partridges were plentiful, and so he ran on, warmed by the rare Musigny,
reminiscing upon the old days and his old friends who were serious
sportsmen, he declared, and knew the habits of the game they were after,
for they seldom returned with an empty game-bag.
"And you are just as keen about shooting as ever?" I ventured.
"I shoot no more," he exclaimed with a shrug. "One must be a philosopher
when one is past sixty--when one has no longer the solid legs to tramp
with, nor the youth and the digestion to _live_. Ah! Besides, the life
has changed--Paris was gay enough in my day. I _lived_ then, but at
sixty--I stopped--with my memories. No! no! beyond sixty it is quite
impossible. One must be philosophic, eh?"
Before I could reply, Madame de Savignac entered the room. I felt the
charm of her personality, as I looked into her eyes, and as she welcomed
me I forgot that her faded silk gown was once in fashion before I was
born, or that madame was short and no longer graceful. As the talk went
on, I began to study her more at my ease, when some one rapped at the
outer door of the vestibule. She started nervously, then, rising,
whispered to Francois, who had come to open it, then a moment later rose
again and, going out into the hall, closed the door behind her.
"Thursday then," I heard a man's gruff voice reply brusquely.
I saw de Savignac straighten in his chair, and lean to one side as if
trying to catch a word of the muffled conversation in the vestibule. The
next instant he had recovered his genial manner to me, but I saw that
again he laboured for some moments painfully for his breath.
The door of the vestibule closed with a vicious snap. Then I heard the
crunch of sabots on the gravelled court, and the next instant caught a
glimpse of the stout, brutal figure of the peasant Le Gros, the big
dealer in cattle, as he passed the narrow window of the vestibule.
It was _he_, then, with his insolent, bestial face purple with good
living, who had slammed the door. I half started indignantly from my
chair--then I remembered it was no affair of mine.
Presently madame returned--flushed, and, with a forced smile, in which
there was more pain than pleasure, poured for me another glass of
Musigny. I saw instantly that something unpleasant had passed--something
unusually unpleasant--perhaps tragic, and I discreetly rose to take my
leave.
Without a word of explanation as to what had happened, Madame de
Savignac kissed my dog good-bye on the top of his silky head, while de
Savignac stroked him tenderly. He was perfectly willing to come with me,
and cocked his head on one side.
We were all in the courtyard now.
"_Au revoir_," they waved to me.
"_Au revoir_," I called back.
"_Au revoir_," came back to me faintly, as Pierre and the doggie and I
entered the green lane and started for home.
"Monsieur sees that I was right, is it not true?" ventured Pierre, as we
gained the open fields. "Monsieur de Savignac would have been grieved
had not monsieur accepted the little dog."
"Yes," I replied absently, feeling more like a marauder for having
accepted all they had out of their hearts thrust upon me.
Then I stopped--lifted the roly-poly little spaniel, and taking him in
my arms whispered under his silky ear: "We shall go back often, you and
I"--and I think he understood.
* * * * *
A few days later I dropped into Madame Vinet's snug little cafe in Pont
du Sable. It was early in the morning and the small room of the cafe,
with barely space enough for its four tables still smelt of fresh soap
suds and hot water. At one of the tables sat the peasant in his black
blouse, sipping his coffee and applejack.
Le Gros lifted his sullen face as I entered, shifted his elbows, gripped
the clean marble slab of his table with both his red hands, and with a
shrewd glint from his small, cruel eyes, looked up and grunted.
"Ah!--_bonjour_, monsieur."
"_Bonjour_, Monsieur Le Gros," I replied. "We seem to be the only ones
here. Where's the patronne?"
"Upstairs, making her bed--another dry day," he muttered, half to
himself, half to me.
"She will stay dry for some days," I returned. "The wind is well set
from the northeast."
"_Sacristi!_ a dirty time," he growled. "My steers are as dry as an
empty cask."
"I'd like a little rain myself," said I, reaching for a chair--"I have a
young dog to train--a spaniel Monsieur de Savignac has been good enough
to give me. He is too young to learn to follow a scent on dry ground."
Le Gros raised his bull-like head with a jerk.
"De Savignac gave you a _dog_, did he? and he has a dog to give away,
has he?"
The words came out of his coarse throat with a snarl.
I dropped the chair and faced him.
(He is the only man in Pont du Sable that I positively dislike.)
"Yes," I declared, "he gave me a dog. May I ask you what business it is
of yours?"
A flash of sullen rage illumined for a moment the face of the cattle
dealer. Then he muttered something in his peasant accent and sat
glowering into his empty coffee cup as I turned and left the room, my
mind reverting to Madame de Savignac's door which his coarse hand had
closed with a vicious snap.
* * * * *
We took the short cut across the fields often now--my yellow puppy and
I. Indeed I grew to see these good friends of mine almost daily, and as
frequently as I could persuade them, they came to my house abandoned by
the marsh.
The Peruvian gentleman's boarding house had been a failure, and I
learned from the cure that the de Savignacs were hard pressed to pay
their creditors.
It was Le Gros who held the mortgage, I further gleaned.
And yet those two dear people kept a brave heart. They were still giving
what they had, and she kept him in ignorance as best she could,
softening the helplessness of it all, with her gentleness and her
courage.
In his vague realization that the end was near, there were days when he
forced himself into a gay mood and would come chuckling down the lane to
open the gate for me, followed by Mirza, the tawny old mother of my
puppy, who kept her faithful brown eyes on his every movement. Often it
was she who sprang nimbly ahead and unlatched the gate for me with her
paw and muzzle, an old trick he had taught her, and he would laugh when
she did it, and tell me there were no dogs nowadays like her.
Thus now and then he forced himself to forget the swarm of little
miseries closing down upon him--forgot even his aches and pains, due
largely to the dampness of the vine-smothered garconniere whose
old-fashioned interior smelt of cellar damp, for there was hardly a room
in it whose wall paper had escaped the mould.
It was not until March that the long-gathering storm broke--as quick as
a crackling lizard of lightning strikes. Le Gros had foreclosed the
mortgage.
The Chateau of Hirondelette was up for sale.
When de Savignac came out to open the gate for me late that evening his
face was as white as the palings in the moonlight.
"Come in," said he, forcing a faint laugh---he stopped for a moment as
he closed and locked the gate--labouring painfully for his breath. Then
he slipped his arm under my own. "Come along," he whispered, struggling
for his voice. "I have found another bottle of Musigny."
A funeral, like a wedding or an accident, is quickly over. The sale of
de Savignac's chateau consumed three days of agony.
As I passed the "garconniere" by the lane beyond the courtyard on my way
to the last day's sale, I looked over the hedge and saw that the
shutters were closed--farther on, a doctor's gig was standing by the
gate. From a bent old peasant woman in sabots and a white cap, who
passed, I learned which of the two was ill. It was as I had feared--his
wife. And so I continued on my way to the sale.
As I passed through the gates of the chateau, the rasping voice of the
lean-jawed auctioneer reached my ears as he harangued in the drizzling
rain before the steps of the chateau the group of peasants gathered
before him--widows in rusty crepe veils, shrewd old Norman farmers in
blue blouses looking for bargains, their carts wheeled up on the
mud-smeared lawn. And a few second-hand dealers from afar, in black
derbys, lifting a dirty finger to close a bid for mahogany.
Close to this sordid crowd on the mud-smeared lawn sat Le Gros, his
heavy body sunk in a carved and gilded arm-chair that had once graced
the boudoir of Madame de Savignac. As I passed him, I saw that his face
was purple with drink. He sat there the picture of insolent ignorance,
this pig of a peasant.
At times the auctioneer rallied the undecided with coarse jokes, and
the crowd roared, for they are not burdened with delicacy, these Norman
farmers.
"_Allons! Allons!_ my good ladies!" croaked the auctioneer. "Forty sous
for the lot. A bed quilt for a princess and a magnificent water filter
de luxe that will keep your children well out of the doctor's hands.
_Allons!_ forty sous, forty-one--two?"
A merchant in hogs raised his red, puffy hand, then turned away with a
leer as the shrill voice of a fisher woman cried, "Forty-five."
"Sold!" yelped the auctioneer--"sold to madame the widow Dupuis of
Hirondelette," who was now elbowing her broad way through the crowd to
her bargain which she struggled out with, red and perspiring, to the
mud-smeared lawn, where her eldest daughter shrewdly examined the
bedquilt for holes.
I turned away when it was all over and followed the crowd out through
the gates. Le Gros was climbing into his cart. He was drunk and swearing
over the poor result of the sale. De Savignac was still in his debt--and
I continued on my way home, feeling as if I had attended an execution.
Half an hour later the sharp bark of my yellow puppy greeted me from
beyond my wall. As I entered my courtyard, he came to me wriggling with
joy. Suddenly I stopped, for my ear caught the sound of a tail gently
patting the straw in the cavernous old stable beyond my spaniel's
kennel. I looked in and saw a pair of eyes gleaming like opals in the
gloom. Then the tawny body of Mirza, the mother, rose from the straw and
came slowly and apologetically toward me with her head lowered.
"Suzette!" I called, "how did she get here?"
"The boy of Monsieur de Savignac brought her an hour ago, monsieur,"
answered the little maid. "There is a note for monsieur. I have left it
on the table."
I went in, lighted the fire, and read the following:
"THE GARCONNIERE, _Saturday_.
"Take her, my friend. I can no longer keep her with me. You
have the son, it is only right you should have the mother.
We leave for Paris to-morrow. We shall meet there soon, I
trust. If you come here, do not bring her with you. I said
good-bye to her this morning.
"Jacques de Savignac."
It was all clear to me now--pitifully clear--the garconniere had gone
with the rest.
* * * * *
On one of my flying trips to Paris I looked them up in their refuge, in
a slit of a street. Here they had managed to live by the strictest
economy, in a plain little nest under the roof, composed of two rooms
and a closet for a kitchen.
One night, early in June, after some persuasion, I forced him to go with
me to one of those sparkling _risquee_ little comedies at the Palais
Royal which he loved, and so on to supper at the Cafe de la Paix, where
that great gipsy, Boldi, warms the heart with his fiddle.
The opera was just out, when we reached our table, close to the band.
Beauty and the Beast were arriving, and wraps of sheen and lace were
being slipped from fair shoulders into the fat waiting hands of the
garcons, while the busy maitre d'hotel beamed with his nightly smile and
jotted down the orders.
The snug supper room glittered with light, clean linen and shining
glass. Now that the theatres were out, it had become awake with the
chatter with which these little midnight suppers begin--suppers that so
often end in confidences, jealousy and even tears, that need only the
merriest tone of a gipsy's fiddle to turn to laughter.
Boldi is an expert at this. He watches those to whom he plays, singling
out the one who needs his fiddle most, and to-night he was watching de
Savignac.
We had finished our steaming dish of lobster, smothered in a spiced
sauce that makes a cold dry wine only half quench one's thirst, and were
proceeding with a crisp salad when Boldi, with a rushing crescendo
slipped into a delicious waltz. De Savignac now sat with his chin sunk
heavily in his hands, drinking in the melody with its spirited
accompaniment as the cymballist's flexible hammers flew over the
resonant strings, the violins following the master in the red coat, with
that keen alertness with which all real gipsies play. I realized now,
what the playing of a gipsy meant to him. By the end of the waltz De
Savignac's eyes were shining.
Boldi turned to our table and bowed.
"Play," said I, to him in my poor Hungarian (that de Savignac might not
understand, for I wished to surprise him) "a real czardas of your
people--ah! I have it!" I exclaimed. "Play the legend and the mad dance
that follows--the one that Racz Laczi loved--the legend of the young man
who went up the mountain and met the girl who jilted him."
Boldi nodded his head and grinned with savage enthusiasm. He drew his
bow across the sobbing strings and the legend began. Under the spell of
his violin, the chatter of the supper room ceased--the air now heavy
with the mingled scent of perfume and cigars, seemed to pulsate under
the throb of the wild melody--as he played on, no one spoke--the men
even forgetting to smoke; the women listening, breathing with parted
lips. I turned to look at de Savignac--he was drunk and there was a
strange glitter in his eyes, his cheeks flushed to a dull crimson, but
not from wine.
Boldi's violin talked--now and then it wept under the vibrant grip of
the master, who dominated it until it dominated those to whom it played.
The young man in the legend was rushing up the mountain path in earnest
now, for he had seen ahead of him the girl he loved--now the melody
swept on through the wooing and the breaking of her promise, and now
came the rush of the young man down to the nearest village to drown his
chagrin and forget her in the mad dance, the "Czardas," which followed.
As the czardas quickened until its pace reached the speed of a
whirlwind, de Savignac suddenly staggered to his feet--his breath coming
in short gasps.
"Sit down!" I pleaded, not liking the sudden purplish hue of his
cheeks.
"Let--me--alone," he stammered, half angrily. "It--is so good--to--be
alive again."
"You shall not," I whispered, my eye catching sight of a gold louis
between his fingers. "You don't know what you are doing--it is not
right--this is my dinner, old friend--_all of it_, do you understand?"
"Let--me--alone," he breathed hoarsely, as I tried to get hold of the
coin--"it is my last--my last--my last!"--and he tossed the gold piece
to the band. It fell squarely on the cymballum and rolled under the
strings.
"Bravo!" cried a little woman opposite, clapping her warm, jewelled
hands. Then she screamed, for she saw Monsieur de Savignac sway heavily,
and sink back in his seat, his chin on his chest, his eyes closed.
I ripped open his collar and shirt to give him breath. Twice his chest
gave a great bound, and he murmured something I did not catch--then he
sank back in my arms--dead.
During the horror and grim reality of it all--the screaming women, the
physician working desperately, although he knew all hope was gone--while
the calm police questioned me as to his identity and domicile, I shook
from head to foot--and yet the worst was still to come--I had to tell
Madame de Savignac.
[Illustration: spilled bottle of wine]
* * * * *
[Illustration: The man with the gun]
CHAPTER NINE
THE MAN WITH THE GUN
It is at last decided! The kind and sympathetic Minister of Agriculture
has signed the official document opening the shooting-season for hares
and partridges in _La belle France_, to-morrow, Sunday, the thirtieth of
September. Thrice happy hunters!--they who had begun to grumble in their
cafes over the rumour that the opening of the shooting-season might be
postponed until the second or even third Sunday in October.
My good friend the mayor of Pont du Sable has just handed me my
hunting-permit for the coming year bearing the stamp of the _Republique
Francaise_, the seal of the prefecture, the signature of the prefet, and
including everything, from the colour of my hair and complexion to my
height, age, birth and domicile. On the back of this important piece of
paper I read as follows:
That the permit must be produced at the demand of all agents authorized
by law. That it is prohibited to shoot without it, or upon lands without
the consent of the proprietor having the right--or outside of the season
fixed by the laws of the prefets.
Furthermore:
The father--the mother--the tutor--the masters, and guardians are
civilly responsible for the misdemeanours committed while shooting by
their infants--wards--pupils, or domestics living with them.
And finally:
That the hunter who has lost his permit cannot resume again the exercise
of the hunt until he has obtained and paid for a new one, twenty-eight
francs and sixty centimes.
To-morrow, then, the jolly season opens.
"_Vive la Republique!_"
It is a season, too, of crisp twilights after brilliant days, so short
that my lost village is plunged in darkness as early as seven, and goes
to bed to save the candle--the hour when the grocer's light gleaming
ahead of me across the slovenly little public square becomes the only
beacon in the village; and, guided by it, I pick my way in the dark
along the narrow thoroughfare, stumbling over the laziest of the village
dogs sprawled here and there in the road outside the doorways of the
fishermen.
Across one of these thresholds I catch a glimpse to-night of a tired
fisher girl stretched on her bed after her long day at sea. Beside the
bed a very old woman in a white cotton cap bends over her bowl of soup
by the wavering light of a tallow dip.
"_Bonsoir_, monsieur!" croaks a hoarse voice from the dark. It is
Marianne. She has fished late.
At seven-thirty the toy train rumbles into Pont du Sable, stops for a
barefooted passenger, and rumbles out again through the
village--crawling lest it send one of the laziest dogs yelping to its
home. The headlight on the squat locomotive floods the way ahead,
suddenly illumining the figure of a blinking old man laden with nets
and three barelegged children who scream, "_Bonsoir_, monsieur," to the
engineer.
What glorious old days are these! The wealth of hedged fields---the lush
green grass, white with hoar frost at daybreak--the groups of mild-eyed
cows and taciturn young bulls; in all this brilliant clearness of sea
air, sunshine and Norman country spreading its richness down to the very
edge of the sea, there comes to the man with the gun a sane
exhilaration--he is alive.
On calm nights the air is pungent and warm with the perfume of tons of
apples lying heaped in the orchards, ready for the cider-making, nights,
when the owls hoot dismally under a silver moon.
When the wind veers to the north it grows cold. On such nights as these
"the Essence of Selfishness" seeks my fireside.
She is better fed than many other children in the lost village beyond my
wall. And spoiled!--_mon Dieu!_ She is getting to be hopeless.
Ah, you queen of studied cruelty and indifference! You, with your nose
of coral pink, your velvet ears that twitch in your dreams, and your
blue-white breast! You, who since yesterday morning have gnawed to death
two helpless little birds in my hedge which you still think I have not
discovered! And yet I still continue to feed you by hand piecemeal since
you disdain to dine from my best china, and Suzette takes care of you
like a nurse.
_Eh bien!_ Some day, do you hear, I shall sell you to the rabbit-skin
man, who has a hook for a hand, and the rest of you will find its way to
some cheap table d'hote, where you will pass as ragout of rabbit Henri
IV. under a thick sauce. What would you do, I should like to know, if
you were the vagabond cat who lives back in the orchard, and whose four
children sleep in the hollow trunk of the tree and are content with what
their mother brings them, whether it be plain mole or the best of
grasshopper. Eh, mademoiselle? Open those topaz eyes of yours--Suzette
is coming to put you to bed.
The trim little maid entered, crossed noiselessly in the firelight to my
chair, and, laying a sealed note from my friend the Baron beneath the
lamp, picked up the sleepy cat and carried her off to her room.
The note was a delightful surprise.
"_Cher monsieur_: Will you make me the pleasure and the honour to come
and do the _ouverture_ of the hunt at my chateau to-morrow, Sunday--my
auto will call for you about six of the morning. We will be about ten
guns, and I count on the amiability of my partridges and my hares to
make you pass a beautiful and good day. Will you accept, dear sir, the
assurance of my sentiments the most distinguished?"
It was nice of the Baron to think of me, for I had made his acquaintance
but recently at one of Tanrade's dinners, during which, I recall, the
Baron declared to me as he lifted his left eyebrow over his cognac, that
the hunt--_la chasse_--"was always amusing, and a great blessing to men,
since it created the appetite of the wolf and was an excuse to get rid
of the ladies." He told me, too, as he adjusted his monocle safely in
the corner of his aristocratic aquiline nose, that his favourite saint
was St. Hubert. He would have liked to have known him--he must have
been a _bon garcon_, this patron saint of hunting.
"Ah! _Les femmes!_" he sighed, as he straightened his erect torso, that
had withstood so many Parisian years, against the back of his chair.
"Ah! _Les femmes!_ But in zee fields zey cannot follow us? _Hein?_" He
laughed, lapsing into his broken English. "Zey cannot follow us through
zee hedges, ovaire zee rough grounds, in zee rains, in zee muds. Nevaire
take a woman hunting," he counselled me sotto voce beneath his vibrant
hand, for Alice de Breville was present. "One can _nevaire_ make love
and kill zee agile little game at zee same time. _Par exemple!_ You
whispaire somezing in madame's leetle ear and brrrh! a partridge--_que
voulez-vous, mon cher?_" he concluded, with a shrug. "It is quite
impossible--_quite_ impossible."
I told him leisurely, as we sipped our liqueur, of the hunting in my own
country, of the lonely tramps in the wilderness following a line of
traps in the deep snow, the blind trails, the pork sandwich melted
against the doughnuts at noon, leaking lean-tos, smoky fires, and bad
coffee.
"_Parbleu!_" he roared. "You have not zee rendezvous? You have not zee
hunting breakfast? I should be quite ill--you hunt like zee Arabs--like
zee gipsies--ah, yes, I forget--zee warm sandwich and zee native nuts."
He tapped the table gently with his rings, smiling the while
reminiscently into his glass, then, turning again to me, added
seriously:
"It is not all zee play--zee hunt. I have had zee legs broken by zee
fatigue. Zee good breakfast is what you say 'indispensable' to break zee
day. Zee good stories, zee camaraderie, zee good kind wine--_enfin
tout!_ But"--and again he leaned nearer--"but _not zee_
ladies--_nevaire_--only zee memories."
I repeat, it was nice of the Baron to think of me. I could easily
picture to myself as I reread his note his superb estate, that
stronghold of his ancestors; the hearty welcome at its gates; the
gamekeepers in their green fustians; the pairs of perfectly trained
dogs; the abundance of partridges and hares; and the breakfast in the
old chateau, a feast that would be replete with wit and old Burgundy.
How splendid are these Norman autumns! What exhilarating old days
during this season of dropping apples, blue skies, and falling leaves!
Days when the fat little French partridges nestle in companies in the
fields, shorn to stubble after the harvest, and sleek hares at sunrise
lift their long ears cautiously above the dew-bejeweled cobwebs along
the ditches to make sure that the green feeding-patch beyond is safe
from the man and the gun.
Fat, garrulous Monsieur Toupin of the village becomes under the spell of
Madame Vinet's best cognac so uproarious when he has killed one of these
sleek, strong-limbed hares, that madame is obliged to draw the
turkey-red curtain over the window of her small cafe that Monsieur
Toupin may not be seen by his neighbours.