THE WOLVES OUT.
JEAN DEL' PEYRA was riding home, a distance of some fifteen miles from
La Roque Gageac. His way led through forests of oak clothing the slopes
and plateau of chalk. The road was bad--to be more exact, there was no
road; there was but a track.
In times of civil broil, when the roads were beset by brigands,
travellers formed or found ways for themselves through the bush, over
the waste land, away from the old and neglected arteries of traffic. The
highways were no longer kept up--there was no one to maintain them in
repair, and if they were sound no one would travel on them who could
avoid them by a détour, when exposed to be waylaid, plundered, carried
off to a dungeon, and put to ransom.
To understand the condition of affairs, a brief sketch of the English
domination in Guyenne is necessary.
By the marriage of Eleanor, daughter and heiress of William X., Earl of
Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine, with Henry of Anjou, afterwards Henry II.
of England, in 1152, the vast possessions of her family were united to
those of the Angevin house, which claimed the English crown.
By this union the house of Anjou suddenly rose to be a power, superior
to that of the French crown on the Gaulish soil, which it cut off
entirely from the mouths of the Seine and the Loire, and nipped between
its Norman and Aquitanian fingers. The natives of the South--speaking
their own language, of different race, aspirations, character, from
those in the North--had no traditional attachment to the French throne,
and no ideal of national concentration about it into one great unity.
Here and there, dotted about as islets in the midst of the English
possessions in the South, were feudal or ecclesiastical baronies, or
townships, that were subject immediately to the French crown, and exempt
from allegiance to the English King; and these acted as germs,
fermenting in the country, and gradually but surely influencing the
minds of all, and drawing all to the thought that for the good of the
land it were better that it should belong to France than to England.
Such was the diocese and county of Sarlat. This had belonged to a
monastic church founded in the eighth century, but it had been raised to
an episcopal see in 1317, and had never wavered in its adherence to the
French interest. Sarlat was not on the Dordogne, but lay buried,
concealed in the depths of oak-woods, accessible only along narrow
defiles commanded at every point by rocky headlands; and the key to the
episcopal city was La Roque Gageac, the impregnable fortress and town on
the pellucid, rippling Dordogne--the town cramped to the steep slope,
the castle nestling into an excavation in the face of the abrupt scarp.
Nearly opposite La Roque stood an insulated block of chalk, with
precipices on all sides, and to secure this, in 1280, Philip III. of
France built on it a free town, exempt from all taxes save a trifling
house-charge due to himself; which town he hoped would become a great
commercial centre, and a focus whence French influence might radiate to
the south of the Dordogne. Unhappily the importance of Domme made it a
prize to be coveted by the English, and in 1347 they took it. They were
expelled in 1369, but John Chandos laid siege to it in 1380 and took it
again, and from that date it remained uninterruptedly in their hands
till the end of the English power in Aquitaine. For three hundred years
had Guyenne pertained to the English crown, many of the towns and most
of the nobility had no aspirations beyond serving the Leopards. The
common people were supremely indifferent whether the Fleur-de-lys or the
Leopards waved above them, so long as they were left undisturbed. It was
precisely because they had not the boon of tranquillity afforded them by
subjection to the English that they turned at last with a sigh of
despair to the French. But it was to the Leopards, the hereditary coat
of Guyenne, that they looked first, and it was only when the Leopard
devoured them that they inclined to the Lilies.
The reason for this general dissatisfaction and alienation was the
violence of the nobility, and the freebooters, who professed to act for
the Crown of England, and to have patents warranting them to act
licentiously. These men, caring only for their own interests, doing
nothing to advance the prosperity of the land, used their position,
their power, to undermine and ruin it. They attacked the towns whether
under the English or French allegiance--that mattered nothing--and
forced the corporations to enter into compacts with them, whereby they
undertook to pay them an annual subvention, not to ensure protection,
but merely to escape pillage. But even these _patis_, as they were
called, were precarious, and did not cover a multitude of excuses for
infringement of the peace. If, for instance, a merchant of Sarlat was in
debt to a man of Domme, the latter appealed to his feudal master, who,
in spite of any _patis_ granted, swooped down on such members of the
community of Sarlat as he could lay hold of, and held them in durance
till not only was the debt paid, but he was himself indemnified for the
trouble he had taken in obtaining its discharge.
If these things were done in the green tree, what in the dry?
In addition to the feudal seigneurs in their castles, ruling over their
seigneuries, and nominally amenable to the English crown, there were the
_routiers_, captains of free companies, younger sons of noble houses,
bastards, runaway prisoners: any idle and vicious rascal who could
collect thirty men of like kidney constituted himself a captain, made
for himself and his men a habitation by boring into the limestone or
chalk rock, in an inaccessible position, whence he came down at pleasure
and ravaged and robbed, burned and murdered indiscriminately, the lands
and houses and persons of those, whether French or English, who had
anything to attract his greed, or who had incurred his resentment.
When Arnaud Amanieu, Sire d'Albret, transferred his allegiance from the
English King to the King of France, he was seen by Froissart in Paris,
sad of countenance, and he gave this as his reason: "Thank God! I am
well in health, but my purse was fuller when I warred on behalf of the
King of England. Then when we rode on adventures, there were always some
rich merchants of Toulouse, of Condom, of La Réole, or Bergerac for us
to squeeze. Every day we got some spoil to stuff our superfluities and
jollities--alack! now all is dead and dull." That was the saying of a
great Prince, whom the King of France delighted to honour. Now hear the
words of a common _routier_: "How rejoiced were we when we rode abroad
and captured many a rich prior or merchant, or a train of mules laden
with Brussels cloths, or furs from the fair of Landit, or spices from
Bruges, or silks from Damascus! All was ours, and we ransomed men at our
good pleasure. Every day fresh spoil. The villages purveyed to us, and
the rustics brought us corn, flour, bread, litter, wines, meat, and
fowl; we were waited on as kings, we were clothed as princes, and when
we rode abroad the earth quaked before us."
In this terrible time agriculture languished, trade was at a standstill.
Bells were forbidden to be rung in churches from vespers till full day,
lest they should direct the freebooters to villages that they might
ravage. The towns fortified themselves, the villagers converted their
churches into castles, and surrounded them with moats. Children were
planted on all high points to keep watch, and give warning at the flash
of a helmet. Wretched peasants spent their nights in islands in
mid-river or in caves underground.
No one who has not visited the country swept and re-swept by these
marauders can have any conception of the agony through which the country
passed. It is furrowed, torn, to the present day by the picks of the
ruffians who sought for themselves nests whence they might survey the
land and swoop down on it, but above all by the efforts of the tortured
to hide themselves--here burrowing underground like moles in mid-field,
there boring out chambers in clefts of the rock, there constructing for
themselves cabins in the midst of mosquito-haunted marshes, and there,
again, ensconcing themselves in profound depths of trackless forests.
As Jean del' Peyra rode along, he shook his head and passed his hand
over his face, as though to free it from cobwebs that had gathered about
his eyes and were irritating him. But these were no spider-threads: what
teased and confused him were other fibres, spun by that brown witch,
Noémi.
He was angry, indignant with her, but his anger and indignation were, as
it were, trowel and prong that dug and forked the thoughts of her deep
into his mind. He thought of her standing before him, quivering with
wrath, the fire flashing and changing hue in her opalescent brown eyes,
and the hectic flame running through her veins and tinging cheek and
brow. He thought of her voice, so full of tone, so flexible, as
opalescent in melodious change as her eyes iridescent of light.
That she--she with such a smooth face, such slim fingers--should talk of
crime as a joke, exult over the misery of her fellows! A very leopard in
litheness and in beauty, and a very leopard in heart.
Jean del' Peyra's way led down the head stream of the Lesser Beune. The
valley was broad--one level marsh--and, in the evening, herons were
quivering in it, stooping to pick up an eft or a young roach.
"Ah! you vile creature!" sang forth Jean, as a black hare rose on his
left and darted past him into the wood. "Prophet of evil! But what else
in these untoward times and in this evil world can one expect but omens
of ill?"
The track by which Jean descended emerged from the dense woods upon open
ground. As the Beune slid to a lower level, it passed under precipices
of rock, about a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet high; and these
cliffs, composed of beds of various softness, were horizontally
channelled, constituting terraces, each terrace unsupported below, or
rather thrown forward over a vault. Moreover, there was not one of these
platforms of rock that was not tenanted. In the evening, peasants
returning from their work were ascending to their quarters by scrambling
up the rocks where vertical, by means of notches cut in the stone, into
which they thrust their hands and feet. Where the ledges overhung, the
men were drawn up by ropes to the platforms above.
But not only was this the case with men, but with their oxen. Jean
passed and saluted a farmer who was in process of placing his beasts in
a position of security for the night. His wife was above, in the rock,
and was working a windlass by means of which an ox was being gradually
lifted from the ground by broad bands passed under its belly, and so was
raised to the height of some thirty feet, where the beast, accustomed to
this proceeding, quickly stepped on to a narrow path cut in the rock,
and walked to its stable, also rock-hewn in the face of the cliff.
In another place was a woman with her children closing up the opening of
a grotto that was level with the soil. This was effected by a board
which fitted into a rebate in the rock, and then the woman, after
putting her children within, heaped stones and sods against the board to
disguise it; and when this had been done to her satisfaction, she
crawled in by a hole that had been left for the purpose, and by a cord
pulled after her a bunch of brambles that served to plug and disguise
this hole.
Bitterness welled up in the heart of Jean as he noticed all these
efforts made by the poor creatures to place themselves in security
during the hours of darkness.
"Ah, Fontaineya!" called Jean to the farmer who was superintending the
elevation of his second ox. "How goes the world with you?"
"Bad, but might be worse--even as with you."
"With me things are not ill."
"Whence come you, then?"
"From La Roque."
"Aha! Not from Ste. Soure?"
"No, I have been from home these fourteen days."
"Then do not say things are not ill with you till you have been home,"
remarked the peasant dryly.
"What has happened?" asked Jean, his blood standing still with alarm.
"The wolves have been hunting!"
"What wolves?"
"The red. Le Gros Guillem."
"He has been to Ste. Soure?"
"He has been to where Ste. Soure _was_."