the Pere Bourron's cows in her charge, who grazed on a long point of the
marsh, lush with salt grass, that lay sheltered back of the dunes
fronting the open sea.
Now and then, when a cow strayed over the dunes on to the hard beach
beyond to gaze stupidly at the breakers, the little girl's voice would
become as authoritative as a boy's. "_Eh ben, tu sais!_" she would shout
as she ran to head the straggler off, adding some sound whacks with a
stick until the cow decided to lumber back to the rest. "_Ah mais!_"
Yvonne would sigh as she seated herself again in the wire-grass, tucking
her firm bronzed legs under a patched skirt that had once served as a
winter petticoat for the Mere Bourron.
Occasionally a trudging coast guard or a lone hunter in passing would
call "_Bonjour!_" to her, and since she was pretty, this child of
fifteen, they would sometimes hail her with "_Ca va, ma petite!_" and
Yvonne would flush and reply bravely, "_Mais oui, M'sieur, merci._"
Since she was only a little girl with hair as black as a gipsy's, a
ruddy olive skin, fresh young lips and a well-knit, compact body,
hardened by constant exposure to the sea air and sun, no one bothered
their heads much about her name. She was only a child who smiled when
the passerby would give her a chance, which was seldom, and when she
did, she disclosed teeth as white as the tiny shells on the beach. There
were whole days on the marsh when she saw no one.
At noon, when the cracked bell in the distant belfry of the gray church
of Pont du Sable sent its discordant note quavering across the marsh,
Yvonne drew forth a sailor's knife from where it lay tucked safe within
the breast of her coarse chemise, and untying a square of blue cotton
cloth, cut in two her portion of peasant bread, saving half the bread
and half a bottle of Pere Bourron's thinnest cider for the late
afternoon.
There were days, too, when Marianne coming up from the sea with her
nets, stopped to rest beside the child and talk. Yvonne having no mother
which she could remember, Marianne had become a sort of transient mother
to her, whom the incoming tide sometimes brought her and whom she would
wait for with uncertain expectancy, often for days.
One afternoon, early in the spring, when the cows were feeding in the
scant slanting shade of the dunes, Yvonne fell asleep. She lay out
straight upon her back, her brown legs crossed, one wrist over her eyes.
She slept so soundly that neither the breeze that had sprung up from the
northeast, stirring with every fresh puff the stray locks about her
small ears, or the sharp barking of a dog hunting rabbits for himself
over the dunes, awakened her. Suddenly she became conscious of being
grasped in a pair of strong arms, and, awakening with a little scream,
looked up into the grinning face of Marianne, who straightway gave her
a big, motherly hug until she was quite awake and then kissed her
soundly on both cheeks, until Yvonne laughed over her fright.
"_Oh, mon Dieu!_ but I was frightened," sighed the child, and sat up
straight, smoothing back her tumbled hair. "Oh! la! la!" she gasped.
"They are beauties, _hein!_" exclaimed Marianne, nodding to an oozing
basketful of mackerel; then, kneeling by the basket, she plunged her red
hands under the slimy, glittering mass of fish, lifting and dropping
them that the child might see the average size in the catch.
"_Eh ben!_" declared Marianne, "some day when thou art bigger, _ma
petite_, I'll take thee where thou canst make some silver. There's half
a louis' worth there if there's a sou!" There was a gleam of
satisfaction in her eyes, as she bent over her basket again, dressed as
she was in a pair of fisherman's trousers cut off at the knees.
"One can play the lady on half a louis," she continued, covering her
fish from the sun with her bundle of nets. "My man shall have a full
bottle of the best to-night," she added, wiping her wet hands across her
strong bare knees.
"How much 'cake' does that old crab of a Bourron pay thee?" she
inquired, turning again to the child.
"Six sous a day, and then my food and lodging," confessed Yvonne.
"He won't ruin himself," muttered Marianne.
"They say the girl at the Three Wolves gets ten," added the child with
awe, "but thou knowest how--she must do the washing besides."
Marianne's square jaw shut hard. She glanced at Yvonne's patched skirt,
the one that had been the Mere Bourron's winter petticoat, feeling its
quality as critically as a fashionable dressmaker.
"_Sacristi!_" she exclaimed, examining a rent, "there's one door that
the little north wind won't knock twice at before he enters. Keep still,
_ma petite_, I've got thread and a needle."
She drew from her trousers' pocket a leather wallet in which lay four
two-sous pieces, an iron key and a sail needle driven through a ball of
linen thread. "It is easily seen thou art not in love," laughed
Marianne, as she cross-stitched the tear. "Thou wilt pay ten sous for a
ribbon gladly some day when thou art in love."
The child was silent while she sewed. Presently she asked timidly, "One
eats well there?"
"Where?"
"But thou knowest--_there_."
"In the prison?"
"_Mais oui_," whispered Yvonne.
"Of course," growled Marianne, "one eats well; it is perfect. _Tiens!_
we have the good soup, that is well understood; and now and then meat
and rice."
"Oh!" exclaimed the child in awe.
"_Mais oui_," assured Marianne with a nod, "and prunes."
"Where is that, the prison?" ventured the child.
"It is very far," returned Marianne, biting off the thread, "and it is
not for every one either," she added with a touch of pride--"only I
happen to be an old friend and know the judge."
"And how much does it cost a day, the prison?" asked Yvonne.
"Not _that_," replied Marianne, snipping her single front tooth
knowingly with the tip of her nail.
"_Mon Dieu!_ and they give you all that for nothing?" exclaimed the
child in astonishment. "It is _chic_, that, _hein!_" and she nodded her
pretty head with decision, "_Ah mais oui, alors!_" she laughed.
"I must be going," said Marianne, abruptly. "My young ones will be
wanting their soup." She flattened her back against her heavy basket,
slipped the straps under her armpits and rose to her feet, the child
passing the bundle of nets to her and helping her shoulder them to the
proper balance.
"_Au revoir, ma belle petite_," she said, bending to kiss the girl's
cheek; then with her free hand she dove into her trousers' pocket and
drew out a two-sous piece. "_Tiens_," she exclaimed, pressing the
copper into the child's hand.
Yvonne gave a little sigh of delight. It was not often she had two sous
all to herself to do what she pleased with, which doubles the delight of
possession. Besides, the Mere Bourron kept her wages--or rather, count
of them, which was cheaper--on the back page of a greasy book wherein
were registered the births of calves.
"_Au revoir_," reiterated Marianne, and turned on her way to the village
down the trail that wound through the salt grass out to the road
skirting the bay. Yvonne watched her until she finally disappeared
through a cut in the dunes that led to the main road.
The marsh lay in the twilight, the curlews were passing overhead bound
for a distant mud flat for the night. "_Courli! Courli!_" they called,
the old birds with a rasp, the young ones cheerfully; as one says
"_bonsoir_." The cows, conscious of the fast-approaching dark, were
moving toward the child. She stood still until they had passed her,
then drove them slowly back to the Pere Bourron's, her two-sous piece
clutched safe in her hand.
It was dark when she let down the bars of the orchard, leading into the
farm-yard. Here the air was moist and heavy with the pungent odour of
manure; a turkey gobbler and four timid hens roosting in a low apple
tree, stirred uneasily as the cows passed beneath them to their stable
next to the kitchen--a stable with a long stone manger and walls two
feet thick. Above the stable was a loft covered by a thatched roof; it
was in a corner of this loft, in a large box filled with straw and
provided with a patchwork-quilt, that Yvonne slept.
A light from the kitchen window streamed across the muddy court. The
Pere and Mere Bourron were already at supper. The child bolted the
stable door upon her herd and slipped into her place at table with a
timid "_Bonsoir, m'sieur, madame_," to her masters, which was
acknowledged by a grunt from the Pere Bourron and a spasm of coughing
from his spouse.
The Mere Bourron, who had the dullish round eye of a pig that gleamed
suspiciously when she became inquisitive, had supped well. Now and then
she squinted over her fat jowls veined with purple, plying her mate with
short, savage questions, for he had sold cattle that day at the market
at Bonville. Such evenings as these were always quarrelsome between the
two, and as the little girl did not count any more than the chair she
sat in, they argued openly over the day's sale. The best steer had
brought less than the Mere Bourron had believed, a shrewd possibility,
even after a month's bargaining. When both had wiped their plates clean
with bread--for nothing went to waste there--the child got up and
brought the black coffee and the decanter of applejack. They at last
ceased to argue, since the Mere Bourron had had the final word. Pere
Bourron sat with closed fists, opening one now and then to strengthen
his coffee with applejack. Being a short, thickset man, he generally sat
in his blouse after he had eaten, with his elbows on the table and his
rough bullet-like head, with its crop of unkempt hair, buried in his
hands.
When Yvonne had finished her soup, and eaten all her bread, she rose and
with another timid "_Bonsoir_" slipped away to bed.
"Leave the brindle heifer tied!" shrilled madame as the child reached
the courtyard.
"_Mais, oui madame_, it is done," answered Yvonne, and crept into her
box beneath the thatch.
* * * * *
At sixteen Yvonne was still guarding the cows for the Bourrons. At
seventeen she fell in love.
He was a slick, slim youth named Jean, with a soapy blond lock plastered
under the visor of his leather cap pulled down to his red ears. On fete
days, he wore in addition a scarlet neck-tie girdling his scrawny
throat. He had watched Yvonne for a long time, very much as the snake in
the fable saved the young dove until it was grown.
And so, Yvonne grew to dreaming while the cows strayed. Once the Pere
Bourron struck at her with a spade for her negligence, but missed.
Another night he beat her soundly for letting a cow get stalled in the
mud. The days on the marsh now became interminable, for he worked for
Gavelle, the carpenter, a good three _kilometres_ back of Pont du Sable
and the two could see each other only on fete days when he met her
secretly among the dunes or in the evenings near the farm. He would wait
for her then at the edge of the woods skirting the misty sea of pasture
that spread out below the farm like some vast and silent dry lake,
dotted here and there with groups of sleeping cattle.
She saw Marianne but seldom now, for the latter fished mostly at the
Three Wolves, sharing her catch with a crew of eight fishermen. Often
they would seine the edge of the coast, their boat dancing off beyond
the breakers while they netted the shallow water, swishing up the hard
beach--these gamblers of the sea. They worked with skill and precision,
each one having his share to do, while one--the quickest--was appointed
to carry their bundle of dry clothes rolled in a tarpaulin.
Marianne seemed of casual importance to her now. We seldom think of our
best friends in time of love. Yvonne cried for his kisses which at
first she did not wholly understand, but which she grew to hunger for,
just as when she was little she craved for all she wanted to eat for
once--and candy.
She began to think of herself, too--of Jean's scarlet cravat--of his new
shoes too tight for him, which he wore with the pride of a village dandy
on fete days and Sundays--and of her own patched and pitifully scanty
wardrobe.
"She has nothing, that little one," she had heard the gossips remark
openly before her, time and time again, when she was a child. Now that
she was budding into womanhood and was physically twice as strong as
Jean, now that she was conscious of _herself_, she began to know the
pangs of vanity.
It was about this time that she bought the ribbon, just as Marianne had
foretold, a red ribbon to match Jean's tie, and which she fashioned into
a bow and kept in a paper box, well hidden in the straw of her bed. The
patched skirt had long ago grown too short, and was now stuffed into a
broken window beyond the cow manger to temper the draught from the neck
of a sick bull.
She wore now, when it stormed, thick woollen stockings and sabots; and
another skirt of the Mere Bourron's fastened around a chemise of coarse
homespun linen, its colour faded to a delicious pale mazarine blue,
showing the strength and fullness of her body.
* * * * *
She had stolen down from the loft this night to meet him at the edge of
the woods.
"Where is he?" were his first words as he sought her lips in the dark.
"He has gone," she whispered, when her lips were free.
"Where?"
"_Eh ben_, he went away with the Pere Detour to the village--madame is
asleep."
"Ah, good!" said he.
"_Mon Dieu!_ but you are warm," she whispered, pressing her cheek
against his own.
"I ran," he drawled, "the patron kept me late. There is plenty of work
there now."
He put his arm around her and the two walked deeper into the wood, he
holding her heavy moist hand idly in his own. Presently the moon came
out, sailing high among the scudding clouds, flashing bright in the
clear intervals. A white mist had settled low over the pasture below
them, and the cattle were beginning to move restlessly under the chill
blanket, changing again and again their places for the night. A bull
bellowed with all his might from beyond the mysterious distance. He had
evidently scented them, for presently he emerged from the mist and moved
along the edge of the woods, protected by a deep ditch. He stopped when
he was abreast of them to bellow again, then kept slowly on past them.
They had seated themselves in the moonlight among the stumps of some
freshly cut poplars.
"_Dis donc_, what is the matter?" he asked at length, noticing her
unusual silence, for she generally prattled on, telling him of the
uneventful hours of her days.
"Nothing," she returned evasively.
"_Mais si; bon Dieu!_ there _is_ something."
She placed her hands on her trembling knees.
"No, I swear there is nothing, Jean," she said faintly.
But he insisted.
"One earns so little," she confessed at length. "Ten sous a day, it is
not much, and the days are so long on the marsh. If I knew how to cook
I'd try and get a place like Emilienne."
"Bah!" said he, "you are crazy--one must study to cook; besides, you are
not yet eighteen, the Pere Bourron has yet the right to you for a year."
"That is true," confessed the girl simply; "one has not much chance when
one is an orphan. Listen, Jean."
"What?"
"Listen--is it true that thou dost love me?"
"Surely," he replied with an easy laugh.
"Listen," she repeated timidly; "if thou shouldst get steady work--I
should be content ... to be..." But her voice became inaudible.
"_Allons!_... what?" he demanded irritably.
"To ... to be married," she whispered.
He started. "_Eh ben! en voila_ an idea!" he exclaimed.
"Forgive me, Jean, I have always had that idea----" She dried her eyes
on the back of her hand and tried hard to smile. "It is foolish, eh? The
marriage costs so dear ... but if thou shouldst get steady work..."
"_Eh ben!_" he answered slowly with his Normand shrewdness, "I don't say
no."
"I'll help thee, Jean; I can work hard when I am free. One wins forty
sous a day by washing, and then there is the harvest."
There was a certain stubborn conviction in her words which worried him.
"_Eh ben!_" he said at length, "we might get married--that's so."
She caught her breath.
"Swear it, Jean, that thou wilt marry me, swear it upon Sainte Marie."
"_Eh voila_, it's done. _Oui_, by Sainte Marie!"
She threw her arms about him, crushing him against her breast.
"_Dieu!_ but thou art strong," he whispered.
"Did I hurt thee?"
"No--thou art content now?"
"Yes--I am content," she sobbed, "I am content, I am content."
He had slipped to the ground beside her. She drew his head back in her
lap, her hand pressed hard against his forehead.
"_Dieu!_ but I am content," she breathed in his ear.
He felt her warm tears dropping fast upon his cheek.
* * * * *
All night she lay in the straw wide awake, flushed, in a sort of fever.
At daylight she drove her cows back to the marsh without having barely
touched her soup.
Far across the bay glistened the roof of a barn under construction. An
object the size of a beetle was crawling over the new boards.
It was Jean.
"I'm a fool," he thought, as he drove in a nail. Then he fell to
thinking of a girl in his own village whose father was as rich as the
Pere Bourron.
"_Sacre Diable!_" he laughed at length, "if every one got married who
had sworn by Sainte Marie, Monsieur le Cure would do a good business."
* * * * *
A month later Pere Bourron sold out a cartful of calves at the market at
Bonville. It was late at night when he closed his last bargain over a
final glass, climbed up on his big two-wheeled cart, and with a face of
dull crimson and a glazed eye, gathered up the reins and started swaying
in his seat for home. A boy carrying milk found him at daylight the next
morning lying face down in the track of his cart, dead, with a fractured
skull. Before another month had passed, the Mere Bourron had sold the
farm and gone to live with her sister--a lean woman who took in sewing.
Yvonne was free.
Free to work and to be married, and she did work with silent ferocity
from dawn until dark, washing the heavy coarse linen for a farm, and
scrubbing the milk-pans bright until often long after midnight--and
saved. Jean worked too, but mostly when he pleased, and had his hair
cut on fete days, most of which he spent in the cafe and saw Yvonne
during the odd moments when she was free.
Life over the blacksmith's shop, where she had taken a room, went
merrily for a while. Six months later--it is such an old story that it
is hardly worth the telling--but it was long after dark when she got
back from work and she found it lying on the table in her rough clean
little room--a scrap of paper beside some tiny worsted things she had
been knitting for weeks.
"I am not coming back," she read in an illiterate hand.
She would have screamed, but she could not breathe. She turned again,
staring at the paper and gripping the edge of the table with both
hands--then the ugly little room that smelt of singed hoofs rocked and
swam before her.
When she awoke she lay on the floor. The flame of the candle was
sputtering in its socket. After a while she crawled to her knees in the
dark; then, somehow, she got to her feet and groped her way to the
door, and down the narrow stairs out to the road. She felt the need of a
mother and turned toward Pont du Sable, keeping to the path at the side
of the wood like a homeless dog, not wishing to be observed. Every
little while, she was seized with violent trembling so that she was
obliged to stop--her whole body ached as if she had been beaten.
A sharp wind was whistling in from the sea and the night was so black
that the road bed was barely visible.
It was some time before she reached the beginning of Pont du Sable, and
turned down a forgotten path that ran back of the village by the marsh.
A light gleamed ahead--the lantern of a fishing-boat moored far out on
the slimy mud. She pushed on toward it, mistaking its position, in her
agony, for the hut of Marianne. Before she knew it, she was well out on
the treacherous mud, slipping and sinking. She had no longer the
strength now to pull her tired feet out. Twice she sank in the slime
above her knees. She tried to go back but the mud had become ooze--she
was sinking--she screamed--she was gone and she knew it. Then she
slipped and fell on her face in a glaze of water from the incoming tide.
At this instant some one shouted back, but she did not hear.
It was Marianne.
It was she who had moored the boat with the lantern and was on her way
back to her hut when she heard a woman scream twice. She stopped as
suddenly as if she had been shot at, straining her eyes in the direction
the sound came from--she knew that there was no worse spot in the bay, a
semi-floating solution of mud veined with quicksand. She knew, too, how
far the incoming tide had reached, for she had just left it at her bare
heels by way of a winding narrow causeway with a hard shell bottom that
led to the marsh. She did not call for help, for she knew what lay
before her and there was not a second to lose. The next instant, she had
sprung out on the treacherous slime, running for a life in the
fast-deepening glaze of water.
"Lie down!" she shouted. Then her feet touched a solid spot caked with
shell and grass. Here she halted for an instant to listen--a choking
groan caught her ear.
"Lie down!" she shouted again and sprang forward. She knew the knack of
running on that treacherous slime.
She leapt to a patch of shell and listened again. The woman was choking
not ten yards ahead of her, almost within reach of a thin point of
matted grass running back of the marsh, and there she found her, and she
was still breathing. With her great strength she slid her to the point
of grass. It held them both. Then she lifted her bodily in her arms,
swung her on her back and ran splashing knee-deep in water to solid
ground.
"_Sacre bon Dieu!_" she sobbed as she staggered with her burden. "_C'est
ma belle petite!_"
* * * * *
For weeks Yvonne lay in the hut of the worst vagabond of Pont du Sable.
So did a mite of humanity with black eyes who cried and laughed when he
pleased. And Marianne fished for them both, alone and single-handed,
wrenching time and time again comforts from the sea, for she would
allow no one to go near them, not even such old friends as Monsieur le
Cure and myself--that old hag, with her clear blue eyes, who walks with
the stride of a man, and who looks at you squarely, at times
disdainfully--even when drunk.
[Illustration: sabots]
* * * * *
[Illustration: a Normande]
CHAPTER SIX
THE BARON'S PERFECTOS
Strange things happen in my "Village of Vagabonds." It is not all fisher
girls, Bohemian neighbours, romance, and that good friend the cure who
shoots one day and confesses sinners the next. Things from the outside
world come to us--happenings with sometimes a note of terror in them to
make one remember their details for days.
Only the other day I had run up from the sea to Paris to replenish the
larder of my house abandoned by the marsh at Pont du Sable, and was
sitting behind a glass of vermouth on the terrace of the Cafe de la Paix
when the curtain rose.
One has a desire to promenade with no definite purpose these soft
spring days, when all Paris glitters in the warm sun. The days slip by,
one into another--days to be lazy in, idle and extravagant, to promenade
alone, seeking adventure, and thus win a memory, if only the amiable
glance of a woman's eyes.
I was drinking in the tender air, when from my seat on the terrace I
recognized in the passing throng the familiar figure of the Brazilian
banker, the Baron Santos da Granja. The caress of spring had enticed the
Baron early this afternoon to the Boulevard. Although he had been
pointed out to me but once, there was no mistaking his conspicuous
figure as he strode on through the current of humanity, for he stood
head and shoulders above the average mortal, and many turned to glance
at this swarthy, alert, well-preserved man of the world with his keen
black eyes, thin pointed beard and moustache of iron gray. From his
patent-leather boots to his glistening silk hat the Baron Santos da
Granja was immaculate.
Suddenly I saw him stop, run his eyes swiftly over the crowded tables
and then, though there happened to be one just vacated within his
reach, turn back with a look of decision and enter the Government's
depot for tobacco under the Grand Hotel.
I, too, was in need of tobacco, for had not my good little
maid-of-all-work, Suzette, announced to me only the day before:
"Monsieur, there are but three left of the big cigars in the thin box;
and the ham of the English that monsieur purchased in Paris is no more."