THE HERD OF SWINE.
I was back in the woods of Pierrettes, my precious satchel, still
but two-thirds emptied, slung about my shoulders, my clothes wrinkled
dry from their sopping in the waters of the Dordogne. All that day of
my finding of the food had I lain concealed in the woods; but, with
the fall of dusk, I made my way, by a long _détour_, to the
river-bank, and crossed the stream swimming and in safety. And now was
I again _la Grand’ Bête_, seeking to trace in the scent of trodden
violets the path by which my phantom Carinne had vanished.
That night I passed, warned by experience, in the branches of a tree.
With dawn of the following day I was on foot again, striking
northwards by the sun, and stretching over the encumbered miles with
all the speed I could accomplish. I had a thought in my breast, and
good fortune enabled me to put it to the proof. For, somewhere about
four o’clock as I judged, I emerged into a woodland track that I felt
convinced was the one made detestable by a dangling body; and sure
enough I came of a sudden to the fatal tree, and was aware of a cut
slack of rope hanging from a branch thereof, though the corpse itself
was removed.
Now, it behoved me to proceed with caution, which I did; yet none so
successfully but that I came plump out of the mouth of the green
passage upon M. de Lâge himself, and saw and was seen by him in a
single moment. Therefore I had nothing for it but to brazen out the
situation.
He showed no disturbance at my approach, nor, indeed, did he take any
notice of me; but he crept hither and thither, with lack-lustre eyes,
gathering nettles. I went up to him, suppressing my repugnance of the
miserable creature.
“Is mademoiselle returned?” I said outright.
He stopped in his picking, and leered up at me vaguely. He seemed
utterly broken and forlorn.
“She will not return,” he said; and resumed his task. I stood some
moments watching him. Suddenly he clasped his hands plaintively
together and looked me again in the face.
“Why did she go at all?” he said. “Can monsieur tell me, for I
forget?”
He put his fingers aimlessly, like an infant, to his head.
“I had a pride in her. She was beautiful and self-willed. _Mon Dieu!_
but she would make me laugh or tremble, the rogue. Well, she is gone.”
Could it be that his every memory of his villainy was lost with his
cherished tankards?
“What a love was mine,” he murmured. “I would have denied her
nothing--in reason; and she has deserted me.”
“Monsieur,” I said, “do you remember me?”
“You, you!” he cried angrily--“what do I know or care about this Orson
that springs upon me from the green? You need to be shaved and washed,
monsieur.”
“Undoubtedly; if monsieur would provide me with the means?”
He gave me a quick inquisitive look.
“You have a queer accent for a patriot. Well, well--it is no concern
of mine.”
Again he resumed his task, again to pause in it.
“Do you seek a service? I hear it is the case with many.”
“I seek food and a lodging for the night.”
“Eh! but can you pay for them?”
“In reason--certainly, in reason.”
“So, then?--should Georgette bring a generous basketful--bah!” he
cried suddenly, stamping irritably on the ground--“I offer you my poor
hospitality, monsieur, and” (the leer came into his eyes
again)--“should monsieur feel any scruple, a vail left on the
mantelpiece for the servants will doubtless satisfy it.”
But he had no servant left to him, it would seem. When, by-and-by, he
ushered me, with apish ceremony, into his house, I found the place
desolate and forlorn as we had left it.
“I have reduced my following,” he said, “since my niece withdrew
herself from my protection. What does a single bachelor want with an
army of locusts to devour him?”
He showed me into a little bare room on the second floor, with nothing
worthy of remark in it but an ill-furnished bedstead, and a baneful
picture on the wall that I learnt was a portrait of Carinne by
herself.
“It is a little of a travesty,” said De Lâge. “She looked in a
mirror, and painted as she saw herself therein--crooked, like a stick
dipt under water. But she was clever, for all she insisted that this
was a faithful likeness.”
I believe there were tears on his face as he left me. What a riddle
was the creature! There is a blind spot in every eye, it is said--and
the eyes are the windows of the soul.
He had supplied me with soap and water and a razor, and these I found
almost as grateful to my wants as the satchel had been. When I was
something restored to cleanliness I descended to the corridor below,
and, attracted by a sound of movement, entered one of the rooms that
opened therefrom.
Within, a young woman was engaged in laying one end of a carved-oak
table with a white napkin. She looked round as I advanced, stared,
gave a twitter of terror, and, retreating to the wall, put an arm up,
with the elbow pointed at me, as if I were something horrible in her
sight.
I had a sharp intuition; for this, I saw, was the little _aubergiste_
of the ‘Golden Lion.’
“You think me responsible for the poor rogue’s hanging?” I said.
She whispered “Yes,” with a pitiful attempt to summon her indignation
to this ordeal of fear. I went up to her and spoke gently, while she
shrunk from me.
“Georgette, my child, it is not so. You must take that on my honour,
for I am a gentleman, Georgette, in disguise.”
“In disguise?” she whispered, with trembling lips; but her eyes
wondered.
“Truly, little girl; I am a wanderer now, and proscribed because I
would not lend myself to thy Michel’s punishment.”
“Oh!” she sobbed, “but it was cruel. And the Republic destroys its own
children, m’sieu’.”
“Thy father----?”
“Ah! he, at least, is back, if still under surveillance; otherwise I
should not be enabled to come daily to minister to the needs of this
poor lonely old man.”
“Now thou art a good soul, thou little _aubergiste_. And thy
ministrations are meat to him, I perceive.”
“Hush, m’sieu’! but if he were to hear? He asks no questions, he
accepts all like a child. He would die of shame were he to learn that
he owes his dinner to the gratitude of m’sieu’ his father’s
dependant.”
“Is he so sensitive? Thou great little Georgette! And
mademoiselle--she does not return?”
She shook her head.
“Tell me where she is, child; for I believe you know.”
“Oh!” she murmured, obviously in great distress, “m’sieu’ must not ask
me.”
I took her hands and drew her towards me.
“Look in my eyes and tell me what you see there.”
She glanced up scared and entreating.
“But, is it cruelty, false faith, the currish soul of the liar and
informer?”
“No, no, m’sieu’.”
“Then is it not, rather, the honour of a gentleman, the chivalry that
would help and protect a defenceless woman cast adrift in this fearful
land of blood and licence?”
I gave her my title.
“Now,” I said, “you can cast me to the axe with a word. And where is
Mademoiselle Carinne, Georgette?”
She still hesitated. I could see the little womanly soul of her
tossing on a lake of tears.
“At least,” I said, “she will not return hither?”
“She will never return--oh, monseigneur! she will never return; and it
is not for me to say why.”
I released her hands.
“Well,” I said, “I would have helped her and have cared for her,
Georgette; but you will not let me.”
She broke forth at once at that, her arms held out and her eyes
swimming.
“I will tell you, monseigneur--all that I know; and God forgive me if
I do wrong!”
“And me, Georgette, and wither me with His vengeance.”
“I will tell you, monseigneur. That night--that night after the
terror, she spent in the woods, and all the next day she hid there,
moving towards Coutras. I would go often to the Château to take to M.
de Lâge the money for our weekly bill of faggots, and--and for other
reasons; and now she watched for me and waylaid me and told me all.
Oh, m’sieu’! she was incensed--and it was not for me to judge; but M.
de Lâge is a wise man, and perhaps there is a wisdom that makes too
little account of the scruples of our sex.”
“She would not return to him? Well!”
“She would beg or starve sooner, she said; and she would begin by
asking a little food of me. Oh, m’sieu’, but the sad proud demoiselle!
My heart wept to hear her so humble to the peasant girl to whom she
had been good and gracious always in the old days of peace.”
“That is well. And where is she?”
“I cannot tell you, m’sieu’. Ah, pardon! She but waited for the night,
when I could bring her food--all that would keep and that she could
carry--and then she started on foot for the mountains of Gatine.”
“Now, _mon Dieu_! they must be twenty leagues away.”
“Twenty-five, m’sieu’, by La Roche Chalais and Mareuil. But she would
avoid the towns, and journey by way of the woods and the harsh
desolate country. Mother of God! but it makes me weep to think of her
white face and her tender feet in those frightful solitudes.”
“It is madness!”
“But indeed, m’sieu’. And, though the towns gather all to them and the
country is depopulated, there may be savages still left here and
there--swineherds, charcoal-burners, to whom that libertine
Lacombe----”
“Silence, girl! And you would have denied her a protector!”
“She bound me to silence, m’sieu’, lest her uncle should send in
pursuit.”
“It is madness--it is madness. And what does she go to seek in the
mountains?”
“Ah! m’sieu’, I know not--unless it is some haven of rest where the
footstep of man is never heard.”
“Now, Georgette; will you meet me to-night where you met her, and
bring me food--for which I will pay you--and point me out the way that
Mademoiselle Carinne took at parting? I have a mind to journey to the
mountains, also, and to go by the harsh country and to start in the
dark. Will you, Georgette?”
“Pray the good God,” she said, “that it is not all a _jeu de
l’oie_”--and at that moment we heard De Lâge feebly mounting the
stairway.
He entered the room and accosted me with a sort of sly courtesy that
greatly confounded me. Associations connected with my reappearance,
perhaps, had kindled the slow fuse of his memory; but the flame would
burn fitfully and in a wrong direction; and, indeed, I think the shock
of his loss (of the tankards) had quite unhinged his mind.
“Shall we fall to?” he said. “This is not Paris; yet our good country
Grisels can canvass the favour of a hungry man.”
He gave a ridiculous little laugh.
“And what have we here, girl?” he said.
“M’sieu’, it is a pasty of young partridges.”
His palate was not dulled with his wits. It foretasted the delicacy
and his eyes moistened. He lingered regretfully over the wedge he cut
for me.
“Be generous, monsieur,” he cried, with an enjoying chuckle, “and own
that you have been served none better at Véry’s. Oh, but I know my
Paris! I was there so late as September of last year, and again, on
business connected with my estate, during the month of the king’s
trial.”
He blenched over some sudden half-memory; but the sight of Georgette
carrying my platter to me restored him to the business of the table.
“I know my Paris!” he cried again. “I have taken kidneys with
champagne at La Rapée’s; sheep’s feet at la Buvette du Palais;
oysters at Rocher de Cançale. Ho-ho! but does monsieur know the
Rocher?”
“_Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis, et ego restaurabo vos!_”
I said, quoting a well-known inscription over an eating-house.
He gave a sharp little squeak.
“Eh! but monsieur has the right etymology of the _restaurateur_; he is
a man of taste and of delicacy. This poor burgundy” (he clawed up his
glass)--“it might have been Clos Vougeot de Tourton if monsieur had
not been so stringent in his sequestration.”
He favoured me with a leer--very arch and very anxious. I could only
stare. Evidently he took me, in his wandering mind, for some other
than that I was. I was to be enlightened in a moment.
It was when Georgette had left the room and we were alone. The falling
sunlight came through a curtain of vine-leaves about the window, and
reddened his old mad face. He bent forward, looking at me eagerly.
“Hush, monsieur! The plate--the tankards--the christening-cups! You
will let me have them back? My God! there was a cross, in niello, of
the twelfth century. It will bring you nothing in the markets of the
Vandals. Monsieur, monsieur! I accept your terms--hot terms, brave
terms for a bold wooer. But you must not seek to carry her with a high
hand. She knows herself, and her pride and her beauty. Hush! I can
tell you where she lies hidden. She crouches under a rosebush in the
garden, and as the petals fall, they have covered and concealed her.”
Now I understood. He was again, in his lost soul, staking Carinne
against his forfeited pots. He took me for Lacombe.
I jumped to my feet.
* * * * * * *
And now began my second period of wandering; but under conditions
infinitely more trying than the first. Keeping to the dense woods by
day, and traversing the highways only by night, I had hitherto escaped
that which was to prove the cruellest usurer of my vigour--the
merciless blazing sun. Here, as I travelled by desolate broomy wastes;
by arid hills, from which any knob of rock projecting was hot as the
handle of an oven; by choking woods and endless winding valleys,--I
would sometimes ask myself in amazement what could be the nature of
the infatuation that for its own sake would elect to endure these
sufferings. I had not spoken to the girl. I was not authorised to
champion her cause. Strangest of all, the lack of womanly
sensitiveness she had displayed under the very ordeal of St Fargeau’s
dying groans had not prepossessed me in her favour. Yet, slowly was I
making, and would continue to make, my way to these mountains of
Limosin, in the dreamy hope of happening upon a self-willed and rather
heartless young woman, who--if we _were_ to come together--would
probably resent my intrusion as an affront. Truly an eccentric quest.
Well--I was unaccountable to myself, and of no account to others.
Maybe that last is the explanation. My world of conventions was dead,
and I lived--as I have already said--a posthumous life. Through it, no
doubt, I was drawn by shadows--attracted by the unexplainable--blown
by any wind of irresponsibility. This anarchy at least opened out
strange vistas of romance to the imaginative soul. It is odd to live
apart from, and independent of, the voice of duty. That state shall
seldom occur; but, when it does, to experience it is to something feel
the marvel of dematerialisation.
Depleted of human life; savage in its loneliness; blistered and flaked
by the sun, the country through which I travelled was yet beautiful to
a degree. Of food--by means of eking out my little supply with
chestnuts and wild berries--I had a poor sufficiency; but thirst
tortured me often and greatly. I moved slowly, threshing the land, as
it were, for traces of an ignis-fatuus that still fled before me in
fancy. And I had my frights and perils--one adventure, also; but that
I shall not in this connection relate.
Once, high up on the ridge of a valley, I saw a poor wretch, his arms
bound behind him, hurrying forward under escort of a guard. It was
evening, soft and tranquil. A cluster of mountain-peaks swam in the
long distance; the horizon was barred with a grate of glowing clouds.
Therethrough, it seemed, the consumed sun had fallen into white ashes
of mist; but the cooling furnace of the sky, to the walls of which a
single star clung like an unextinguished spark, was yet rosy with
heat; and against the rose the hillside and the figures that crowned
it were silhouetted in a sharp deep purple. How beautiful and how
voiceless! The figure fell, and his scream came down to me like a
bat’s cheep as the soldiers prodded him to rise with their bayonets.
Then I cursed the Goths that had spoiled me my picture.
Another time, lying concealed in a little hanging copse above a gorge,
I heard bleating below me and the rainy patter of feet, and peered
forth to see a flock of goats being driven down the valley. They were
shepherded by three or four ‘requisition’ men, as they were
called--patriot louts whose business it was to beat up the desolated
country for those herds of sheep or swine that had run wild for lack
of owners. Their unexpected appearance was a little lesson in caution
to me, for I had enjoyed so long an immunity from interference as to
have grown careless of showing myself in the most exposed districts.
On two occasions only was I troubled by wolves. The first was on a
morning of lassitude and fatigue, when water had failed me for many
hours. I was resting, on a heath-covered slope, within a rocky cave or
lair in the hillside. For long the sky wraiths had been loading cloud
upon cloud, till the gathered steam of the earth, finding no outlet,
seemed to scald one’s body. Then, in a moment, such a storm crashed
down as I had never before experienced. Each slam of thunder amongst
the rocks was like a port of hell flung open; the lightning, slashing
through the hail, seemed to melt and run in a marrowy-white flood that
palpitated as it settled down on the heather. But the hail! the fury
of this artillery of ice--its noise, and the frenzy of the Carmagnole
it danced! I was fortunate to be under a solid roof; and when at last
the north wind, bristling with blades, charged down the valley like
the Duke of Saxony’s Horse at Fontenoy, I thought the earth must have
slipped its course and swerved into everlasting winter.
Suddenly the mouth of the _ressui_ was blotted by a couple of shaggy
forms. They came pelting up--their tails hooked like carriage-brakes
to their bellies, their eyes blazing fear--and, seeing me within,
jerked to a rigid halt, while the stones drummed on their hides. The
next moment, cowed out of all considerations of caste, they had slunk
by me and were huddled, my very sinister familiars, at the extreme end
of the cave.
Oh, but this was the devil of an embarrassment! I had sat out sermons
that stabbed me below the belt at every second lunge; I had had
accepted offers of gallantry that I had never made; I had ridiculed
the work of an anonymous author to his face. Here, however, was a
situation that it seemed beyond my power of _finesse_ to acquit myself
of with _aplomb_. In point of fact, the moment the storm slackened, I
slipped out--conscious of the strange fancy that bristles were growing
on my thighs--and, descending hurriedly to the valley, climbed a tree.
It was only then (so base is human nature) that I waived the pretence
that the wolf is a noble animal.
But my second experience was a more finished one. Then I tasted the
full flavour of fright, and almost returned the compliment of a feast
to my company. I was padding, towards evening, over a woodland lawn,
when from a hollow at the foot of a great chestnut-tree a rumbling
snarl issuing vibrated on the strings of my sensibilities, and I saw
three or four very ugly snouts project themselves from the blackness.
I went steadily by and steadily continued my way, which without doubt
was the discerning policy to pursue. But impulse will push behind as
well as fly before reason, and presently that which affects the nerves
of motion did so frantically hustle me at the rear as to set me off
running at the top of my speed. Then the folly of my behaviour was
made manifest to me, for, glancing over my shoulder as I sped, I saw
that no fewer than five fierce brutes were come out of their lair at
the sound, and were beginning to slink in my wake.
I gave a yell that would have fetched Charon from the other side of
the Styx; my feet seemed to dance on air; I threatened to outstrip my
own breath. Still the patter behind me swelled into a race, and I
found myself ghastlily petting a thought as to the length of a wolfs
eye-tooth and the first feel of it clamped into one’s flesh. Now, of a
sudden, the wood opened out, and I saw before me the butt of a decayed
tree, and, on its farther side, a little reedy pond shining livid
under a rampart of green that hedged off the sunset. At the water I
drove, in a lost hope that the pursuit would check itself at its
margin, and, in my blind onset, dashed against a branch of the dead
tree and fell half stunned into the pool beyond. Still an inspiring
consciousness of my peril enabled me to scramble farther, splashing
and choking, until I was perhaps twenty yards from the shore; and
then, in shallow water, I sat down, my head just above the surface,
and caught at my sliding faculties and laughed. Immediately I was
myself again, and the secure and wondering spectator of a very
Walpurgis dance that was enacting for my benefit on the bank.
The five wolves appeared, indeed, to be skipping in pure amazement,
like the mountains of Judæa; but they howled in tribulation, like the
gate of Palestina. They leapt and ran hither and thither; they bit at
the air, at their flanks, at their feet; they raked their heads with
their paws and rolled on the ground in knots. At last I read the
riddle in a tiny moted cloud that whirled above them. In dashing
against the rotten branch I had, it seemed, upset a hornets’ nest
built in the old tooth of the tree, and the garrison had sallied forth
to cover my retreat.
Oh, but the braves! I raised a little pæan to them on the spot, but I
took care not to shout it. Suddenly the beasts turned tail and went
yelling back into the wood. I did not rise at once. I left the victors
time to congratulate themselves and to settle down. And at last I was
too diffident to pester them with my gratitude, and I waded sheer
across the pool (that was nowhere more than three feet deep) and
landed on its farther side.
* * * * * * *
One day I happened upon Carinne!
That is the high note of this droning chant of retrospection.
I was walking aimlessly, the hot thirst upon me once more, when I came
out from amongst trees into a sort of forest amphitheatre of
considerable extent, whose base, like the kick in a bottle, was a
round hill, pretty high, and scattered sparsely with chestnut-trees. I
climbed the slopes toilfully, and getting a view of things from near
the summit, saw that to the north the circumference of green was
broken by the gates of a hazy valley. It was as beautiful a place as I
had ever chanced on; but its most gladdening corner to me was that
whence a little brook looped out of the forest skirt, like a timid
child coaxed from its mother’s apron, and pattering a few yards, fled
back again to shelter.
Now I would take it all in before I descended, postponing the cool
ecstasy like an epicure. I mounted to the top, and, peering between
the chestnut trunks down the farther slopes, uttered an exclamation of
surprise. A herd of swine was peacefully feeding against the fringe of
the wood, and, even as I looked, one of them, a mottled porkling,
crashed through a little rug of branches spread upon the ground and
vanished into Tartarus. Immediately his dismal screeches rebuked the
skies, and, at the sound, a girl came running out of the wood, and,
kneeling above the fatal breach, clasped her hands over her eyes and
turned away her face--a very Niobe of pigs. Seeing her thus, I
descended to her assistance; but, lost in her grief, it seemed, she
did not hear me until I was close upon her. Then suddenly she glanced
up startled,--and her eyes were the cold eyes of Carinne.