IT was characteristic enough of M. de St Denys to bear his guest no grudge for the fiasco, chiefly brought about, it must be admitted, by that guest’s malfeasance. With no man was the evil of the day more sufficient to itself; and he would be the last to insist upon that discipline of conscience that burdens each successive dawn with a new heritage of regrets. Moreover, the dog had the right humour, when he was restored to it, to properly appreciate Ned’s immediate comprehension of rule one and only of the Brotherhood; and on his way home with Théroigne, the comedy of the situation did gradually so slake the turmoil of his soul as that he must try to win over his companion to regard the matter from anything but a tragic standpoint. In this he was but partly successful; for woman has a cast in her humorous perceptives that deprives her of the sense of proportion.
“Is it so little a thing?” she said hotly. “But it was thy honour I fought to maintain. And no wonder, then, that men will take sport of that in us which they hold so cheap in themselves.”
However, his mended view of the affair impressed her so far as that, meeting with the Englishman by the village fountain on the morning following the orgy, she condescended to some distant notice of, and speech with, him. For, indeed, with her sex, to punish with silence is to wield a scourge of hand-stinging adders.
Ned, serenely undisturbed by, if not unconscious of, a certain toneless hauteur, greeted Mademoiselle Lambertine with his usual politeness. He was not, in truth, greatly interested in this fine animal. He recognised in her no original quality that set her apart from her fellows. Beauty of an astonishing order was hers indeed—beauty as much of promise as of fulfilment. The little remaining gaucherie of the hoyden dwelt with her only like a lingering brogue on the tongue of an expatriated Irishman. It was rough-and-tumble budding into a manner of caress. But beauty, save as it might contribute to the motif of a picture, was no fire to raise this young man’s temperature, and in Théroigne’s presence he seemed only to breathe an opulent atmosphere of commonplace. She was glowing passion interpreted through colour—siennas and leafy browns, and golds like the reflection of sunsets; a dryad, a pagan, a liberal-limbed tetonnière. If she were ever to find herself a soul, he could imagine her standing out richly as a Rembrandt portrait against torn dark backgrounds. But at present she seemed to lack the setting that occasion might procure her.
“Why do you toil this long way for water?” said he.
“For the reason that monsieur travels,” she answered coldly.
“Do I comprehend? I loiter up the channels of life seeking the spring-heads.”
“Whence the waters gush sweet and clear. Down in the dull homesteads one draws only stagnation from the ground.”
“Or from the barrels underground. Méricourt would do well, I think, to make this fountain its rendezvous.”
“Oh, monsieur! one need not drink much wine, I see, to yield oneself to insolence.”
“Well, you are angry over that kiss. But it was a jest, Théroigne. My heart was as cold as this basin.”
Did this improve matters?
“No doubt,” she said, flushing up, “you only lack the opportunity to be a Judas. And is it so they treat women in your barbarous island?”
“They treat them as they elect to be treated. We have a saying that as one makes one’s bed, so one must lie on it.”
“It is a noble creed!” cried the girl derisively. “It is the Pharisee speaking in English.”
“Nay, mademoiselle. It is to be vertebrate, that is all. To condone evil on the score of provocation to evil, to excuse it on the ground of constitutional tendency—that is the first infirmity of declining races.”
She looked at him mockingly, then fell into a little musing fit.
“Perhaps it is the right point of view,” she murmured; “but for us—mon Dieu! our eyes will get bloodshot and our vision obscured, and—yes, I would rather die of fire than of frost.”
She turned upon him, still pondering.
“It is strange. They say you are a great lord in your own country.”
“I am nephew to one, and his heir.”
“And is he like you?”
Ned permitted himself a snigger.
“He is very unlike me. He is the doyen, perhaps, of Lotharios.”
“An old man?”
“Yes, old.”
“And you travel like a commis voyageur—for experience, says the gross Van Roon! There must be something of courage in you Englishmen, after all, though you will run before us where you are fewer than ten to one.”
Ned changed the subject.
“Why were you so hurt last night by my reference to Nicette?”
“She is a saint.”
“How do you know?”
“How does a blind man know when some one sits at an open window by which he passes? He feels the presence—that is all.”
“That is all, then?”
“No; but this—Nicette cried lustily till the waters of baptism redeemed her, and thereafter never again: so early was the devil expelled from that sweet shrine.”
“And the little brother—is he a saint too?”
Théroigne laughed contemptuously.
“Baptiste? Oh, to be sure! the little unregenerate! He is the devil’s imp rather.”
“They are orphans?”
“Since three years. The girl mothers him, the graceless rogue.”
“I wronged her in ignorance, you see. That club of good-fellowship—it was all so concordant, so much in harmony with its own laws of frolic give-and-take. Why should a very saint be superior to so genial a fraternity?”
“We are a fraternity, as monsieur says, extending the hand of brotherhood to——”
She broke off, uttering a sharp exclamation as of terror or disgust, and shrunk back against the well rim. A figure had come into view—by way of the meadow path, up which Nicette had borne her load of fodder—and had paused over against the fountain, where it stood obsequiously bowing and gesticulating. It was that of a tall, large-boned man, fair-haired, apple-faced, with a mild, deprecating expression in its big blue eyes. Its head was crowned with a greasy cloth cap, shaped like the half of a tomato; its shirt, of undesirable fustian, was strangely decorated over the left breast with a yellow badge cut into something the shape of a duck’s foot; its full small-clothes—that came pretty high to the waist and were braced over the shoulders with leather bands, yoked to others running horizontally across chest and back—seemed in their every stereotyped crease the worn expression of humility.
“What is it, my friend?” said Ned.
Théroigne put a hand on his arm.
“Do not speak to him, save to bid him return whither he came. God in heaven! I can see the grass withering under his feet! Monsieur, monsieur” (for Ned was walking towards the man), “it is one of the accursed race!”
The creature fawned like a Celestial as the young man approached.
“Monseigneur, for the love of God, a drink of water!” said he.
His dry, thick lips seemed to grate on the words.
“Why not?” said Ned. “You have only to help yourself.”
“Let him dare!” shrieked Théroigne. “Monsieur, do you hear! it is a Cagot, a Cagot, I say!”
The man looked up, with a despairing forlorn gesture, and drooped again like one to whom long experience had taught the hopelessness of self-vindication.
“Is that so?” asked Ned.
“Alas! monseigneur, it is so.”
“What do you do it for, then; and what the deuce is it? Here—have you a cup or vessel of your own?”
With a hurried manner, compound of supplication and triumph, the creature, fumbling in its shirt, brought forth an iron mug. Ned received and carried it to the well. Théroigne sprang from him.
“You are not to be warned? It will poison the blessed spring.”
“Nonsense,” said Ned; but recognising her real agitation and alarm, he offered her a compromise. He would carry the mug to a little distance, and there she, standing back from it, should drop in water from her pitcher. To this she consented, after some demur; and the Cagot had his drink.
“That makes a man of you,” said Ned, watching the poor fellow take all down in reviving gulps.
The other shrugged his shoulders despondingly.
“Monseigneur, I can never be that. It is forbidden to us to stand apart from the beasts. We had hoped in these days of——” he broke off, shook his head, and only repeated, “I can never be that, monseigneur.”
“Then I would not come among men to be so treated.”
“Nor should I, but that my one pig had strayed and I dared to seek it. Monseigneur—if monseigneur would soil his tongue with the word—has he——”
“I have seen no pig. No doubt it will be returned to you, if found.”
“Returned! Hélas! but a poor return, indeed.”
“It will not be?”
“The lights, the entrails—a little of the coarser meat, perhaps.”
“How is that, then?”
“Where we squat, monseigneur, thither come the authorised of the pure blood. ‘These are your bounds,’ say they; and they signify, arbitrarily, any limit that occurs. Woe, then, to the Cagot sheep or pig that strays without the visionary cordon! Whoever finds it may kill, reserving to himself the good, and returning to the unhappy owner the inferior parts only of the meat.”
“It is of a piece with all I see, here more than elsewhere—the grossest inconsistency where the senses seek gratification. Truly, I think, the emancipation of the race is to be from self-denial.”
He gave the man a piece of money—rather peremptorily checking the fulsome benedictions his act called forth—and saw him slink off the way he had come. For all its show of servility, there had appeared something indescribably noble in the poor creature’s rendering of an ignoble part. It was as if, on the stage of life, he were willing to sacrifice his individuality to the success of the piece. Not all scapegoats could so triumph physically through long traditions and experiences of suffering. These Cagots—they might have come from the loins of the wandering Jew.
He walked back to Théroigne, his heart even a little less than before inclined to her. She held away from him somewhat, as if he were contaminated.
“A fraternity, extending the hand of brotherhood,” he said—repeating some words of hers uttered before the Cagot had intervened—“to whom was mademoiselle about to say? to all, without exception?”
She looked at him, half fearful, half defiant.
“This man is of the accursed race,” she cried low.
“A Jew?”
“A Cagot.”
“And what is that?”
“You do not know? They come from France, where she sits with her feet in the mountains—outcasts, pariahs, with blood so hot that an apple will wrinkle in their hands as if it had been roasted.”
“I should have fancied that a recommendation to you of Méricourt.”
“Ah, grace of God! With them it is nothing but the emitting of a pestilent miasma. These people are brutes. They would even have tails, but that their mothers are cunning to bite them off when they are newly born.”
Ned went into a fit of laughter.
“It is true, monsieur.”
“It is at least easily proved. And they come from the south?”
“From the south and from the west. It is not often we see them here; but this new spirit that is in the air—mon Dieu!—it stirs in them, I suppose, with a hope of better times—of release from the restrictions imposed upon them for the safety of the community; and now they will sometimes wander far afield.”
“And what are these restrictions?”
“They are many—as to the isolation of their camps; as to their tenure of land or carrying of weapons; as to buying or selling food; as to their right to enter a church by the common door, to take the middle of the street, to touch a passer-by, to remain in any village of the pure after sundown. They must grow their own flesh, find their own springs, wear, each man, woman, and child the duck-foot badge, that they may be known and shunned. Indeed, I cannot tell a tithe of the laws that control them.”
“But for what reason are they set apart?”
“Little mother of God! how can I say? They are Cagots, they are accursed—that is all I know.”
Even as she spoke an angry brabble of voices came to them from the direction of the path by which the outcast had retreated; and in a moment the man himself reappeared, scuttling along in a stooping posture, and hauling by the ear his recovered pig, that squeaked passionately as it was urged forward. But now in his wake came a posse of louts—young chawbacons drawn from the fields—who pelted the poor wretch with clods of clay, and were for baiting him, it seemed, in a crueller manner.
Ned ran down and placed himself between victim and pursuers. The former, bruised and breathless, pattered out a hurried fire of explanation and entreaty.
The young gentleman faced the little mob—half-a-dozen or so—that had closed upon itself—compact claypolism.
“What do you want with this man?” he said.
His demand evoked a clamour of vituperation.
“What is that to you? It is the law! The mongrel is accursed—l’âme damnée—le tison d’enfer! Down with this insolent the stranger! he is a Cagot himself!”
Ned waited calmly for the tumult to subside.
“I ask you what this man has done?” said he.
“Cannot you tell the heretic by his smell? Oh-a-eh! here is a fine Catholic nose! Out of our way—the pig is forfeit!”
They hissed and yelped, and raised a shrill chorus of “baas” at the unfortunate. Curiously, he seemed to feel this last form of insult more acutely than any. Suddenly a clod of earth, aimed presumably at the poor creature, hurtled through the air and struck Ned’s shoulder in passing. It might have rebounded on the assailant, so immediate was the retribution that followed. The erst-calm paladin went for the vermin like a terrier, and like a terrier repaid his own punishment with interest.
The great chuff howled and blubbered and wriggled under the blows that rained upon him. Presently Ned, exhausted, swung his victim in a hysteric heap upon the ground, and stood to breathe himself. Then it was that the reserve, withdrawn in affright, seeing his momentary fatigue, gathered heart of numbers, and came down upon him in phalanx. He received them, nothing dismayed, and accounted for the first with a “give-upon-the-nose,” and for another with a “poached eye.” He was patently tired, however—enervated by the heat of the day—and his adversaries, recognising this, were encouraging one another to annihilate him, when all in a moment a volume of water slapped into their faces and quenched their ardour for ever.
A new champion had come upon the field, and that was no other than Mademoiselle Théroigne with her pitcher. She laughed volubly, on a menacing note, in the washed and streaming countenances.
“Beasts, pigs, cowards!” she shrilled. “For one Englishman—name of God!—for one trumpery Englishman to lay you out flat as linen on a bleaching-green! Get back—hide yourselves in your furrows, or play bully to the little rabbits in the field corners! Not to the bucks—that were too bold.”
She made as if to follow up the water with the vessel. Ned cried out: “You will break the earthenware sooner than their heads, mademoiselle!” in agony lest she should blaze beyond self-extinguishment, as on the previous evening; but she only stiffened her claws like a cat and prepared to spring. It was enough. The swamped and demoralised crew gathered up its wreckage and fled incontinent, and was in a moment out of sight round the curve.
Ned took off his hat to his tutelary divinity—this Athena to his Achilles.
“Your weapons were better than mine,” he said; “but your task was harder: for you had to fight against prejudice as well.”
The Cagot, still holding his pig by the ear, crept up to the young man and caught and ravenously kissed his hand. Then he looked wistfully at a brown-haired goddess.
“Oh, mon Dieu, no!” said Théroigne. “You must not touch me or come near me.”
She turned and addressed Ned, almost with an entreating sound in her voice:—
“You have courage of every sort, monsieur. But for me—yes, it is as you say. My heart warms to such valour; but I cannot forget in a moment these long traditions—this fear and this abhorrence. Do not let him approach me.”
She stepped back, as if to escape a very radiated influence. But she spoke softly to the Englishman, and with the manner of one who in giving help has wrought a little conscious bond of sympathy.
“Bid the man go hence by the Liége road,” she said. “So will he evade his persecutors. But a few toises out he can enter the woods and work round to his lair.”
“I will see him on his way, mademoiselle.”
He bade her good morning quite respectfully, and drove the Cagot before him from the village. It was slow progress, for the recalcitrant pig must be humoured. The man looked back from time to time, his face full of the most human gratitude. A little way on he paused by an outlying cottage until his benefactor was come up with him. Then, smiling brightly, he stayed Ned with a significant gesture, and went on tiptoe to the door that stood open. A loaf lay on a table within. This the Cagot seized with a muttered word, and so came forth again, hugging his prize.
“What, the devil!” cried Ned.
He had seen a woman within the hut. She had shrunk, crying out, from the intruder, but had made no effort to defend her property.
“A thief!” exclaimed the Englishman.
“Nenni!” said the man in a deprecatory voice. “It is one of our poor little privileges. I appropriated the bread that monseigneur might see.”
“The deuce, you did!”
“We may take it—but, yes, we may enter and take, wherever we see it, a cut loaf turned upside-down, with the sliced part to the door. I will return it if monseigneur wills.”
“No,” said Ned. “This privilege is on a par with all the rest. Let the fool pay toll to his own inconsequence. Lead on, my friend.”
Very shortly they turned into a forest track, plunging amongst trees for a half mile or more. Here Ned pushed up to his humble wayfellow.
“Why are you accursed?” said he.
“God help us, monseigneur! I know not. Thus they hold and keep us. Wheresoever in our wanderings we alight, we must report our names and habitations to the bailli of the nearest jurisdiction, that no loophole may be left us to escape from ourselves; for it is forbidden to us to intermarry with the pure of blood, lest we thereby, merging into the community, lose our unhappy distinction.”
“But, whence come you, and what have you done to merit this—this——?”
“Monseigneur, we are accursed. It is not given to us to know more than that.”
Was there a faint note of stubbornness, a suggestion of some conscious secret withheld, in this abject reiteration of abasement? Ned was in doubt; but at least it seemed these strange people carried horror with them like a hidden plague-spot.
“Tell me,” said he, “why did you cower when the louts cried ‘Baa’ to you?”
The man looked up furtively.
“It is our ears,” he muttered. “They will call them sheep’s ears, monseigneur.”
“Certainly, it would appear, they are not designed for rings. That is a progressive evolution, my friend.”
The Cagot did not answer. A few steps farther brought them into a little dell traversed by a brook. Here, by the water-side, was stretched a single tent of tattered brown canvas.
“Alone!” said Ned, surprised.
“Alone, monseigneur, save for the woman and the little bien fils de son père. In these days the tribes are much broken up. They wander piecemeal. There are rumours abroad—hopes, prospects, as if it were prelude to the advent of a Messiah. I think, perhaps, I have seen to-day a harbinger—an angel bearing tidings.”
He gazed at the young man with large solemn eyes. His face was full of a wistful patience—not brutalised, but mild and intelligent.
“Oh, truly, I am the devil of an angel!” said Ned; and he waved his hand and turned.
“Monseigneur, I will never forget,” said the Cagot.