Part 31 (1/2)
”Helene's fault, you say, child? No, we will not make that excuse for him. If the poor girl was unhappy, there were other ways--”
”But what could he have done, papa? Now you are very unkind. If she asked him to come, could he have said no? Is that the way for a gentleman to treat a lady?”
Riette had posed him, and she knew it. But she did not reap any personal advantage.
”As to that,” he said, ”the whole thing was your fault. I did not send you to Lancilly to carry messages, but to learn your lessons. What did it matter to you if your cousin Helene was unhappy? In this world we must all be unhappy sometimes, as you will find. Go to bed at once.
Consider yourself in disgrace. You will stay in your room for two days on bread and water, and you will not go to Lancilly again for a long time, perhaps never. I am sorry I ever sent you there, but in future Mademoiselle Helene's affairs will be arranged without you.”
Riette went obediently away, shaking her head. As she went upstairs she heard her father calling to Marie Gigot, giving severe commands in a nervous voice, and she smiled faintly through her tears.
”Nevertheless, little papa, we love our Ange, you and I!” she said.
Angelot wandered about solitary with his gun and Nego, avoiding the Lancilly side of the country, and keeping to his father's and his uncle's land, where game abounded. For the present his good spirits were effectually crushed; and yet, even now, his native hopefulness rose and comforted him. It was true every one was angry; it was true he had given his word of honour not to attempt to see Helene, and at any moment her future might be decided without him; but on the other hand, her father had promised that she should not marry Ratoneau; and he and she, they were both young, they loved each other; somehow, some day, the future could hardly fail to be theirs.
In the meantime, Angelot was better off among his woods and moorlands than Helene in her locked room, all the old labyrinths and secret ways discovered and stopped. The vintage was very near, for the last days of September had come. Again a young moon was rising over the country, for the moon which lighted Helene to La Mariniere on her first evening in Anjou had waned and gone. And the heather had faded, the woods and copses began to be tinted with bronze, to droop after the long, hot season, only broken by two or three thunderstorms. The evenings were drawing in, the mornings began to be chilly; autumn, even lovelier than summer in that climate which has the seasons of the poets, was giving a new freshness to the air and a new colour to the landscape.
One day towards evening Angelot visited La Joubardiere. He went to the farm a good deal at this time, for it was pleasant to see faces that did not frown upon him, but smiled a constant welcome, and there was always the excuse of talking to Joubard about the vintage. And again, this evening, the Maitresse brought out a bottle of her best wine, and the two old people talked of their son at the war; and all the time they were very well aware that something was wrong with Monsieur Angelot, whom they had known and loved from his cradle. The good wife's eyes twinkled a little as she watched him, and if nothing had happened later to distract her thoughts, she would have told her husband that the boy was in love. Joubard put down the young master's strange looks to anxiety, not unfounded, about his uncle Joseph and the Chouan gentlemen.
Since Simon's spying and questioning, Joubard had taken a more serious view of these matters.
”Monsieur Angelot has been at Les Chouettes to-day?” he said. ”No? Ah, perhaps it is as well. There were two gentlemen shooting with Monsieur Joseph--I think they were Monsieur des Barres and Monsieur Cesar d'Ombre. A little dangerous, such company. Monsieur Joseph perhaps thinks a young man is better out of it.”
Angelot did not answer, and turned the conversation back to the vintage.
”Yes, I believe it will be magnificent,” said the farmer. ”If Martin were only here to help me! But it is hard for me, alone, to do my duty by the vines. Hired labour is such a different thing. I believe in the old rhyme:--
'L'ombre du bon maitre Fait la vigne croitre!'
Monsieur your father explained to me the meaning of it, that there must be no trees in or near the vineyard, no shadow but that of the master.
He found that in a book, he said. Surely, I thought, a man must have plenty of time on his hands, to write a book to prove what every child knows. Now I take its meaning to be deeper than that. There is a shadow the vine needs and can't do without. You may talk as you please about sun and air and showers; 'tis the master's eye and hand and shadow that gives growth and health to the vines.”
”Don't forget the good G.o.d,” said Maitresse Joubard. ”All the shadows of the best masters won't do much without Him.”
”Did I say so?” Her husband turned upon her. ”It is His will, I suppose, that things are so. We must take His creation as we find it. All I say is, He gives me too much to do, when He sets me on a farm with five sons and leaves me there but takes them all away.”
”Hush, hush, master; Martin will come back,” his wife said.
Nearly a month ago she had said the same. Angelot, standing again in the low dark kitchen with her slender old gla.s.s in his hand, remembered the day vividly, for it had indeed been a marked day in his life. The breakfast at Les Chouettes, the hidden Chouans, General Ratoneau and his adventure in the lane, and then the wonderful moonlight evening, the coming of Helene, the dreams which all that night waited upon her and had filled all the following days. Yes; it was on that glorious morning that Maitresse Joubard, poor soul, had talked with so much faith and courage of her Martin's return. And Angelot, for his part, though he would not for worlds have said so, saw no hope of it at all. The last letter from Martin had come many months ago. The poor conscript, the young Angevin peasant, tall like his father, with his mother's quiet, dark face, was probably lying heaped and hidden among other dead conscripts at the foot of some Spanish fortress wall.
Angelot set down his gla.s.s, took up his gun, looked vaguely out of the door into the misty evening, bright with the spiritual brilliance of the young moon.
”If Martin comes back, anything is possible,” he was thinking. ”I should believe then that all would go well with me.”
From the white, ruinous archway that opened on the lane, a figure hobbled slowly forward across the gleams and shadows of the yard. The great dog chained there began to yelp and cry; it was not the voice with which he received a stranger; Nego growled at his master's feet.
Angelot's gaze became fixed and intent. The figure looked like one of those wandering beggars, those _chemineaux_, who tramped the roads of France with a bag to collect bones and crusts of bread, the sc.r.a.ps of food which no good Christian refused them, who haunted the lonely farms at night and to whom a stray lamb or kid or chicken never came amiss.
This figure was ragged like them; it stooped, and limped upon a wooden leg and a stick; an empty sleeve was pinned across its breast. And the rags were those of a soldier's uniform, and the dark, bent face was tanned by hotter suns than the sun of Anjou.
Angelot turned to the old Joubards and tried to speak, but his voice shook and was choked, and the tears blinded his eyes.