A Village of Vagabonds Part 30

Alice's ringless white hands were clenched in her lap.

"And I saw, as I gave," continued the cure, "the end of pain and of hunger--little by little I gave, hoping somehow to replace it, until I dared give no more."

He paused, and drew forth from the breast of his soutane a small cotton sack that had once held his gun wads. "Here is what is left, gentlemen,"

said he, facing the Munic.i.p.al Council; "I have counted it at last, four hundred and eighty francs, sixty-five centimes."

There were tears now in Alice's eyes; dark eyes that followed the cure's with a look of tenderness and pain. The mayor sat breathing irritably.

As for the Munic.i.p.al Council, it was evident to Tanrade and myself, that not one of these plain, red-eared citizens was eager to send a priest to jail--it was their custom occasionally to go to ma.s.s.

"Marianne's illness," continued the cure, "was an important item. You seemed to consider her case of typhoid as a malady that would cure itself if let alone. Marianne needed care, serious care, strong as she was. The girl, Yvonne, she saved from drowning last year, and her baby, she still shelters among her own children in her hut. They, too, had to be fed; for Marianne was helpless to care for them. There was the little boy, too, of the Gavons--left alone, with a case of measles well developed when I found him, on the draughty floor of a loft; the mother and father had been drunk together for three days at Bar la Rose. And there were others--the Mere Gailliard, who would have been sold out for her rent, and poor old Varnet, the fisherman; he had no home, no money, no friends; he is eighty-four years old. Most of the winter he slept in a hedge under a cast-off sail. I got him a better roof and something for his stomach, Monsieur le Maire."

He paused again, and drew out a folded paper from his pocket. "Here is a list of all I can remember I have given to, and the amounts as near as I can recall them," he declared simply. Again he turned to Alice. "It is to you, dear friend, I have come to confess," he continued; "as for you, gentlemen, my very life, the church I love, all that this village means to me, lies in your hands; I do not beg your mercy. I have sinned and I shall take the consequences--all I ask you to do is to judge fairly the error of my ways." Monsieur le Cure took his seat.

"It is for you, Madame de Breville, to decide," said the mayor, after some moments conference with the Council, "since the amount in question was given by your hand."

Alice rose--softly she slipped past the Munic.i.p.al Council of Pont du Sable, until she stood looking up into the cure's eyes; then her arms went about his strong neck and she kissed him as tenderly as a sister.

"Child!" I heard him murmur.

"We shall give another concert," she whispered in his ear.

[Ill.u.s.tration: bell]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The miser--Garron]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE MISER--GARRON

We've had a drowning at Pont du Sable. Drownings are not infrequent on this rough Norman coast of France. Only last December five able fishermen went down within plain sight of the dunes in a roaring white sea that gave no quarter. This gale by night became a cyclone; the sea a driving h.e.l.l of water, hail and screaming wind. The barometer dropped to twenty-eight. The wind blew at one hundred and twenty kilometers an hour. Six fis.h.i.+ng boats hailing from Boulogne perished with their crews.

Their women went by train to Calais, still hoping for news, and returned weeping and alone.

At Boulogne the waves burst in spray to a height of forty feet over the breakwater--small wonder that the transatlantic liner due there to take on pa.s.sengers, signalled to her plunging tender already in danger--"Going through--No pa.s.sengers--" and proceeded on her way to New York.

The sea that night killed with a blow.

This latest drowning at Pont du Sable was a tragedy--or rather, the culmination of a series of tragedies.

"Suicide?"

"_Non_--_mon ami_--wait until you hear the whole truth of this plain tale."

On my return from shooting this morning, Suzette brought me the news.

The whole fis.h.i.+ng village has known it since daylight.

It seems that the miser, Garron--Garron's boy--Garron's woman, Julie, and another woman who n.o.body seems to know much about, are mixed up in the affair.

Garron's history I have known for months--my good friend the cure confided to me much concerning the unsavory career of this vagabond of a miser, whose hut is on the "Great Marsh," back of Pont du Sable. Garron and I hailed "_bonjour_" to each other through the mist at dawn one morning, as I chanced to pa.s.s by his abode, a wary flight of vignon having led me a fruitless chase after them across the great marsh. At a distance through the rifts of mist I mistook this isolated hut of Garron's for a _gabion_. As I drew within hailing distance of its owner I saw that the hut stood on a point of mud and wire gra.s.s that formed the forks of the stream that snakes its way through the centre of this isolated prairie, and so on out to the open sea, two kilometers beyond.

As shrewd a rascal as Garron needed just such a place to settle on. As he returned my _bonjour_, his woman, Julie, appeared in the low doorway of the hut and grinned a greeting to me across the fork of the stream.

She impressed me as being young, though she was well on in the untold forties. Her ma.s.s of fair hair--her ruddy cheeks--her blue eyes and her thick strong body, gave her the appearance of youthful buxomness.

Life must be tough enough with a man like Garron. With the sagacity of an animal he knew the safety of the open places. By day no one could emerge from the far horizon of low woodland skirting the great marsh, without its sole inhabitant noting his approach. By night none but as clever a poacher as Garron could have found his way across the labyrinth of bogs, ditches and pitfalls. Both the hut and the woman cost Garron nothing; both were a question of abandoned wreckage.

Garron showed me his hut that morning, inviting me to cross a muddy plank as slippery as gla.s.s, with which he had spanned the stream, that he might get a closer look at me and know what manner of man I was. He did not introduce me to the woman, and I took good care, as I crossed his threshold and entered the dark living-room with its dirt floor, not to force her acquaintance, but instead, ran my eye discreetly over the objects in the gloom--a greasy table littered with dirty dishes, a bed hidden under a worn quilt and a fireplace of stones over which an iron pot of soup was simmering. Beyond was another apartment, darker than the one in which I stood--a sort of catch-all for the refuse of the former.

The whole of this disreputable shack was built of the wreckage of honest s.h.i.+ps. It might have been torn down and rea.s.sembled into some sort of a decent craft. Part of a stout rudder with its heavy iron hinges, served as the door. For years it had guided some good s.h.i.+p safe into port--then the wreck occurred. For weeks after--months, perhaps--it had drifted at sea until it found a resting place on the beach and was stolen by Garron to serve him as a strong barrier.

Garron had a bad record--you saw this in his small s.h.i.+fty black eyes, that evaded your own when you spoke to him, and were riveted upon you the moment your back was turned. He was older than the woman--possibly fifty years of age, when I first met him, and, though he lived in the open, there was a ghastly pallor in his hard face with its determined, square jaw--a visage well seamed by sin--and crowned by a shock of black hair streaked with gray. In body he was short, with unusually broad shoulders and unnaturally long arms. Physically he was as strong as an ape, yet I believe the woman could easily have strangled him with her bare hands. Garron had been a hard drinker in his youth, a capable thief and a skilful poacher. His career in civilization ended when he was young and--it is said--good-looking.

Some twenty-five years ago--so the cure tells me--Garron worked one summer for a rich cattle dealer named Villette, on his farm some sixty kilometers back of the great marsh. Villette was one of those big, silent Normans, who spoke only when it was worth while, and was known for his brusqueness and his honesty. He was a giant in build--a man whose big hands and feet moved slowly but surely; a man who avoided making intimate friends.h.i.+ps and was both proud and rich--proud of his goods and chattels--of his vast grazing lands and his livestock--proud too, of his big stone farmhouse with its ancient courtyard flanked by his stone barns and his entrance gate whose walls were as thick as those of some feudal stronghold; proud, too, of his wife--a plump little woman with a merry eye and whom he never suspected of being madly infatuated with his young farm hand, Garron.

Their love affair culminated in an open scandal. The woman lacked both the shrewdness and discretion of her lover; he had poached for years and had never been caught;--it is, therefore, safe to say he would as skilfully have managed to evade suspicion as far as the woman was concerned, had not things gone from bad to worse.

Villette discovered this too late; Garron had suddenly disappeared, leaving madame to weather the scandal and the divorce that followed.

More than this, young Garron took with him ten thousand francs belonging to the woman, who had been fool enough to lend him her heart--a sum out of her personal fortune which, for reasons of her own, she deemed it wisest not to mention.

With ten thousand francs in bank notes next his skin, Garron took the shortest cut out of the neighbourhood. He travelled by night and slept by day, keeping to the unfrequented wood roads and trails secreted between the thick hedges, hidden by-ways that had proved their value during the guerilla warfares that were so successfully waged in Normandy generations ago. Three days later Garron pa.s.sed through the modest village of Hirondelette, an unknown vagabond. He looked so poor that a priest in pa.s.sing gave him ten sous.

"Courage, my son," counselled the good man--"you will get work soon. Try the farm below, they are in need of hands."

"May you never be in want, father," Garron strangled out huskily in reply. Then he slunk on to the next farm and begged his dinner. The bank notes no longer crinkled when he walked; they had taken the contour of his hairy chest. Every now and then he stopped and clutched them to see if they were safe, and twice he counted and recounted them in a ditch.

With the Great Marsh as a safe refuge in his crafty mind, he pa.s.sed by the next sundown back of Pont du Sable; slept again in a hedge, and by dawn had reached the marsh. Most of that day he wandered over it looking for a site for his hut. He chose the point at the forks of the stream--no one in those days, save a lone hunter ever came there.

Moreover, there was another safeguard. The Great Marsh was too cut up by ditches and bogs to graze cattle on, hence no one to tend them, and the more complete the isolation of its sole inhabitant.

Having decided on the point, he set about immediately to build his hut.

The sooner housed the better, thought Garron, besides, the packet next his chest needed a safe hiding place.

For days the curlews, circling high above the marsh, watched him snaking driftwood from the beach up the crooked stream to the point at the forks. The rope he dragged them with he stole from a fisherman's boat picketed for the night beyond the dunes. When he had gathered a sufficient amount of timber he went into Pont du Sable with three hares he had snared and traded them for a few bare necessities--an old saw, a rusty hammer and some new nails. He worked steadily. By the end of a fortnight he had finished the hut. When it was done he fas.h.i.+oned (for he possessed considerable skill as a carpenter) a clever hiding place in the double wall of oak for his treasure. Then he nailed up his door and went in search of a mate.

He found her after dark--this girl to his liking--at the _fete_ in the neighbouring village of Avelot. She turned and leered at him as he nudged her elbow, the lights from the merry-go-round she stood watching illumining her wealth of fair hair and her strong young figure silhouetted against the glare. Garron had studied her shrewdly, singling her out in the group of village girls laughing with their sweethearts.

The girl he nudged he saw did not belong to the village--moreover, she was barefooted, mischievously drunk, and flushed with riding on the wooden horses. She was barely eighteen. She laughed outright as he gripped her strong arm, and opened her wanton mouth wide, showing her even, white teeth. In return for her welcome he slapped her strong waist soundly.

"_Allons-y_--what do you say to a gla.s.s, _ma belle_?" ventured Garron with a grin.

"_Eh ben!_ I don't say no," she laughed again, in reply.

He felt her turn instinctively toward him--there was already something in common between these two. He pushed her ahead of him through the group with a certain familiar authority. When they were free of the crowd and away from the lights his arm went about her st.u.r.dy neck and he crushed her warm mouth to his own.