The cellar of the Café de la Victoire was so snug and warm and Brent so
healthily tired after his first long day in Beaucourt that he slept till
nine o’clock, twelve sound wholesome hours.
Someone was moving about overhead in the kitchen. A box was overturned,
and the clatter woke Brent. He sat up and listened to a sound that was
surprising and singular because of its unexpectedness, an unexpectedness
that was not without pathos. Brent sat very still, cursing the wire bed
because it creaked even when he breathed and creaked most
self-assertively. He could hear a woman weeping up above there, weeping
her heart out with a passion that broke into little exclamations of
anguish and despair: “O my little house!—what a tragedy!—What a ruin!
Nothing left, not even a door.”
And Brent understood that Manon Latour had returned. His first sensation
was one of puzzled discomfort. He did not know whether to climb the
steps and add the embarrassment of an explanation to the tumult of her
emotion, or whether he should lie hidden until she had recovered her
self-control. Yet it seemed rather a negative piece of poltroonery for
him to sit there in the cellar listening to the sound of her weeping.
There was a nakedness about her grief that embarrassed Brent. Manon
thought herself alone; she had thrown herself upon the bosom of
Beaucourt’s solitude, and Brent felt like some Peeping Tom spying upon
her nakedness.
In the end he did what the plain man and soldier in him wanted to do.
Too much psychology might ruin any love affair; in life it is the
emotions that matter. Brent went up the stone steps in his socked feet,
walked along the short passage, and stood in the kitchen doorway,
looking at Manon Latour.
She was sitting on a box, her hands covering her face as though she were
praying, a little figure in black, a figure that was still tremulous
with emotion. A bag lay on the floor beside the box. Brent noticed her
muddy shoes, her black hat and cloak hung on a nail, and the pretty way
her dark hair was wound like a wreath about her head. She had a mass of
hair, lustrous as the surface of a freshly broken piece of coal, and its
blackness contrasted with the characteristic pallor of her face and
throat. Brent’s recollection of a year ago had left him the memory of a
brave and very determined little woman with bright, dark eyes, a little
woman who had faced him with a sang-froid that had impressed a man who
had learnt to respect one thing and one thing only—courage. And now he
saw her in tears over this wreck of a house, and her tears touched
Brent’s heart. He had a feeling that these were not the tears of a woman
who wept easily like an April sky. She was shocked, overwhelmed,
discouraged.
“Madame!”
Her hands dropped from her face. She looked at Brent with eyes that
accepted him as a Frenchman who had happened to wander in, another
homeless soul lost in the ruins of Beaucourt.
“Good day, monsieur. It is a pleasant home-coming, is it not?—Perhaps
one expects too much!”
She gave a little twitch of the shoulders.
“It appears that I have no chair to offer a visitor. My café has plenty
of fresh air, but no furniture.”
Brent had felt instantly that the house was hers, and that he had no
right to be in it; his sense of ownership vanished; the cellar had
ceased to be his billet. He stood with one shoulder resting against the
wall, considering the situation, while Manon was trying to remember him
as some neighbour whose face had been part of the familiar life of
Beaucourt. She saw a man in velveteen breeches and a black coat, with a
dark blue scarf knotted round his neck, a man with a ruddy and rather
delicate skin, a short brown beard, and a small moustache. His eyes were
of that soft but intense blue that belonged to the north and the open
air; intelligent eyes set well apart under a square forehead. He had a
good-tempered, easy mouth. It was the face of an incomplex man,
whimsical, a little sad. There was nothing distinctive about him, he was
like thousands of other men, neither tall nor short, a very ordinary
person, save perhaps for his eyes. They were a little unusual—less
stupid and self-absorbed than the eyes of most men. There was something
in them that appealed to the woman.
Manon did not recognize Brent.
“I am trying to remember you, monsieur.”
“I do not belong to Beaucourt.”
She noticed that he was without boots, and again she was puzzled, for
his socks were clean. Either he had been in the house all the while, or
he had left his boots on the doorstep. Brent saw that she was looking at
his feet, and that she was puzzled.
“I spent the night in your cellar, madame, and my boots are down there.”
“How droll! I seem to have seen you before.”
“It was about a year ago.”
She was interested, challenged.
“Was it here?”
“Yes, here in Beaucourt.”
And then he put his head back and smiled.
“It is still there; the ground has not been touched.”
She stared. Her eyes changed from a deep brown to black; her face grew
more serious, and seemed to show little shadow-marks under the eyes and
about the mouth. She stood up, came a step nearer, and looked Brent
straight in the face.
“Of what do you speak?”
“The treasure that you buried in the garden.”
He saw her face as a hard, white surface, and her eyes as two hard,
black circles.
“But—who are you? It was an English soldier.”
“I was that English soldier, madame. Shall I prove it?”
“Yes.”
He went and groped in the cellar for his boots, and sitting on the top
step, laced them on, while Manon Latour waited in the passage. A little
widow who has kept a café, and has had half the men in the village in
love with her, cannot but know something of man and of the very obvious
habits of the creature. Also, a pretty woman who has a head on her
shoulders is apt to get very bored with the perennial fools. They all
tell the same tale; they all want the same reward. Manon had grown
fastidious.
But this man puzzled her from the very beginning. What was he doing in
French clothes, and why had he come back to Beaucourt? She chose the
direct method, and asked him the reason.
Brent was knotting the lace of his left boot. He looked up over his
shoulder and smiled.
“I had a dream——”
He saw that she was quite unconvinced.
“Why does one do certain things? Have you a reason for everything? My
friend was buried here, that’s all.”
He got up and went out into the yard, and Manon followed him. Brent
turned into the garden through the gate in the stone wall, and walked
along the weedy path between the currant bushes and the dead stalks of
last year’s cabbages. He stopped at the place where the shell had
punched a hole through the wall, and where the stones lay scattered.
“Is the place as you remember it?”
Her eyes were still intensely black, her forehead worried.
“No.”
“And the difference?”
“The place was here—just in front of the stump of that old espalier.
There was nothing but earth and weeds. No stones.”
“I put the stones there,” said Brent.
She gave him a quick gleam of the eyes.
“You?”
“Yes, after you had gone. I thought the thing would look more natural.
Then I went to bury my friend. After that—I was taken prisoner.”
She remained calm, judicial, compelling herself to a cool realization of
the fact that this man had kept faith with her, if all that she had
buried there was under the soil. And then, another thought prompted her
to ask him a question.
“You say, monsieur, that you came back to see the grave of your friend?”
She was aware of Brent’s blue eyes lighting up with a flicker of
shrewdness and humour.
“No, I did not come back to rob you.”
“I had not accused you of that.”
“If the thought was there, it was natural.”
She felt ashamed of having asked him that question, and her face
softened.
“It is all so strange. You come back as a Frenchman, and in French
clothes.”
“That’s of no importance,” he said; “there is only one thing that
matters at this moment—the proof that I did not rob you.”
“But—wait——”
She caught his arm as he turned to fetch a rusty spade he had seen lying
among the rubbish in the yard.
“Supposing someone else had found it—and taken it away?”
“Then you would disbelieve me?”
She thought a moment.
“No.”
Brent went for the spade, threw the stones aside and began to dig. Manon
did not move or offer to help. She stood and watched him, conscious of
the sudden and peculiar intimacy that was joining her to this unexpected
man. She was convinced that he had told her the truth.
Brent had opened a hole about a foot deep.
“Be careful,” she said suddenly; “the silver is in a big crock. You
might strike it with a spade.”
Brent’s blue eyes flashed her a look of gratitude. She had thrown him a
“Hail, comrade,” uttered one of those little, human confessions of faith
that warm a man’s heart. She wanted him to understand that she believed
in him, and that he should understand it before the spade turned up the
truth. Brent treasured these words. They touched the pride of a man who
had been a failure.
“How deep did you dig?” he asked.
“About half a metre—I had so little time.”
Brent thrust the spade softly into the soil and felt it jar on something
solid. He glanced at Manon with an air of triumph.
“It is there.”
She looked down into the hole and then at Brent.
“You are a man of your word, monsieur. I thank you.”
Brent spaded out a little more of the soil, and then went on his hands
and knees and began to grope in the hole. First he lifted out a big
crock that was full of loose silver, one-franc, two-franc, and
five-franc pieces. Below the crock lay a tin trunk painted a yellowish
brown. Only a portion of the lid showed—the place where the crock had
stood; the rest was covered with earth.
He looked questioningly at Manon Latour.
“Let it stay there,” she said.
And then she laughed.
“You will be thinking me a miser, monsieur, but all that belonged to my
husband who is dead.”
“Shall I put the silver back in the same place?”
“Yes,—put it back, if you please, monsieur. That hole will make the
safest bank I can think of.”
“I suppose there is no one watching us?” said Brent, feeling strangely
happy at being included in the conspiracy.
She looked round the garden, remembering that it was hidden on three
sides by its high stone wall.
“It is not likely. I saw no one in Beaucourt.”
Brent replaced the crock, and shovelled back the earth, and Manon helped
him to pile the stones over the spot. She appeared to be thinking, but
her silence was without embarrassment or constraint. Her face had become
the face of a serious child, a child who was neither afraid nor unhappy.
“How is it you speak French so well?” she asked him with a child’s
abruptness.
“A Frenchman taught me, while I was a prisoner.”
She nodded, and the nod seemed to suggest that she understood that he
had reasons, but that she was not worrying her head about them.
“Tiens! but I am hungry—I had my cup of coffee and a slice of bread at
four. Since then I have walked from Ste. Claire.”
Brent threw on a last stone. There was a healthy zest in the way she
spoke of her hunger.
“And Paul has not had even that,” he said; “but your house has a
store-room and a larder.”
“Then it is a miracle,” she answered.
“Come and see the miracle. It is right that you should take possession.”