"God only knows what this winter has been," declared his
reverence--"Empty nets--always empty nets."
He struck the table with his clenched fist. "Empty nets!" he cried,
"until I could bear it no longer. My children were in dire need; they
came to you," he declared, turning to the mayor, "and you refused them."
The mayor shrugged his shoulders with a grunt of resentment.
"I gave what I could, while it lasted, from the public fund," he
explained frankly; "there were new roads to be cut."
"Roads!" shouted the cure. "What are roads in comparison to illness and
starvation? They came to me," he went on, turning to Alice, "little
children--mothers, ill, with little children and not a sou in the house,
and none to be earned fishing. Old men crying for bread for those whom
they loved. I grew to hate the very thought of the bells; they seemed to
me a needless luxury among so much misery."
His voice rose until it rang clear in the room.
"I gave it to them," he cried out. "There in my little drawer lay the
power to save those who were near death from sickness, from dirt, from
privation!"
Alice's ringless white hands were clenched in her lap.
"And I saw, as I gave," continued the cure, "the end of pain and of
hunger--little by little I gave, hoping somehow to replace it, until I
dared give no more."
He paused, and drew forth from the breast of his soutane a small cotton
sack that had once held his gun wads. "Here is what is left, gentlemen,"
said he, facing the Municipal Council; "I have counted it at last, four
hundred and eighty francs, sixty-five centimes."
There were tears now in Alice's eyes; dark eyes that followed the cure's
with a look of tenderness and pain. The mayor sat breathing irritably.
As for the Municipal Council, it was evident to Tanrade and myself, that
not one of these plain, red-eared citizens was eager to send a priest to
jail--it was their custom occasionally to go to mass.
"Marianne's illness," continued the cure, "was an important item. You
seemed to consider her case of typhoid as a malady that would cure
itself if let alone. Marianne needed care, serious care, strong as she
was. The girl, Yvonne, she saved from drowning last year, and her baby,
she still shelters among her own children in her hut. They, too, had to
be fed; for Marianne was helpless to care for them. There was the little
boy, too, of the Gavons--left alone, with a case of measles well
developed when I found him, on the draughty floor of a loft; the mother
and father had been drunk together for three days at Bar la Rose. And
there were others--the Mere Gailliard, who would have been sold out for
her rent, and poor old Varnet, the fisherman; he had no home, no money,
no friends; he is eighty-four years old. Most of the winter he slept in
a hedge under a cast-off sail. I got him a better roof and something for
his stomach, Monsieur le Maire."
He paused again, and drew out a folded paper from his pocket. "Here is a
list of all I can remember I have given to, and the amounts as near as I
can recall them," he declared simply. Again he turned to Alice. "It is
to you, dear friend, I have come to confess," he continued; "as for you,
gentlemen, my very life, the church I love, all that this village means
to me, lies in your hands; I do not beg your mercy. I have sinned and I
shall take the consequences--all I ask you to do is to judge fairly the
error of my ways." Monsieur le Cure took his seat.
"It is for you, Madame de Breville, to decide," said the mayor, after
some moments conference with the Council, "since the amount in question
was given by your hand."
Alice rose--softly she slipped past the Municipal Council of Pont du
Sable, until she stood looking up into the cure's eyes; then her arms
went about his strong neck and she kissed him as tenderly as a sister.
"Child!" I heard him murmur.
"We shall give another concert," she whispered in his ear.
[Illustration: bell]
* * * * *
[Illustration: The miser--Garron]
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE MISER--GARRON
We've had a drowning at Pont du Sable. Drownings are not infrequent on
this rough Norman coast of France. Only last December five able
fishermen went down within plain sight of the dunes in a roaring white
sea that gave no quarter. This gale by night became a cyclone; the sea a
driving hell of water, hail and screaming wind. The barometer dropped to
twenty-eight. The wind blew at one hundred and twenty kilometers an
hour. Six fishing boats hailing from Boulogne perished with their crews.
Their women went by train to Calais, still hoping for news, and returned
weeping and alone.
At Boulogne the waves burst in spray to a height of forty feet over the
breakwater--small wonder that the transatlantic liner due there to take
on passengers, signalled to her plunging tender already in
danger--"Going through--No passengers--" and proceeded on her way to New
York.
The sea that night killed with a blow.
This latest drowning at Pont du Sable was a tragedy--or rather, the
culmination of a series of tragedies.
"Suicide?"
"_Non_--_mon ami_--wait until you hear the whole truth of this plain
tale."
On my return from shooting this morning, Suzette brought me the news.
The whole fishing village has known it since daylight.
It seems that the miser, Garron--Garron's boy--Garron's woman, Julie,
and another woman who nobody seems to know much about, are mixed up in
the affair.
Garron's history I have known for months--my good friend the cure
confided to me much concerning the unsavory career of this vagabond of a
miser, whose hut is on the "Great Marsh," back of Pont du Sable. Garron
and I hailed "_bonjour_" to each other through the mist at dawn one
morning, as I chanced to pass by his abode, a wary flight of vignon
having led me a fruitless chase after them across the great marsh. At a
distance through the rifts of mist I mistook this isolated hut of
Garron's for a _gabion_. As I drew within hailing distance of its owner
I saw that the hut stood on a point of mud and wire grass that formed
the forks of the stream that snakes its way through the centre of this
isolated prairie, and so on out to the open sea, two kilometers beyond.
As shrewd a rascal as Garron needed just such a place to settle on. As
he returned my _bonjour_, his woman, Julie, appeared in the low doorway
of the hut and grinned a greeting to me across the fork of the stream.
She impressed me as being young, though she was well on in the untold
forties. Her mass of fair hair--her ruddy cheeks--her blue eyes and her
thick strong body, gave her the appearance of youthful buxomness.
Life must be tough enough with a man like Garron. With the sagacity of
an animal he knew the safety of the open places. By day no one could
emerge from the far horizon of low woodland skirting the great marsh,
without its sole inhabitant noting his approach. By night none but as
clever a poacher as Garron could have found his way across the labyrinth
of bogs, ditches and pitfalls. Both the hut and the woman cost Garron
nothing; both were a question of abandoned wreckage.
Garron showed me his hut that morning, inviting me to cross a muddy
plank as slippery as glass, with which he had spanned the stream, that
he might get a closer look at me and know what manner of man I was. He
did not introduce me to the woman, and I took good care, as I crossed
his threshold and entered the dark living-room with its dirt floor, not
to force her acquaintance, but instead, ran my eye discreetly over the
objects in the gloom--a greasy table littered with dirty dishes, a bed
hidden under a worn quilt and a fireplace of stones over which an iron
pot of soup was simmering. Beyond was another apartment, darker than
the one in which I stood--a sort of catch-all for the refuse of the
former.
The whole of this disreputable shack was built of the wreckage of honest
ships. It might have been torn down and reassembled into some sort of a
decent craft. Part of a stout rudder with its heavy iron hinges, served
as the door. For years it had guided some good ship safe into port--then
the wreck occurred. For weeks after--months, perhaps--it had drifted at
sea until it found a resting place on the beach and was stolen by Garron
to serve him as a strong barrier.
Garron had a bad record--you saw this in his small shifty black eyes,
that evaded your own when you spoke to him, and were riveted upon you
the moment your back was turned. He was older than the woman--possibly
fifty years of age, when I first met him, and, though he lived in the
open, there was a ghastly pallor in his hard face with its determined,
square jaw--a visage well seamed by sin--and crowned by a shock of black
hair streaked with gray. In body he was short, with unusually broad
shoulders and unnaturally long arms. Physically he was as strong as an
ape, yet I believe the woman could easily have strangled him with her
bare hands. Garron had been a hard drinker in his youth, a capable thief
and a skilful poacher. His career in civilization ended when he was
young and--it is said--good-looking.
Some twenty-five years ago--so the cure tells me--Garron worked one
summer for a rich cattle dealer named Villette, on his farm some sixty
kilometers back of the great marsh. Villette was one of those big,
silent Normans, who spoke only when it was worth while, and was known
for his brusqueness and his honesty. He was a giant in build--a man
whose big hands and feet moved slowly but surely; a man who avoided
making intimate friendships and was both proud and rich--proud of his
goods and chattels--of his vast grazing lands and his livestock--proud
too, of his big stone farmhouse with its ancient courtyard flanked by
his stone barns and his entrance gate whose walls were as thick as those
of some feudal stronghold; proud, too, of his wife--a plump little
woman with a merry eye and whom he never suspected of being madly
infatuated with his young farm hand, Garron.
Their love affair culminated in an open scandal. The woman lacked both
the shrewdness and discretion of her lover; he had poached for years and
had never been caught;--it is, therefore, safe to say he would as
skilfully have managed to evade suspicion as far as the woman was
concerned, had not things gone from bad to worse.
Villette discovered this too late; Garron had suddenly disappeared,
leaving madame to weather the scandal and the divorce that followed.
More than this, young Garron took with him ten thousand francs belonging
to the woman, who had been fool enough to lend him her heart--a sum out
of her personal fortune which, for reasons of her own, she deemed it
wisest not to mention.
With ten thousand francs in bank notes next his skin, Garron took the
shortest cut out of the neighbourhood. He travelled by night and slept
by day, keeping to the unfrequented wood roads and trails secreted
between the thick hedges, hidden by-ways that had proved their value
during the guerilla warfares that were so successfully waged in Normandy
generations ago. Three days later Garron passed through the modest
village of Hirondelette, an unknown vagabond. He looked so poor that a
priest in passing gave him ten sous.
"Courage, my son," counselled the good man--"you will get work soon. Try
the farm below, they are in need of hands."
"May you never be in want, father," Garron strangled out huskily in
reply. Then he slunk on to the next farm and begged his dinner. The bank
notes no longer crinkled when he walked; they had taken the contour of
his hairy chest. Every now and then he stopped and clutched them to see
if they were safe, and twice he counted and recounted them in a ditch.
With the Great Marsh as a safe refuge in his crafty mind, he passed by
the next sundown back of Pont du Sable; slept again in a hedge, and by
dawn had reached the marsh. Most of that day he wandered over it looking
for a site for his hut. He chose the point at the forks of the
stream--no one in those days, save a lone hunter ever came there.
Moreover, there was another safeguard. The Great Marsh was too cut up by
ditches and bogs to graze cattle on, hence no one to tend them, and the
more complete the isolation of its sole inhabitant.
Having decided on the point, he set about immediately to build his hut.
The sooner housed the better, thought Garron, besides, the packet next
his chest needed a safe hiding place.
For days the curlews, circling high above the marsh, watched him snaking
driftwood from the beach up the crooked stream to the point at the
forks. The rope he dragged them with he stole from a fisherman's boat
picketed for the night beyond the dunes. When he had gathered a
sufficient amount of timber he went into Pont du Sable with three hares
he had snared and traded them for a few bare necessities--an old saw, a
rusty hammer and some new nails. He worked steadily. By the end of a
fortnight he had finished the hut. When it was done he fashioned (for he
possessed considerable skill as a carpenter) a clever hiding place in
the double wall of oak for his treasure. Then he nailed up his door and
went in search of a mate.
* * * * *
He found her after dark--this girl to his liking--at the _fete_ in the
neighbouring village of Avelot. She turned and leered at him as he
nudged her elbow, the lights from the merry-go-round she stood watching
illumining her wealth of fair hair and her strong young figure
silhouetted against the glare. Garron had studied her shrewdly, singling
her out in the group of village girls laughing with their sweethearts.
The girl he nudged he saw did not belong to the village--moreover, she
was barefooted, mischievously drunk, and flushed with riding on the
wooden horses. She was barely eighteen. She laughed outright as he
gripped her strong arm, and opened her wanton mouth wide, showing her
even, white teeth. In return for her welcome he slapped her strong waist
soundly.
"_Allons-y_--what do you say to a glass, _ma belle_?" ventured Garron
with a grin.
"_Eh ben!_ I don't say no," she laughed again, in reply.
He felt her turn instinctively toward him--there was already something
in common between these two. He pushed her ahead of him through the
group with a certain familiar authority. When they were free of the
crowd and away from the lights his arm went about her sturdy neck and he
crushed her warm mouth to his own.
"_Allons-y_--" he repeated--"Come and have a glass."
They had crossed in the mud to a dingy tent lighted by a lantern; here
they seated themselves on a rough bench at a board table, his arm still
around her. She turned to leer at him now, half closing her clear blue
eyes. When he had swallowed his first thimbleful of applejack he spat,
and wiped his mouth with the back of his free hand, while the girl grew
garrulous under the warmth of the liquor and his rough affection. Again
she gave him her lips between two wet oaths. No one paid any attention
to them--it was what a _fete_ was made for. For a while they left their
glasses and danced with the rest to the strident music of the
merry-go-round organ.
It was long after midnight when Garron paid his score under the tent.
She had told him much in the meantime--there was no one to care whom she
followed. She told him, too, she had come to the _fete_ from a hamlet
called Les Forets, where she had been washing for a woman. The moon was
up when they took the highroad together, following it until it reached
the beginning of Pont du Sable, then Garron led the way abruptly to the
right up a tangled lane that ran to an old woodroad that he used to gain
the Great Marsh. They went lurching along together in comparative
silence, the man steadying the girl through the dark places where the
trees shut out the moon. Garron knew the road as well as his pocket--it
was a favourite with him when he did not wish to be seen. Now and then
the girl sang in a maudlin way:
"_Entrez, entrez, messieurs,
C'est l'amour qui vous attend._"
It was gray dawn when they reached the edge of the Great Marsh that lay
smothered under a blanket of chill mist.
"It is over there, my nest," muttered Garron, with a jerk of his thumb
indicating the direction in which his hut lay. Again he drew her roughly
to him.
"_Dis donc, toi!_" he demanded brusquely: "how do they call you?" It had
not, until then, occurred to him to ask her name.
"_Eh ben_--Julie," she replied. "It's a _sacre_ little name I never
liked. _Eh, tu sais_," she added slowly--"when I don't like a thing--"
she drew back a little and gazed at him sullenly--"_Eh ben_--I am like
that when I don't like a thing." Her flash of temper pleased him--he had
had enough of the trustful kitten of Villette's.
"Come along," said he gruffly.
"_Dis donc, toi_," she returned without moving. "It is well understood
then about my dress and the shoes?"
"_Mais oui! Bon Dieu!_" replied the peasant irritably. He was hungry and
wanted his soup. He swore at the chill as he led the way across the
marsh while she followed in his tracks, satisfied with his promise of
the dress and shoes. She wanted a blue dress and she had seen the shoes
that pleased her some months before in the grocery at Pont du Sable when
a dog and she had dragged a fisherwoman in her cart for their board and
lodging.
By the time they reached the forks of the stream the rising sun had
melted the blanket of the mist until it lay over the desolate prairie in
thin rifts of rose vapour.
It was thus the miser, Garron, found his mate.
* * * * *
Julie proved to be a fair cook, and the two lived together, at the
beginning, in comparative peace. Although it was not until days after
the _fete_ at Avelot that she managed to hold him to his promise about
the blue dress, he sent her to Pont du Sable for her shoes the day
after their arrival on the marsh--she bought them and they hurt her. The
outcome of this was their first quarrel.
"_Sacre bon Dieu!_" he snarled--"thou art never content!" Then he struck
her with the back of his clenched fist and, womanlike, she went
whimpering to bed. Neither he nor she thought much of the blow. Her mind
was on the shoes that did not fit.
When she was well asleep and snoring, he ran his sinewy arm in the hole
he had made in the double wall--lifted the end of a short, heavy plank,
caught it back against a nail and gripped the packet of bank notes that
lay snug beneath it. Satisfied they were safe and his mate still asleep,
he replaced the plank over his fortune--crossed the dirt floor to his
barrier of a door, dropped an iron rod through two heavy staples,
securely bolting it--blew out the tallow dip thrust in the neck of an
empty bottle, and went to bed.
Months passed--months that were bleak and wintry enough on the marsh for
even a hare to take to the timber for comfort. During most of that
winter Garron peddled the skins of rabbits he snared on the marsh, and
traded and bought their pelts, and he lived poor that no one might
suspect his wealth. He and his mate rose, like the wild fowl, with the
sun and went to bed with it, to save the light of the tallow dip. Though
I have said she could easily have strangled him with her hands, she
refrained. Twice, when she lay half awake she had seen him run his wiry
arm in the wall--one night she had heard the lifting of the heavy plank
and the faint crinkling sound of the package as he gripped it. She had
long before this suspected he had money hidden.
Julie was no fool!
With the spring the marsh became more tenable. The smallest song birds
from the woods flitted along the ditches; there were days, too, when the
desolate prairie became soft--hazy--and inviting.
At daybreak, the beginning of one of these delicious spring days,
Garron, hearing a sharp cry without, rose abruptly and unbolted his
barrier. He would have stepped out and across his threshold had not his
bare foot touched something heavy and soft. He looked down--still half
asleep--then he started back in a sort of dull amazement. The thing his
foot had touched was a bundle--a rolled and well-wrapped blanket, tied
with a stout string. The sharp cry he had heard he now realized, issued
from the folds of the blanket. Garron bent over it, his thumb and
forefinger uncovering the face of a baby.
"_Sacristi!_" he stammered--then leaned back heavily against the old
rudder of a door. Julie heard and crawled out of bed. She was peering
over his shoulder at the bundle at his feet before he knew it.
Garron half wheeled and faced her as her breath touched his coarse ear.
"_Eh bien!_ what is it?" he exclaimed, searching vainly for something
else to say.
"_Eh ben! Ca! Nom de Dieu!_" returned his mate nodding to the bundle.
"It is pretty--that!"
"_Tu m'accuses, hein?_" he snarled.
"They do not leave bundles of that kind at the wrong door," she retorted
in reply, half closing her blue eyes and her red hands.
"_Allons! allons!_" he exclaimed with heat, still at a loss for his
words.
With her woman's instinct she brushed past him and started to pick up
the bundle, but he was too quick for her and drew her roughly back,
gripping her waist so sharply that he felt her wince.
"It does not pass like that!" he cried sharply. "_Eh ben!_ listen to me.
I'm too old a rat to be made a fool of--to be tricked like that!"
"Tricked!" she laughed back--"No, my old one--it is as simple as
_bonjour_, and since it is thine thou wilt keep it. Thou'lt--keep what
thou--"
The pent-up rage within him leaped to his throat:
"It does not pass like that!" he roared. With his clenched fist he
struck her squarely across the mouth. He saw her sink limp to the
ground, bleeding, her head buried between her knees. Then he picked up
the child and started with it across the plank that spanned the fork of
the stream. A moment later, still dizzy from the blow, she saw him
dimly, making rapidly across the marsh toward a bend in the stream. Then
the love of a mother welled up within her and she got to her feet and
followed him.
"Stay where thou art!" he shouted back threateningly.
The child in his arms was screaming. She saw his hand cover its
throat--the next moment she had reached him and her two hands were about
his own in a grip that sent him choking to his knees. The child rolled
from his arms still screaming, and the woman who was strangling Garron
into obedience now sank her knee in his back until she felt him give up.
"_Assez!_" he grunted out when he could breathe.
"_Eh ben!_ I am like _that_ when I don't like a thing!" she cried,
savagely repeating her old words. He looked up and saw a dangerous gleam
in her eyes. "_Ah, mais oui alors!_" she shouted defiantly. "Since it is
thine thou wilt keep it!"
Garron did not reply. She knew the fight was out of him and picked up
the still screaming baby, which she hugged to her breast, crooning over
it while Garron got lamely to his feet. Without another word she started
back to the hut, Garron following his mate and his son in silence.
* * * * *
Years passed and the boy grew up on the marsh, tolerated by Garron and
idolized and spoiled by Julie--years that transformed the black-eyed
baby into a wiry, reckless young rascal of sixteen with all the vagabond
nature of his father--straight and slim, with the clear-cut features of
a gypsy. A year later the brother of Madame Villette, a well-known
figure on the Paris Bourse, appeared and after a satisfactory
arrangement with Garron, took the boy with him to Paris to be educated.
It was hard on Julie, who adored him. Her consent was not even asked,
but at the time she consoled herself with the conviction, however, that
the good fortune that had fallen to the lot of the baby she had saved,
was for the best. The uncle was rich--that in itself appealed strongly
to her peasant mind. That, and her secret knowledge of Garron's fortune,
for she had discovered and counted it herself and, motherlike, told the
boy.
* * * * *
In Paris the attempt to educate Jacques Baptiste Garron was an expensive
experiment. When he went to bed at all it was only when the taverns and
cafes along the "Boul-miche" closed before dawn. Even then he and his
band of idle students found other retreats and more glasses in the
all-night cafes near the Halles. And so he ate and drank and slept and
made love to any little outcast who pleased him--one of these amiable
_petites femmes_--the inside of whose pocketbook was well greased with
rouge--became his devoted slave.