A Village of Vagabonds Part 31

"_Allons-y_--" he repeated--"Come and have a gla.s.s."

They had crossed in the mud to a dingy tent lighted by a lantern; here they seated themselves on a rough bench at a board table, his arm still around her. She turned to leer at him now, half closing her clear blue eyes. When he had swallowed his first thimbleful of applejack he spat, and wiped his mouth with the back of his free hand, while the girl grew garrulous under the warmth of the liquor and his rough affection. Again she gave him her lips between two wet oaths. No one paid any attention to them--it was what a _fete_ was made for. For a while they left their gla.s.ses and danced with the rest to the strident music of the merry-go-round organ.

It was long after midnight when Garron paid his score under the tent.

She had told him much in the meantime--there was no one to care whom she followed. She told him, too, she had come to the _fete_ from a hamlet called Les Forets, where she had been was.h.i.+ng for a woman. The moon was up when they took the highroad together, following it until it reached the beginning of Pont du Sable, then Garron led the way abruptly to the right up a tangled lane that ran to an old woodroad that he used to gain the Great Marsh. They went lurching along together in comparative silence, the man steadying the girl through the dark places where the trees shut out the moon. Garron knew the road as well as his pocket--it was a favourite with him when he did not wish to be seen. Now and then the girl sang in a maudlin way:

"_Entrez, entrez, messieurs, C'est l'amour qui vous attend._"

It was gray dawn when they reached the edge of the Great Marsh that lay smothered under a blanket of chill mist.

"It is over there, my nest," muttered Garron, with a jerk of his thumb indicating the direction in which his hut lay. Again he drew her roughly to him.

"_Dis donc, toi!_" he demanded brusquely: "how do they call you?" It had not, until then, occurred to him to ask her name.

"_Eh ben_--Julie," she replied. "It's a _sacre_ little name I never liked. _Eh, tu sais_," she added slowly--"when I don't like a thing--"

she drew back a little and gazed at him sullenly--"_Eh ben_--I am like that when I don't like a thing." Her flash of temper pleased him--he had had enough of the trustful kitten of Villette's.

"Come along," said he gruffly.

"_Dis donc, toi_," she returned without moving. "It is well understood then about my dress and the shoes?"

"_Mais oui! Bon Dieu!_" replied the peasant irritably. He was hungry and wanted his soup. He swore at the chill as he led the way across the marsh while she followed in his tracks, satisfied with his promise of the dress and shoes. She wanted a blue dress and she had seen the shoes that pleased her some months before in the grocery at Pont du Sable when a dog and she had dragged a fisherwoman in her cart for their board and lodging.

By the time they reached the forks of the stream the rising sun had melted the blanket of the mist until it lay over the desolate prairie in thin rifts of rose vapour.

It was thus the miser, Garron, found his mate.

Julie proved to be a fair cook, and the two lived together, at the beginning, in comparative peace. Although it was not until days after the _fete_ at Avelot that she managed to hold him to his promise about the blue dress, he sent her to Pont du Sable for her shoes the day after their arrival on the marsh--she bought them and they hurt her. The outcome of this was their first quarrel.

"_Sacre bon Dieu!_" he snarled--"thou art never content!" Then he struck her with the back of his clenched fist and, womanlike, she went whimpering to bed. Neither he nor she thought much of the blow. Her mind was on the shoes that did not fit.

When she was well asleep and snoring, he ran his sinewy arm in the hole he had made in the double wall--lifted the end of a short, heavy plank, caught it back against a nail and gripped the packet of bank notes that lay snug beneath it. Satisfied they were safe and his mate still asleep, he replaced the plank over his fortune--crossed the dirt floor to his barrier of a door, dropped an iron rod through two heavy staples, securely bolting it--blew out the tallow dip thrust in the neck of an empty bottle, and went to bed.

Months pa.s.sed--months that were bleak and wintry enough on the marsh for even a hare to take to the timber for comfort. During most of that winter Garron peddled the skins of rabbits he snared on the marsh, and traded and bought their pelts, and he lived poor that no one might suspect his wealth. He and his mate rose, like the wild fowl, with the sun and went to bed with it, to save the light of the tallow dip. Though I have said she could easily have strangled him with her hands, she refrained. Twice, when she lay half awake she had seen him run his wiry arm in the wall--one night she had heard the lifting of the heavy plank and the faint crinkling sound of the package as he gripped it. She had long before this suspected he had money hidden.

Julie was no fool!

With the spring the marsh became more tenable. The smallest song birds from the woods flitted along the ditches; there were days, too, when the desolate prairie became soft--hazy--and inviting.

At daybreak, the beginning of one of these delicious spring days, Garron, hearing a sharp cry without, rose abruptly and unbolted his barrier. He would have stepped out and across his threshold had not his bare foot touched something heavy and soft. He looked down--still half asleep--then he started back in a sort of dull amazement. The thing his foot had touched was a bundle--a rolled and well-wrapped blanket, tied with a stout string. The sharp cry he had heard he now realized, issued from the folds of the blanket. Garron bent over it, his thumb and forefinger uncovering the face of a baby.

"_Sacristi!_" he stammered--then leaned back heavily against the old rudder of a door. Julie heard and crawled out of bed. She was peering over his shoulder at the bundle at his feet before he knew it.

Garron half wheeled and faced her as her breath touched his coa.r.s.e ear.

"_Eh bien!_ what is it?" he exclaimed, searching vainly for something else to say.

"_Eh ben! ca! Nom de Dieu!_" returned his mate nodding to the bundle.

"It is pretty--that!"

"_Tu m'accuses, hein?_" he snarled.

"They do not leave bundles of that kind at the wrong door," she retorted in reply, half closing her blue eyes and her red hands.

"_Allons! allons!_" he exclaimed with heat, still at a loss for his words.

With her woman's instinct she brushed past him and started to pick up the bundle, but he was too quick for her and drew her roughly back, gripping her waist so sharply that he felt her wince.

"It does not pa.s.s like that!" he cried sharply. "_Eh ben!_ listen to me.

I'm too old a rat to be made a fool of--to be tricked like that!"

"Tricked!" she laughed back--"No, my old one--it is as simple as _bonjour_, and since it is thine thou wilt keep it. Thou'lt--keep what thou--"

The pent-up rage within him leaped to his throat:

"It does not pa.s.s like that!" he roared. With his clenched fist he struck her squarely across the mouth. He saw her sink limp to the ground, bleeding, her head buried between her knees. Then he picked up the child and started with it across the plank that spanned the fork of the stream. A moment later, still dizzy from the blow, she saw him dimly, making rapidly across the marsh toward a bend in the stream. Then the love of a mother welled up within her and she got to her feet and followed him.

"Stay where thou art!" he shouted back threateningly.

The child in his arms was screaming. She saw his hand cover its throat--the next moment she had reached him and her two hands were about his own in a grip that sent him choking to his knees. The child rolled from his arms still screaming, and the woman who was strangling Garron into obedience now sank her knee in his back until she felt him give up.

"_a.s.sez!_" he grunted out when he could breathe.

"_Eh ben!_ I am like _that_ when I don't like a thing!" she cried, savagely repeating her old words. He looked up and saw a dangerous gleam in her eyes. "_Ah, mais oui alors!_" she shouted defiantly. "Since it is thine thou wilt keep it!"

Garron did not reply. She knew the fight was out of him and picked up the still screaming baby, which she hugged to her breast, crooning over it while Garron got lamely to his feet. Without another word she started back to the hut, Garron following his mate and his son in silence.

Years pa.s.sed and the boy grew up on the marsh, tolerated by Garron and idolized and spoiled by Julie--years that transformed the black-eyed baby into a wiry, reckless young rascal of sixteen with all the vagabond nature of his father--straight and slim, with the clear-cut features of a gypsy. A year later the brother of Madame Villette, a well-known figure on the Paris Bourse, appeared and after a satisfactory arrangement with Garron, took the boy with him to Paris to be educated.

It was hard on Julie, who adored him. Her consent was not even asked, but at the time she consoled herself with the conviction, however, that the good fortune that had fallen to the lot of the baby she had saved, was for the best. The uncle was rich--that in itself appealed strongly to her peasant mind. That, and her secret knowledge of Garron's fortune, for she had discovered and counted it herself and, motherlike, told the boy.

In Paris the attempt to educate Jacques Baptiste Garron was an expensive experiment. When he went to bed at all it was only when the taverns and cafes along the "Boul-miche" closed before dawn. Even then he and his band of idle students found other retreats and more gla.s.ses in the all-night cafes near the Halles. And so he ate and drank and slept and made love to any little outcast who pleased him--one of these amiable _pet.i.tes femmes_--the inside of whose pocketbook was well greased with rouge--became his devoted slave.

She was proud of this handsome devil-may-care "type" of hers and her jealousy was something to see to believe. Little by little she dominated him until he ran heavily in debt. She even managed the uncle when the nephew failed--she was a shrewd little brat--small and tense as wire, with big brown eyes and hair that was sometimes golden and sometimes a dry t.i.tian red, according to her choice. Once, when she left him for two days, Garron threatened to kill himself.

"_Pauvre gosse!_" she said sympathizingly on her return--and embraced him back to sanity.

The real grain of saneness left in young Garron was his inborn love of a gun. It was the gun which brought him down from Paris, back to the Great Marsh now and then when the ducks were on flight.

He had his own _gabion_ now at the lower end of the bay at Pont du Sable, in which he slept and shot from nights when the wind was northeast--a comfortable, floating box of a duck-blind sunk in an outer jacket of tarred planks and chained to a heavy picket driven in the mud and wire gra.s.s, for the current ran dangerously strong there when the tide was running out.

Late in October young Garron left Paris suddenly and the girl with the t.i.tian hair was with him. He, like his father, needed a safe refuge.