Brent felt challenged.
He crossed the garden towards her, knocking the moisture from the leaves
of a bed of winter-greens, and still followed by the brown dog. Brent’s
French was very British, the Army French of estaminets and billets, but
his heart was concerned in the convincing of Manon.
“Madame, allez vous! Le Boche—il arrive toute suite!”
She stood and stared at him, and it was obvious that she believed that
she had never seen him before; and his present appearance was not
reassuring. She saw a very dirty man with a cut-throat’s beard and a
haggard face, a starved face in which the blue eyes looked like the cold
eyes of a corpse. There was nothing soldierly about him save the rifle
on his shoulder. The disreputable indiscipline of Brent’s whole
atmosphere suggested the one word “loot.”
“Monsieur, que faites-vous ici?”
She stood her ground, and kept her eyes on Brent’s face. She was a
black-haired, black-eyed little woman with a skin of ivory; in age about
six and twenty; very sturdy, very strong. Yet there was a softness about
her, a white glow, a femininity, that were wholly pleasant and
appealing. Manon Latour had a heart and courage. You saw the soul of her
in her big, dark, watchful eyes, in her firm white throat, in her
full-lipped, vivid mouth, in the confident poise of her head. She stood
there and defied Brent—this disreputable straggler who had surprised
her burying her treasure.
The brown dog was sniffing at her black skirt, and at the newly turned
soil.
Brent managed to smile, and the thinness of his yellow face seemed to
crack with it.
“Bon garçon,—bon garçon, moi. Allez, madame. Hang it,—do you think I
would touch your stuff?”
She said nothing, but continued to watch his face.
Then Paul had an idea. He pointed the muzzle of his rifle at the place
where she had been digging, fumbled for the bit of pencil he had found
in Tom’s pocket, and walking to the wall, began to print three rapid and
rather straggling letters on a piece of plaster.
“R. I. P.”
He stood back, cocked his head with a flick of humour, smiled.
“Compris?”
She understood.
“Monsieur, c’est vrai?”
“Oui—here,—catch hold.”
He pushed the butt of the rifle towards her.
“Fusillez, si vous voulez—moi. Cela ne fait rien. Oui. Mon ami, mon
comrade, il est mort. Je suis fini.”
She put the butt of the rifle aside with a gentle little touch of the
hand. Her eyes had softened, and they were very beautiful eyes.
“Je me confie à vous, monsieur.”
“Bon.”
The brown dog looked up at them both and wagged his tail. He appeared to
approve of the affair, and of Manon’s faith in this scarecrow of a man.
She walked down the path and into the house, leaving the spade she had
used standing against the wall. Some sudden impulse made her pause in
the doorway and look back at Brent. He had followed her as far as the
gateway leading into the yard, and was resting his crossed hands on the
muzzle of his rifle, and she noticed that he rocked slightly from foot
to foot. The man could hardly stand, and her heart smote her.
“Monsieur!”
She disappeared into the house, and returned almost immediately with her
hat and coat, a little leather bag, and a bottle of red wine. The bottle
was half full.
“Monsieur, pour votre santé.”
Brent stepped forward, and took the bottle from her. His hand shook.
“Ah, mon pauvre vieux—comme vous êtes fatigué!”
She pinned on her hat while Brent drank the wine, looking at him with
eyes that were no longer hard and black, but softly brown and gentle.
She was aware of his dry, cracked lips, the working of the muscles in
his throat, a slight trembling of the arm that held the bottle.
“Monsieur, venez avec moi.”
Brent stared. He understood. Then he nodded his head at the spade she
had left by the doorway.
“Non. Mon ami est mort.—Over there. Compris?”
“Le bon Dieu vous garde,” she said.
She put on her coat, picked up her little bag, and was ready to go. The
brown dog looked at them both, and then made up his mind to escape with
the woman. Brent went with her as far as the yard gate.
“Au revoir, monsieur.”
“Bon chance,” he said with a cracked smile.
He watched the little black figure disappear round the angle of the big
stone house that jutted out across the end of the Rue Romaine on the way
to Bonnière.
“Damned plucky,” he said aloud; “she ought to have gone long ago.”
Brent went back to the garden and the place where Manon had buried her
treasure. The patch of raw earth was too noticeable and too obvious, in
spite of the weeds she had trampled into it, and Brent looked about for
something with which to camouflage it. The smashed walls and the
scattered stones offered a suggestion. The main mass of the débris lay
close to the spot that Manon Latour had chosen, and Brent set about
re-arranging those stones with an art that aped reality. The pattern he
made pretended that the shell had struck the wall at a slight angle, and
his casual dotting of the outlying fragments made the trick quite
convincing. The raw earth was covered; no one would trouble to go poking
about there. He completed the job by smudging out the letters he had
printed on the wall, using a bit of broken stone and the sleeve of his
tunic.
“Bon,” he said; “Tom would never have touched the girl’s money. There
was no dirt on Tom.”
Brent collected a pick from one of the outhouses, appropriated Manon’s
spade, and returned to the orchard above the stream. This orchard
belonged to Manon Latour; so did the meadow below it, and a strip of
woodland on the other side of the little valley. Brent took off his
tunic, hung it on the stump of the apple tree and began to dig. The red
wine had flushed and heartened him, but it was food he needed, and the
sting of the wine soon wore off. Sweat ran from him; the sweat of
exhaustion; he panted and nearly fell forward over his spade when he had
lifted the first layer of sods.
He sat down on the bank, and putting his head between his knees,
remained thus for some minutes. The faintness passed. The spirit
reasserted itself and coerced the body.
He got to work again,—and slowly deepened that narrow trench,—giving a
little grunt of physical anguish each time he made a stroke with the
pick. The thing was done at last, and Brent stood resting like an old
man, leaning on the handle of the spade, and looking at Beckett’s body.
He had been so absorbed in the work, and his senses were so dull and
unalert, that he was quite unaware of the fact that a German patrol had
straggled across the field and through the orchard, and that an N.C.O.
and four privates were standing a few yards away, watching him. They,
too, were very dirty, these “field-greys,” sallow-faced and heavy about
the eyes. They looked at Brent with a mixture of curiosity, amusement,
and the elemental sympathy of men for a soldier doing a soldier’s job.
“Hallo—Tommy!”
Brent turned and looked at these “field-greys,”—without surprise and
without fear. It was as though he had expected them. They were just
dirty, tired men like himself, part of the earth, part of the great
machine.
“Morning,—Fritz.”
He jerked a thumb towards the body.
“My pal.—I’m done. Give me a hand, will you?”
The N.C.O. spoke English, but the affair was so elemental and so human
that the whole group understood. They helped Brent to lift the body into
the grave and to put back the earth, using their boots and the spade.
Brent picked up his pay-book and handed it to the N.C.O.
“You had better keep that, Fritz.”
A young, fair-haired German was standing close to Brent and looking at
him intently. He noticed the Englishman’s dry lips and pinched nostrils,
his dirty chin, and starved eyes and forehead.
He nudged Brent with his elbow.
Brent saw a bit of brown bread in the young German’s hand.
“Hungrig?”
Brent smiled.
“I am—that.”
He took the piece of bread, and ate with gross relish, for he was
famished. The “field-greys” stood around and smoked cigarettes, English
cigarettes picked up during the advance. The N.C.O. questioned Brent.
“Any English up there?”
Brent shook his head and went on eating. He was thinking of Manon Latour
trudging along in the spring sunshine with the larks singing overhead.
“She ought to be safe,” he thought; “she had about an hour’s start.
Damned nice little woman, that!”