MADAME GENVIÈVE.
SPRING comes early in Brittany, and by the end of May the apple-blossom
is already almost over, while the hedgerows on each side of the smooth,
broad roads are one tangled glory of golden broom, sweet-smelling
honeysuckle, and delicate bramble-blossom.
But up in the mountains of Basse Bretagne, the _Montagnes Noirs_ as
they are called, it is different. The climate is colder there, and the
seasons later, reminding one more of Scotland. Indeed, the scenery is
not unlike certain parts of Scotland; for, as one winds up the lonely
roads that lead to the heart of these hills, one leaves the vegetation
of the south behind them, and reaches a region of bare, heather-covered
moors, peat-bogs, and low, scrubby fir-trees.
The country is sparsely populated. The traveller only comes across a
cottage at long intervals, and when he does pass one he looks at the
low walls and thatched roof, wondering what sort of lives the people
live who dwell inside.
At the door of one of these lonely cottages a woman was standing one
bright May morning—in the May that followed the events which we have
described in the last chapters—shading her eyes from the sun.
She was dressed in the ordinary Breton peasant’s dress—a black gown,
with a great white cap and a white plaited collar, and her face was
wrinkled and weather-beaten.
‘Pierre, Pierre, where art thou?’ she cried, scanning the bare moorland
with her keen black eyes; ‘it is already seven o’clock, and the pigs
are not fed, nor the chickens, and the cow waits in her stall to be led
out to pasture.’
There was no answer, and she shrugged her shoulders impatiently.
‘Plague upon the boy,’ she muttered, ‘and upon those who brought him!
Three francs a week doth not go far on his food, for he eats like an
ox, and as for trouble—_hein!_’ And she shrugged her shoulders again in
the expressive way only practised by a Frenchwoman or an Italian, then
she proceeded to search the wretched little outhouses which adjoined
her cottage for the delinquent.
[Illustration: ‘Thou lazy dreamer!’ she said, pulling him to his feet
by the collar of his blue cotton blouse.
V. L. PAGE 205.]
She found him at last, a little white-faced, dark-haired lad, clad in a
blue cotton suit, and wearing the wooden sabots of the country. He was
lying asleep in the sun behind a diminutive haystack, which looked as
if hay-crops in that part of the country were wont to be scanty.
He woke with a start as the woman shook him roughly, and shrank away
from her with a look of fear in his brown eyes.
‘Thou lazy dreamer!’ she said, pulling him to his feet by the collar
of his blue cotton blouse, and giving him a push in the direction of
the pig-sty, ‘there is all thy work to do, and instead of doing it thou
liest and sleepest as if thou wert the son of a lord. Make haste now,
and feed the cow and the chickens, and take the cow to the pasture over
by the bog-side yonder. See, if thou lingerest I shall take the stick,
as I took it yesterday.’
Apparently the threat was no idle one, for the little boy went off
hurriedly. He entered the cottage, and in a few minutes he returned
dragging a pail which was evidently too heavy for him, and with
much exertion managed at last to empty its contents into a great
stone trough. Then he let down some low wooden bars, and from a rough
enclosure two or three long-legged, bony pigs rushed out, jostling one
another, and almost knocking the little fellow over in their haste to
get at their food.
He stood watching them dully, leaning against the gate almost as if he
had not energy to go on to his next task.
Perhaps the woman noticed this, and perhaps the thought rose in her
mind that it would not pay to work the little foreigner—whom her son
Jacques had brought from Paris one cold January day, bidding her at
all costs to keep him safely, and guard against any possibility of his
escape—too hard. For he had already been ill once, and he might fall
ill again; and if anything happened to him then the three francs which
Jacques sent her regularly for his board would cease to arrive, and
the little hoard of silver which she was gathering in the old cracked
coffee-pot which stood on the shelf above her bed would grow no bigger,
and that would be a thousand pities, for she cared more for silver
francs than for children.
‘See here, Pierre,’ she said, going into the cottage and returning with
two thick slices of rye-bread, between which she had placed a morsel
of meat and a sliced shalot, ‘it is fine and warm in the sun, so thou
and Nanette shall have a little _fête_. Here is thy dinner; thou canst
carry it with thee, and lie out in the sun all day on the hillside,
while Nanette grazes to her heart’s content. See, thou canst go at
once. I can attend to the poultry.’
The boy took the sandwich, which the old woman wrapped up in a piece
of greasy paper, and put it carefully away in a little wallet which he
wore slung over his shoulder.
‘Shall I tether Nanette, madame, or shall I let her go free?’ he asked.
He spoke in the same patois in which the woman had spoken, but his
accent was strangely foreign.
‘Thou canst lead her with the rope until thou reachest the other side,
and then thou canst let her graze where she will,’ replied the woman;
‘only thou must keep in sight of the cottage, and be home ere the sun
goes down.’
She turned away, and the boy took down a length of rope from the wall,
and deftly slipped it over the horns of a gentle-looking little dun
cow which had come forward, and was licking the sides of the trough
where the pigs had fed, in the vain hope that she might find some of
their food still sticking to the edges.
He led her away, and the docile animal followed him quietly, for Breton
cows are accustomed to being led out to graze, and soon the two were
picking their way gingerly over the quaking bog, which was still soft
with the winter rain. Once arrived at the other side, where there was
a strip of short, sweet grass, the boy slipped the rope from Nanette’s
horns, and, climbing a short way up the side of the hill, he lay down
in the sun and began to think.
Poor little fellow! his thoughts were always the same, and they were
sometimes so confused that he could hardly tell whether the things he
thought about were real or not. They floated through his brain, broken
up and confused, like the colours in a kaleidoscope, and there were
only two things that he was ever quite certain about. One was that he
had not always lived in the low thatched cottage which he had just
left; the other, that he was an English boy, and not a French one.
There were other things which he remembered vaguely, and which he was
sure were real, although the old woman at the cottage, Madame Genviève,
as she was called, always said that they were but feverish dreams that
had fixed themselves in his brain during the illness which he had had
after he had come to live with her.
This illness had taken away his memory, so she told him, and had filled
his head with strange fancies, and had made him forget that he was her
grandson, and had always lived in Paris until his mother died, and his
father—her son Jacques—had brought him to the little cottage in the
_Montagnes Noirs_ to be the comfort of his old grandmother’s failing
years.
But somehow Pierre did not believe all this, although he had learned to
hold his tongue: for at first, when he used to talk of a strange memory
which was always in his mind, and would speak the language which came
easiest to his tongue, she would look round anxiously as if she feared
that some one might hear him, and then she would fly into a passion,
and scold him, and even beat him; and afterwards, when her anger had
cooled, and the fear had gone out of her eyes, she would stroke his
head, and tell him that those were but sick fancies, which he must be
careful to hide, in case the inspector down at Châteauneuf should hear
about him, and take him away and shut him up in an institution, as he
did to all people who thought such thoughts.
So Pierre learned to hold his tongue and keep his thoughts to himself.
This had been easy at first, when the least effort to think made his
head ache as though it would split; but it was more difficult now that
the fine weather, and the long days spent in the open air, were making
his poor little body, and his mind too, stronger.
To-day as he lay on the hillside in the sun these thoughts were clearer
than ever. He remembered a big station, all lit up, and he was there
with some one else, a grown-up man it seemed to him, who did not call
him Pierre, but some other name which had quite a different sound. Bah!
he did not remember, but that did not matter. Perhaps the name would
come into his mind later, as other things had come. The gentleman had
gone away somewhere, and had told him to wait, and he had waited. Then
some other men had passed, carrying bags, and talking to one another.
They were gentlemen, he could remember that, wearing warm coats with
fur collars. As he was looking at them, suddenly the face of one of
them grew into a coarse, bad face, with a stubbly beard and a patch
over one eye, and it seemed to him that he wanted to catch that man
very much. So he ran after him, and cried, ‘I know you! I know you!’
The man had passed, but he turned round, and, lo and behold! he had
a gentleman’s face once more. Then, somehow, Pierre was in a railway
carriage with the gentleman and his friends, and the train was moving,
and he wanted to get out; but one of the men laughed and said something
about his knowing too much. And then it seemed that in this strange
memory he struggled, and tried to scream, and some one put his hand
over his mouth. And then he tried to bite the hand; he remembered his
teeth going into the soft flesh, then he must have fallen, for he felt
a dreadful pain at the back of his head, and everything stopped for a
while; and when he woke up he was in the little box-bed in the thatched
cottage on the moor, and the old woman was sitting cowering over the
peat-fire talking to a stranger, who presently put some money in her
hand and went away.
The story was very vague and confused. There was much about it which he
could not understand, and when he tried to remember any more his head
always ached; but somehow he knew that it was true, and he knew too
that he was an English boy, though why an English boy should be living
with an old woman in the heart of the _Montagnes Noirs_ was more than
he could make out.
But slowly a great determination was forming itself in his poor
confused mind, and that was that one day he would run away. He knew
that somewhere, to the north, over these hills, lay St Brieuc, and St
Brieuc was near the sea. So much he had learned from the neighbouring
peasants whom he saw occasionally, though very, very rarely, and they
knew, because at Easter-time they drove their lean pigs and cows to
sell at the market there. And over the sea was England.
‘Some day,’ thought Pierre, as he opened his satchel and broke off a
corner of his sandwich, ‘when the days are longer, and my legs do
not feel so tired—in a month perhaps—I will run away, and walk to St
Brieuc, and there perhaps I may find a boat, and I will go to England.
And when I am in England, then I will remember.’