The Maids of Paradise Part 42

The couplet ended, the two children in the middle sprang forward and dragged a third child out of the circle. Then the song began again, the reduced circle dancing around the three children in the middle.

"--The son of the King has come with two or three-- Nay, with a whole bright flock of paroquets, Crimson, silver, and violet."

It was something like a game I had played long ago--in the age of fable--and I lingered, touched with homesickness.

The three children in the middle took a fourth comrade from the circle, crying, "Will you go to the moon or will you go to the stars?"

"The moon," lisped the little maid, and she was led over to the fountain.

"The stars," said the first prisoner, and was conducted to the stone bridge.

Soon a small company was cl.u.s.tered on the bridge, another band at the fountain. Then, as there were no more to dance in a circle, the lad and la.s.sie who had stood in the middle to choose candidates for the moon and stars clasped hands and danced gayly across the square to the group of expectant children at the fountain, crying:

"Baradoz! Baradoz!"

(Paradise! Paradise!)

and the whole band charged on the little group on the bridge, shouting and laughing, while the unfortunate tenants of the supposed infernal regions fled in every direction, screaming:

"Pater noster Dibi doub!

Dibi doub!

Dibi doub!"

Their shouts and laughter still came faintly from the tree-shaded square as I crossed the bridge and walked out into the moorland toward the sea, where I could see the sun gilding the headland and the spouting-rocks of Point Paradise.

Over the turning tide cormorants were flying, now wheeling like hawks, now beating seaward in a duck-like flight. I pa.s.sed little, lonely pools on the moor, from which snipe rose with a startling squak!

squak! and darted away inland as though tempest blown.

Presently a blue-gray ma.s.s in mid-ocean caught my eye. It was the island of Groix, and between it and Point Paradise lay an ugly, naked, black shape, motionless, oozing smoke from two stubby funnels--the cruiser _Fer-de-Lance_! So solidly inert lay the iron-clad that it did not seem as if she had ever moved or ever could move; she looked like an imbedded ledge cropping up out of the sea.

Far across the hilly moorland the white semaph.o.r.e glistened like a gull's wing--too far for me to see the b.a.l.l.s and cones hoisted or the bright signals glimmering along the halyards as I followed a trodden path winding south through the gorse. Then a dip in the moorland hid the semaph.o.r.e and at the same moment brought a house into full view--a large, solid structure of dark stone, heavily Romanesque, walled in by an ancient b.u.t.tressed barrier, above which I could see the tree-tops of a fruit-garden.

The Chateau de Trecourt was a fine example of the so called "fortified farm"; it had its moat, too, and crumbling wing-walls, pierced by loop-holes and over-hung with miniature battlements. A walled and loop-holed pa.s.sageway connected the house with another stone enclosure in which stood stable, granary, cattle-house, and sheepfold, all of stone, though the roofs of these buildings were either turfed or thatched. And over them the weather-vane, a golden Dorado, swam in the suns.h.i.+ne.

One thing I noticed as I crossed the unused moat on a permanent bridge: the youthful Countess no longer denied herself the services of servants, for I saw a cloaked shepherd and his two wolf-like and tailless sheep-dogs watching the flock scattered over the downs; and there were at least half a dozen farm servants pottering about from stable to granary, and a toothless porter to answer the gate-bell and pilot me past the tiny loop-holed lodge-turret to the house. There was also a man, lying belly down in the bracken, watching me; and as I walked into the court I tried to remember where I had seen his face before.

The entire front of the house was covered with those splendid orange-tinted tea-roses that I had noticed in Paradise; thicket on thicket of clove-scented pinks choked the flower-beds; and a broad mat of deep-tinted pansies lay on the lawn, spread out for all the world like a glorious Eastern rug.

There was a soft whirring in the air like the sound of a humming-bird close by; it came from a spinning-wheel, and grew louder as a servant admitted me into the house and guided me to a sunny room facing the fruit garden.

The spinner at the wheel was singing in an undertone--singing a Breton "gwerz," centuries old, retained in memory from generation to generation:

"Woe to the Maids of Paradise, Yvonne!

Twice have the Saxons landed; twice!

Yvonne!

Yet must Paradise see them thrice!

Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik."

Old as were the words, the melody was older--so old and quaint and sweet that it seemed a berceuse fas.h.i.+oned to soothe the drowsing centuries, lest the memories of ancient wrongs awake and rouse the very dead from their Gothic tombs.

All the sad history of the Breton race was written in every minor note; all the mystery, the gentleness, the faith of the lost people of Armorica.

And now the singer was intoning the "Gwerz Ar Baradoz"--the "Complaint of Paradise"--a slow, thrilling miserere, scarcely dominating the velvet whir of the spinning-wheel.

Suddenly the melody ceased, and a young Bretonne girl appeared in the doorway, courtesying to me and saying in perfect English: "How do you do, Mr. Scarlett; and how do you like my spinning songs, if you please?"

The girl was Mademoiselle Sylvia Elven, the marvellously clever actress from the Odeon, the same young woman who had played the Alsacienne at La Trappe, as perfectly in voice and costume as she now played the Bretonne.

"You need not be astonished at all," she said, calmly, "if you will only reflect that my name is Elven, which is also the name of a Breton town. Naturally, I am a Bretonne from Elven, and my own name is Duhamel--Sylvenne Duhamel. I thought I ought to tell you, so that you would not think me too clever and try to carry me off on your horse again."

I laughed uncertainly; clever women who talk cleverly always disturb me. Besides, somehow, I felt she was not speaking the truth, yet I could not imagine why she should lie to me.

"You were more fluent to the helpless turkey-girl," she suggested, maliciously.

I had absolutely nothing to say, which appeared to gratify her, for she dimpled and smiled under her snowy-winged coiffe, from which a thick gold strand of hair curled on her forehead--a sad bit of coquetry in a Bretonne from Elven, if she told the truth.

"I only came to renew an old and deeply valued friends.h.i.+p," she said, with mock sentimentality; "I am going back to my flax now."

However, she did not move.

"And, by-the-way," she said, languidly, "is there in your intellectual circus company a young gentleman whose name is Eyre?"

"Kelly Eyre? Yes," I said, sulkily.

"Ah."

She strolled out of the room, hesitated, then turned in the doorway with a charming smile.

"The Countess will return from her gallop at five."

She waited as though expecting an answer, but I only bowed.

"Would you take a message to Mistaire Kelly Eyre for me?" she asked, sweetly.

I said that I would.

"Then please say that: '_On Sunday the book-stores are closed in Paris._'"

"Is that what I am to say?"

"Exactly that."

"Very well, mademoiselle."

"Of course, if he asks who told you--you may say that it was a Bretonne at Point Paradise."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing, monsieur."