FERGAN THE QUARRYMAN.
It was long after the bailiff had led away his prisoners. The night grew
rapidly darker. A young woman, pale, lean and deformed, clad in a
tattered smock, her feet bare, her head half covered with a hood from
which her hair escaped, held her face hidden in her hands, as she sat on
a stone near the hearth of the hut which Fergan inhabited at the
extremity of the village. A few chips of brush-wood were burning in the
fire-place. Above rose the blackened walls, cracked by the recent
conflagration; bunches of brush fastened on poles replaced the roof,
through which here and there some brilliant star could be seen. A litter
of straw in the best protected corner of the hovel, a trunk, a few
wooden vessels--such was the furnishing of the home of a serf. The young
woman, seated near the fire-place, was the wife of Fergan, Joan the
Hunchback. Her forehead in her hands, crouching upon the stone which
served her as a seat, Joan remained motionless. Only at intervals a
slight tremor of the shoulders announced that she wept. A man entered
the hut. It was Fergan the Quarryman. Thirty years of age, robust and
large of frame, his dress consisted of a goat-skin kilt, of which the
hair was almost worn off; his shabby hose left his legs and feet bare;
on his shoulder he carried an iron pick and the heavy hammer which he
used to break and extract the stones from the quarry. Joan the Hunchback
raised her head at the sight of her husband. Although homely, her
suffering and timid figure breathed an angelic kindness. Advancing
quickly towards Fergan, her face bathed in tears, Joan said to him with
an inexpressible mixture of hope and anxiety, while she interrogated
him with her eyes: "Have you learned anything?"
"Nothing," answered the serf in despair, throwing down his pick and
hammer; "nothing, nothing!"
Joan fell back upon the stone sobbing. She raised her hands to heaven
and murmured: "I shall never again see Colombaik! My poor child is lost
for ever!"
Fergan, no less distressed than his wife, sat down on another stone
placed near the fire-place, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his
hands. Thus he remained for a long spell, gloomy, silent. Suddenly
rising, he started to walk uneasily, muttering in a muffled voice: "That
cannot remain so--I shall go--Yes, I shall! I must find him!"
Joan, hearing the serf repeat: "I shall go! I shall go!" raised her
head, wiped her tears with the back of her hand and asked: "Where is it
you want to go?"
"To the castle!" roared the serf, continuing his agitated walk, his arms
crossed over his chest. Trembling from head to foot, Joan clasped her
hands, and tried to speak. In her terror, she could not at first utter a
word; her teeth chattered. At last she said in a faint voice:
"Fergan--you must have lost your wits when you say you will go to the
castle."
"I shall go after the moon has set."
"Oh! I have lost my poor child," rejoined Joan moaning, "I am going to
lose my husband also." She moaned again. The imprecations and the
foot-falls of the serf alone interrupted the silence of the night. The
fire went out in the fire-place, but the moon, just risen, threw her
pale rays into the interior of the hut through the open spaces left by
the pole and bunches of brush that took the place of the burnt-out roof.
The silence lasted long. Joan the Hunchback taking courage anew, resumed
in an accent that was almost confident: "You propose to go to-night--to
the castle--fortunately that's impossible." And seeing that the serf did
not intermit his silent walk, Joan took his hand as he moved toward her:
"Why do you not answer? That frightens me." He roughly withdrew his
hand, and thrusting his wife back, exclaimed in an irritated voice:
"Leave me alone, woman, leave me alone."
The feeble creature fell down a few steps beyond among some rubbish, and
her head having struck against a piece of wood, she could not hold back
a cry of pain. Fergan walked back, and by the light of the moon he saw
Joan rising painfully. He ran to her, helped her to sit down on one of
the stones of the fire-place, and asked anxiously: "Did you hurt
yourself falling?"
"No, no, my dear husband."
"My poor Joan!" exclaimed the serf alarmed, having placed one of his
hands on the forehead of his wife, "you bleed!"
"I have been weeping," she replied sweetly, staunching her wound with a
lock of her long disheveled hair.
"You suffer? Answer me, dear wife!"
"No, no, I fell because I am feeble," answered Joan with her angelic
mildness; "let's not think about that," and she added, smiling sadly and
alluding to her deformity, "I need not fear being made ugly by a scar."
Fergan imagined that Joan the Hunchback meant he would have treated her
with less rudeness if she had been handsome, and he felt deeply grieved.
In a tone of kind reproach he replied: "Apart from the hastiness of my
temper, have I not always treated you as the best of wives?"
"That's true, my dear Fergan, and my gratitude is great."
"Have I not freely taken you for wife?"
"Yes, notwithstanding you could have chosen from the serfs of the
seigniory a companion who would not have been deformed."
"Joan," replied the quarryman with sad bitterness, "if your countenance
had been as beautiful as your heart is good, whose would have been the
first night of our wedding? Would it not have belonged to Neroweg 'Worse
than a Wolf,' or to one of his whelps?"
"Oh, Fergan, my ugliness saved us this supreme shame."
"The wife of Sylvest, one of my ancestors, a poor slave of the Romans,
also escaped dishonor by disfiguring herself," was the thought that
flashed through the quarryman's mind while he sighed, and pondered: "Oh,
slavery and serfdom weigh upon our race for centuries. Will the day of
deliverance, predicted by Victoria the Great,[A] ever come."
Joan, seeing her husband plunged in meditation, said to him: "Fergan, do
you remember what Pierrine the Goat told us three days ago on the
subject of our son? She had, as was her custom, led her sheep to the
steepest heights of the great ravine, whence she saw one of the knights
of the Count of Plouernel rush on a gallop out of a copse where our
little Colombaik had gone to gather some dead wood. Pierrine was of the
opinion that that knight carried off our child under his cloak."
"The suspicions of Pierrine were well founded."
"Good God! What is it you say?"
"A few hours ago, while I was at the quarry, several serfs, engaged in
repairing the road of the castle which was partly destroyed during the
last war, came for stone. For the last three days I have been like
crazy. I have been telling everybody of the disappearance of Colombaik.
I spoke about it to these serfs. One of them claimed to have seen the
other evening, shortly before nightfall, a knight holding on his horse a
child about seven or eight years, with blonde hair--"
"Unhappy we! That was Colombaik."
"The knight then climbed the hill that leads to the manor of Plouernel,
and went in."
"But what can they do to our child?"
"What will they do!" exclaimed the serf shivering, "they'll strangle
him, and use his blood for some infernal philter. There is a sorceress
stopping at the castle."
Joan uttered a cry of fright, but rage swiftly followed upon her fright.
Delirious and running to the door she cried out: "Fergan, let's go to
the manor--we shall enter even if we have to tear up the stones with our
nails--I shall have my child--the sorceress shall not throttle him--no!
no!" The serf, holding her by the arm, drew her back. Almost immediately
she fainted away in his arms. Still, in a muffled voice, the poor woman
muttered: "It seems to me I see him die--if my heart were torn in a vice
I could not suffer more--it is too late--the sorceress will have
strangled the child--no--who knows!" Presently seizing her husband by
the hand, "You meant to go to the castle--come--come!"
"I shall go alone when the moon is down."
"Oh, we are crazy, my poor man! Pain leads us astray. How can one
penetrate into the lair of the count?"
"By a secret entrance."
"And who has informed you of it?"
"My grandfather Den-Brao accompanied his father Yvon the Forester in
Anjou during the great famine in 1033. Den-Brao, a skillful mason, after
having worked for more than a year in the castle of a lord of Anjou
became his serf, and was exchanged by his master for an armorer of
Neroweg IV, an ancestor of the present lord. My grandfather, now a serf
of the lord of Plouernel, was engaged in the construction of a donjon
which was attached to the castle. The work lasted many a year. My
father, Nominoe, almost a child at the commencement of the structure,
had grown to manhood when it was finished. He helped his father in his
work, and became a mason himself. After his day's work, my grandfather
used to trace upon a parchment the plan of the several parts of the
donjon which he was to execute. One day my father asked him the
explanation of certain structures, the purpose of which he could not
understand. 'These separate stone works, connected by the work of the
carpenter and the blacksmith,' answered my grandfather, 'will constitute
a secret staircase made through the thick of the wall of the donjon, and
it will ascend from the lowest depth of this edifice to the top, while
it furnishes access to several reducts otherwise invisible. Thanks to
this secret issue, the Lord of Plouernel, if besieged in his castle, and
unable to resist his enemies, will be able to escape, and reach a long
subterraneous gallery which comes out at the rocks that stretch to the
north, at the foot of the mountain, where the seigniorial manor-house
rises.' Indeed, Joan, during those days of continual wars, similar works
were executed in all the strongholds: their owners always looked to
preserving the means of escape from their enemies. About six months
before the completion of the donjon, and when all that was left to do
was the construction of the staircase and the secret issue, traced upon
the plan of my grandfather, my father broke both of his legs by the fall
of an enormous stone. That grave accident became the cause of a great
piece of good fortune."
"What say you, Fergan!"
"My father remained here, at this hovel, unable to work by reason of his
wounds. During that interval the donjon was finished. But the artisan
serfs, instead of returning every evening to their respective villages,
no longer left the castle. The seigneur of Plouernel wished, so it was
said, to hasten the completion of the works and to save the time lost in
the morning and evening by the traveling of the serfs. For about six
months the people of the plain saw the movement of the workingmen
gathered upon the last courses of the donjon, which rose ever higher.
After that, when the platform and the turrets which crown it were
finished, nothing more was seen. The serfs never re-appeared in their
villages, and their bereaved families are still awaiting them."
"What became of them?"
"Neroweg IV, fearing they might reveal the secret issue constructed by
themselves, had them locked up in the subterraneous place, that I stated
to you. It is there that my grandfather, together with his fellow
workingmen, twenty-seven in number, perished, a prey to the tortures of
hunger."
"That's horrible! What barbarity!"
"Yes, it is horrible! My father, kept at home by his injuries, alone
escaped this fearful death, overlooked, no doubt, by the seigneur of
Plouernel. Trying to fathom the mystery of my grandfather's
disappearance, my father recalled the information he had received from
his father on the plan of the donjon and its secret issue. One night,
accordingly, my father betook himself to that secluded spot, and
succeeded in discovering an airhole concealed amid brushwood. He slid
down this opening, and after walking long in a narrow gallery, he was
arrested by an enormous iron grating. Seeking to break it, he passed his
arm through the bars. His hand touched a mass of bones--human bones and
skulls--"
"Good God! Poor victims!"
"It was the bones of the serfs, who, locked up in this subterraneous
passage with my grandfather, had died of hunger. My father did not try
to penetrate further. Certain of the fate of my grandfather, but lacking
the energy to avenge him, he made to me this revelation on his
death-bed. I went--it is a long time ago--to inspect the rocks. I
discovered the subterraneous issue. Through it, to-night, will I enter
the donjon and look for our child."
"Fergan, I shall not try to oppose your plan," observed Joan after a
moment of silence and suppressing her apprehensions; "but how will you
clear that grating which prevented your father from entering the
underground passage? Is it not above your strength?"
"That grating has been fastened in the rock, it can be unfastened with
my iron pick and hammer. I have the requisite strength for that job."
"Once in the passage, what will you do?"
"Last evening I took from the wooden casket, hidden yonder under the
rubbish, a few strips of the parchment where Den-Brao had traced the
plan of the buildings; I have posted myself on the localities. The
secret gallery, in its ascent towards the castle, comes out, on the
other side of the donjon, upon a secret staircase built in the thick of
the wall. That leads, from the lowest of the three rows of subterranean
dungeons, up to the turret that rises to the north of the platform."
"The turret," queried Joan, growing pale, "the turret, whence
occasionally strange lights issue at night?"
"It is there that Azenor the Pale, the sorceress of Neroweg, carries on
her witchcraft," answered the quarryman in a hollow voice. "It is in
that turret that Colombaik must be, provided he still lives. It is there
I shall go in search of our child."
"Oh, my poor man," murmured Joan, "I faint at the thought of the perils
you are about to face!"
"Joan," suddenly interjected the serf, raising his hands towards the
starry sky, visible through rifts in the roof, "before an hour the moon
will have set; I must go now."
The quarryman's wife, after making a superhuman effort to overcome her
terror, said in a voice that was almost firm: "I do not ask to accompany
you, Fergan; I might be an encumbrance in this enterprise. But I
believe, as you do, that at all costs we must try to save our child. If
in three days you are not back--"
"It will mean that I have encountered death in the castle of Plouernel."
"I shall not be behind you a day, my dear husband. Have you weapons to
defend yourself?"
"I have my iron pick and my hammer."
"And bread? You must have some provisions."
"I have still a big piece of bread in my wallet; you will fill my gourd
with water; that will suffice me."
While his wife was attending to these charges, the serf provided himself
with a long rope which he wound around him; he also placed a tinder-box
in his wallet, a piece of punk, and a wick, steeped in resin, of the
kind that quarrymen use to light their underground passages. These
preparations being ended, Fergan silently stretched his arms towards his
wife. The brave and sweet creature threw herself into them. The couple
prolonged this painful embrace a few moments, as if it were a last
adieu. The serf then, swinging his heavy hammer on his shoulder and
taking up his iron pick, started towards the rocks where the secret
issue of the seigniorial manor ran out.