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Title: The Garotters

Author: William D. Howells

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CONTENTS

A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT by R. L. Stevenson
A LEAF IN THE STORM by Ouida
A TERRIBLY STRANGE BED by Wilkie Collins
MICHEL LORIO'S CROSS by Hesba Stretton
A PERILOUS AMOUR by Stanley J. Weyman




It was late in November,
1456.

The snow fell over Paris
with rigorous,
relentless persistence;
sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices;
sometimes there was a lull,
and flake after flake descended out of the black night air,
silent,
circuitous,
interminable.

To poor people,
looking up under moist eyebrows,
it seemed a wonder where it all came from.

Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon,
at a tavern window:

was it only pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus?

or were the holy angels moulting?

He was only a poor Master of Arts,
he went on;
and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity,
he durst not venture
to conclude.

A silly old priest from Montargis,
who was among the company,
treated the young rascal
to a bottle of wine in honour of the jest and grimaces
with which it was accompanied,
and swore on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when he was Villon's age.

The air was raw and pointed,
but not far below freezing;
and the flakes were large,
damp,
and adhesive.

The whole city was sheeted up.

An army might have marched from end
to end and not a footfall given the alarm.

If there were any belated birds in heaven,
they saw the island like a large white patch,
and the bridges like slim white spars on the black ground of the river.

High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers.

Many a niche was drifted full;
many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head.

The gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses,
drooping toward the point.

The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side.

In the intervals of the wind there was a dull sound dripping about the precincts of the church.

The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of the snow.

All the graves were decently covered;
tall white housetops stood around in grave array;
worthy burghers were long ago in bed,
be-nightcapped like their domiciles;
there was no light in all the neighbourhood but a little peep from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir,
and tossed the shadows
to and fro in time
to its oscillations.

The clock was hard on ten when the patrol went by
with halberds and a lantern,
beating their hands;
and they saw nothing suspicious about the cemetery of St. John.

Yet there was a small house,
backed up against the cemetery wall,
which was still awake,
and awake
to evil purpose,
in that snoring district.

There was not much
to betray it from without;
only a stream of warm vapour from the chimney-top,
a patch where the snow melted on the roof,
and a few half-obliterated footprints at the door.

But within,
behind the shuttered windows,
Master Francis Villon,
the poet,
and some of the thievish crew
with whom he consorted,
were keeping the night alive and passing round the bottle.

A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from the arched chimney.

Before this straddled Dom Nicolas,
the Picardy monk,
with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared
to the comfortable warmth.

His dilated shadow cut the room in half;
and the firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person,
and in a little pool between his outspread feet.

His face had the beery,
bruised appearance of the continual drinker's;
it was covered
with a network of congested veins,
purple in ordinary circumstances,
but now pale violet,
for even
with his back
to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side.

His cowl had half fallen back,
and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull-neck.

So he straddled,
grumbling,
and cut the room in half
with the shadow of his portly frame.

On the right,
Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a scrap of parchment;
Villon making a ballade which he was
to call the
"Ballade of Roast Fish,"
and Tabary sputtering admiration at his shoulder.

The poet was a rag of a man,
dark,
little,
and lean,
with hollow cheeks and thin black locks.

He carried his four and twenty years
with feverish animation.

Greed had made folds about his eyes,
evil smiles had puckered his mouth.

The wolf and pig struggled together in his face.

It was an eloquent,
sharp,
ugly,
earthly countenance.

His hands were small and prehensile,
with fingers knotted like a cord;
and they were continually flickering in front of him in violent and expressive pantomime.

As
for Tabary,
a broad,
complacent,
admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips;
he had become a thief,
just as he might have become the most decent of burgesses,
by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys.

At the monk's other hand,
Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game of chance.

About the first there clung some flavour of good birth and training,
as about a fallen angel;
something long,
lithe,
and courtly in the person;
something aquiline and darkling in the face.

Thevenin,
poor soul,
was in great feather;
he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques,
and all night he had been gaining from Montigny.

A flat smile illuminated his face;
his bald head shone rosily in a garland of red curls;
his little protuberant stomach shook
with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains.

"Doubles or quits?"
said Thevenin.

Montigny nodded grimly.

"Some may prefer
to dine in state,"
wrote Villon,
"on bread and cheese on silver plate.

Or,
or--help me out,
Guido!"
Tabary giggled.

"Or parsley on a golden dish,"
scribbled the poet.

The wind was freshening without;
it drove the snow before it,
and sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop,
and made sepulchral grumblings in the chimney.

The cold was growing sharper as the night went on.

Villon,
protruding his lips,
imitated the gust
with something between a whistle and a groan.

It was an eerie,
uncomfortable talent of the poet's,
much detested by the Picardy monk.

"Can't you hear it rattle in the gibbet?"
said Villon.

"They are all dancing the devil's jig on nothing,
up there.

You may dance,
my gallants;
you'll be none the warmer.

Whew,
what a gust! Down went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree! I say,
Dom Nicolas,
it'll be cold to-night on the St. Denis Road?"
he asked.

Dom Nicholas winked both his big eyes,
and seemed
to choke upon his Adam's apple.

Montfaucon,
the great,
grisly Paris gibbet,
stood hard by the St. Denis Road,
and the pleasantry touched him on the raw.

As
for Tabary,
he laughed immoderately over the medlars;
he had never heard anything more light-hearted;
and he held his sides and crowed.

Villon fetched him a fillip on the nose,
which turned his mirth into an attack of coughing.

"Oh,
stop that row,"
said Villon,
"and think of rhymes to
'fish'!"
"Doubles or quits?

Said Montigny,
doggedly.

"With all my heart,"
quoth Thevenin.

"Is there any more in that bottle?"
asked the monk.

"Open another,"
said Villon.

"How do you ever hope
to fill that big hogshead,
your body,
with little things like bottles?

And how do you expect
to get
to heaven?

How many angels,
do you fancy,
can be spared
to carry up a single monk from Picardy?

Or do you think yourself another Elias--and they'll send the coach
for you?"
"/Hominibus/ impossible,"
replied the monk,
as he filled his glass.

Tabary was in ecstasies.

Villon filliped his nose again.

"Laugh at my jokes,
if you like,"
he said.

Villon made a face at him.

"Think of rhymes to
'fish,'
"
he said.

"What have you
to do
with Latin?

You'll wish you knew none of it at the great assizes,
when the devil calls
for Guido Tabary,
/clericus/--the devil
with the humpback and red-hot fingernails.

Talking of the devil,"
he added,
in a whisper,
"look at Montigny!"
All three peered covertly at the gamester.

He did not seem
to be enjoying his luck.

His mouth was a little
to a side;
one nostril nearly shut,
and the other much inflated.

The black dog was on his back,
as people say,
in terrifying nursery metaphor;
and he breathed hard under the gruesome burden.

"He looks as if he could knife him,"
whispered Tabary,
with round eyes.

The monk shuddered,
and turned his face and spread his open hands
to the red embers.

It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas,
and not any excess of moral sensibility.

"Come now,"
said Villon--"about this ballade.

How does it run so far?"
And beating time
with his hand,
he read it aloud
to Tabary.

They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal movement among the gamesters.

The round was completed,
and Thevenin was just opening his mouth
to claim another victory,
when Montigny leaped up,
swift as an adder,
and stabbed him
to the heart.

The blow took effect before he had time
to utter a cry,
before he had time
to move.

A tremor or two convulsed his frame;
his hands opened and shut,
his heels rattled on the floor;
then his head rolled backward over one shoulder,
with eyes wide open;
and Thevenin Pensete's spirit had returned
to Him who made it.

Every one sprang
to his feet;
but the business was over in two twos.

The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly fashion,
the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof
with a singular and ugly leer.

"My God!"
said Tabary,
and he began
to pray in Latin.

Villon broke out into hysterical laughter.

He came a step forward and ducked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin,
and laughed still louder.

Then he sat down suddenly,
all of a heap,
upon a stool,
and continued laughing bitterly,
as though he would shake himself
to pieces.

Montigny recovered his composure first.

"Let's see what he has about him,"
he remarked;
and he picked the dead man's pockets
with a practised hand,
and divided the money into four equal portions on the table.

"There's
for you,"
he said.

The monk received his share
with a deep sigh,
and a single stealthy glance at the dead Thevenin,
who was beginning
to sink into himself and topple sideways off the chair.

"We're all in
for it,"
cried Villon,
swallowing his mirth.

"It's a hanging job
for every man Jack of us that's here--not
to speak of those who aren't."

He made a shocking gesture in the air
with his raised right hand,
and put out his tongue and threw his head on one side,
so as
to counterfeit the appearance of one who has been hanged.

Then he pocketed his share of the spoil,
and executed a shuffle
with his feet as if
to restore the circulation.

Tabary was the last
to help himself;
he made a dash at the money,
and retired
to the other end of the apartment.

Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair,
and drew out the dagger,
which was followed by a jet of blood.

"You fellows had better be moving,"
he said,
as he wiped the blade on his victim's doublet.

"I think we had,"
returned Villon,
with a gulp.

"Damn his fat head!"
he broke out.

"It sticks in my throat like phlegm.

What right has a man
to have red hair when he is dead?"
And he fell all of a heap again upon the stool,
and fairly covered his face
with his hands.

Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud,
even Tabary feebly chiming in.

"Cry-baby!"
said the monk.

"I always said he was a woman,"
added Montigny,
with a sneer.

"Sit up,
can't you?"
he went on,
giving another shake
to the murdered body.

"Tread out that fire,
Nick!"
But Nick was better employed;
he was quietly taking Villon's purse,
as the poet sat,
limp and trembling,
on the stool where he had been making a ballade not three minutes before.

Montigny and Tabary dumbly demanded a share of the booty,
which the monk silently promised as he passed the little bag into the bosom of his gown.

In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man
for practical existence.

No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook himself,
jumped
to his feet,
and began helping
to scatter and extinguish the embers.

Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into the street.

The coast was clear;
there was no meddlesome patrol in sight.

Still it was judged wiser
to slip out severally;
and as Villon was himself in a hurry
to escape from the neighbourhood of the dead Thevenin,
and the rest were in a still greater hurry
to get rid of him before he should discover the loss of his money,
he was the first by general consent
to issue forth into the street.

The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven.

Only a few vapours,
as thin as moonlight,
fleeted rapidly across the stars.

It was bitter cold;
and,
by a common optical effect,
things seemed almost more definite than in the broadest daylight.

The sleeping city was absolutely still;
a company of white hoods,
a field full of little alps,
below the twinkling stars.

Villon cursed his fortune.

Would it were still snowing! Now,
wherever he went,
he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets;
wherever he went,
he was still tethered
to the house by the cemetery of St. John;
wherever he went,
he must weave,
with his own plodding feet,
the rope that bound him
to the crime and would bind him
to the gallows.

The leer of the dead man came back
to him
with new significance.

He snapped his fingers as if
to pluck up his own spirits,
and,
choosing a street at random,
stepped boldly forward in the snow.

Two things preoccupied him as he went:

the aspect of the gallows at Montfaucon in this bright,
windy phase of the night's existence,
for one;
and
for another,
the look of the dead man
with his bald head and garland of red curls.

Both struck cold upon his heart,
and he kept quickening his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by mere fleetness of foot.

Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder
with a sudden nervous jerk;
but he was the only moving thing in the white streets,
except when the wind swooped round a corner and threw up the snow,
which was beginning
to freeze,
in spouts of glittering dust.

Suddenly he saw,
a long way before him,
a black clump and a couple of lanterns.

The clump was in motion,
and the lanterns swung as though carried by men walking.

It was a patrol.

And though it was merely crossing his line of march he judged it wiser
to get out of eyeshot as speedily as he could.

He was not in the humour
to be challenged,
and he was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow.

Just on his left hand there stood a great hotel,
with some turrets and a large porch before the door;
it was half ruinous,
he remembered,
and had long stood empty;
and so he made three steps of it,
and jumped into the shelter of the porch.

It was pretty dark inside,
after the glimmer of the snowy streets,
and he was groping forward
with outspread hands,
when he stumbled over some substance which offered an indescribable mixture of resistances,
hard and soft,
firm and loose.

His heart gave a leap,
and he sprang two steps back and stared dreadfully at the obstacle.

Then he gave a little laugh of relief.

It was only a woman,
and she dead.

He knelt beside her
to make sure upon this latter point.

She was freezing cold,
and rigid like a stick.

A little ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair,
and her cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon.

Her pockets were quite empty;
but in her stocking,
underneath the garter,
Villon found two of the small coins that went by the name of whites.

It was little enough,
but it was always something;
and the poet was moved
with a deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent her money.

That seemed
to him a dark and pitiable mystery;
and he looked from the coins in his hand
to the dead woman,
and back again
to the coins,
shaking his head over the riddle of man's life.

Henry V.

of England,
dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France,
and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man's doorway before she had time
to spend her couple of whites--it seemed a cruel way
to carry on the world.

Two whites would have taken such a little while
to squander;
and yet it would have been one more good taste in the mouth,
one more smack of the lips,
before the devil got the soul,
and the body was left
to birds and vermin.

He would like
to use all his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind,
he was feeling,
half mechanically,
for his purse.

Suddenly his heart stopped beating;
a feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs,
and a cold blow seemed
to fall upon his scalp.

He stood petrified
for a moment;
then he felt again
with one feverish movement;
then his loss burst upon him,
and he was covered at once
with perspiration.

To spendthrifts money is so living and actual--it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit
to their fortune--that of time;
and a spendthrift
with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent.

For such a person
to lose his money is
to suffer the most shocking reverse,
and fall from heaven
to hell,
from all
to nothing,
in a breath.

And all the more if he has put his head in the halter
for it;
if he may be hanged to-morrow
for that same purse,
so dearly earned,
so foolishly departed! Villon stood and cursed;
he threw the two whites into the street;
he shook his fist at heaven;
he stamped,
and was not horrified
to find himself trampling the poor corpse.

Then he began rapidly
to retrace his steps toward the house beside the cemetery.

He had forgotten all fear of the patrol,
which was long gone by at any rate,
and had no idea but that of his lost purse.

It was in vain that he looked right and left upon the snow;
nothing was
to be seen.

He had not dropped it in the streets.

Had it fallen in the house?

He would have liked dearly
to go in and see;
but the idea of the grisly occupant unmanned him.

And he saw besides,
as he drew near,
that their efforts
to put out the fire had been unsuccessful;
on the contrary,
it had broken into a blaze,
and a changeful light played in the chinks of door and window,
and revived his terror
for the authorities and Paris gibbet.

He returned
to the hotel
with the porch,
and groped about upon the snow
for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion.

But he could only find one white;
the other had probably struck sideways and sunk deeply in.

With a single white in his pocket,
all his projects
for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away.

And it was not only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp;
positive discomfort,
positive pain,
attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch.

His perspiration had dried upon him;
and although the wind had now fallen,
a binding frost was setting in stronger
with every hour,
and he felt benumbed and sick at heart.

What was
to be done?

Late as was the hour,
improbable as was his success,
he would try the house of his adopted father,
the chaplain of St. Benoit.

He ran all the way,
and knocked timidly.

There was no answer.

He knocked again and again,
taking heart
with every stroke;
and at last steps were heard approaching from within.

A barred wicket fell open in the iron-studded door,
and emitted a gush of yellow light.

"Hold up your face
to the wicket,"
said the chaplain from within.

"It's only me,"
whimpered Villon.

"Oh,
it's only you,
is it?"
returned the chaplain;
and he cursed him
with foul,
unpriestly oaths
for disturbing him at such an hour,
and bade him be off
to hell,
where he came from.

"My hands are blue
to the wrist,"
pleaded Villon;
"my feet are dead and full of twinges;
my nose aches
with the sharp air;
the cold lies at my heart.

I may be dead before morning.

Only this once,
father,
and,
before God,
I will never ask again!"
"You should have come earlier,"
said the ecclesiastic,
coolly.

"Young men require a lesson now and then."

He shut the wicket and retired deliberately into the interior of the house.

Villon was beside himself;
he beat upon the door
with his hands and feet,
and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.

"Wormy old fox!"
he cried.

"If I had my hand under your twist,
I would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit."

A door shut in the interior,
faintly audible
to the poet down long passages.

He passed his hand over his mouth
with an oath.

And then the humour of the situation struck him,
and he laughed and looked lightly up
to heaven,
where the stars seemed
to be winking over his discomfiture.

What was
to be done?

It looked very like a night in the frosty streets.

The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination,
and gave him a hearty fright;
what had happened
to her in the early night might very well happen
to him before morning.

And he so young! And
with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement before him! He felt quite pathetic over the notion of his own fate,
as if it had been some one else's,
and made a little imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning when they should find his body.

He passed all his chances under review,
turning the white between his thumb and forefinger.

Unfortunately he was on bad terms
with some old friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a plight.

He had lampooned them in verses;
he had beaten and cheated them;
and yet now,
when he was in so close a pinch,
he thought there was at least one who might perhaps relent.

It was a chance.

It was worth trying at least,
and he would go and see.

On the way,
two little accidents happened
to him which coloured his musings in a very different manner.

For,
first,
he fell in
with the track of a patrol,
and walked in it
for some hundred yards,
although it lay out of his direction.

And this spirited him up;
at least he had confused his trail;
for he was still possessed
with the idea of people tracking him all about Paris over the snow,
and collaring him next morning before he was awake.

The other matter affected him quite differently.

He passed a street-corner where,
not so long before,
a woman and her child had been devoured by wolves.

This was just the kind of weather,
he reflected,
when wolves might take it into their heads
to enter Paris again;
and a lone man in these deserted streets would run the chance of something worse than a mere scare.

He stopped and looked upon the place
with an unpleasant interest--it was a centre where several lanes intersected each other;
and he looked down them all,
one after another,
and held his breath
to listen,
lest he should detect some galloping black things on the snow or hear the sound of howling between him and the river.

He remembered his mother telling him the story and pointing out the spot,
while he was yet a child.

His mother! If he only knew where she lived,
he might make sure at least of shelter.

He determined he would inquire upon the morrow;
nay,
he would go and see her,
too,
poor old girl! So thinking,
he arrived at his destination--his last hope
for the night.

The house was quite dark,
like its neighbours;
and yet after a few taps he heard a movement overhead,
a door opening,
and a cautious voice asking who was there.

The poet named himself in a loud whisper,
and waited,
not without some trepidation,
the result.

Nor had he
to wait long.

A window was suddenly opened,
and a pailful of slops splashed down upon the door-step.

Villon had not been unprepared
for something of the sort,
and had put himself as much in shelter as the nature of the porch admitted;
but
for all that he was deplorably drenched below the waist.

His hose began
to freeze almost at once.

Death from cold and exposure stared him in the face;
he remembered he was of phthisical tendency,
and began coughing tentatively.

But the gravity of the danger steadied his nerves.

He stopped a few hundred yards from the door where he had been so rudely used,
and reflected
with his finger
to his nose.

He could only see one way of getting a lodging,
and that was
to take it.

He had noticed a house not far away,
which looked as if it might be easily broken into;
and thither he betook himself promptly,
entertaining himself on the way
with the idea of a room still hot,
with a table still loaded
with the remains of supper,
where he might pass the rest of the black hours,
and whence he should issue,
on the morrow,
with an armful of valuable plate.

He even considered on what viands and what wines he should prefer;
and as he was calling the roll of his favourite dainties,
roast fish presented itself
to his mind
with an odd mixture of amusement and horror.

"I shall never finish that ballade,"
he thought
to himself;
and then,
with another shudder at the recollection,
"Oh,
damn his fat head!"
he repeated,
fervently,
and spat upon the snow.

The house in question looked dark at first sight;
but as Villon made a preliminary inspection in search of the handiest point of attack,
a little twinkle of light caught his eye from behind a curtained window.

"The devil!"
he thought.

"People awake! Some student or some saint,
confound the crew! Can't they get drunk and lie in bed snoring like their neighbours?

What's the good of curfew,
and poor devils of bell- ringers jumping at a rope's end in bell-towers?

What's the use of day,
if people sit up all night?

The gripes
to them!"
He grinned as he saw where his logic was leading him.

"Every man
to his business,
after all,"
added he,
"and if they're awake,
by the Lord,
I may come by a supper honestly
for once,
and cheat the devil."

He went boldly
to the door and knocked
with an assured hand.

On both previous occasions he had knocked timidly and
with some dread of attracting notice;
but now when he had just discarded the thought of a burglarious entry,
knocking at a door seemed a mighty simple and innocent proceeding.

The sound of his blows echoed through the house
with thin,
phantasmal reverberations,
as though it were quite empty;
but these had scarcely died away before a measured tread drew near,
a couple of bolts were withdrawn,
and one wing was opened broadly,
as though no guile or fear of guile were known
to those within.

A tall figure of a man,
muscular and spare,
but a little bent,
confronted Villon.

The head was massive in bulk,
but finely sculptured;
the nose blunt at the bottom,
but refining upward
to where it joined a pair of strong and honest eyebrows;
the mouth and eyes surrounded
with delicate markings;
and the whole face based upon a thick white beard,
boldly and squarely trimmed.

Seen as it was by the light of a flickering hand- lamp,
it looked perhaps nobler than it had a right
to do;
but it was a fine face,
honourable rather than intelligent,
strong,
simple,
and righteous.

"You knock late,
sir,"
said the old man,
in resonant,
courteous tones.

Villon cringed,
and brought up many servile words of apology;
at a crisis of this sort,
the beggar was uppermost in him,
and the man of genius hid his head
with confusion.

"You are cold,"
repeated the old man,
"and hungry?

Well,
step in."

And he ordered him into the house
with a noble enough gesture.

"Some great seigneur,"
thought Villon,
as his host,
setting down the lamp on the flagged pavement of the entry,
shot the bolts once more into their places.

"You will pardon me if I go in front,"
he said,
when this was done;
and he preceded the poet upstairs into a large apartment,
warmed
with a pan of charcoal and lit by a great lamp hanging from the roof.

It was very bare of furniture;
only some gold plate on a sideboard,
some folios,
and a stand of armour between the windows.

Some smart tapestry hung upon the walls,
representing the crucifixion of our Lord in one piece,
and in another a scene of shepherds and shepherdesses by a running stream.

Over the chimney was a shield of arMs. "Will you seat yourself,"
said the old man,
"and forgive me if I leave you?

I am alone in my house to-night,
and if you are
to eat I must forage
for you myself."

No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from the chair on which he had just seated himself,
and began examining the room
with the stealth and passion of a cat.

He weighed the gold flagons in his hand,
opened all the folios,
and investigated the arms upon the shield,
and the stuff
with which the seats were lined.

He raised the window curtains,
and saw that the windows were set
with rich stained glass in figures,
so far as he could see,
of martial import.

Then he stood in the middle of the room,
drew a long breath,
and retaining it
with puffed cheeks,
looked round and round him,
turning on his heels,
as if
to impress every feature of the apartment on his memory.

"Seven pieces of plate,"
he said.

"If there had been ten,
I would have risked it.

A fine house,
and a fine old master,
so help me all the saints!"
And just then,
hearing the old man's tread returning along the corridor,
he stole back
to his chair,
and began humbly toasting his wet legs before the charcoal pan.

His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a jug of wine in the other.

He set down the plate upon the table,
motioning Villon
to draw in his chair,
and going
to the sideboard,
brought back two goblets,
which he filled.

"I drink your better fortune,"
he said gravely,
touching Villon's cup
with his own.

"To our better acquaintance,"
said the poet,
growing bold.

A mere man of the people would have been awed by the courtesy of the old seigneur,
but Villon was hardened in that matter;
he had made mirth
for great lords before now,
and found them as black rascals as himself.

And so he devoted himself
to the viands
with a ravenous gusto,
while the old man,
leaning backward,
watched him
with steady,
curious eyes.

"You have blood on your shoulder,
my man,"
he said.

Montigny must have laid his wet right hand upon him as he left the house.

He cursed Montigny in his heart.

"It was none of my shedding,"
he stammered.

"I had not supposed so,"
returned his host,
quietly.

"A brawl?"
"Well,
something of that sort,"
Villon admitted,
with a quaver.

"Perhaps a fellow murdered?"
"Oh no,
not murdered,"
said the poet,
more and more confused.

"It was all fair play--murdered by accident.

I had no hand in it,
God strike me dead!"
he added,
fervently.

"One rogue the fewer,
I dare say,"
observed the master of the house.

"You may dare
to say that,"
agreed Villon,
infinitely relieved.

"As big a rogue as there is between here and Jerusalem.

He turned up his toes like a lamb.

But it was a nasty thing
to look at.

I dare say you've seen dead men in your time,
my lord?"
he added,
glancing at the armour.

"Many,"
said the old man.

"I have followed the wars,
as you imagine."

Villon laid down his knife and fork,
which he had just taken up again.

"Were any of them bald?"
he asked.

"Oh yes,
and
with hair as white as mine."

"I don't think I should mind the white so much,"
said Villon.

"His was red."

And he had a return of his shuddering and tendency
to laughter,
which he drowned
with a great draught of wine.

"I'm a little put out when I think of it,"
he went on.

"I knew him--damn him! And then the cold gives a man fancies--or the fancies give a man cold,
I don't know which."

"Have you any money?"
asked the old man.

"I have one white,"
returned the poet,
laughing.

"I got it out of a dead jade's stocking in a porch.

She was as dead as Caesar,
poor wench,
and as cold as a church,
with bits of ribbon sticking in her hair.

This is a hard winter
for wolves and wenches and poor rogues like me."

"I,"
said the old man,
"am Enguerrand de la Feuillee,
seigneur de Brisetout,
bailie du Patatrac.

Who and what may you be?"
Villon rose and made a suitable reverence.

"I am called Francis Villon,"
he said,
"a poor Master of Arts of this university.

I know some Latin,
and a deal of vice.

I can make Chansons,
ballades,
lais,
virelais,
and roundels,
and I am very fond of wine.

I was born in a garret,
and I shall not improbably die upon the gallows.

I may add,
my lord,
that from this night forward I am your lordship's very obsequious servant
to command."

"No servant of mine,"
said the knight.

"My guest
for this evening,
and no more."

"A very grateful guest,"
said Villon,
politely,
and he drank in dumb show
to his entertainer.

"You are shrewd,"
began the old man,
tapping his forehead,
"very shrewd;
you have learning;
you are a clerk;
and yet you take a small piece of money off a dead woman in the street.

Is it not a kind of theft?"
"It is a kind of theft much practised in the wars,
my lord."

"The wars are the field of honour,"
returned the old man,
proudly.

"There a man plays his life upon the cast;
he fights in the name of his lord the king,
his Lord God,
and all their lordships the holy saints and angels."

"Put it,"
said Villon,
"that I were really a thief,
should I not play my life also,
and against heavier odds?"
"For gain,
but not
for honour."

"Gain?"
repeated Villon,
with a shrug.

"Gain! The poor fellow wants supper,
and takes it.

So does the soldier in a campaign.

Why,
what are all these requisitions we hear so much about?

If they are not gain
to those who take them,
they are loss enough
to the others.

The men-at- arms drink by a good fire,
while the burgher bites his nails
to buy them wine and wood.

I have seen a good many ploughmen swinging on trees about the country;
ay,
I have seen thirty on one elm,
and a very poor figure they made;
and when I asked some one how all these came
to be hanged,
I was told it was because they could not scrape together enough crowns
to satisfy the men-at-arMs. "

"These things are a necessity of war,
which the low-born must endure
with constancy.

It is true that some captains drive overhard;
there are spirits in every rank not easily moved by pity;
and indeed many follow arms who are no better than brigands."

"You see,"
said the poet,
"you cannot separate the soldier from the brigand;
and what is a thief but an isolated brigand
with circumspect manners?

I steal a couple of mutton-chops,
without so much as disturbing people's sleep;
the farmer grumbles a bit,
but sups none the less wholesomely on what remains.

You come up blowing gloriously on a trumpet,
take away the whole sheep,
and beat the farmer pitifully into the bargain.

I have no trumpet;
I am only Tom,
Dick,
or Harry;
I am a rogue and a dog,
and hanging's too good
for me--with all my heart;
but just ask the farmer which of us he prefers,
just find out which of us he lies awake
to curse on cold nights."

"Look at us two,"
said his lordship.

"I am old,
strong,
and honoured.

If I were turned from my house to-morrow,
hundreds would be proud
to shelter me.

Poor people would go out and pass the night in the streets
with their children,
if I merely hinted that I wished
to be alone.

And I find you up,
wandering homeless,
and picking farthings off dead women by the wayside! I fear no man and nothing;
I have seen you tremble and lose countenance at a word.

I wait God's summons contentedly in my own house,
or,
if it please the king
to call me out again,
upon the field of battle.

You look
for the gallows;
a rough,
swift death,
without hope or honour.

Is there no difference between these two?"
"As far as
to the moon,"
Villon acquiesced.

"But if I had been born lord of Brisetout,
and you had been the poor scholar Francis,
would the difference have been any the less?

Should not I have been warming my knees at this charcoal pan,
and would not you have been groping
for farthings in the snow?

Should not I have been the soldier,
and you the thief?"
"A thief?"
cried the old man.

"I a thief! If you understood your words,
you would repent them."

Villon turned out his hands
with a gesture of inimitable impudence.

"If your lordship had done me the honour
to follow my argument!"
he said.

"I do you too much honour in submitting
to your presence,"
said the knight.

"Learn
to curb your tongue when you speak
with old and honourable men,
or some one hastier than I may reprove you in a sharper fashion."

And he rose and paced the lower end of the apartment,
struggling
with anger and antipathy.

Villon surreptitiously refilled his cup,
and settled himself more comfortably in the chair,
crossing his knees and leaning his head upon one hand and the elbow against the back of the chair.

He was now replete and warm;
and he was in no wise frightened
for his host,
having gauged him as justly as was possible between two such different characters.

The night was far spent,
and in a very comfortable fashion after all;
and he felt morally certain of a safe departure on the morrow.

"Tell me one thing,"
said the old man,
pausing in his walk.

"Are you really a thief?"
"I claim the sacred rights of hospitality,"
returned the poet.

"My lord,
I am."

"You are very young,"
the knight continued.

"I should never have been so old,"
replied Villon,
showing his fingers,
"if I had not helped myself
with these ten talents.

They have been my nursing mothers and my nursing fathers."

"You may still repent and change."

"I repent daily,"
said the poet.

"There are few people more given
to repentance than poor Francis.

As
for change,
let somebody change my circumstances.

A man must continue
to eat,
if it were only that he may continue
to repent."

"The change must begin in the heart,"
returned the old man,
solemnly.

"My dear lord,"
answered Villon,
"do you really fancy that I steal
for pleasure?

I hate stealing,
like any other piece of work or of danger.

My teeth chatter when I see a gallows.

But I must eat,
I must drink;
I must mix in society of some sort.

What the devil! Man is not a solitary animal--/cui Deus foeminam tradit/.

Make me king's pantler,
make me Abbot of St. Denis,
make me bailie of the Patatrac,
and then I shall be changed indeed.

But as long as you leave me the poor scholar Francis Villon,
without a farthing,
why,
of course,
I remain the same."

"The grace of God is all powerful."

"I should be a heretic
to question it,"
said Francis.

"It has made you lord of Brisetout and bailie of the Patatrac;
it has given me nothing but the quick wits under my hat and these ten toes upon my hands.

May I help myself
to wine?

I thank you respectfully.

By God's grace,
you have a very superior vintage."

The lord of Brisetout walked
to and fro
with his hands behind his back.

Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in his mind about the parallel between thieves and soldiers;
perhaps Villon had interested him by some cross-thread of sympathy;
perhaps his wits were simply muddled by so much unfamiliar reasoning;
but whatever the cause,
he somehow yearned
to convert the young man
to a better way of thinking,
and could not make up his mind
to drive him forth again into the street.

"There is something more than I can understand in this,"
he said at length.

"Your mouth is full of subtleties,
and the devil has led you very far astray;
but the devil is only a very weak spirit before God's truth,
and all his subtleties vanish at a word of true honour,
like darkness at morning.

Listen
to me once more.

I learned long ago that a gentleman should live chivalrously and lovingly
to God and the king and his lady;
and though I have seen many strange things done,
I have still striven
to command my ways upon that rule.

It is not only written in all noble histories,
but in every man's heart,
if he will take care
to read.

You speak of food and wine,
and I know very well that hunger is a difficult trial
to endure;
but you do not speak of other wants;
you say nothing of honour,
of faith
to God and other men,
of courtesy,
of love without reproach.

It may be that I am not very wise,--and yet I think I am,--but you seem
to me like one who has lost his way and made a great error in life.

You are attending
to the little wants,
and you have totally forgotten the great and only real ones,
like a man who should be doctoring toothache on the judgment day.

For such things as honour and love and faith are not only nobler than food and drink,
but indeed I think we desire them more,
and suffer more sharply
for their absence.

I speak
to you as I think you will most easily understand me.

Are you not,
while careful
to fill your belly,
disregarding another appetite in your heart,
which spoils the pleasure of your life and keeps you continually wretched?"
Villon was sensibly nettled under all this sermonising.

"You think I have no sense of honour!"
he cried.

"I'm poor enough,
God knows! It's hard
to see rich people
with their gloves,
and you blowing in your hands.

An empty belly is a bitter thing,
although you speak so lightly of it.

If you had had as many as I,
perhaps you would change your tune.

Anyway,
I'm a thief,--make the most of that,--but I'm not a devil from hell,
God strike me dead! I would have you
to know I've an honour of my own,
as good as yours,
though I don't prate about it all day long,
as if it was a God's miracle
to have any.

It seems quite natural
to me;
I keep it in its box till it's wanted.

Why,
now,
look you here,
how long have I been in this room
with you?

Did you not tell me you were alone in the house?

Look at your gold plate! You're strong,
if you like,
but you're old and unarmed,
and I have my knife.

What did I want but a jerk of the elbow and here would have been you
with the cold steel in your bowels,
and there would have been me,
linking in the streets,
with an armful of golden cups! Did you suppose I hadn't wit enough
to see that?

and I scorned the action.

There are your damned goblets,
as safe as in a church;
there are you,
with your heart ticking as good as new;
and here am I,
ready
to go out again as poor as I came in,
with my one white that you threw in my teeth! And you think I have no sense of honour--God strike me dead!"
The old man stretched out his right arm.

"I will tell you what you are,"
he said.

"You are a rogue,
my man,
an impudent and black-hearted rogue and vagabond.

I have passed an hour
with you.

Oh,
believe me,
I feel myself disgraced! And you have eaten and drunk at my table.

But now I am sick at your presence;
the day has come,
and the night-bird should be off
to his roost.

Will you go before,
or after?"
"Which you please,"
returned the poet,
rising.

"I believe you
to be strictly honourable."

He thoughtfully emptied his cup.

"I wish I could add you were intelligent,"
he went on,
knocking on his head
with his knuckles.

"Age! age! the brains stiff and rheumatic."

The old man preceded him from a point of self-respect;
Villon followed,
whistling,
with his thumbs in his girdle.

"God pity you,"
said the lord of Brisetout at the door.

"Good-bye,
papa,"
returned Villon,
with a yawn.

"Many thanks
for the cold mutton."

The door closed behind him.

The dawn was breaking over the white roofs.

A chill,
uncomfortable morning ushered in the day.

Villon stood and heartily stretched himself in the middle of the road.

"A very dull old gentleman,"
he thought.

"I wonder what his goblets may be worth?"
A LEAF IN THE STORM BY OUIDA The Berceau de Dieu was a little village in the valley of the Seine.

As a lark drops its nest among the grasses,
so a few peasant people had dropped their little farms and cottages amid the great green woods on the winding river.

It was a pretty place,
with one steep,
stony street,
shady
with poplars and
with elms;
quaint houses,
about whose thatch a cloud of white and gray pigeons fluttered all day long;
a little aged chapel
with a conical red roof;
and great barns covered
with ivy and thick creepers,
red and purple,
and lichens that were yellow in the sun.

All around it were the broad,
flowering meadows,
with the sleek cattle of Normandy fattening in them,
and the sweet dim forests where the young men and maidens went on every holy day and feast-day in the summer-time
to seek
for wood-anemones,
and lilies of the pools,
and the wild campanula,
and the fresh dog-rose,
and all the boughs and grasses that made their house-doors like garden bowers,
and seemed
to take the cushat's note and the linnet's song into their little temple of God.

The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed.

Men said that the hamlet had been there in the day of the Virgin of Orleans;
and a stone cross of the twelfth century still stood by the great pond of water at the bottom of the street under the chestnut-tree,
where the villagers gathered
to gossip at sunset when their work was done.

It had no city near it,
and no town nearer than four leagues.

It was in the green care of a pastoral district,
thickly wooded and intersected
with orchards.

Its produce of wheat and oats and cheese and fruit and eggs was more than sufficient
for its simple prosperity.

Its people were hardy,
kindly,
laborious,
happy;
living round the little gray chapel in amity and good-fellowship.

Nothing troubled it.

War and rumours of war,
revolutions and counter-revolutions,
empires and insurrections,
military and political questions--these all were
for it things unknown and unheard of,
mighty winds that arose and blew and swept the lands around it,
but never came near enough
to harm it,
lying there,
as it did in its loneliness like any lark's nest.

Even in the great days of the Revolution it had been quiet.

It had had a lord whom it loved in the old castle on the hill at whose feet it nestled;
it had never tried
to harm him,
and it had wept bitterly when he had fallen at Jemmapes,
and left no heir,
and the chateau had crumbled into ivy-hung ruins.

The thunder-heats of that dread time had scarcely scorched it.

It had seen a few of its best youth march away
to the chant of the Marseillaise
to fight on the plains of Champagne;
and it had been visited by some patriots in /bonnets rouges/ and soldiers in blue uniforms,
who had given it tricoloured cockades and bade it wear them in the holy name of the Republic one and indivisible.

But it had not known what these meant,
and its harvests had been reaped without the sound of a shot in its fields or any gleam of steel by its innocent hearths;
so that the terrors and the tidings of those noble and ghastly years had left no impress on its generations.

Reine Allix,
indeed,
the oldest woman among them all,
numbering more than ninety years,
remembered when she was a child hearing her father and his neighbours talk in low,
awe-stricken tones one bitter wintry night of how a king had been slain
to save the people;
and she remembered likewise--remembered it well,
because it had been her betrothal night and the sixteenth birthday of her life--how a horseman had flashed through the startled street like a comet,
and had called aloud,
in a voice of fire,
"/Gloire! gloire! gloire!/--Marengo! Marengo! Marengo!"
and how the village had dimly understood that something marvellous
for France had happened afar off,
and how her brothers and her cousins and her betrothed,
and she
with them,
had all gone up
to the high slope over the river,
and had piled up a great pyramid of pine wood and straw and dried mosses,
and had set flame
to it,
till it had glowed in its scarlet triumph all through that wondrous night of the sultry summer of victory.

These and the like memories she would sometimes relate
to the children at evening when they gathered round her begging
for a story.

Otherwise,
no memories of the Revolution or the Empire disturbed the tranquility of the Berceau;
and even she,
after she had told them,
would add,
"I am not sure now what Marengo was.

A battle,
no doubt,
but I am not sure where nor why.

But we heard later that little Claudis,
my aunt's youngest-born,
a volunteer not nineteen,
died at it.

If we had known,
we should not have gone up and lit the bonfire."

This woman,
who had been born in that time of famine and flame,
was the happiest creature in the whole hamlet of the Berceau.

"I am old;
yes,
I am very old,"
she would say,
looking up from her spinning-wheel in her house-door,
and shading her eyes from the sun,
"very old--ninety-two last summer.

But when one has a roof over one's head,
and a pot of soup always,
and a grandson like mine,
and when one has lived all one's life in the Berceau de Dieu,
then it is well
to be so old.

Ah,
yes,
my little ones,--yes,
though you doubt it,
you little birds that have just tried your wings,--it is well
to be so old.

One has time
to think,
and thank the good God,
which one never seemed
to have a minute
to do in that work,
work,
work when one was young."

Reine Allix was a tall and strong woman,
very withered and very bent and very brown,
yet
with sweet,
dark,
flashing eyes that had still light in them,
and a face that was still noble,
though nearly a century had bronzed it
with its harvest suns and blown on it
with its winter winds.

She wore always the same garb of homely dark-blue serge,
always the same tall white head-gear,
always the same pure silver ear-rings that had been at once an heirloom and a nuptial gift.

She was always shod in her wooden sabots,
and she always walked abroad
with a staff of ash.

She had been born in the Berceau de Dieu;
had lived there and wedded there;
had toiled there all her life,
and never left it
for a greater distance than a league,
or
for a longer time than a day.

She loved it
with an intense love.

The world beyond it was nothing
to her;
she scarcely believed in it as existing.

She could neither read nor write.

She told the truth,
reared her offspring in honesty,
and praised God always--had praised Him when starving in a bitter winter after her husband's death,
when there had been no field work,
and she had had five children
to feed and clothe;
and praised Him now that her sons were all dead before her,
and all she had living of her blood was her grandson Bernadou.

Her life had been a hard one.

Her parents had been hideously poor.

Her marriage had scarcely bettered her condition.

She had laboured in the fields always,
hoeing and weeding and reaping and carrying wood and driving mules,
and continually rising
with the first streak of daybreak.

She had known fever and famine and all manner of earthly ills.

But now in her old age she had peace.

Two of her dead sons,
who had sought their fortunes in the other hemisphere,
had left her a little money,
and she had a little cottage and a plot of ground,
and a pig,
and a small orchard.

She was well-to-do,
and could leave it all
to Bernadou;
and
for ten years she had been happy,
perfectly happy,
in the coolness and the sweetness and the old familiar ways and habits of the Berceau.

Bernadou was very good
to her.

The lad,
as she called him,
was five and twenty years old,
tall and straight and clean-limbed,
with the blue eyes of the North,
and a gentle,
frank face.

He worked early and late in the plot of ground that gave him his livelihood.

He lived
with his grandmother,
and tended her
with a gracious courtesy and veneration that never altered.

He was not very wise;
he also could neither read nor write;
he believed in his priest and his homestead,
and loved the ground that he had trodden ever since his first steps from the cradle had been guided by Reine Allix.

He had never been drawn
for the conscription,
because he was the only support of a woman of ninety;
he likewise had never been half a dozen kilometres from his birthplace.

When he was bidden
to vote,
and he asked what his vote of assent would pledge him
to do,
they told him,
"It will bind you
to honour your grandmother so long as she shall live,
and
to get up
with the lark,
and
to go
to mass every Sunday,
and
to be a loyal son
to your country.

Nothing more."

And thereat he had smiled and straightened his stalwart frame,
and gone right willingly
to the voting-urn.

He was very stupid in these things;
and Reine Allix,
though clear- headed and shrewd,
was hardly more learned in them than he.

"Look you,"
she had said
to him oftentimes,
"in my babyhood there was the old white flag upon the chateau.

Well,
they pulled that down and put up a red one.

That toppled and fell,
and there was one of three colours.

Then somebody
with a knot of white lilies in his hand came one day and set up the old white one afresh;
and before the day was done that was down again and the tricolour again up where it is.

Now,
some I know fretted themselves greatly because of all these changes of the flags;
but as
for me,
I could not see that any one of them mattered:

bread was just as dear and sleep was just as sweet whichever of the three was uppermost."

Bernadou,
who had never known but the flag of three colours,
believed her,
as indeed he believed every word that those kindly and resolute old lips ever uttered
to him.

He had never been in a city,
and only once,
on the day of his first communion,
in the town four leagues away.

He knew nothing more than this simple,
cleanly,
honest life that he led.

With what men did outside his little world of meadow-land and woodland he had no care nor any concern.

Once a man had come through the village of the Berceau,
a travelling hawker of cheap prints,--a man
with a wild eye and a restless brain,--who told Bernadou that he was a downtrodden slave,
a clod,
a beast like a mule,
who fetched and carried that the rich might fatten,
a dolt,
an idiot,
who cared nothing
for the rights of man and the wrongs of the poor.

Bernadou had listened
with a perplexed face;
then
with a smile,
that had cleared it like sunlight,
he had answered,
in his country dialect,
"I do not know of what you speak.

Rights?

Wrongs?

I cannot tell,
But I have never owned a sou;
I have never told a lie;
I am strong enough
to hold my own
with any man that flouts me;
and I am content where I am.

That is enough
for me."

The peddler had called him a poor-spirited beast of burden,
but had said so out of reach of his arm,
and by night had slunk away from the Berceau de Dieu,
and had been no more seen there
to vex the quiet contentment of its peaceful and peace-loving ways.

At night,
indeed,
sometimes,
the little wine-shop of the village would be frequented by some half-dozen of the peasant proprietors of the place,
who talked communism after their manner,
not a very clear one,
in excited tones and
with the feverish glances of conspirators.

But it meant little,
and came
to less.

The weather and the price of wheat were dearer matters
to them;
and in the end they usually drank their red wine in amity,
and went up the village street arm in arm,
singing patriotic songs until their angry wives flung open their lattices and thrust their white head-gear out into the moonlight,
and called
to them shrewishly
to get
to bed and not make fools of themselves in that fashion;
which usually silenced and sobered them all instantly;
so that the revolutions of the Berceau de Dieu,
if not quenched in a wine-pot,
were always smothered in a nightcap,
and never by any chance disturbed its repose.

But of these noisy patriots Bernadou was never one.

He had the instinctive conservatism of the French peasant,
which is in such direct and tough antagonism
with the feverish socialism of the French artisan.

His love was
for the soil--a love deep-rooted as the oaks that grew in it.

Of Paris he had a dim,
vague dread,
as of a superb beast continually draining and devouring.

Of all forms of government he was alike ignorant.

So long as he tilled his little angle of land in peace,
so long as the sun ripened his fruits and corn,
so long as famine was away from his door and his neighbours dwelt in good-fellowship
with him,
so long he was happy,
and cared not whether he was thus happy under a monarchy,
an empire,
or a republic.

This wisdom,
which the peddler called apathy and cursed,
the young man had imbibed from nature and the teachings of Reine Allix.

"Look at home and mind thy word,"
she had said always
to him.

"It is labour enough
for a man
to keep his own life clean and his own hands honest.

Be not thou at any time as they are who are
for ever telling the good God how He might have made the world on a better plan,
while the rats gnaw at their hay-stacks and the children cry over an empty platter."

And he had taken heed
to her words,
so that in all the country-side there was not any lad truer,
gentler,
braver,
or more patient at labour than was Bernadou;
and though some thought him mild even
to foolishness,
and meek even
to stupidity,
he was no fool;
and he had a certain rough skill at music,
and a rare gift at the culture of plants,
and made his little home bright within the winter-time
with melody,
and in the summer gay without as a king's parterre.

At any rate,
Reine Allix and he had been happy together
for a quarter of a century under the old gray thatch of the wayside cottage,
where it stood at the foot of the village street,
with its great sycamores spread above it.

Nor were they less happy when in mid-April,
in the six and twentieth year of his age,
Bernadou had come in
with a bunch of primroses in his hand,
and had bent down
to her and saluted her
with a respectful tenderness,
and said softly and a little shyly,
"/Gran'mere/,
would it suit you if I were ever--to marry?"
Reine Allix was silent a minute and more,
cherishing the primroses and placing them in a little brown cupful of water.

Then she looked at him steadily
with her clear,
dark eyes.

"Who is it,
my child?"
He was always a child
to her,
this last-born of the numerous brood that had once dwelt
with her under the spreading branches of the sycamores,
and had now all perished off the face of the earth,
leaving himself and her alone.

Bernadou's eyes met hers frankly.

"It is Margot Dal.

Does that please you,
/gran'mere/,
or no?"
"It pleases me well,"
she said,
simply.

But there was a little quiver about her firm-set mouth,
and her aged head was bent over the primroses.

She had foreseen it;
she was glad of it;
and yet
for the instant it was a pang
to her.

"I am very thankful,"
said Bernadou,
with a flash of joy on his face.

He was independent of his grandmother;
he could make enough
to marry upon by his daily toil,
and he had a little store of gold and silver in his bank in the thatch,
put by
for a rainy day;
but he would have no more thought of going against her will than he would have thought of lifting his hand against her.

In the primitive homesteads of the Berceau de Dieu filial reverence was still accounted the first of virtues,
yet the simplest and the most imperative.

"I will go see Margot this evening,"
said Reine Allix,
after a little pause.

"She is a good girl and a brave,
and of pure heart and fair name.

You have chosen well,
my grandson."

Bernadou stooped his tall,
fair,
curly head,
and she laid her hands on him and blessed him.

That evening,
as the sun set,
Reine Allix kept her word,
and went
to the young maiden who had allured the eyes and heart of Bernadou.

Margot was an orphan;
she had not a penny
to her dower;
she had been brought up on charity,
and she dwelt now in the family of the largest landowner of the place,
a miller
with numerous offspring,
and several head of cattle,
and many stretches of pasture and of orchard.

Margot worked
for a hard master,
living indeed as one of the family,
but sharply driven all day long at all manner of housework and field work.

Reine Allix had kept her glance on her,
through some instinctive sense of the way that Bernadou's thoughts were turning,
and she had seen much
to praise,
nothing
to chide,
in the young girl's modest,
industrious,
cheerful,
uncomplaining life.

Margot was very pretty,
too,
with the brown oval face and the great black soft eyes and the beautiful form of the Southern blood that had run in the veins of her father,
who had been a sailor of Marseilles,
while her mother had been a native of the Provencal country.

Altogether,
Reine Allix knew that her beloved one could not have done better or more wisely,
if choose at all he must.

"Some people,
indeed,"
she said
to herself as she climbed the street whose sharp-set flints had been trodden by her wooden shoes
for ninety years--"Some people would mourn and scold because there is no store of linen,
no piece of silver plate,
no little round sum in money
with the poor child.

But what does it matter?

We have enough
for three.

It is wicked indeed
for parents
to live so that they leave their daughter portionless,
but it is no fault of the child's.

Let them say what they like,
it is a reason the more that she should want a roof over her head and a husband
to care
for her good."

So she climbed the steep way and the slanting road round the hill,
and went in by the door of the mill-house,
and found Margot busy in washing some spring lettuces and other green things in a bowl of bright water.

Reine Allix,
in the fashion of her country and her breeding,
was about
to confer
with the master and mistress ere saying a word
to the girl,
but there was that in Margot's face and in her timid greeting that lured speech out of her.

She looked long and keenly into the child's downcast countenance,
then touched her
with a tender smile.

"Petite Margot,
the birds told me a little secret to-day.

Canst guess what it is?

Say?"
Margot coloured and then grew pale.

True,
Bernadou had never really spoken
to her,
but still,
when one is seventeen,
and has danced a few times
with the same person,
and has plucked the leaves of a daisy away
to learn one's fortune,
spoken words are not very much wanted.

At sight of her the eyes of the old woman moistened and grew dimmer than age had made them;
she smiled still,
but the smile had the sweetness of a blessing in it,
and no longer the kindly banter of humour.

"You love him,
my little one?"
she said,
in a soft,
hushed voice.

"Ah,
madame!"
Margot could not say more.

She covered her face
with her hands,
and turned
to the wall,
and wept
with a passion of joy.

Down in the Berceau there were gossips who would have said,
with wise shakes of their heads,
"Tut,
tut! how easy it is
to make believe in a little love when one is a serving-maid,
and has not a sou,
nor a roof,
nor a friend in the world,
and a comely youth well-to-do is willing
to marry us!"
But Reine Allix knew better.

She had not lived ninety years in the world not
to be able
to discern between true feeling and counterfeit.

She was touched,
and drew the trembling frame of Margot into her arms,
and kissed her twice on the closed,
blue-veined lids of her black eyes.

"Make him happy,
only make him happy,"
she murmured;
"for I am very old,
Margot,
and he is alone,
all alone."

And the child crept
to her,
sobbing
for very rapture that she,
friendless,
homeless,
and penniless,
should be thus elected
for so fair a fate,
and whispered through her tears,
"I will."

Reine Allix spoke in all form
to the miller and his wife,
and
with as much earnestness in her demand as though she had been seeking the hand of rich Yacobe,
the tavern-keeper's only daughter.

The people assented;
they had no pretext
to oppose;
and Reine Allix wrapped her cloak about her and descended the hill and the street just as the twilight closed in and the little lights began
to glimmer through the lattices and the shutters and the green mantle of the boughs,
while the red fires of the smithy forge glowed brightly in the gloom,
and a white horse waited
to be shod,
a boy in a blue blouse seated on its back and switching away
with a branch of budding hazel the first gray gnats of the early year.

"It is well done,
it is well done,"
she said
to herself,
looking at the low rosy clouds and the pale gold of the waning sky.

"A year or two,
and I shall be in my grave.

I shall leave him easier if I know he has some creature
to care
for him,
and I shall be quiet in my coffin,
knowing that his children's children will live on and on and on in the Berceau,
and sometimes perhaps think a little of me when the nights are long and they sit round the fire."

She went in out of the dewy air,
into the little low,
square room of her cottage,
and went up
to Bernadou and laid her hands on his shoulders.

"Be it well
with thee,
my grandson,
and
with thy sons'
sons after thee,"
she said solemnly.

"Margot will be thy wife.

May thy days and hers be long in thy birthplace!"
A month later they were married.

It was then May.

The green nest of the Berceau seemed
to overflow
with the singing of birds and the blossoming of flowers.

The corn-lands promised a rare harvest,
and the apple orchards were weighed down
with their red and white blossoMs. The little brown streams in the woods brimmed over in the grass,
and the air was full of sweet mellow sunlight,
a cool fragrant breeze,
a continual music of humming bees and soaring larks and mule-bells ringing on the roads,
and childish laughter echoing from the fields.

In this glad springtime Bernadou and Margot were wedded,
going
with their friends one sunny morning up the winding hill-path
to the little gray chapel whose walls were hidden in ivy,
and whose sorrowful Christ looked down through the open porch across the blue and hazy width of the river.

Georges,
the baker,
whose fiddle made merry melody at all the village dances,
played before them tunefully;
little children,
with their hands full of wood-flowers,
ran before them;
his old blind poodle smelt its way faithfully by their footsteps;
their priest led the way upward
with the cross held erect against the light;
Reine Allix walked beside them,
nearly as firmly as she had trodden the same road seventy years before in her own bridal hour.

In the hollow below lay the Berceau de Dieu,
with its red gables and its thatched roofs hidden beneath leaves,
and its peaceful pastures smiling under the serene blue skies of France.

They were happy--ah,
heaven,
so happy!--and all their little world rejoiced
with them.

They came home and their neighbours entered
with them,
and ate and drank,
and gave them good wishes and gay songs,
and the old priest blessed them
with a father's tenderness upon their threshold;
and the fiddle of Georges sent gladdest dance-music flying through the open casements,
across the road,
up the hill,
far away
to the clouds and the river.

At night,
when the guests had departed and all was quite still within and without,
Reine Allix sat alone at her window in the roof,
thinking of their future and of her past,
and watching the stars come out,
one by another,
above the woods.

From her lattice in the eaves she saw straight up the village street;
saw the dwellings of her lifelong neighbours,
the slopes of the rich fields,
the gleam of the broad gray water,
the whiteness of the crucifix against the darkened skies.

She saw it all--all so familiar,
with that intimate association only possible
to the peasant who has dwelt on one spot from birth
to age.

In that faint light,
in those deep shadows,
she could trace all the scene as though the brightness of the moon shone on it;
it was all,
in its homeliness and simplicity,
intensely dear
to her.

In the playtime of her childhood,
in the courtship of her youth,
in the joys and woes of her wifehood and widowhood,
the bitter pains and sweet ecstasies of her maternity,
the hunger and privation of struggling desolate years,
the contentment and serenity of old age--in all these her eyes had rested only on this small,
quaint,
leafy street,
with its dwellings close and low,
like bee-hives in a garden,
and its pasture-lands and corn-lands,
wood-girt and water-fed,
stretching as far as the sight could reach.

Every inch of its soil,
every turn of its paths,
was hallowed
to her
with innumerable memories;
all her beloved dead were garnered there where the white Christ watched them;
when her time should come,
she thought,
she would rest
with them nothing loath.

As she looked,
the tears of thanksgiving rolled down her withered cheeks,
and she bent her feeble limbs and knelt down in the moonlight,
praising God that He had given her
to live and die in this cherished home,
and beseeching Him
for her children that they likewise might dwell in honesty,
and
with length of days abide beneath that roof.

"God is good,"
she murmured,
as she stretched herself
to sleep beneath the eaves,--"God is good.

Maybe,
when He takes me
to Himself,
if I be worthy,
He will tell His holy saints
to give me a little corner in His kingdom,
that He shall fashion
for me in the likeness of the Berceau."

For it seemed
to her that,
than the Berceau,
heaven itself could hold no sweeter or fairer nook of Paradise.

The year rolled on,
and the cottage under the sycamores was but the happier
for its new inmate.

Bernadou was serious of temper,
though so gentle,
and the arch,
gay humour of his young wife was like perpetual sunlight in the house.

Margot,
too,
was so docile,
so eager,
so bright,
and so imbued
with devotional reverence
for her husband and his home,
that Reine Allix day by day blessed the fate that had brought
to her this fatherless and penniless child.

Bernadou himself spoke little;
words were not in his way;
but his blue,
frank eyes shone
with an unclouded radiance that never changed,
and his voice,
when he did speak,
had a mellow softness in it that made his slightest speech
to the two women
with him tender as a caress.

"Thou art a happy woman,
my sister,"
said the priest,
who was well-nigh as old as herself.

Reine Allix bowed her head and made the sign of the cross.

"I am,
praise be
to God!"
And being happy,
she went
to the hovel of poor Madelon Dreux,
the cobbler's widow,
and nursed her and her children through a malignant fever,
sitting early and late,
and leaving her own peaceful hearth
for the desolate hut
with the delirious ravings and heartrending moans of the fever-stricken.

"How ought one
to dare
to be happy if one is not of use?"
she would say
to those who sought
to dissuade her from running such peril.

Madelon Dreux and her family recovered,
owing
to her their lives;
and she was happier than before,
thinking of them when she sat on the settle before the wood fire roasting chestnuts and spinning flax on the wheel,
and ever and again watching the flame reflected on the fair head of Bernadou or in the dark,
smiling eyes of Margot.

Another spring passed and another year went by,
and the little home under the sycamores was still no less honest in its labours or bright in its rest.

It was one among a million of such homes in France,
where a sunny temper made mirth
with a meal of herbs,
and filial love touched
to poetry the prose of daily household tasks.

A child was born
to Margot in the springtime
with the violets and daisies,
and Reine Allix was proud of the fourth generation,
and,
as she caressed the boy's healthy,
fair limbs,
thought that God was indeed good
to her,
and that her race would live long in the place of her birth.

The child resembled Bernadou,
and had his clear,
candid eyes.

It soon learned
to know the voice of
"/gran'mere/,"
and would turn from its young mother's bosom
to stretch its arms
to Reine Allix.

It grew fair and strong,
and all the ensuing winter passed its hours curled like a dormouse or playing like a puppy at her feet in the chimney- corner.

Another spring and summer came,
and the boy was more than a year old,
with curls of gold,
and cheeks like apples,
and a mouth that always smiled.

He could talk a little,
and tumbled like a young rabbit among the flowering grasses.

Reine Allix watched him,
and her eyes filled.

"God is too good,"
she thought.

She feared that she should scarce be so willing
to go
to her last sleep under the trees on the hillside as she used
to be.

She could not help a desire
to see this child,
this second Bernadou,
grow up
to youth and manhood;
and of this she knew it was wild
to dream.

It was ripe midsummer.

The fields were all russet and amber
with an abundance of corn.

The little gardens had seldom yielded so rich a produce.

The cattle and the flocks were in excellent health.

There had never been a season of greater promise and prosperity
for the little traffic that the village and its farms drove in sending milk and sheep and vegetable wealth
to that great city which was
to it as a dim,
wonderful,
mystic name without meaning.

One evening in this gracious and golden time the people sat out as usual when the day was done,
talking from door
to door,
the old women knitting or spinning,
the younger ones mending their husbands'
or brothers'
blouses or the little blue shirts of their infants,
the children playing
with the dogs on the sward that edged the stones of the street,
and above all the great calm heavens and the glow of the sun that had set.

Reine Allix,
like the others,
sat before the door,
for once doing nothing,
but
with folded hands and bended head dreamily taking pleasure in the coolness that had come
with evening,
and the smell of the limes that were in blossom,
and the blithe chatter of Margot
with the neighbours.

Bernadou was close beside them,
watering and weeding those flowers that were at once his pride and his recreation,
making the face of his dwelling bright and the air around it full of fragrance.

The little street was quiet in the evening light,
only the laughter of the children and the gay gossip of their mothers breaking the pleasant stillness;
it had been thus at evening
with the Berceau centuries before their time;
they thought that it would thus likewise be when the centuries should have seen the youngest-born there in his grave.

Suddenly came along the road between the trees an old man and a mule;
it was Mathurin,
the miller,
who had been that day
to a little town four leagues off,
which was the trade-mart and the corn-exchange of the district.

He paused before the cottage of Reine Allix;
he was dusty,
travel-stained,
and sad.

Margot ceased laughing among her flowers as she saw her old master.

None of them knew why,
yet the sight of him made the air seem cold and the night seem near.

"There is terrible news,"
he said,
drawing a sheet of printed words from his coat-pocket--"terrible news! We are
to go
to war."

"War!"
The whole village clustered round him.

They had heard of war,
far-off wars in Africa and Mexico,
and some of their sons had been taken off like young wheat mown before its time;
but it still remained
to them a thing remote,
impersonal,
inconceivable,
with which they had nothing
to do,
nor ever would have anything.

"Read!"
said the old man,
stretching out his sheet.

The only one there who could do so,
Picot,
the tailor,
took it and spelled the news out
to their wondering ears.

It was the declaration of France against Prussia.

There arose a great wail from the mothers whose sons were conscripts.

The rest asked in trembling,
"Will it touch us?"
"Us!"
echoed Picot,
the tailor,
in contempt.

"How should it touch us?

Our braves will be in Berlin
with another fortnight.

The paper says so."

The people were silent;
they were not sure what he meant by Berlin,
and they were afraid
to ask.

"My boy! my boy!"
wailed one woman,
smiting her breast.

Her son was in the army.

"Marengo!"
murmured Reine Allix,
thinking of that far-off time in her dim youth when the horseman had flown through the dusky street and the bonfire had blazed on the highest hill above the river.

"Bread will be dear,"
muttered Mathurin,
the miller,
going onward
with his foot-weary mule.

Bernadou stood silent,
with his roses dry and thirsty round him.

"Why art thou sad?"
whispered Margot,
with wistful eyes.

"Thou art exempt from war service,
my love?"
Bernadou shook his head.

"The poor will suffer somehow,"
was all he answered.

Yet
to him,
as
to all the Berceau,
the news was not very terrible,
because it was so vague and distant--an evil so far off and shapeless.

Monsieur Picot,
the tailor,
who alone could read,
ran from house
to house,
from group
to group,
breathless,
gay,
and triumphant,
telling them all that in two weeks more their brethren would sup in the king's palace at Berlin;
and the people believed and laughed and chattered,
and,
standing outside their doors in the cool nights,
thought that some good had come
to them and theirs.

Only Reine Allix looked up
to the hill above the river and murmured,
"When we lit the bonfire there,
Claudis lay dead;"
and Bernadou,
standing musing among his roses,
said,
with a smile that was very grave,
"Margot,
see here! When Picot shouted,
'/A Berlin!/'
he trod on my Gloire de Dijon rose and killed it."

The sultry heats and cloudless nights of the wondrous and awful summer of the year 1870 passed by,
and
to the Berceau de Dieu it was a summer of fair promise and noble harvest,
and never had the land brought forth in richer profusion
for man and beast.

Some of the youngest and ablest- bodied labourers were indeed drawn away
to join those swift trains that hurried thousands and tens of thousands
to the frontier by the Rhine.

But most of the male population were married,
and were the fathers of young children;
and the village was only moved
to a thrill of love and of honest pride
to think how its young Louis and Jean and Andre and Valentin were gone full of high hope and high spirit,
to come back,
maybe,--who could say not?--with epaulets and ribbons of honour.

Why they were gone they knew not very clearly,
but their superiors affirmed that they were gone
to make greater the greatness of France;
and the folk of the Berceau believed it,
having in a corner of their quiet hearts a certain vague,
dormant,
yet deep-rooted love,
on which was written the name of their country.

News came slowly and seldom
to the Berceau.

Unless some one of the men rode his mule
to the little town,
which was but very rarely,
or unless some peddler came through the village
with a news-sheet or so in his pack or rumours and tidings on his lips,
nothing that was done beyond its fields and woods came
to it.

And the truth of what it heard it had no means of measuring or sifting.

It believed what it was told,
without questioning;
and as it reaped the harvests in the rich hot sun of August,
its peasants laboured cheerily in the simple and firm belief that mighty things were being done
for them and theirs in the far eastern provinces by their great army,
and that Louis and Jean and Andre and Valentin and the rest--though indeed no tidings had been heard of them--were safe and well and glorious somewhere,
away where the sun rose,
in the sacked palaces of the German king.

Reine Allix alone of them was serious and sorrowful,
she whose memories stretched back over the wide space of near a century.

"Why art thou anxious,
/gran'mere/?"
they said
to her.

"There is no cause.

Our army is victorious everywhere;
and they say our lads will send us all the Prussians'
corn and cattle,
so that the very beggars will have their stomachs full."

But Reine Allix shook her head,
sitting knitting in the sun.

"My children,
I remember the days of my youth.

Our army was victorious then;
at least,
they said so.

Well,
all I know is that little Claudis and the boys
with him never came back;
and as
for bread,
you could not get it
for love or money,
and the people lay dead of famine out on the public roads."

"But that is so long ago,
/gran'mere/!"
they urged.

Reine Allix nodded.

"Yes,
it is long ago,
my dears.

But I do not think that things change very much."

They were silent out of respect
for her,
but among themselves they said,
"She is very old.

Nothing is as it was in her time."

One evening,
when the sun was setting red over the reapen fields,
two riders on trembling and sinking horses went through the village using whip and spur,
and scarcely drew rein as they shouted
to the cottagers
to know whether they had seen go by a man running
for his life.

The people replied that they had seen nothing of the kind,
and the horsemen pressed on,
jamming their spurs into their poor beasts'
steaming flanks.

"If you see him,
catch and hang him,"
they shouted,
as they scoured away;
"he is a Prussian spy!"
"A Prussian!"
the villagers echoed,
with a stupid stare--"a Prussian in France!"
One of the riders looked over his shoulder
for a moment.

"You fools! do you not know?

We are beaten,--beaten everywhere,--and the Prussian pigs march on Paris."

The spy was not seen in the Berceau,
but the news brought by his pursuers scared sleep from the eyes of every grown man that night in the little village.

"It is the accursed Empire!"
screamed the patriots of the wine-shop.

But the rest of the people were too terrified and down-stricken
to take heed of empires or patriots;
they only thought of Louis and Jean and Andre and Valentin;
and they collected round Reine Allix,
who said
to them,
"My children,
for love of money all our fairest fruits and flowers--yea,
even
to the best blossoms of our maidenhood--were sent
to be bought and sold in Paris.

We sinned therein,
and this is the will of God."

This was all
for a time that they heard.

It was a place lowly and obscure enough
to be left in peace.

The law pounced down on it once or twice and carried off a few more of its men
for army service,
and arms were sent
to it from its neighbouring town,
and an old soldier of the First Empire tried
to instruct its remaining sons in their use.

But he had no apt pupil except Bernadou,
who soon learned
to handle a musket
with skill and
with precision,
and who carried his straight form gallantly and well,
though his words were seldom heard and his eyes were always sad.

"You will not be called till the last,
Bernadou,"
said the old soldier;
"you are married,
and maintain your grandam and wife and child.

But a strong,
muscular,
well-built youth like you should not wait
to be called;
you should volunteer
to serve France."

"I will serve France when my time comes,"
said Bernadou,
simply,
in answer.

But he would not leave his fields barren,
and his orchard uncared for,
and his wife
to sicken and starve,
and his grandmother
to perish alone in her ninety-third year.

They jeered and flouted and upbraided him,
those patriots who screamed against the fallen Empire in the wine-shop;
but he looked them straight in the eyes,
and held his peace,
and did his daily work.

"If he is called,
he will not be found wanting,"
said Reine Allix,
who knew him better than did even the young wife whom he loved.

Bernadou clung
to his home
with a dogged devotion.

He would not go from it
to fight unless compelled,
but
for it he would have fought like a lion.

His love
for his country was only an indefinite,
shadowy existence that was not clear
to him;
he could not save a land that he had never seen,
a capital that was only
to him as an empty name;
nor could he comprehend the danger that his nation ran,
nor could he desire
to go forth and spend his life-blood in defence of things unknown
to him.

He was only a peasant,
and he could not read nor greatly understand.

But affection
for his birthplace was a passion
with him,
mute indeed,
but deep-seated as an oak.

For his birthplace he would have struggled as a man can only struggle when supreme love as well as duty nerves his arm.

Neither he nor Reine Allix could see that a man's duty might lie from home,
but in that home both were alike ready
to dare anything and
to suffer everything.

It was a narrow form of patriotism,
yet it had nobleness,
endurance,
and patience in it;
in song it has been oftentimes deified as heroism,
but in modern warfare it is punished as the blackest crime.

So Bernadou tarried in his cottage till he should be called,
keeping watch by night over the safety of his village,
and by day doing all he could
to aid the deserted wives and mothers of the place by the tilling of their ground
for them and the tending of such poor cattle as were left in their desolate fields.

He and Margot and Reine Allix,
between them,
fed many mouths that would otherwise have been closed in death by famine,
and denied themselves all except the barest and most meagre subsistence,
that they might give away the little they possessed.

And all this while the war went on,
but seemed far from them,
so seldom did any tidings of it pierce the seclusion in which they dwelt.

By-and- by,
as the autumn went on,
they learned a little more.

Fugitives coming
to the smithy
for a horse's shoe;
women fleeing
to their old village homes from their base,
gay life in the city;
mandates from the government of defence sent
to every hamlet in the country;
stray news- sheets brought in by carriers or hawkers and hucksters--all these by degrees told them of the peril of their country,
vaguely indeed,
and seldom truthfully,
but so that by mutilated rumours they came at last
to know the awful facts of the fate of Sedan,
the fall of the Empire,
the siege of Paris.

It did not alter their daily lives;
it was still too far off and too impalpable.

But a foreboding,
a dread,
an unspeakable woe settled down on them.

Already their lands and cattle had been harassed
to yield provision
for the army and large towns;
already their best horses had been taken
for the siege-trains and the forage-waggons;
already their ploughshares were perforce idle,
and their children cried because of the scarcity of nourishment;
already the iron of war had entered their souls.

The little street at evening was mournful and very silent;
the few who talked spoke in whispers,
lest a spy should hear them,
and the young ones had no strength
to play--they wanted food.

"It is as it was in my youth,"
said Reine Allix,
eating her piece of black bread and putting aside the better food prepared
for her,
that she might save it,
unseen,
for the
"child."

It was horrible
to her and
to all of them
to live in that continual terror of an unknown foe,
that perpetual expectation of some ghastly,
shapeless misery.

They were quiet,--so quiet!--but by all they heard they knew that any night,
as they went
to their beds,
the thunder of cannon might awaken them;
any morning,
as they looked on their beloved fields,
they knew that ere sunset the flames of war might have devoured them.

They knew so little too;
all they were told was so indefinite and garbled that sometimes they thought the whole was some horrid dream-- thought so,
at least,
until they looked at their empty stables,
their untilled land,
their children who cried from hunger,
their mothers who wept
for the conscripts.

But as yet it was not so very much worse than it had been in times of bad harvest and of dire distress;
and the storm which raged over the land had as yet spared this little green nest among the woods on the Seine.

November came.

"It is a cold night,
Bernadou;
put on some more wood,"
said Reine Allix.

Fuel at the least was plentiful in that district,
and Bernadou obeyed.

He sat at the table,
working at a new churn
for his wife;
he had some skill at turnery and at invention in such matters.

The child slept soundly in its cradle by the hearth,
smiling while it dreamed.

Margot spun at her wheel.

Reine Allix sat by the fire,
seldom lifting her head from her long knitting-needles,
except
to cast a look on her grandson or at the sleeping child.

The little wooden shutter of the house was closed.

Some winter roses bloomed in a pot beneath the little crucifix.

Bernadou's flute lay on a shelf;
he had not had heart enough
to play it since the news of the war had come.

Suddenly a great sobbing cry rose without--the cry of many voices,
all raised in woe together.

Bernadou rose,
took his musket in his hand,
undid his door,
and looked out.

All the people were turned out into the street,
and the women,
loudly lamenting,
beat their breasts and strained their children
to their bosoMs. There was a sullen red light in the sky
to the eastward,
and on the wind a low,
hollow roar stole
to them.

"What is it?"
he asked.

"The Prussians are on us!"
answered twenty voices in one accord.

"That red glare is the town burning."

Then they were all still--a stillness that was more horrible than their lamentations.

Reine Allix came and stood by her grandson.

"If we must die,
let us die /here/,"
she said,
in a voice that was low and soft and grave.

He took her hand and kissed it.

She was content
with his answer.

Margot stole forth too,
and crouched behind them,
holding her child
to her breast.

"What can they do
to us?"
she asked,
trembling,
with the rich colours of her face blanched white.

Bernadou smiled on her.

"I do not know,
my dear.

I think even they can hardly bring death upon women and children."

"They can,
and they will,"
said a voice from the crowd.

None answered.

The street was very quiet in the darkness.

Far away in the east the red glare glowed.

On the wind was still that faint,
distant,
ravening roar,
like the roar of famished wolves;
it was the roar of fire and of war.

In the silence Reine Allix spoke:

"God is good.

Shall we not trust in Him?"
With one great choking sob the people answered;
their hearts were breaking.

All night long they watched in the street--they who had done no more
to bring this curse upon them than the flower-roots that slept beneath the snow.

They dared not go
to their beds;
they knew not when the enemy might be upon them.

They dared not flee;
even in their own woods the foe might lurk
for them.

One man indeed did cry aloud,
"Shall we stay here in our houses
to be smoked out like bees from their hives?

Let us fly!"
But the calm,
firm voice of Reine Allix rebuked him:

"Let who will,
run like a hare from the hounds.

For me and mine,
we abide by our homestead."

And they were ashamed
to be outdone by a woman,
and a woman of ninety years old,
and no man spoke any more of flight.

All the night long they watched in the cold and the wind,
the children shivering beneath their mothers'
skirts,
the men sullenly watching the light of the flames in the dark,
starless sky.

All night long they were left alone,
though far off they heard the dropping shots of scattered firing,
and in the leafless woods around them the swift flight of woodland beasts startled from their sleep,
and the hurrying feet of sheep terrified from their folds in the outlying fields.

The daybreak came,
gray,
cheerless,
very cold.

A dense fog,
white and raw,
hung over the river;
in the east,
where the sun,
they knew,
was rising,
they could only see the livid light of the still towering flames and pillars of black smoke against the leaden clouds.

"We will let them come and go in peace if they will,"
murmured old Mathurin.

"What can we do?

We have no arms,
no powder hardly,
no soldiers,
no defence."

Bernadou said nothing,
but he straightened his tall limbs,
and in his grave blue eyes a light gleamed.

Reine Allix looked at him as she sat in the doorway of her house.

"Thy hands are honest,
thy heart pure,
thy conscience clear.

Be not afraid
to die if need there be,"
she said
to him.

He looked down and smiled on her.

Margot clung
to him in a passion of weeping.

He clasped her close and kissed her softly,
but the woman who read his heart was the woman who had held him at his birth.

By degrees the women crept timidly back into their houses,
hiding their eyes so that they should not see that horrid light against the sky,
while the starving children clung
to their breasts or
to their skirts,
wailing aloud in terror.

The few men there were left,
for the most part of them very old or else mere striplings,
gathered together in a hurried council.

Old Mathurin,
the miller,
and the patriots of the wine-shop were agreed that there should be no resistance,
whatever might befall them;
that it would be best
to hide such weapons as they had and any provisions that still remained
to them,
and yield up themselves and their homes
with humble grace
to the dire foe.

"If we do otherwise,"
they said,
"the soldiers will surely slay us,
and what can a miserable little hamlet like this achieve against cannon and steel and fire?"
Bernadou alone raised his voice in opposition.

His eye kindled,
his cheek flushed,
his words
for once sprang from his lips like fire.

"What!"
he said
to them,
"shall we yield up our homes and our wives and our infants without a single blow?

Shall we be so vile as
to truckle
to the enemies of France and show that we can fear them?

It were a shame,
a foul shame;
we were not worthy of the name of men.

Let us prove
to them that there are people in France who are not afraid
to die.

Let us hold our own so long as we can.

Our muskets are good,
our walls strong,
our woods in this weather morasses that will suck in and swallow them if only we have tact
to drive them there.

Let us do what we can.

The camp of the francs-tireurs is but three leagues form us.

They will be certain
to come
to our aid.

At any rate,
let us die bravely.

We can do little,
that may be;
but if every man in France does that little that he can,
that little will be great enough
to drive the invaders off the soil."

Mathurin and the others screamed at him and hooted.

"You are a fool!"
they shouted.

"You will be the undoing of us all.

Do you not know that one shot fired,
nay,
only one musket found,
and the enemy puts a torch
to the whole place?"
"I know,"
said Bernadou,
with a dark radiance in his azure eyes.

"But then it is a choice between disgrace and the flames;
let us only take heed
to be clear of the first--the last must rage as God wills."

But they screamed and mouthed and hissed at him:

"Oh yes! fine talk,
fine talk! See your own roof in flames if you will;
you shall not ruin ours.

Do what you will
with your own neck;
keep it erect or hang by it,
as you choose.

But you have no right
to give your neighbours over
to death,
whether they will or no."

He strove,
he pleaded,
he conjured,
he struggled
with them half the night,
with the salt tears running down his cheeks,
and all his gentle blood burning
with righteous wrath and loathing shame,
stirred
for the first time in all his life
to a rude,
simple,
passionate eloquence.

But they were not persuaded.

Their few gold pieces hidden in the rafters,
their few feeble sheep starving in the folds,
their own miserable lives,
all hungry,
woe-begone,
and spent in daily terrors--these were still dear
to them,
and they would not imperil them.

They called him a madman;
they denounced him as one who would be their murderer;
they threw themselves on him and demanded his musket,
to bury it
with the rest under the altar in the old chapel on the hill.

Bernadou's eyes flashed fire;
his breast heaved;
his nerves quivered;
he shook them off and strode a step forward.

"As you live,"
he muttered,
"I have a mind
to fire on you,
rather than let you live
to shame yourselves and me!"
Reine Allix,
who stood by him silent all the while,
laid her hand on his shoulder.

"My boy,"
she said in his ear,
"you are right,
and they are wrong.

Yet let not dissension between brethren open the door
for the enemy
to enter thereby into your homes.

Do what you will
with your own life,
Bernadou,--it is yours,--but leave them
to do as they will
with theirs.

You cannot make sheep into lions,
and let not the first blood shed here be a brother's."

Bernadou's head dropped on his breast.

"Do as you will,"
he muttered
to his neighbours.

They took his musket from him,
and in the darkness of the night stole silently up the wooded chapel hill and buried it,
with all their other arms,
under the altar where the white Christ hung.

"We are safe now,"
said Mathurin,
the miller,
to the patriots of the tavern.

"Had that madman had his way,
he had destroyed us all."

Reine Allix softly led her grandson across his own threshold,
and drew his head down
to hers,
and kissed him between the eyes.

"You did what you could,
Bernadou,"
she said
to him;
"let the rest come as it will."

Then she turned from him,
and flung her cloak over her head,
and sank down,
weeping bitterly;
for she had lived through ninety-three years only
to see this agony at the last.

Bernadou,
now that all means of defence was gone from him,
and the only thing left
to him
to deal
with was his own life,
had become quiet and silent and passionless,
as was his habit.

He would have fought like a mastiff
for his home,
but this they had forbidden him
to do,
and he was passive and without hope.

He shut
to his door,
and sat down
with his hand in that of Reine Allix and his arm around his wife.

"There is nothing
to do but
to wait,"
he said,
sadly.

The day seemed very long in coming.

The firing ceased
for a while;
then its roll commenced afresh,
and grew nearer
to the village.

Then again all was still.

At noon a shepherd staggered into the place,
pale,
bleeding,
bruised,
covered
with mire.

The Prussians,
he told them,
had forced him
to be their guide,
had knotted him tight
to a trooper's saddle,
and had dragged him
with them until he was half dead
with fatigue and pain.

At night he had broken from them and had fled.

They were close at hand,
he said,
and had burned the town from end
to end because a man had fired at them from a housetop.

That was all he knew.

Bernadou,
who had gone out
to hear his news,
returned into the house and sat down and hid his face within his hands.

"If I resist you are all lost,"
he muttered.

"And yet
to yield like a cur!"
It was a piteous question,
whether
to follow the instinct in him and see his birthplace in flames and his family slaughtered
for his act,
or
to crush out the manhood in him and live,
loathing himself as a coward
for evermore.

Reine Allix looked at him,
and laid her hand on his bowed head,
and her voice was strong and tender as music:

"Fret not thyself,
my beloved.

When the moment comes,
then do as thine own heart and the whisper of God in it bid thee."

A great sob answered her;
it was the first since his earliest infancy that she had ever heard from Bernadou.

It grew dark.

The autumn day died.

The sullen clouds dropped scattered rain.

The red leaves were blown in millions by the wind.

The little houses on either side the road were dark,
for the dwellers in them dared not show any light that might be a star
to allure
to them the footsteps of their foes.

Bernadou sat
with his arms on the table,
and his head resting on them.

Margot nursed her son.

Reine Allix prayed.

Suddenly in the street without there was the sound of many feet of horses and of men,
the shouting of angry voices,
the splashing of quick steps in the watery ways,
the screams of women,
the flash of steel through the gloom.

Bernadou sprang
to his feet,
his face pale,
his blue eyes dark as night.

"They are come!"
he said,
under his breath.

It was not fear that he felt,
nor horror;
it was rather a passion of love
for his birthplace and his nation--a passion of longing
to struggle and
to die
for both.

And he had no weapon! He drew his house-door open
with a steady hand,
and stood on his own threshold and faced these his enemies.

The street was full of them