Meanwhile there was more than ordinary animation among the girls stationed behind the groups of men. They were scanning all the church doors, whence were now issuing good women, tellers of rosaries, who had lingered long over their devotions.

"He is coming out," exclaimed tall Aimee Ma.s.sonneau, the daughter of farmer Glorieux, of Terre-Aymont. "Did you see him, that poor Mathurin Lumineau? He insisted upon coming to ma.s.s. I am sure he might have got dispensation!"

"Yes," returned the little auburn-haired daughter of Malabrit, "it is six years since he came to Sallertaine."

"Six years--really?"

"Yes, I remember. It was the year my sister was married."

"And why do you think he came?" asked Victoire Guerineau, of La Pinconniere, a sharp-tongued pretty girl, with a complexion like a wild rose. "For he must have shown some spirit to manage it."

"To stand by his father," said a voice; "the old man had been so saddened by the going of Eleonore and Francois."

"To show himself with his brother Andre," put in another. "He's a good-looking fellow is Andre Lumineau! I should not mind----"

Victoire Guerineau and the others broke into a peal of laughter.

"You are quite out of it. It's for Felicite Gauvrit he came!"

"Oh, oh!" exclaimed those in front.

"How ill-natured you are! If she were to hear you."

And several turned towards the Michelonnes' doorstep, near to which, amid a little throng, stood Mathurin's former fiancee.

Suddenly a murmur ran through the crowd.

"There he is. Poor fellow! How difficult it is for him to walk."

And under the pointed arch of a low doorway, one half of which only was open, a deformed figure was seen struggling to force a pa.s.sage through the narrow aperture, one hand holding a crutch clutched hold of a pillar outside, by which the poor man strove to drag himself through, but he had only succeeded in freeing one shoulder. With head thrown back, there was an expression of agony upon the face which attested the violence of the effort, and the strength of will that would not give in. Mathurin Lumineau seemed on the point of suffocation; he looked at no one in the throng of people whose gaze was riveted upon him; his eyes on a higher level than those of the spectators were fixed upon the blue vault of heaven with an expression of anguish that re-acted upon them.

Conversation was interrupted; voices began to murmur,

"Oh, help him! He is suffocating!"

Some of the men made a movement to go to his a.s.sistance; at that moment, from the gloom of the interior, his father asked:

"Shall I help you out, Mathurin? You cannot squeeze through there. Let me help you."

In a low voice, inaudible to those without, but with terrible energy, Mathurin answered:

"Don't touch me. Confound it! Don't touch me. I will get out by myself."

At length the man forced his huge bust through the door, and with a tremendous effort steadied himself, stroked his tawny beard and settled his hat on his head. Then with the aid of his crutches, standing as upright as he could, Mathurin looked straight before him, and advanced towards the group of men, which opened out silently at his approach. No one ventured to address him, it was so long since he had been among them, the old habit of familiarity seemed lost; but the attention of all was concentrated upon their former comrade, and no one noticed that his old father with Andre and Marie-Rose were following close behind him.

The cripple had soon reached the spot where the girls were standing.

They fell apart even more quickly than the men had done, for they guessed his intention; a lane opened between them reaching up to the houses. At the far end of this living avenue, clad in black dresses and white coifs, standing erect, quite alone, was seen Felicite Gauvrit. She was the one he sought. She knew it; she had foreseen her triumph. No sooner had she observed Mathurin Lumineau sitting on the family bench in church, then she had said to herself: "He has come for me. I will hide away by the Michelonnes' house, and he will follow me." For she was gratified to have it seen that he still loved her, the girl to whom, handsome though she was, no suitors came. The women with whom she had been talking had prudently moved away; she stood alone, under the Michelonnes' window, looking like a lay figure from some museum in her costume of heavy stiff material, the braids of her l.u.s.trous brown hair s.h.i.+ning under the small coif, her dazzlingly white complexion and uncovered throat. Erect, with arms pendant on either side of the moire ap.r.o.n, she watched her former lover coming towards her between the double row of inquisitive lookers-on. The many faces bent upon the girl in nowise intimidated her. Perhaps in the suit and cravat Mathurin was wearing she recognised the very ones he had worn at the time of the accident; any way, she remained calm and unabashed, her face even wore a slight smile. He drew nearer, leaning on his crutches, his eyes fixed, not on the path, but on Felicite Gauvrit.

What the poor fellow wanted was to see her once again; to make her understand that health was returning, that hope was awakening out of his misery, that the heart of Mathurin Lumineau had never wavered.

All this his sad eyes told her as he drew near, offering in piteous pleading the bodily and mental suffering he had endured to her who had been their cause. But his strength was unequal to the effort, he grew deadly white; and when the insolent beauty, the first to speak, said calmly before all the throng:

"Good day, Mathurin," he could not answer. To have seen the smile on those rosy lips, to be so near to her, and to hear her address him in the same easy tones as if they had but parted the day before, was more than he could bear.

He grew faint, leant heavily on his crutches, and slightly turned his tawny head to Driot, who was behind him, as if to say: "Take me away,"

and the younger brother understanding the appeal, pa.s.sed the suffering man's arm under his and led him away, saying as he did so, to divert the attention of the crowd:

"Good day to yourself, Felicite. It is an age since I have seen you.

You are not a bit altered."

"Nor are you," she retorted.

A few laughed; but among those a.s.sembled there were many who were deeply touched, even disposed to tears. Some of the girls of Sallertaine pitied the poor fellow so exhausted and confused, led away on his brother's arm; they sorrowed that he could never enjoy that love which each, in the recesses of her heart, hoped some day to share with the yet unknown swain. One of them murmured:

"It is not only in body that he is afflicted, his mind, too, seems gone, poor fellow!"

Many women, mothers going home with their children, walked more sedately as they saw the group on the way to Chalons: old farmer Toussaint, Andre and Mathurin, with Marie-Rose bringing up the rear.

They recalled with a shudder what a magnificent youth the poor cripple once had been, and thought: Heaven send that no such calamity befall our boys when they grow up!

Felicite Gauvrit began to be affected in her turn, but in a different manner. The departure of the Lumineaus had turned attention away from her. Some of the men surrounded the district crier, who was calling out the list of lost articles and farms to be let; others repaired to the inns. The girls collected in little companies to seek the homeward way. Every minute five or six white coifs were to be seen bowing and bending in farewell salute, separating from the others, and going off to the right hand or the left. Felicite, left alone for some minutes, joined one of the groups going west of Sallertaine, towards the high Marais; she was received with some embarra.s.sment, as one whom they did not want to fall out with, yet who was somewhat compromising, and whose company their mothers did not desire for them.

Young men drinking together in the inns called after her the slighting remarks men make on girls for whom they have little respect. She did not answer them back, but with her companions descended the hilly road bordered with houses, and thence on to the open Marais in the direction of Perrier.

At that time of the year, before autumn rains had set in, many of the farms could be reached on foot without the aid of boats. A raised path, rough and ill-kept, flanked by d.y.k.es on either side, led across the meadows; grey-green gra.s.s covered the level plain until the uniform tint dissolved in brownish hue in the distant horizon. Horses grazing, stretched out their necks, and looked at the little group clad in black and white, breaking the continuity of grey-green plain.

Ducks, at the sound of their footsteps, ran in among the rushes that trembled on the edge. From time to time a shelving embankment branched off the path, and one of the girls, separating from the group, would make her way by it to some distant house, only marked by the customary cl.u.s.ter of poplar-trees; and Felicite Gauvrit, roused for a moment from her abstraction, would say "Good-bye," and then walk on silently as before.

Soon she was left alone on the path that stretches to the sea. Then slackening her pace, she gave herself up without restraint to her thoughts. She was not happy at home. At sixty-five her father had married again a woman of thirty of loose character, whom he had met at Barre-de-Mont, and to whom in virtue of her youth he had made over the most realisable part of his property. The young stepmother was not kind to Felicite. One reproached the other with extravagance and ruining the home. The eldest brother, in the Customs at Sables d'Olonne, a gambler and hard drinker, was perpetually threatening the old man with a summons for falsified accounts, and by thus intimidating him drained still further the diminished capital of the Gauvrits. The old family, once so respected in the Marais, was rapidly declining, and this Felicite knew too well. The young men of Sallertaine and the neighbouring parishes came readily enough to dances at La Seuliere; they danced, drank, joked with her, but not one of them offered to marry her. The impending ruin, the family divisions, kept suitors away.

Yet another reason, more real, and one that appealed more strongly to sentiment than any other, held back the sons of farmers, and even farm-labourers from asking the hand of Felicite Gauvrit in marriage; and this was the tie, binding only in honour, the debt of fidelity, rendered even more sacred by misfortune, which public opinion obstinately maintained as still existing between La Seuliere and La Fromentiere. In everybody's opinion Felicite Gauvrit remained one of the Lumineau household; a girl who had not the right to withdraw her betrothal promise, and who was not to be sought in marriage by any other while Mathurin was living. Some men even had a superst.i.tious dread of her; they would have been afraid to set up housekeeping with a girl whose first love had met so unhappy a fate. All the advances she had made had come to nought. Soured and embittered, in her rage she had gone so far as to regret that the cripple had not been killed on the spot. Had the poor wretch, who was scarcely to be called living, died then and there, she would have recovered her liberty, the past would have been quickly forgotten; while now, it was kept in everyone's memory by the sight of the maimed man on crutches, hanging about the farmstead of which he should have been master. She had found that Death is sometimes long in claiming its victims. Then courage had returned; in her astuteness Felicite had recognised that public opinion holding her as belonging to the Lumineau family, by them only could she realise her ambition: to go away from La Seuliere, escape the domination of her stepmother, and become the mistress of a large farm, with more means and freedom than ever she had possessed at home.

Never having loved her former betrothed, actuated only by vanity, as is sometimes the case in country surroundings, she had said to herself:

"I will bide my time. I will make them long the more for me by not going to La Fromentiere. One day Mathurin will come to me, or will call me to him. I am positive that he has not forgotten me. Stupid of him; but it will help my ends. Thanks to him, I shall see them all again; the old man who mistrusts me, the young men who will admire me for my beauty. And I shall marry either Francois or Andre, and shall be the mistress of a farm as I ought to be, and of the richest farm in the whole parish."

Now Francois, whom she had tried to captivate, had gone away. But, on the other hand, Mathurin had come to her; at the cost of terrible fatigue and suffering he had dragged himself to Sallertaine to greet her publicly; while Andre, before all the girls, had said: "It is an age since I saw you. You are not a bit altered."

Felicite had gathered one of the yellow irises that grew so profusely on the Marais. Half laughing she thought over her recent triumph, the iris lightly held between her lips; her arms swinging as she walked caused the full sleeves to rustle against the moire of her ap.r.o.n; her smiling gaze was directed to the distant meadows. She was thinking that Andre would make a handsome husband, better looking than ever Mathurin had been; that, after all, he was one year younger than herself, that he had engaging manners, and had not been wanting in audacity either to have said: "You have not altered." And she went on to think: "The first opportunity that offers, I will invite them to a dance at home. I am sure that Andre will come."

Slowly she walked along the raised path in the burning rays of the mid-day sun. Gra.s.shoppers were chirping; every now and again the acrid scent of fading rushes was in the air. Wholly absorbed in her daydream, Felicite Gauvrit did not perceive that she had nearly reached home. The white buildings of La Seuliere, standing out in the meadow, came as an unwelcome surprise. At the same moment a doubt crossed her mind, disturbing, unbidden ending to her dream. Suppose Andre too were to go away? Or that Mathurin, elated as he was sure to be by the least sign of remembrance, and made thereby more eager, more jealous, were to guess what was in the wind?

Felicite had stopped in the middle of the bridge that led from the path to the farm. The tall, supple young woman raised her arms above her head, scowled impatiently, and snapped the stem of the yellow iris, which fell p.r.o.ne into the d.y.k.e, then following it with her eyes for a second, she looked at her own reflection in the water, and smiled again. "I shall succeed," she said. And descending the slope of the bridge she reached La Seuliere by the cross road.

CHAPTER IX.

THE CONSCRIPTS OF SALLERTAINE.

The afternoon of that autumn Sunday was marked by a deeper peacefulness than usual. The air was warm, the light veiled, the wind, which, rising with the tide, had outstripped it, sweeping over the vast gra.s.sy plain, brought no sound of work in its train, no creak of plough, no ring of hammer, spade, or axe. The bells alone were heard answering each other from Sallertaine, Perrier, Saint Gervais, Chalons with its new church, vast as a cathedral, and Seullans hidden among the trees on the hill. Chimes for High Ma.s.s, ringing for Angelus, the three strokes for vespers left the bells but little rest; far and near they told out the familiar tones, understood for centuries past.