jealousy was something to see to believe. Little by little she dominated
him until he ran heavily in debt. She even managed the uncle when the
nephew failed--she was a shrewd little brat--small and tense as wire,
with big brown eyes and hair that was sometimes golden and sometimes a
dry Titian red, according to her choice. Once, when she left him for two
days, Garron threatened to kill himself.
"_Pauvre gosse!_" she said sympathizingly on her return--and embraced
him back to sanity.
The real grain of saneness left in young Garron was his inborn love of a
gun. It was the gun which brought him down from Paris, back to the Great
Marsh now and then when the ducks were on flight.
He had his own _gabion_ now at the lower end of the bay at Pont du
Sable, in which he slept and shot from nights when the wind was
northeast--a comfortable, floating box of a duck-blind sunk in an outer
jacket of tarred planks and chained to a heavy picket driven in the mud
and wire grass, for the current ran dangerously strong there when the
tide was running out.
Late in October young Garron left Paris suddenly and the girl with the
Titian hair was with him. He, like his father, needed a safe refuge.
Pressed by his creditors he had forged his uncle's name. The only way
out of the affair was to borrow from Julie to hush up the matter. It did
not occur to him at the time how she would feel about the girl; neither
did he realize that he had grown to be an arrogant young snob who now
treated Julie, who had saved his life, and pampered him, more like a
servant than a foster-mother.
The night young Garron arrived was at the moment of the highest tides.
The four supped together that night in the hut--the father silent and
sullen throughout the meal and Julie insanely jealous of the girl. Later
old Garron went off across the marsh in the moonlight to look after his
snares.
When the three were alone Julie turned to the boy. For some moments she
regarded him shrewdly. She saw he was no longer the wild young savage
she had brought up; there was a certain nervous, blase feebleness about
his movements as he sat uneasily in his chair, his hands thrust in the
pockets of his hunting coat, his chin sunk on his chest. She noticed
too, the unnatural redness of his lips and the haggard pallor about his
thin, sunken cheeks.
"_Eh ben, mon petit_--" she began at length. "It is a poor place to get
fat in, your Paris! They don't feed you any too well--_hein?_--Those
grand restaurants you talk so much about. Pouf!"
"_Penses-tu?_" added the girl, since Garron did not reply. Instead he
lighted a fresh cigarette, took two long puffs from it, and threw it on
the floor.
The girl, angered at his silence and lack of courage, gave him a vicious
glance.
"_Helas!_" sighed Julie, "you were quicker with your tongue when you
were a baby."
"_Ah zut!_" exclaimed the girl in disgust. "He has something to tell
you--" she blurted out to Julie.
"_Eh ben!_ What?" demanded Julie firmly.
"I need some money," muttered the boy doggedly. "I _need it!!_" he cried
suddenly, gaining courage in a sort of nervous hysteria.
Julie stared at him in amazement, the girl watching her like a lynx.
"_Bon Dieu!_" shouted Julie. "And it is because of _that_ you sit there
like a sick cat! Listen to me, my little one. Eat the good grease like
the rest of us and be content if you keep out of jail."
The boy sank lower in his chair.
"It will be jail for me," he said, "unless you help me. Give me five
hundred francs. I tell you I am in a bad fix. _Sacre bon Dieu!_--you
_shall_ give it to me!" he cried, half springing from his chair.
"Shut up, thou," whispered the girl--"not so fast!"
"Do you think it rains money here?" returned Julie, closing her red
fists upon the table, "that all you have to do is to ask for it? _Ah,
mais non, alors!_"
The boy slunk back in his chair staring at the tallow dip
disconsolately. The girl gritted her small teeth--somehow, she felt
abler than he to get it out of Julie in the end.
"You stole it, _hein?_" cried Julie, "like your father. Name of a dog!
it is the same old trick that, and it brings no good. _Allons!_" she
resumed after a short pause. "_Depeche toi!_ Get out for your ducks--I'm
going to bed."
"Give me four hundred," pleaded the boy.
"Not a sou!" cried Julie, bringing her fist down on the greasy table,
and she shot a jealous glance at the girl.
Without a word, young Garron rose dejectedly, got into his goatskin
coat, picked up his gun and, turning, beckoned to the girl.
"Go on!" she cried; "I'll come later."
"He is an infant," said she to Julie, when young Garron had closed the
door behind him. "He has no courage. You know the fix we are in--the
Commissaire of Police in Paris already has word of it."
Julie did not reply; she still sat with her clenched fists outstretched
on the table.
"He has forged his uncle's check," snapped the girl.
Julie did not reply.
"_Ah, c'est comme ca!_" sneered the girl with a cool laugh--"and when
he is in jail," she cried aloud, "_Eh, bien--quoi?_"
"He will not have _you_, then," returned Julie faintly.
"Ah----" she exclaimed. She slipped her tense little body into her thick
automobile coat and with a contemptuous toss of her chin passed out into
the night, leaving the door open.
"Jacques!" she called shrilly--"Jacques!--_Attends._"
"_Bon!_" came his voice faintly in reply from afar on the marsh.
After some moments Julie got slowly to her feet, crossed the dirt floor
of the hut and closing the door dropped the bar through the staples.
Then for the space of some minutes she stood by the table struggling
with a jealous rage that made her strong knees tremble. She who had
saved his life, who had loved him from babyhood--she told herself--and
what had he done for her in return? The great Paris that she knew
nothing of had stolen him; Paris had given him _her_--that little viper
with her red mouth; Paris had ruined him--had turned him into a thief
like his father. Silently she cursed his uncle. Then her rage reverted
again to the girl. She thought too, of her own life with Garron--of all
its miserly hardships. "They have given me nothing--" she sobbed
aloud--"nothing."
"Five hundred francs would save him!" she told herself. She caught her
breath, then little by little again the motherly warmth stole up into
her breast deadening for the moment the pain of her jealousy. She
straightened to her full height, squaring her broad shoulders like a man
and stepped across to the wall.
"It is as much mine as it is his," she said between her teeth.
She ran her arm into the hole in the wall, lifted the heavy plank and
drew out a knitted sock tied with a stout string. From the toe she drew
out Garron's fortune.
"He shall have it--the _gosse_--" she said, "and the rest--is as much
mine as it is his."
She thrust the package in her breast.
Half an hour later Julie stood, scarcely breathing, her ear to the
locked door of his _gabion_.
"A pretty lot you came from," she overheard the girl say, "that old cat
would sooner see you go to jail." The rest of her words were half lost
in the rush and suck of the tide slipping out from the _gabion's_ outer
jacket of boards. The heavy chain clinked taut with the pull of the
outgoing tide, then relaxed in the back rush of water.
"Bah!" she heard him reply, "they are pigs, those peasants. I was a fool
to have gone to them for help."
"You had better have gone to the old man," taunted the girl, "as I told
you at first."
"He is made of the same miserly grizzle as she," he retorted hotly.
Again the outrush of the tide drowned their words.
Julie clenched her red fists and drew a long breath. A sudden frenzy
seized her. Before she realized what she was doing, she had crawled in
the mud on her hands and knees to the heavy picket. Here she waited
until the backward rush again slackened the chain, then she half drew
the iron pin that held the last link. Half drew it! Had the girl been
alone, she told herself, she would have given her to the ebb tide.
Julie rose to her feet and turned back across the marsh, unconscious
that the last link was nearly free and that the jerk and pull of the
outgoing tide was little by little freeing the pin from the link.
She kept on her way, towards a hidden wood road that led down to the
marsh at the far end of Pont du Sable and beyond.
She was done with the locality forever. Garron's money was still in her
breast.
* * * * *
At the first glimmer of dawn the next morning, the short, solitary
figure of a man prowled the beach. He was hatless and insane with rage.
In one hand he gripped an empty sock. He would halt now and then and
wave his long, ape-like arms--cursing the deep strip of sea water that
prevented him from crossing to the hard desert of sand beyond--far out
upon which lay an upturned _gabion_. Within this locked and stranded
box lay two dead bodies. Crabs fought their way eagerly through the
cracks of the water-sprung door, and over it, breasting the salt breeze,
slowly circled a cormorant--curious and amazed at so strange a thing at
low tide.
[Illustration: the upturned gabion]
* * * * *
[Illustration: game birds on the marsh]
CHAPTER TWELVE
MIDWINTER FLIGHTS
One dines there much too well.
This snug Restaurant des Rois stands back from the grand boulevard in a
slit of a street so that its ancient windows peer out askance at the gay
life streaming by the corner.
The burgundy at "Les Rois" warms the soul, and the Chablis! Ah! where
else in all Paris is there such Chablis? golden, sound and clear as
topaz. Chablis, I hold, should be drank by some merry blonde whose heart
is light; Burgundy by a brunette in a temper.
The small cafe on the ground floor is painted white, relieved by a
frieze of gilded garlands and topped by a ceiling frescoed with rosy
nymphs romping in a smoked turquoise sky.
Between five and seven o'clock these midwinter afternoons the cafe is
filled with its _habitues_--distinguished old Frenchmen, who sip their
absinthe leisurely enough to glance over the leading articles in the
conservative _Temps_ or the slightly gayer _Figaro_. Upstairs, by means
of a spiral stairway, is a labyrinth of narrow, low-ceiled corridors
leading to half a dozen stuffy little _cabinets particuliers_, about
whose faded lambrequins and green velveted chairs there still lurks the
scent of perfumes once in vogue with the gallants, beaux and belles of
the Second Empire.
Alice de Breville, Tanrade, and myself, are dining to-night in one of
these _intime_ little rooms. The third to the left down the corridor.
_Sapristi!_ what a change in Tanrade. He is becoming a responsible
person---he has even grown neat and punctual--he who used to pound at
the door of my house abandoned by the marsh at Pont du Sable, an hour
late for dinner, dressed in a fisherman's sea-going overalls of brown
canvas, a pair of sabots and a hat that any passing vagabond might have
discarded by the roadside. I could not help noticing carefully to-night
his new suit of black broadcloth, with its standing collar, buttoned up
under his genial chin. His black hair is neatly combed and his
broad-brimmed hat that hangs over my own on the wall, is but three days
old. Thus had this _bon garcon_ who had won the Prix de Rome been
transformed---and Alice was responsible, I knew, for the change. Who
would not change anything for so exquisite and dear a friend as Alice?
She, too, was in black, without a jewel--a gown which her lithe body
wore with all its sveltness--a gown that matched her dark eyes and hair,
accentuating the clean-cut delicacy of her features and the ivory
clearness of her olive skin. She was a very merry Alice to-night, for
her long engagement at the Bouffes Parisiennes was at an end. And she
had been making the best of her freedom by keeping Tanrade hard at work
over the score of his new ballet. They are more in love with each other
than ever--so much so that they insist on my dining with them, and so
these little dinners of three at "Les Rois" have become almost nightly
occurrences. It is often so with those in love to be generous to an old
friend--even lovers have need of company.
We were lingering over our coffee when the talk reverted to the new
ballet.
"It is done, _ma cherie_," declared Tanrade, in reply to an imperative
inquiry from Alice. "Baviere shall have the whole of the second act
to-morrow."
"And the ballet in the third?" she asked sternly, lifting her brilliant
eyes.
"_Eh, voila!_" laughed that good fellow, as he drew forth from his
pocket a thin roll of manuscript and spread it out before her, that she
might see--but it was not discreet for me to continue, neither is it
good form to embrace before the old _garcon de cafe_, who at that moment
entered apologetically with the liqueurs--as for myself, I have long
since ceased to count in such tender moments of reward, during which I
am of no more consequence than a faithful poodle.
Again the garcon entered, this time with smiling assurance, for he
brought me a telegram forwarded from my studio by my concierge. I opened
the despatch: the next instant I jumped to my feet.
"Read!" I cried, poking the blue slip under Tanrade's nose, "it's from
the cure."
"Howling northeast gale"--Tanrade read aloud--"Duck and geese--come
midnight train, bring two hundred fours, one hundred double zeros for
ten bore."
"_Vive le cure!_" I shouted, "the good old boy to let us know. A
northeast gale at last--a howler," he says.
"He is charming--the cure," breathed Alice, her breast
heaving--"Charming!" she repeated in a voice full of suppressed emotion.
Tanrade did not speak. He had let the despatch slip to the floor and sat
staring at his glass.
"You'll come, of course," I said with sudden apprehension, but he only
shook his head. "What! you're not going?" I exclaimed in amazement.
"We'll kill fifty ducks a night--it's the gale we've been waiting for."
I saw the sullen gleam that had crept into Alice's eyes soften; she drew
near him--she barely touched his arm:
"Go, _mon cher_!" she said simply--"if you wish."
He lifted his head with a grim smile, and I saw their eyes meet. I well
knew what was passing in his mind--his promise to her to work--more than
this, I knew he had not the heart to leave her during her well-earned
rest.
"_Ah! les hommes!_" Alice exclaimed, turning to me impetuously--"you are
quite crazy, you hunters."
I bowed in humble apology and again her dark eyes softened to
tenderness.
"_Non_--forgive me, _mon ami_," she went on, "you are sane enough until
news comes of those wretched little ducks, then, _mon Dieu!_ there is no
holding you. Everything else goes out of your head; you become as mad as
children rushing to a fete. Is it not so?"
Still Tanrade was silent. Now and then he gave a shrug of his big
shoulders and toyed with his half empty glass of liqueur. _Sapristi!_
it is not easy to decide between the woman you love and a northeast gale
thrashing the marsh in front of my house abandoned. He, like myself,
could already picture in his mind's eye duck after duck plunge out of
the night among our live decoys. My ears, like his own, were already
ringing with the roar of the guns from the _gabions_--I could not resist
a last appeal.
"Come," I insisted--"both of you--no--seriously--listen to me. There is
plenty of dry wood in the garret; you shall have the _chambre d'amis_,
dear friend, and this brute of a composer shall bunk in my room--we'll
live, and shoot and be happy. Suzette will be overjoyed at your coming.
Let me wire her to have breakfast ready for us?"
Alice laughed softly: "You are quite crazy, my poor friend," she said,
laying her white hand on my shoulder. "You will freeze down there in
that stone house of yours. Oh, la! la!" she sighed knowingly--"the leaks
for the wind--the cold bedrooms, the cold stone floors--B-r-r-h-h!"
Tanrade straightened back in his chair: "No," said he, "it is
impossible; Baviere can not wait. He must have his score. The rehearsals
have been delayed long enough as it is--Go, _mon vieux_, and good luck
to you!"
Again the old garcon entered, this time with the timetable I had sent
him for in a hurry.
"_Voila_, monsieur!" he began excitedly, his thumbnail indicating the
line--"the 12.18, as monsieur sees, is an express--monsieur will not
have to change at Lisieux."
"_Bon!_" I cried--"quick--a taxi-auto."
"_Bien_, monsieur--a good hunt to monsieur," and he rushed out into the
narrow corridor and down the spiral stairs while I hurried into my coat
and hat.
Tanrade gripped my hand:
"Shoot straight!" he counselled with a smile. Alice gave me her cheek,
which I reverently kissed and murmured my apologies for my insistence in
her small ear. Then I swung open the door and made for the spiral
stairs. At the bottom step I stopped short. I had completely forgotten I
should not return until after New Year's, and I rushed back to wish
them a _Bonne Annee_ in advance, but I closed the door of the stuffy
little _cabinet particulier_ quicker than I opened it, for her arms were
about the sturdy neck of a good comrade whose self-denial made me feel
like the mad infant rushing to the fete.
"_Bonne Annee, mes enfants!_" I called from the corridor, but they did
not hear.
Ten minutes later I reached my studio, dumped three hundred cartridges
into a worn valise and caught the 12.18 with four minutes to spare.
* * * * *
_Enfin!_ it is winter in earnest!
The northeast gale gave, while it lasted, the best shooting the cure and
I have ever had. Then the wind shifted to the southwest with a falling
barometer, and the flights ceased. Again, for three days, the Norman
coast has been thrashed by squalls of driving snow. The wild geese are
honking in V-shaped lines to an inland refuge for the white sea is no
longer tenable. Curlews cry hoarsely over the frozen fields. It is
tough enough lying hidden in my sand pit on the open beach beyond the
dunes, where I crack away at the ricketing flights of fat gray plover
and beat myself to keep warm. Fuel is scarce and there is hardly a sou
to be earned fishing in such cruel weather as this.
The country back of my house abandoned by the marsh is now stripped to
bare actualities--all things are reduced to their proper size. Houses,
barns and the skeletons of leafless trees stand out, naked facts in the
landscape. The orchards are soggy in mud and the once green feathery
lane back of my house abandoned, is now a rough gash of frozen pools and
rotten leaves.
Birds twitter in the thin hedges.
I would never have believed my wild garden, once so full of mystery--gay
flowers, sunshine and droning bees, to be so modest in size. A few
rectangles of bare, frozen ground, and a clinging vine trembling against
the old wall, is all that remains, save the scraggly little fruit trees
green with moss. Beyond, in a haze of chill sea mist, lie the
woodlands, long undulating ribbons of gray twigs crouching under a
leaden sky.
In the cavernous cider press whose doors creak open within my courtyard
Pere Bordier and a boy in eartabs, are busy making cider. If you stop
and listen you can hear the cider trickling into the cask and Pere
Bordier encouraging the patient horse who circles round and round a
great stone trough in which revolve two juggernauts of wooden wheels.
The place reeks with the ooze and drip of crushed apples. The giant
screw of oak, the massive beams, seen dimly in the gloomy light that
filters through a small barred window cut through the massive stone
wall, gives the old pressoir the appearance of some feudal torture
chamber. Blood ran once, and people shrieked in such places--as these.
* * * * *
To-morrow begins the new year and every peasant girl's cheeks are
scrubbed bright and her hair neatly dressed, for to-morrow all France
embraces--so the cheeks are rosy in readiness.
"_Tiens_, mademoiselle!" exclaims the butcher's boy clattering into my
kitchen in his sabots.
_Eh, voila!_ My good little maid-of-all-work, Suzette, has been kissed
by the butcher's boy and a moment later by Pere Bordier, who has left
the cider press for a steaming bowl of _cafe au lait_; and ten minutes
later by the Mere Pequin who brings the milk, and then in turn by the
postman--by her master, by the boy in eartabs and by every child in the
village since daylight for they have entered my courtyard in droves to
wish the household of my house abandoned a happy new year, and have gone
away content with their little stomachs filled and two big sous in their
pockets.
And now an old fisherman enters my door. It is the Pere Varnet--he who
goes out with his sheep dog to dig clams, since he is eighty-four and
too old to go to sea.
"_Ah, malheur!_" he sighs wearily, lifting his cap with a trembling hand
as seamed and tough as his tarpaulin. "Ah, the bad luck," he repeats in
a thin, husky voice. "I would not have deranged monsieur, but _bon
Dieu_, I am hungry. I have had no bread since yesterday. It is a little
beast this hunger, monsieur. There are no clams--I have searched from
the great bank to Tocqueville."
It is surprising how quick Suzette can heat the milk.
The old man is now seated in her kitchen before a cold duck of the
cure's killing and hot coffee--real coffee with a stiff drink of
applejack poured into it, and there is bread and cheese besides. Like
hungry men, he eats in silence and when he has eaten he tells me his dog
is dead--that woolly sheep dog of his with a cast in one fishy green
eye.
"_Oui_, monsieur," confided the old man, "he is dead. He was all I had
left. It is not gay, monsieur, at eighty-four to lose one's last
friend--to have him poisoned."
"Who poisoned him?" I inquired hotly--"was it Bonvin the butcher? They
say it was he poisoned both of Madame Vinet's cats."
"_Eh, ben!_" he returned, and I saw the tears well up into his watery
blue eyes--"one should not accuse one's neighbours, but they say it was
he, monsieur--they say it was in his garden that Hector found the bad
stuff--there are some who have no heart, monsieur."
"Bonvin!" I cried, "so it was that pig who poisoned him, eh? and you
saved his little girl the time the _Belle Marie_ foundered."
"_Oui_, monsieur--the time the _Belle Marie_ foundered. It is true I
did--we did the best we could! Had it not been for the fog and the ebb
tide I think we could have saved them all."
He fell to eating again, cutting into the cheese discreetly--this fine
old gentleman of the sea.
It is a pity that some one has not poisoned Bonvin I thought. A short
thick fellow, is Bonvin, with cheeks as red as raw chops and small eyes
that glitter with cruelty. Bonvin, whose youngest child--a male, has the
look and intelligence of a veal and whose mother weighs one hundred and
five kilos--a fact which Bonvin is proud of since his first wife, who
died, was under weight despite the fact that the Bonvins being in the
business, eat meat twice daily. I have always believed the veal
infant's hair is curled in suet. Its face grows purple after meals.
* * * * *
A rough old place is my village of vagabonds in winter, and I am glad
Alice did not come. Poor Tanrade--how he would have enjoyed that
northeast gale!
* * * * *
Two weeks later there came to my house abandoned by the marsh such
joyful news that my hand trembled as I realized it--news that made my
heart beat quicker from sudden surprise and delight. As I read and
reread four closely written pages from Tanrade and a corroborative
postscript from Alice, leaving no doubt as to the truth.
"Suzette! Suzette!" I called. "Come quick--_Eh! Suzette!_"
I heard her trim feet running to me from the garden. The next instant
she opened the door of my den and stood before me, her blue eyes and
pretty mouth both open in wonder at being so hurriedly summoned.
"What is the matter, monsieur?" she exclaimed panting, her fresh young
cheeks all the rosier from her run.
"Monsieur Tanrade and Madame de Breville are going to be married," I
announced as calmly as I could.
"_Helas!_" gasped Suzette.
"_Et voila--et voila!_" I cried, throwing the letter back on the table,
while I squared my back to the blazing fire of my den and waited for the
little maid's astonishment to subside.
Suzette did not speak.
"It is true, nevertheless," I added with enthusiasm, "they are to be
married in Pont du Sable. We shall have a fete such as there never was.
Ah! you will have plenty of cooking to do, _mon enfant_. Run and find
Monsieur le Cure--he must know at once."
Suzette did not move--without a word she buried her face in her apron
and burst into tears:
"Oh, monsieur!" she sobbed. "Oh, monsieur! It is
true--that--I--I--have--no luck!"
I looked at her in astonishment.