All night she lay in the straw wide awake, flushed, in a sort of fever.

At daylight she drove her cows back to the marsh without having barely touched her soup.

Far across the bay glistened the roof of a barn under construction. An object the size of a beetle was crawling over the new boards.

It was Jean.

"I'm a fool," he thought, as he drove in a nail. Then he fell to thinking of a girl in his own village whose father was as rich as the Pere Bourron.

"_Sacre Diable!_" he laughed at length, "if every one got married who had sworn by Sainte Marie, Monsieur le Cure would do a good business."

A month later Pere Bourron sold out a cartful of calves at the market at Bonville. It was late at night when he closed his last bargain over a final gla.s.s, climbed up on his big two-wheeled cart, and with a face of dull crimson and a glazed eye, gathered up the reins and started swaying in his seat for home. A boy carrying milk found him at daylight the next morning lying face down in the track of his cart, dead, with a fractured skull. Before another month had pa.s.sed, the Mere Bourron had sold the farm and gone to live with her sister--a lean woman who took in sewing.

Yvonne was free.

Free to work and to be married, and she did work with silent ferocity from dawn until dark, was.h.i.+ng the heavy coa.r.s.e linen for a farm, and scrubbing the milk-pans bright until often long after midnight--and saved. Jean worked too, but mostly when he pleased, and had his hair cut on fete days, most of which he spent in the cafe and saw Yvonne during the odd moments when she was free.

Life over the blacksmith's shop, where she had taken a room, went merrily for a while. Six months later--it is such an old story that it is hardly worth the telling--but it was long after dark when she got back from work and she found it lying on the table in her rough clean little room--a sc.r.a.p of paper beside some tiny worsted things she had been knitting for weeks.

"I am not coming back," she read in an illiterate hand.

She would have screamed, but she could not breathe. She turned again, staring at the paper and gripping the edge of the table with both hands--then the ugly little room that smelt of singed hoofs rocked and swam before her.

When she awoke she lay on the floor. The flame of the candle was sputtering in its socket. After a while she crawled to her knees in the dark; then, somehow, she got to her feet and groped her way to the door, and down the narrow stairs out to the road. She felt the need of a mother and turned toward Pont du Sable, keeping to the path at the side of the wood like a homeless dog, not wis.h.i.+ng to be observed. Every little while, she was seized with violent trembling so that she was obliged to stop--her whole body ached as if she had been beaten.

A sharp wind was whistling in from the sea and the night was so black that the road bed was barely visible.

It was some time before she reached the beginning of Pont du Sable, and turned down a forgotten path that ran back of the village by the marsh.

A light gleamed ahead--the lantern of a fis.h.i.+ng-boat moored far out on the slimy mud. She pushed on toward it, mistaking its position, in her agony, for the hut of Marianne. Before she knew it, she was well out on the treacherous mud, slipping and sinking. She had no longer the strength now to pull her tired feet out. Twice she sank in the slime above her knees. She tried to go back but the mud had become ooze--she was sinking--she screamed--she was gone and she knew it. Then she slipped and fell on her face in a glaze of water from the incoming tide.

At this instant some one shouted back, but she did not hear.

It was Marianne.

It was she who had moored the boat with the lantern and was on her way back to her hut when she heard a woman scream twice. She stopped as suddenly as if she had been shot at, straining her eyes in the direction the sound came from--she knew that there was no worse spot in the bay, a semi-floating solution of mud veined with quicksand. She knew, too, how far the incoming tide had reached, for she had just left it at her bare heels by way of a winding narrow causeway with a hard sh.e.l.l bottom that led to the marsh. She did not call for help, for she knew what lay before her and there was not a second to lose. The next instant, she had sprung out on the treacherous slime, running for a life in the fast-deepening glaze of water.

"Lie down!" she shouted. Then her feet touched a solid spot caked with sh.e.l.l and gra.s.s. Here she halted for an instant to listen--a choking groan caught her ear.

"Lie down!" she shouted again and sprang forward. She knew the knack of running on that treacherous slime.

She leapt to a patch of sh.e.l.l and listened again. The woman was choking not ten yards ahead of her, almost within reach of a thin point of matted gra.s.s running back of the marsh, and there she found her, and she was still breathing. With her great strength she slid her to the point of gra.s.s. It held them both. Then she lifted her bodily in her arms, swung her on her back and ran splas.h.i.+ng knee-deep in water to solid ground.

"_Sacre bon Dieu!_" she sobbed as she staggered with her burden. "_C'est ma belle pet.i.te!_"

For weeks Yvonne lay in the hut of the worst vagabond of Pont du Sable.

So did a mite of humanity with black eyes who cried and laughed when he pleased. And Marianne fished for them both, alone and single-handed, wrenching time and time again comforts from the sea, for she would allow no one to go near them, not even such old friends as Monsieur le Cure and myself--that old hag, with her clear blue eyes, who walks with the stride of a man, and who looks at you squarely, at times disdainfully--even when drunk.

[Ill.u.s.tration: sabots]

[Ill.u.s.tration: a Normande]

CHAPTER SIX

THE BARON'S PERFECTOS

Strange things happen in my "Village of Vagabonds." It is not all fisher girls, Bohemian neighbours, romance, and that good friend the cure who shoots one day and confesses sinners the next. Things from the outside world come to us--happenings with sometimes a note of terror in them to make one remember their details for days.

Only the other day I had run up from the sea to Paris to replenish the larder of my house abandoned by the marsh at Pont du Sable, and was sitting behind a gla.s.s of vermouth on the terrace of the Cafe de la Paix when the curtain rose.

One has a desire to promenade with no definite purpose these soft spring days, when all Paris glitters in the warm sun. The days slip by, one into another--days to be lazy in, idle and extravagant, to promenade alone, seeking adventure, and thus win a memory, if only the amiable glance of a woman's eyes.

I was drinking in the tender air, when from my seat on the terrace I recognized in the pa.s.sing throng the familiar figure of the Brazilian banker, the Baron Santos da Granja. The caress of spring had enticed the Baron early this afternoon to the Boulevard. Although he had been pointed out to me but once, there was no mistaking his conspicuous figure as he strode on through the current of humanity, for he stood head and shoulders above the average mortal, and many turned to glance at this swarthy, alert, well-preserved man of the world with his keen black eyes, thin pointed beard and moustache of iron gray. From his patent-leather boots to his glistening silk hat the Baron Santos da Granja was immaculate.

Suddenly I saw him stop, run his eyes swiftly over the crowded tables and then, though there happened to be one just vacated within his reach, turn back with a look of decision and enter the Government's depot for tobacco under the Grand Hotel.

I, too, was in need of tobacco, for had not my good little maid-of-all-work, Suzette, announced to me only the day before:

"Monsieur, there are but three left of the big cigars in the thin box; and the ham of the English that monsieur purchased in Paris is no more."

"It is well, my child," I had returned resignedly, "that ham could not last forever; it was too good."

"And if Monsieur le Cure comes to dinner there is no more k.u.mmel," the little maid had confessed, and added with a shy lifting of her truthful eyes, "monsieur does not wish I should get more of the black cigars at the grocery?"

I had winced as I recalled the last box, purchased from the only store in Pont du Sable, where they had lain long enough to absorb the pungent odour of dried herring and kerosene.

Of course it was not right that our guests should suffer thus from an empty larder and so, as I have said, I had run up from the sea to replenish it. It was, I confess, an extravagant way of doing one's marketing; but then there was Paris in the spring beckoning me, and who can resist her seductive call at such a time?

But to my story: I finished my gla.s.s of vermouth, and, following the Baron's example, entered the Government's store, where I discovered him selecting with the air of a connoisseur a dozen thin boxes of rare perfectos. He chatted pleasantly with the clerk who served him and upon going to the desk, opened a Russian-leather portfolio and laid before the cas.h.i.+er six crisp, new one-hundred-franc notes in payment for the lot. I have said that the Baron was immaculate, and he _was_, even to his money. It was as spotless and unruffled as his linen, as neat, in fact, as were the n.o.ble perfectos of his choice, long, mild and pure, with tiny ends, and fat, comforting bodies that guaranteed a quality fit for an emperor; but then the least a bank can do, I imagine, is to provide clean money to its president.

As the Baron pa.s.sed out and my own turn at the desk came to settle for my modest provision of Havanas, I recalled to my mind the current gossip of the Baron's extravagance, of the dinners he had lately given that surprised Paris--and Paris is not easily surprised. What if he had "sold more than half of his vast estate in Brazil last year"? And suppose he was no longer able or willing "to personally supervise his racing stable," that he "had grown tired of the track," etc. Nonsense! The press knows so little of the real truth. For me the Baron Santos da Granja a was simply a seasoned man of the world, with the good taste to have retired from its conspicuous notoriety; and good taste is always expensive. His bank account did not interest me.

I knew her well by sight, for she pa.s.sed me often in the Bois de Boulogne when I ran up to Paris on just such errands as my present one.

She had given me thus now and then glimpses of her feverish life--gleams from the facets, since her success in Paris was as brilliant as a diamond. Occasionally I would meet her in the shaded alleys, but always in sight of her brougham, which kept pace with her whims at a safe but discreet distance.