Part 36 (1/2)

Matteo le Gaucher snarled at them, denying that the coins were good, or, if good, that they had been won (as they a.s.serted) by merely carrying a sick man up a hill.

Not for such service did men give gold Napoleons. They lied, Carlo, Beppo, Lorenzo, and the oaf from San Ghomigniano of the Seven Towers.

They all lied, and Matteo, who was certainly in most evil humour that day, tried to knock up the hand in which the Tuscan was jingling them.

He of the City of the Seven Towers felled Matteo, who would never have forgiven him, if the bone-splintering blow of the mattock in the hand of Arcadius had not come to fill the hater with the hope of a greater vengeance.

Nevertheless the thought of the rich man who dwelt on the slopes of Mont St. Andre, with sacks of golden Napoleons on either side of every room, kept haunting him. Matteo could neither eat nor sleep till he had seen.

So he took a half-holiday without asking permission (the beginning of his quarrel with the huge Arcadius) and, stealing a skiff from a neighbouring landing, scrambled up the steep face of Mont St. Andre.

Fortune willed that he should meet the junior _lyceens_ out for a walk, two and two, with only a weak _pion_ to restrain them. Naturally Matteo was mocked and mobbed. Matteo drew a knife, and grinned like a wild cat, but recognised his error in time, accepted the situation, and with the hate of h.e.l.l in his heart, began to show the juniors knife tricks--how to let it fall always with the point down, how to send it whizzing like a gleam of light deep into the heart of a tree, which might just as well have been the heart of a man.

At last he got clear of them, smiling and bowing, till the sober-coated little rascals were lost to sight on the high path. Then he brandished his knife in fury, and vowed that if he could he would cut the throat of every wretched imp among them.

But at the sound of voices he subdued his anger, and, humbly asking his way from this pa.s.ser-by and that other, he at last made his way to Gobelet. He knocked long for admission at the porter's lodge, but the porteress seeing such a calumny on G.o.d's handiwork outside, and scenting appeals for charity, eyed him disfavourably through the little cross-barred spy-window and let him knock.

A little farther down the road, he was quite as unsuccessful at the tower port of the Garden Cottage, over which the Tessiers had been wont to sleep.

There was no one in the house at all, yet Matteo le Gaucher quickly running to the top of the bank opposite, imagined he saw faces mocking him at every window.

It chanced that for his sins (whatever they may have been) my father was at that moment coming leisurely down the hill, his hands behind his back. He had been up to call upon his friend Renard before his siesta, and they two had argued over-long as to the purport of the fourteenth chapter of the Koran.

Suddenly full in his path he found Matteo grovelling before him, his hands and knees covered with blood, foam from his lips, and to all appearance in a state of extreme exhaustion. Now my father, Gordon Cawdor, was a man of very simple and direct mind, so far as the actions of those about him went. He believed that what he saw was the reality.

Indeed, so transparent was his honesty that men took fright at it, counting it as the last achievement of duplicity, so that on an average he was as seldom deceived as any other man in the country.

Now he cried out for help, and after one or two shouts Saunders McKie and Hugh Deventer came through the gate and took up the seeming epileptic.

Saunders was wholly sceptical and when ordered by his master to wash the froth from the sufferer's mouth prospected with such good will for soap within that Matteo, had he dared, would gladly have bitten the finger off. He was compelled to swallow what might have served him another time.

”Dowse him wi' a bucket o' water, and let him gang his ways. I like not the look o' the speldron. He is like the Brownie that my Uncle Jock yince saw on the Lang Hill o' Lowden--a fearsome taed it was, juist like this Eytalian.”

”Hold your peace, Saunders,” commented my father. ”You, he, and I are as G.o.d made us, and little that matters. What is written of us in the Book, _that_ alone shall praise or condemn us!”

”Lord's sake, Maister Cawdor,” said Saunders, who always wilted before my father in his moments of spiritual reproof, ”I was sayin' and thinkin' no different. The Book and What is Written Therein! That's the rub, an' no to be spoken o' lichtly. And after a' the craitur's a craitur, though I will say----”

”Say nothing, Saunders, till you have given the unfortunate to eat and drink. Then when he is recovered I shall speak with him a moment.”

”Weel, Maister Cawdor, let your speech be silver, and no gowden.”

”You mean, Saunders?”

”I juist mean that the buckie has a gallow's look aboot him, and if ye are so ill-advised and--aye, I will say it--sae wicked as to gie him gold, we shall a' hae our throats cutt.i.t in our beds yin o' thae nichts!”

Whereupon my father reproved his old servant for narrow-mindedness and evil thinking, but Saunders held his own.

”Narrow-mindedness here and ill-thinkin' there,” he said, ”blessed are they that think no evil, I ken, and that blessing ye are sure o', Maister Cawdor. But ye pay me a wage to keep watch and ward for ye over all evil-doers, and may I never taste porridge mair if this lad doesna smell the reek o' the deil's peats a mile away.”

Saunders prevailed in the matter of the gold, and it was only a five-franc piece that Matteo carried away from the gate of Gobelet. Hugh Deventer and Alida came out to see off the man who had caused such a disturbance in the peace of the quiet villa. Matteo gazed at Alida with the look of a wild beast before whose cage pa.s.ses a fine-skinned plump gazelle.

He was full to the lips with rage, bitterness, and all uncharitableness.

Gobelet he had seen, but owing to the machinations of that enemy of mankind, Saunders, only the great paved kitchen in which the menservants and maidservants pa.s.sed to and fro, all gazing at him with inquisitive and contemptuous eyes. Ah, if only he could make them smart for that, those full-fed minions whose broken meats had been set down to him, Matteo of Arqua. Not but that these were good, yes, and the wine was excellent. It might be worth while, when he should decide to turn honest, to find some such place, perhaps as porter or lodge-keeper against his old age.