Part 14 (1/2)

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.