Bearn And The Pyrenees Part 41

"'Go, Cagot!' roared the pitiless Odon; 'who now is a false traitor, who now has lied, and proved himself a vile impostor? Away with thy helmet, thy sword, and thy spurs; away with all the armour of the craven! Let the herald at arms degrade thee before the world! Where is now thy name, thy t.i.tles, thy prerogatives? where are thy fiefs and thy domains? Thy name is _Cagot_, thy possessions leprosy, and every foul disease--every impurity of soul and body; thy castle is a mud hut in the Cagoterie of Lurbe, and this is thy blazon!'"

As he spoke he raised his arm in the air, and, with the frantic force of hate, dashed in the face of the distracted Raymond a piece of red cloth cut into the form of a _goose's foot_.

At the sight of this emblem the populace rose with fury, and rushed in a body, with savage cries, on the unfortunate pair.

A scene of horror now takes place; Raymond is deserted by all his people but one, his favourite man-at-arms, and the generous Arnauton, who will not quit his adopted brother even in such degradation; together they stand against the mob, whose rage the Prince himself is unable to restrain. Odon leads them on; the poor old man is with difficulty rescued from their grasp by the determined valour of his defenders, who are, however, too few to contend against their foes, and Odon is on the point of attaining the object of his wishes, and beholding the heart's blood of his rival--when a.s.sistance comes in the shape of the young Cagot who had saved the life of Ena Marie. At the moment when the blow is falling, and Raymond has no chance of escape, he darts forward, and, seizing Odon in his powerful grasp, drags him to the bridge of the Gave, which is thrown over the torrent, where a mill-wheel is working. There a fearful struggle goes on, which is closed by both combatants being precipitated into the stream, to reappear crushed and mangled by the mighty engine under which they fell.

The bravo young Cagot casts one dying look, full of tenderness and grat.i.tude, towards those who watch his end with pity and despair, and all is over.

On the evening of that fatal day, Guilhem and Raymond, both exhausted and overcome with grief and fatigue, rest themselves in a miserable hut, far away amongst the rocks, in one of the steepest and wildest gorges of Mont Binet. It was one of the accursed and abhorred dwellings of the Cagot village of Lurbe.

The night was black and fearful: a tempest raged in all its terrors without, and occasional gusts of wind and rain penetrated the wretched retreat where the unfortunate fugitives sat, their vestments torn, and their bodies as severely wounded as their minds. Several Cagots, both male and female, from other cabins near, hovered round them, tenderly administering to their wants, and preparing such balms to heal their wounds as their simple knowledge afforded. They accompanied these friendly offices with tears and pa.s.sionate gesticulations, accompanied by half inarticulate exclamations, such as savages, unused to speech, might do in a strange unvisited land.

"'It is, then, true, my father,' said Raymond, as he looked round on these beings, ill-clothed, poor, degraded by oppression and contempt, scarcely endowed with common intelligence, and miserable to regard--'It is, then, true, that you are a Cagot, and that these are my brothers and my equals? Ah! why did you let me wander into a world which I ought never to have known? Why did you not let me live and die a Cagot as I was born? These, then, are Cagots!'

"'Yes,' cried Guilhem, weeping bitterly; 'Yes, we are Cagots, and all men are our persecutors; and yet, when one of _their_ children falls into our hands, we do not ill-use it, we do not torture it, we do not crush it beneath the wheels of a mill; we do good for evil, and they repay us by evil alone! Ah! I am as if bound on a flaming pile, my tears are like molten lead on my cheeks. I!--a wretched, vile Cagot!--I should die with pity if I saw one of my executioners in the state to which they have reduced me!'

"'My father, my dear father, calm yourself,' said Raymond, with tender affection; 'your son, at least, is left you.'

"'No, no,' cried the old man, pa.s.sionately;'my son is not left me; my son is dead; he was torn in pieces by the mill-wheel of Orthez. I am not your father; you are not--you never were, you never can be--my son; this is the first word of the secret I have to tell you.'

"'What do you tell me!' cried Raymond, in amazement! 'Your disavowal was not, then, a deception, prompted by paternal affection! What! are you not my father? and was that generous creature, sacrificed for my sake, indeed your son!'

"'He was my child, my only child! the only living being attached to me by the ties of blood--the only creature who would have listened to my last agonized sigh at my hour of death. And see what was his fate, for me! I allowed him to venture for my sake amongst the ferocious people; see to what an end his devotion and grat.i.tude to you had led him!' So saying, the unfortunate old man uncovered the mutilated remains of his unfortunate son, rescued from the stream, and transported to the spot by the compa.s.sionate care of Arnauton d'Espaigne. The body lay on a rustic couch, enveloped in a white shroud, which is always, according to the usage of the country, prepared long before death, a taper of yellow wax shed its feeble rays on the corpse'."

The grief and lamentations of Guilhem are interrupted by the rites which then take place; the men wringing their hands, and gesticulating, and cursing the cruelty of the world: the women weeping and wailing; and one of those endowed with poetical powers, improvising a lament over the body, uttering her words in a melancholy cadence, deeply expressive of the grief of all.

"'Alas, Gratien!' she moaned; 'thou hast then left us! thou hast deserted thy aged father--gone without a pressure of the hand! Gratien, may G.o.d receive thy soul! To live is to suffer. Life is like the wheel by which thou wert torn. Thou wert in the right to fly it. Happy child!

thou art gone to a place where there are no Cagots, no men to persecute thee; thou wilt know now who were the ancestors from whom we descend.

Thou hast no more use for the pruning-knife and the infamous axe. No more toil nor suffering await thee; no more contempt nor outrage!

Accursed be the wheel, oh, Gratien, which crushed thee! never may the torrent wash out thy blood which stains it; let it turn for ever red and b.l.o.o.d.y! No bell tolled for thy soul; but the thunder and the wind, oh, Gratien! Toll louder still--no bell for the Cagot! But Heaven weeps with us, the trees groan with us. Old man! thou dost not weep alone. Adieu, dear Gratien, thy body is returned to thy cabin; but thy soul, escaped the demon, is fled on a beam of the moon to the great house of heaven!

Yes, he cries--I am in heaven; I am telling the Cagots, our ancestors, that their children are still in suffering!'"

Guilhem, comforted by the tenderness of Raymond, recovers in some degree his self-possession, and proceeds to relate to the young knight the manner of his falling, when an infant, into his charge. The narrative is as follows:--

"'In 1360, twenty-six years ago, when I was myself thirty-nine years of age, the event happened which I have now to tell you. I was a Cagot from my birth, by my parents and my ancestors--a proscribed outcast of unkind nature, like these you see around--poor, ignorant, timid, and a mark for insult and contempt. I had already suffered much; for G.o.d, alas! had given me a heart formed to feel and to love; yet long habits of endurance had, in great measure, rendered it callous and insensible, unaided as I was by intellectual culture.

"'I married a woman of my race; but, after a year, she died, leaving me in lonely widowed sorrow, with one child. Alas! he has just rejoined his mother, and rude is the journey which has conducted him to her!

"'At this period, as you know, and as I afterwards learnt from the mouth of your venerable preceptor, the holy hermit, all France was overrun with bands of marauders and robbers of every nation, called the _late-comers_.[48] Bearn was no more free from them than other parts of the kingdom. One day, I was returning from Oloron, my heart more sad than usual,--cursing men and life, for I had been the object of new injuries,--when a chief of one of these predatory bands suddenly presented himself before me; and, addressing me, said: 'Good man, will you do a kind action? Take this infant, abandoned to my men-at-arms by an unfaithful servant. I have saved it from their inhumanity: it has that about it which will pay your trouble.' I saw that he held in his arms a child, who was weeping bitterly; when I looked on its lovely face--round, innocent, and rosy--my heart was touched, and I accepted the charge.

[Footnote 48: Tard-venus.]

"'Alas! the sweet creature knew not that it had fallen into the hands of a Cagot; for no sooner had I received it on my bosom, than it ceased crying; and, so far from showing repugnance to one about to become its father, its hands were stretched towards me, and it smiled in my face.

My dear Raymond, thou wert this infant sent by Providence to my care.'"

The old man then relates his bringing home the child; employing a goat to nourish it; and at length confiding it to the charge and instruction of the hermit of Eysus, the only being whose religion or charity allowed him to listen to the confession of the Cagot. While Raymond, however, was yet an infant, and but a short time after Guilhem had received him, the latter was, one day, returning from an expedition to the town, where the wants of his family obliged him to resort, and pa.s.sed by the ruins of the old tower (the very place in which Raymond afterwards became a prisoner, and was rescued, by the fortunate familiarity of Guilhem with the spot, in time to appear at the tournament).

"'I had,' said he, 'taken from my dress the ignominious mark of my degradation; and, in full security, was gathering at my leisure some herbs destined for your use, when it so happened that some shepherds of the Vallee d'Aspe observed and at once recognised me; and their usual superst.i.tion acting on them at the supposed ill-omen of meeting a Cagot picking herbs, they attacked me with one accord, and commenced pelting me with stones, and using every epithet of opprobrium. I was struck to the earth; then they dragged me to the entrance of a sort of inclined cavern, called in the country 'The Den of the Witches'[49]. With coa.r.s.e jests they thrust me through the opening, exclaiming that, as the evil spirits raised tempests when stones were thrown in there, perhaps they would be appeased by receiving the body of a Cagot.

[Footnote 49: Tutte de las bronchos.]

"'I fell to some distance, rolling along the declivity; and my body stopped at the bottom on the damp earth. When I had a little recovered, I prepared to attempt an escape, as I heard that my tormentors had departed; but, on reaching the opening, I found a barrier which I had not looked for: these wretched men had lighted a fire of weeds and brushwood at the mouth of the cave. The flames raged violently, excited by the current of air from within, and I soon felt the effect; sparks and pieces of burning timber fell in; and my wounded body was soon a prey to a scorching shower which poured down upon me.

"'A greater fire rose within my soul,--my injuries had driven me to despair; my brain reeled, and the torments of h.e.l.l seemed within me and around. Hatred and bitter vengeance rose boiling from my heart; and I cursed all human nature,--invoking ruin and destruction on mankind, from whom I had never known pity, I raved in my burning prison, and gave myself up to fury and despair, when Heaven took compa.s.sion on my misery.

A lighted brand which fell from above disclosed, by the vivid flash it cast through the gloom, an opening at the other end; and I clearly distinguished a covered way, evidently made by human hands, which seemed to run along to some distance before me. I retreated into its shelter, and my heart revived once more.

"'I advanced some little way and reposed myself, when, suddenly, I thought I could distinguish in the distance vague and interrupted sounds. A shudder came over me; and at first I dreaded to move; but, at length, I forced myself to do so; and, gathering up one of the lighted brands, I yielded to my curiosity, and proceeded forward.

"'Presently the sounds became more distinct; and I could not mistake the voice of wailing and lamentation, which found an echo in my own heart and awakened its sympathies. I continued my way cautiously; and, after a few minutes, found myself at an opening, formed in a shelving position, in the manner of a loop-hole, closed with two flagstones, not so near but that a s.p.a.ce was left wide enough for me to see into a vaulted chamber beyond, which at the moment was lighted by a torch.

"'A young and beautiful woman was seated on the ground, in an att.i.tude of profound grief, leaning against the wall opposite. A man of high stature, and who might be about my own age, stood at a little distance, and looked towards her with a ferocious and menacing air, in which there was, nevertheless, an appearance of what might be thought shame, for the glance was oblique, as if he avoided meeting her eye. The light fell full upon his face, which was so remarkable in its expression, that I could not detach my regard from him, and his features remain deeply graven on my memory.

"'You are, then, obstinately resolved to drive me to extremity,' said he, 'and will not consent to my demand?'

"'What?' answered the lady, in a voice of grief, but full of energy, 'shall I despoil my son of his rights and his inheritance without knowing that he is dead, and that in favour of my most cruel enemies?

No! he may yet live--Providence may yet watch over him--restore him one day to the world, when he will come to claim his own and revenge his mother's wrongs!'

"'You have no alternative but a fearful death, remember!' said the man, in hoa.r.s.e accents.

"'Rather any death than abandon my child!' was the answer.

"'Then, madam,' returned her companion, 'your will shall be done--impute your fate to your own conduct.'

"As he p.r.o.nounced these words, he approached the door of the dungeon, where stood another female in the shade, who contemplated the scene in silence, with an unmoved and chilling aspect. They then left the place together, fastening the heavy door carefully, while the sound of their keys and chains sent a fearful echo through the vaulted apartment. Their victim fell back in a state of desolation, pitiable to behold, and burst into pa.s.sionate tears, praying fervently to Heaven, and uttering exclamations which might melt the stoutest heart.'

"'I was deeply moved to behold her; and, in a low voice, ventured to exclaim: 'Madam, be of good cheer! Heaven hears you; and has sent one to your aid who is ready to exert every effort, for your relief.'

"'What voice is that?' cried she, starting.

"'Be not terrified!' I answered; 'it is that of a mortal, guided hither by the hand of G.o.d!'

"'At the same time I applied myself to loosen the stones at the loop-hole, and with much difficulty succeeded in doing so; but, in spite of all my precautions, the unfortunate lady, bewildered with fear and grief, was so astonished when I appeared through the opening, that she uttered a cry and fainted on the ground.

"'Without losing a moment, I took her in my arms, and carried her through to the subterranean way. I then replaced the stones as closely as I could, and hastened to bear her to the mouth of the cave, which I now found without obstacle, the fire extinct, and nothing to impede our progress.

"'Oh, Raymond! the ways of Providence are inscrutable! This dungeon, from whence I had rescued that innocent victim, is the same where, a few days since, you were thrown by the hands of enemies; and the lady who had nearly perished there was--your mother!'

"'Great Heaven!' exclaimed Raymond, 'my mother! condemned to such horrors--buried in the earth alive;--oh! to find the author of her injuries!'