The Maids of Paradise Part 33

The blue tatters of her skirt hung heavy with brine; the creamy skin on her arms glittered with wet spray, and her hair was wet, too, cl.u.s.tering across her cheeks in damp elf-locks.

The mayor glanced at her with that stolid contempt which Finistere Bretons cherish toward those women who show their hair--an immodesty unpardonable in the eyes of most Bretons.

The girl caught sight of the mayor and gave him a laughing greeting which he returned with a shrug.

"If you want a town-crier," she called up, in a deliciously fresh voice, scarcely tinged with the accent, "I'll cry your edicts and I'll drum for you, too!"

"Can your daughter beat the drum?" asked the mayor of the poacher, ignoring the girl's eager face upturned.

"Yes," said the poacher, indifferently, "and she can also beat the devil with two sticks."

The girl threw her rake into a boat and leaped upon the rocks at the base of the cliff.

"Jacqueline! Don't come up that way!" bawled the mayor, horrified.

"Hey! Robert! Ohe! Lizard! Stop her or she'll break her neck!"

The poacher looked up at his daughter then shrugged his shoulders and squatted down on his ragged haunches, restless eyes searching the level ocean, as sea-birds search.

Breathless, hot, and laughing, the girl pulled herself up over the edge of the cliff. I held out my hand to aid her, but she pushed it away, crying, "Thank you all the same, but here I am!"

"Sp.a.w.n of the Lizard," I heard the mayor mutter to himself, "like a snake you wriggle where honest folk fall to destruction!" But he spoke condescendingly to the bright-eyed, breathless child. "I'll pay six sous if you'll drum for me."

"I'll do it for love," she said, saucily--"for the love of drumming, not for your beaux yeux, m'sieu le maire."

The mayor looked at her angrily, but, probably remembering he was at her mercy, suppressed his wrath and held out the telegram. "Can you read that, my child?"

The girl, still breathing rapidly from her scramble, rested her hands on her hips and, head on one side, studied the blue sheets of the telegram over the mayor's outstretched arm.

"Yes, I can read it. Why not? Can't you?"

"Read? I the mayor of Paradise!" repeated the outraged magistrate.

"What do you mean, lizard of lizards! gorse cat!"

"Now if you are going to say such things I won't drum for you," said the child, glancing at me out of her sea-blue eyes and giving a shake to her elf-locks.

"Yes, you will!" bawled the angry mayor. "Shame on your manners, Jacqueline Garenne! Shame on your hair hanging where all the world can see it! Shame on your bare legs--"

"Not at all," said the child, unabashed. "G.o.d made my legs, m'sieu the mayor, and my hair, too. If my coiffe does not cover my hair, neither does the small Paris hat of the Countess de Va.s.sart cover her hair. Complain of the Countess to m'sieu the cure, then I will listen to you."

The mayor glared at her, but she tossed her head and laughed.

"Ho fois! Everybody knows what you are," sniffed the mayor--"and n.o.body cares, either," he muttered, waddling past me, telegram in hand.

The child, quite unconcerned, fell into step beside me, saying, confidentially: "When I was little I used to cry when they talked to me like that. But I don't now; I've made up my mind that they are no better than I."

"I don't know why anybody should abuse you," I said, loudly enough for the mayor to hear. But that functionary waddled on, puffing, muttering, stopping every now and then in the narrow cliff-path to strike flint to tinder or to refill the tiny bowl of his pipe, which a dozen puffs always exhausted.

"Oh, they all abuse us," said the child, serenely. "You see, you are a stranger and don't understand; but you will if you live here."

"Why is everybody unkind to you?" I asked, after a moment.

"Why? Oh, because I am what I am and my father is the Lizard."

"A poacher?"

"Ah," she said, looking up at me with delicious malice, "what is a poacher, monsieur?"

"Sometimes he's a fine fellow gone wrong," I said, laughing. "So I don't believe any ill of your father, or of you, either. Will you drum for me, Jacqueline?"

"For you, monsieur? Why, yes. What am I to read for you?"

I gave her a hand-bill; at the first glance her eyes sparkled, the color deepened under her coat of amber tan; she caught her breath and read rapidly to the end.

"Oh, how beautiful," she said, softly. "Am I to read this in the square?"

"I will give you a franc to read it, Jacqueline."

"No, no--only--oh, do let me come in and see the heavenly wonders!

Would you, monsieur? I--I cannot pay--but would--_could_ you let me come in? I will read your notice, anyway," she added, with a quaver in her voice.

The flushed face, the eager, upturned eyes, deep blue as the sea, the little hands clutching the show-bill, which fairly quivered between the tanned fingers--all these touched and amused me. The child was mad with excitement.

What she antic.i.p.ated, Heaven only knows. Shabby and tarnished as we were, the language of our hand-bills made up in gaudiness for the dingy reality.

"Come whenever you like, Jacqueline," I said. "Ask for me at the gate."

"And who are you, monsieur?"

"My name is Scarlett."

"Scarlett," she whispered, as though naming a sacred thing.

The mayor, who had toddled some distance ahead of us, now halted in the square, looking back at us through the red evening light.

"Jacqueline, the drum is in my house. I'll lend you a pair of sabots, too. Come, hasten little idler!"

We entered the mayor's garden, where the flowers were glowing in the l.u.s.tre of the setting sun. I sat down in a chair; Jacqueline waited, hands resting on her hips, small, shapely toes restlessly brus.h.i.+ng the gra.s.s.

"Truly this coming wonder-show will be a peep into paradise," she murmured. "Can all be true--really true as it is printed here in this bill--I wonder--"

Before she had time to speculate further, the mayor reappeared with drum and drum-sticks in one hand and a pair of sabots in the other. He flung the sabots on the gra.s.s, and Jacqueline, quite docile now, slipped both bare feet into them.

"You may keep them," said the mayor, puffing out his mottled cheeks benevolently; "decency must be maintained in Paradise, even if it beggars me."

"Thank you," said Jacqueline, sweetly, slinging the drum across her hip and tightening the cords. She clicked the ebony sticks, touched the tightly drawn parchment, sounding it with delicate fingers, then looked up at the mayor for further orders.

"Go, my child," said the mayor, amiably, and Jacqueline marched through the garden out into the square by the fountain, drum-sticks clutched in one tanned fist, the scrolls of paper in the other.

In the centre of the square she stood a moment, looking around, then raised the drum-sticks; there came a click, a flash of metal, and the quiet square echoed with the startling outcrash. Back from roof and wall bounded the echoes; the stony pavement rang with the racket.