one’s trade? In undertaking there were many miles to trudge with coffins in a week, and the fixed, sad, sympathetic look long custom had stereotyped was wearisome to the face as a cast of plaster-of-paris. Moreover, the undertaker was master of ceremonies at the house of bereavement as well. He not only arranged the funeral, he sent out the invitations to the “friends of deceased, who are requested to return to the house of the mourners after the obsequies for refreshment.” All the preparations for this feast were made by the undertaker—Master of Burials he chose to be called.
Once, after a busy six months, in which a fever had carried off many a Jersiais, the Master of Burials had given a picnic to his apprentices, workmen, and their families. At this buoyant function he had raised his glass and with playful plaintiveness proposed: “The day we celebrate!”
He was in a no less blithesome mood this day. The head apprentice was reading aloud the accounts for the burials of the month, while the master checked off the items, nodding approval, commenting, correcting or condemning with strange expletives.
“Don’t gabble, gabble next one slowlee!” said the Master of Burials, as the second account was laid aside, duly approved. “Eh ben, now let’s hear the next—who is it?”
“That Josue Anquetil,” answered the apprentice. The Master of Burials rubbed his hands together with a creepy sort of glee. “Ah, that was a clever piece of work! Too little of a length and a width for the box, but let us be thankful—it might have been too short, and it wasn’t.”
“No danger of that, pardingue!” broke in the apprentice. “The first it belonged to was a foot longer than Josue—he.”
“But I made the most of Josue,” continued the Master. “The mouth was crooked, but he was clean, clean—I shaved him just in time. And he had good hair for combing to a peaceful look, and he was light to carry—O my good! Go on, what has Josue the centenier to say for himself?”
With a drawling dull indifference, the lank, hatchet-faced servitor of the master servitor of the grave read off the items:
The Relict of Josue Anquetil, Centenier, in account withEtienne Mahye, Master of Burials.
Item: Livres. Sols. Farth. Paid to Gentlemen of Vingtaine, who carried him to his grave.................. 4 4 0 Ditto to me, Etienne Mahye, for proper gloves of silk and cotton................. 1 0 0 Ditto to me, E. M., for laying of him out and all that appertains............... 0 7 0 Ditto to me, E. M., for coffin............ 4 0 0 Ditto to me, E. M., for divers............ 0 4 0
The Master of Burials interrupted. “Bat’dlagoule, you’ve forgot blacking for coffin!”
The apprentice made the correction without deigning reply, and then went on
Livres. Sols. Farth.
Ditto to me, E. M., for black for blacking coffin.................................... 0 3 0 Ditto to me, E. M., paid out for supper after obs’quies........................... 3 2 0 Ditto to me, E. M., paid out for wine (3 pots and 1 pt. at a shilling) for ditto..................................... 2 5 6 Ditto to me, E. M., paid out for oil and candle.................................... 0 7 0 Ditto to me, E. M., given to the poor, as fitting station of deceased............... 4 0 0
The apprentice stopped. “That’s all,” he said.
There was a furious leer on the face of the Master of Burials. So, after all his care, apprentices would never learn to make mistakes on his side. “O my grief, always on the side of the corpse, that can thank nobody for naught!” was his snarling comment.
“What about those turnips from Denise Gareau, numskull?” he grunted, in a voice between a sneer and a snort.
The apprentice was unmoved. He sniffed, rubbed his nose with a forefinger, laboriously wrote for a moment, and then added:
Ditto to Madame Denise Gareau for turnips for supper after obs’quies ...................... 10 sols
“Saperlote, leave out the Madame, calf-lugs—, you!”
The apprentice did not move a finger. Obstinacy sat enthroned on him. In a rage, the Master made a snatch at a metal flower-wreath to throw at him. “Shan’t! She’s my aunt. I knows my duties to my aunt—me,” said the apprentice stolidly.
The Master burst out in a laugh of scorn. “Gaderabotin, here’s family pride for you! I’ll go stick dandelines in my old sow’s ear—respe d’la compagnie.”
The apprentice was still calm. “If you want to flourish yourself, don’t mind me,” said he, and picking up the next account, he began reading:
Mademoiselle Landresse, in the matter of the Burial ofthe Sieur de Mauprat, to Etienne Mahye, &c. Item—
The first words read by the apprentice had stilled the breaking storm of the Master’s anger. It dissolved in a fragrant dew of proud reminiscence, profit, and scandal.
He himself had no open prejudices. He was an official of the public—or so he counted himself—and he very shrewdly knew his duty in that walk of life to which it had pleased Heaven to call him. The greater the notoriety of the death, the more in evidence was the Master and all his belongings. Death with honour was an advantage to him; death with disaster a boon; death with scandal was a godsend. It brought tears of gratitude to his eyes when the death and the scandal were in high places. These were the only real tears he ever shed. His heart was in his head, and the head thought solely of Etienne Mahye. Though he wore an air of sorrow and sympathy in public, he had no more feeling than a hangman. His sympathy seemed to say to the living, “I wonder how soon you’ll come into my hands,” and to the dead, “What a pity you can only die once—and second-hand coffins so hard to get!”
Item: paid to me, Etienne Mahye,
droned the voice of the apprentice,
for rosewood coffin—
“O my good,” interrupted the Master of Burials with a barren chuckle, and rubbing his hands with glee, “O my good, that was a day in a lifetime! I’ve done fine work in my time, but upon that day—not a cloud above, no dust beneath, a flowing tide, and a calm sea. The Royal Court, too, caught on a sudden marching in their robes, turns to and joins the cortegee, and the little birds a-tweeting-tweeting, and two parsons at the grave. Pardingue, the Lord was—with me that day, and—”
The apprentice laughed—a dry, mirthless laugh of disbelief and ridicule. “Ba su, master, the Lord was watching you. There was two silver bits inside that coffin, on Sieur’s eyes.”
“Bigre!” The Master was pale with rage. His lips drew back, disclosing long dark teeth and sickly gums, in a grimace of fury. He reached out to seize a hammer lying at his hand, but the apprentice said quickly:
“Sapri—that’s the cholera hammer!”
The Master of Burials dropped the hammer as though it were at white heat, and eyed it with scared scrutiny. This hammer had been used in nailing down the coffins of six cholera patients who had died in one house at Rozel Bay a year before. The Master would not himself go near the place, so this apprentice had gone, on a promise from the Royal Court that he should have for himself—this he demanded as reward—free lodging in two small upper rooms of the Cohue Royale, just under the bell which said to the world, “Chicane—chicane! Chicane—chicane!”
This he asked, and this he got, and he alone of all Jersey went out to bury three people who had died of cholera; and then to watch three others die, to bury them scarce cold, and come back, with a leer of satisfaction, to claim his price. At first people were inclined to make a hero of him, but that only made him grin the more, and at last the island reluctantly decided that he had done the work solely for fee and reward.
The hammer used in nailing the coffins, he had carried through the town like an emblem of terror and death, and henceforth he only, in the shop of the Master, touched it.
“It won’t hurt you if you leave it alone,” said the apprentice grimly to the Master of Burials. “But, if you go bothering, I’ll put it in your bed, and it’ll do after to nail down your coffin.”
Then he went on reading with a malicious calmness, as though the matter were the dullest trifle:
Item: one dozen pairs of gloves for mourners.
“Par made, that’s one way of putting it!” commented the apprentice, “for what mourners was there but Ma’m’selle herself, and she quiet as a mice, and not a teardrop, and all the island necks end to end for look at her, and you, master, whispering to her: ‘The Lord is the Giver and Taker,’ and the Femme de Ballast t’other side, saying ‘My dee-ar, my dee-ar, bear thee up, bear thee up—thee.’”
“And she looking so steady in front of her, as if never was shame about her—and her there soon to be; and no ring of gold upon her hand, and all the world staring!” broke in the Master, who, having edged away from the cholera hammer, was launched upon a theme that stirred his very soul. “All the world staring, and good reason,” he added.
“And she scarce winking, eh?” said the apprentice. “True that—her eyes didn’t feel the cold,” said the Master of Burials with a leer, for to his sight as to that of others, only as boldness had been Guida’s bitter courage, the blank, despairing gaze, coming from eyes that turn their agony inward.
The apprentice took up the account again, and prepared to read it. The Master, however, had been roused to a genial theme. “Poor fallen child of Nature!” said he. “For what is birth or what is looks of virtue like a summer flower! It is to be brought down by hand of man.” He was warmed to his text. Habit had long made him so much hypocrite, that he was sentimentalist and hard materialist in one. “Some pend’loque has brought her beauty to this pass, but she must suffer—and also his time will come, the sulphur, the torment, the worm that dieth not—and no Abraham for parched tongue—misery me! They that meet in sin here shall meet hereafter in burning fiery furnace.”
The cackle of the apprentice rose above the whining voice. “Murder, too—don’t forget the murder, master. The Connetable told the old Sieur de Mauprat what people were blabbing, and in half-hour dead he is—he.”
“Et ben, the Sieur’s blood it is upon their heads,” continued the Master of Burials; “it will rise up from the ground—”
The apprentice interrupted. “A good thing if the Sieur himself doesn’t rise, for you’d get naught for coffin or obs’quies. It was you tells the Connetable what folks babbled, and the Connetable tells the Sieur, and the Sieur it kills him dead. So if he rised, he’d not pay you for murdering him—no, bidemme! And ‘tis a gobbly mouthful—this,” he added, holding up the bill.
The undertaker’s lips smacked softly, as though in truth he were waiting for the mouthful. Rubbing his hands, and drawing his lean leg up till it touched his nose, he looked over it with avid eyes, and said: “How much—don’t read the items, but come to total debit—how much she pays me?”
Ma’m’selle Landresse, debtor in all for one hundred and twenty livres, eleven sols and two farthings.
“Shan’t you make it one hundred and twenty-one livres?” added the apprentice.
“God forbid, the odd sols and farthings are mine—no more!” returned the Master of Burials. “Also they look exact; but the courage it needs to be honest! O my grief, if—”
“‘Sh!” said the apprentice, pointing, and the Master of Burials, turning, saw Guida pass the window. With a hungry instinct for the morbid they stole to the doorway and looked down the Rue d’Driere after her. The Master was sympathetic, for had he not in his fingers at that moment a bill for a hundred and twenty livres odd? The way the apprentice craned his neck, and tightened the forehead over his large, protuberant eyes, showed his intense curiosity, but the face was implacable. It was like that of some strong fate, superior to all influences of sorrow, shame, or death. Presently he laughed—a crackling cackle like new-lighted kindling wood; nothing could have been more inhuman in sound. What in particular aroused this arid mirth probably he himself did not know. Maybe it was a native cruelty which had a sort of sardonic pleasure in the miseries of the world. Or was it only the perception, sometimes given to the dullest mind, of the futility of goodness, the futility of all? This perhaps, since the apprentice shared with Dormy Jamais his rooms at the top of the Cohue Royale; and there must have been some natural bond of kindness between the blank, sardonic undertaker’s apprentice and the poor beganne, who now officially rang the bell for the meetings of the Royal Court.
The dry cackle of the apprentice as he looked after Guida roused a mockery of indignation in the Master. “Sacre matin, a back-hander on the jaw’d do you good, slubberdegullion—you! Ah, get go scrub the coffin blacking from your jowl!” he rasped out with furious contempt.
The apprentice seemed not to hear, but kept on looking after Guida, a pitiless leer on his face. “Dame, lucky for her the Sieur died before he had chance to change his will. She’d have got ni fiche ni bran from him.”
“Support d’en haut, if you don’t stop that I’ll give you a coffin before your time, keg of nails—you. Sorrow and prayer at the throne of grace that she may have a contrite heart”—he clutched the funeral bill tighter in his fingers—“is what we must feel for her. The day the Sieur died and it all came out, I wept. Bedtime come I had to sop my eyes with elder-water. The day o’ the burial mine eyes were so sore a-draining I had to put a rotten sweet apple on ‘em over-night—me.”
“Ah bah, she doesn’t need rosemary wash for her hair!” said the apprentice admiringly, looking down the street after Guida as she turned into the Rue d’Egypte.
Perhaps it was a momentary sympathy for beauty in distress which made the Master say, as he backed from the doorway with stealthy step:
“Gatd’en’ale, ‘tis well she has enough to live on, and to provide for what’s to come!”
But if it was a note of humanity in the voice it passed quickly, for presently, as he examined the bill for the funeral of the Sieur de Mauprat, he said shrilly:
“Achocre, you’ve left out the extra satin for his pillow—you.”
“There wasn’t any extra satin,” drawled the apprentice.
With a snarl the Master of Burials seized a pen and wrote in the account:
Item: To extra satin for pillow, three livres.
Guida’s once blithe, rose-coloured face was pale as ivory, the mouth had a look of deep sadness, and the step was slow; but the eye was clear and steady, and her hair, brushed under the black crape of the bonnet as smoothly as its nature would admit, gave to the broad brow a setting of rare attraction and sombre nobility. It was not a face that knew inward shame, but it carried a look that showed knowledge of life’s cruelties and a bitter sensitiveness to pain. Above all else it was fearless, and it had no touch of the consciousness or the consequences of sin; it was purity itself.
It alone should have proclaimed abroad her innocence, though she said no word in testimony. To most people, however, her dauntless sincerity only added to her crime and to the scandalous mystery. Yet her manner awed some, while her silence held most back. The few who came to offer sympathy, with curiousness in their eyes and as much inhumanity as pity in their hearts, were turned back gently but firmly, more than once with proud resentment.
So it chanced that soon only Maitresse Aimable came—she who asked no questions, desired no secrets—and Dormy Jamais.
Dormy had of late haunted the precincts of the Place du Vier Prison, and was the only person besides Maitresse Aimable whom Guida welcomed. His tireless feet went clac-clac past her doorway, or halted by it, or entered in when it pleased him. He was more a watch-dog than Biribi; he fetched and carried; he was silent and sleepless—always sleepless. It was as if some past misfortune had opened his eyes to the awful bitterness of life, and they had never closed again.
The Chevalier had not been with her, for on the afternoon of the very day her grandfather died, he had gone a secret voyage to St. Malo, to meet the old solicitor of his family. He knew nothing of his friend’s death or of Guida’s trouble. As for Carterette, Guida would not let her come—for her own sake.
Nor did Maitre Ranulph visit her after the funeral of the Sieur de Mauprat. The horror of the thing had struck him dumb, and his mind was one confused mass of conflicting thoughts. There—there were the terrifying facts before him; yet, with an obstinacy peculiar to him, he still went on believing in her goodness and in her truth. Of the man who had injured her he had no doubt, and his course was clear, in the hour when he and Philip d’Avranche should meet. Meanwhile, from a spirit of delicacy, avoiding the Place du Vier Prison, he visited Maitresse Aimable, and from day to day learned all that happened to Guida. As of old, without her knowledge, he did many things for her through the same Maitresse Aimable. And it quickly came to be known in the island that any one who spoke ill of Guida in his presence did so at no little risk. At first there had been those who marked him as the wrongdoer, but somehow that did not suit with the case, for it was clear he loved Guida now as he had always done; and this the world knew, as it had known that he would have married her all too gladly. Presently Detricand and Philip were the only names mentioned, but at last, as by common consent, Philip was settled upon, for such evidence as there was pointed that way. The gossips set about to recall all that had happened when Philip was in Jersey last. Here one came forward with a tittle of truth, and there another with tattle of falsehood, and at last as wild a story was fabricated as might be heard in a long day.
But in bitterness Guida kept her own counsel.
This day when she passed the undertaker’s shop she had gone to visit the grave of her grandfather. He had died without knowing the truth, and her heart was hardened against him who had brought misery upon her. Reaching the cottage in the Place du Vier Prison now, she took from a drawer the letter Philip had written her on the day he first met the Comtesse Chantavoine. She had received it a week ago. She read it through slowly, shuddering a little once or twice. When she had finished, she drew paper to her and began a reply.
The first crisis of her life was passed. She had met the shock of utter disillusion; her own perfect honesty now fathomed the black dishonesty of the man she had loved. Death had come with sorrow and unmerited shame. But an innate greatness, a deep courage supported her. Out of her wrongs and miseries now she made a path for her future, and in that path Philip’s foot should never be set. She had thought and thought, and had come to her decision. In one month she had grown years older in mind. Sorrow gave her knowledge, it threw her back on her native strength and goodness. Rising above mere personal wrongs she grew to a larger sense of womanhood, to a true understanding of her position and its needs. She loved no longer, but Philip was her husband by the law, and even as she had told him her whole mind and heart in the days of their courtship and marriage, she would tell him her whole mind and heart now. Once more, to satisfy the bond, to give full reasons for what she was about to do, she would open her soul to her husband, and then no more! In all she wrote she kept but two things back, her grandfather’s death—and one other. These matters belonged to herself alone.
No, Philip d’Avranche, [she wrote], your message came too late. Allthat you might have said and done should have been said and donelong ago, in that past which I believe in no more. I will not askyou why you acted as you did towards me. Words can alter nothingnow. Once I thought you true, and this letter you send would haveme still believe so. Do you then think so ill of my intelligence?In the light of the past it may be you have reason, for you knowthat I once believed in you! Think of it—believed in you!How bad a man are you! In spite of all your promises; in spite ofthe surrender of honest heart and life to you; in spite of truth andevery call of honour, you denied me—dared to deny me, at the verytime you wrote this letter.For the hopes and honours of this world, you set aside, first bysecrecy, and then by falsehood, the helpless girl to whom you onceswore undying love. You, who knew the open book of her heart, youthrew it in the dust. “Of course there is no wife?” the Duc deBercy said to you before the States of Bercy. “Of course,” youanswered. You told your lie without pity.Were you blind that you did not see the consequences? Or did younot feel the horror of your falsehood?—to play shuttlecock with awoman’s life, with the soul of your wife; for that is what yourconduct means. Did you not realise it, or were you so wicked thatyou did not care? For I know that before you wrote me this letter,and afterwards when you had been made prince, and heir to the duchy,the Comtesse Chantavoine was openly named by the Duc de Bercy foryour wife.Now read the truth. I understand all now. I am no longer thethoughtless, believing girl whom you drew from her simple life togive her so cruel a fate. Yesterday I was a child, to-day——Oh,above all else, do you think I can ever forgive you for havingkilled the faith, the joy of life that was in me! You have spoiledfor me for ever my rightful share of the joyous and the good. Myheart is sixty though my body is not twenty. How dared you rob meof all that was my birthright, of all that was my life, and give menothing—nothing in return!Do you remember how I begged you not to make me marry you; but youurged me, and because I loved you and trusted you, I did? how Ientreated you not to make me marry you secretly, but you insisted,and loving you, I did? how you promised you would leave me at thealtar and not see me till you came again to claim me openly for yourwife, and you broke that sacred promise? Do you remember—myhusband!Do you remember that night in the garden when the wind came moaningup from the sea? Do you remember how you took me in your arms, andeven while I listened to your tender and assuring words, in thatmoment—ah, the hurt and the wrong and the shame of it! Afterwardsin the strange confusion, in my blind helplessness I tried to say,“But he loved me,” and I tried to forgive you. Perhaps in time Imight have made myself believe I did; for then I did not know you asyou are—and were; but understanding all now I feel that in thathour I really ceased to love you; and when at last I knew you haddenied me, love was buried for ever.Your worst torment is to come, mine has already been with me. Whenmy miseries first fell upon me, I thought that I must die. Whyshould I live on—why should I not die? The sea was near, and itburies deep. I thought of all the people that live on the greatearth, and I said to myself that the soul of one poor girl could notcount, that it could concern no one but myself. It was clear to me—I must die and end all.But there came to me a voice in the night which said: “Is thy lifethine own to give or to destroy?” It was clearer than my ownthinking. It told my heart that death by one’s own hand meantshame; and I saw then that to find rest I must drag unwilling feetover the good name and memory of my dead loved ones. Then Iremembered my mother. If you had remembered her perhaps you wouldhave guarded the gift of my love and not have trampled it under yourfeet—I remembered my mother, and so I live still.I must go on alone, with naught of what makes life bearable; youwill keep climbing higher by your vanity, your strength, and yourdeceit. But yet I know however high you climb you will never findpeace. You will remember me, and your spirit will seek in vain forrest. You will not exist for me, you will not be even a memory; buteven against your will I shall always be part of you: of your brain,of your heart, of your soul—the thought of me your torment in yourgreatest hour. Your passion and your cowardice have lost me all;and God will punish you, be sure of that.There is little more to say. If it lies in my power I shall neversee you again while I live. And you will not wish it. Yes, inspite of your eloquent letter lying here beside me, you do not wishit, and it shall not be. I am not your wife save by the law; andlittle have you cared for law! Little, too, would the law help youin this now; for which you will rejoice. For the ease of your mindI hasten to tell you why.First let me inform you that none in this land knows me to be yourwife. Your letter to my grandfather never reached him, and to thishour I have held my peace. The clergyman who married us is aprisoner among the French, and the strong-box which held theregister of St. Michael’s Church was stolen. The one other witness,Mr. Shoreham, your lieutenant—as you tell me—went down with theAraminta. So you are safe in your denial of me. For me, I wouldendure all the tortures of the world rather than call you husbandever again. I am firmly set to live my own life, in my own way,with what strength God gives. At last I see beyond the Hedge.Your course is clear. You cannot turn back now. You have gone toofar. Your new honours and titles were got at the last by afalsehood. To acknowledge it would be ruin, for all the world knowsthat Captain Philip d’Avranche of the King’s navy is now the adoptedson of the Duc de Bercy. Surely the house of Bercy has cause forjoy, with an imbecile for the first in succession and a traitor forthe second!I return the fifty pounds you sent me—you will not question why....And so all ends. This is a last farewell between us.Do you remember what you said to me on the Ecrehos? “If ever Ideceive you, may I die a black, dishonourable death, abandoned andalone. I should deserve that if ever I deceived you, Guida.”Will you ever think of that, in your vain glory hereafter?GUIDA LANDRESSE DE LANDRESSE.