Gentian Hill

  He lifted his head from his arms and picked up something that lay on the deck beside him. It was a pitiful mess of blood and dirty white fur, stiff and cold. Somehow it had seemed the last drop of misery, when he had come stumbling up the slippery ladder from that terrible red cockpit, where they had summoned him to say good-by to Cobb, to fall headlong over something at the top and find it was poor Snow. What had she done, poor Snow? The ship’s goat was dead too; he had seen it blown to bits with his own eyes. He’d liked that goat. ...But the animals at Weekaborough were safe, the yard cats that Stella was so fond of, and Hodge, Daniel, and Seraphine, the oxen and horses and his precious sheep .... But with Snow lying across his knees, he couldn’t seem to visualize them very clearly-not even Hodge. "Bloody young fool!" said the irritated voice of the senior midshipman, passing by. "Aren’t there enough good men dead but you must blub like a sissy over the cat? Here, blow your nose, for God’s sake!"

  Zachary had not known he was blubbing, but he found now that his nose was in the most disgusting state. He held out a hand for the flung handkerchief and blew. But it was not the cat it was Cobb-who had died hard. Suddenly the body across his knees was a horrible thing. He picked it up, carried it to the rail, and flung it overboard. It made a very small splash, not like the resounding splashes the men’s bodies made when they hit the water.

  He straightened up and looked about him. Far away in the distance, like white birds on the horizon, Zachary could just see the sails of the enemy ships that had escaped and were flying for Cadiz. The darkness deepened and the ship’s lanterns shone out across the water. The Royal Sovereign had her full complement of lights, but something seemed wrong with the Victory. Zachary stared and blinked, then found the senior midshipman once more beside him, and caught his arm.

  "The Victory!" he said.

  "What’s wrong with the Victory ?" asked the other crossly.

  "Hardly any lanterns. They’ve not lit the Admiral’s lights."

  The elder boy stared. Communication between the ships was difficult. Their frigate knew nothing about the fight, except that they had won it.

  "No Admiral’s lights," he said stupidly.

  “No," said Zachary.

  They continued to stare stupidly, their faces gray in the waning light. All through the fleet, men were staring stupidly at the Victory. Triumph changed to incredulous pain as the darkness and silence deepened. Victory? They had no joy in her any longer, for she had come to them veiled in darkness, like the ship that bore her name. Nelson was dead!

  CHAPTER IV

  1

  A few days after the news of Trafalgar reached Torquay, the Abbé, that man of an iron constitution, was seized with an attack of the grippe. He paid no attention to it, illness in himself being a thing which he considered beneath his attention, but he did not go out to Gentian Hill, for he was sneezing most explosively and coughing in a manner to match the sneezes, and he did not wish others to be similarly afflicted. Moreover, he seemed to have insufficient control over his legs for much walking. The weather too had suddenly turned most inclement, cold, and wet. He sat in his sitting room working at his latest book, holding his aching back stiff as a ramrod, forcing his aching head to intellectual labor with a certain amount of difficulty, but standing no nonsense from it, shivering but disdaining to wear a cloak indoors. Under the table at his feet lay Rover, his landlady’s dog, to help in the disposal of the next meal which should be brought to him. Rover always lent most kindly assistance at mealtimes, for the Abbé was not a man of large appetite, yet did not like to hurt his landlady’s feelings by appearing unappreciative of her cooking. Since November 10, Rover had had practically all the Abbé’s meals, and had put on weight considerably. The two of them continued in this manner for a week, until one morning after a bad night, the Abbé found himself with a sharp pain in his chest, extreme difficulty in breathing, and a most irritating inability to get out of bed. He rang the bell.

  His landlady, Mrs. Jewell, her hands folded at her ample waist, surveyed him with a knowing eye. "What you need, Sir, is a good blooding," she said. "I’ve said so time and again this last week, but no attention would you pay to what I said. Now you’re the worse for it. I’ll send Jewell for Parker."

  "You will do nothing of the kind," said the Abbé. Parker was a hail-fellow-well-met barber and apothecary whose coarse jokes did much to enliven the sick beds of the Jewell family, but were not at all to the taste of the Abbé. "If it is your opinion that a physician is needed, you will send for Dr. Crane of Gentian Hill, but for no one else," and he shut his eyes.

  "Dr. Crane!" ejaculated Mrs. Jewell. "If poor Jewell is to go trampin’ all the way out to Gentian Hill in this weather, then I’ll have the two of you in your beds, an’ me with but the one pair of hands."

  She rustled indignantly from the room, returning a few minutes later, followed by Rover, with some hot milk which she helped the Abbé to drink. But she maintained an outraged silence, and then went away again. The Abbé did not know whether she meant to send for Dr. Crane or not. He hoped she would. He felt now that he would very much like to see the doctor.

  Thumps and snorts beneath the bed told him that Rover had gone to earth there, in hopes that the next meal would be somewhat more exciting than the last. Rover was an ancient black retriever. The Abbé had had a dog rather like him in his boyhood at the chateau. What had the creature’s name been? Jules Téte-Noir. The Abbé had had the smallpox as a small boy, and Jules Téte-Noir had spent almost the entire period of his illness thumping and snorting beneath the bed. During the long nights, his young master had been much comforted by his presence, and the Abbé was comforted now by the presence of Rover. Soothed by the hot milk, he presently dropped into a restless feverish sleep, and in his sleep the past was with him again.

  2

  The window was set wide to the early morning sunshine and the scent of the pine forest drifted through it. Téte-Noir was beneath the bed, and his mother-young and beautiful was standing beside him. She laid her hand on his shoulder and he opened his eyes to look at her. Yet when he did look, she was no longer young; her face was white and ravaged, though she spoke calmly enough. "They are here, Charles," she said.

  He had lain down dressed the night before, and he was up in a Hash, racing down the beautiful stone staircase to the hall below where his father and his brothers, inarticulate with fury, were dragging the heavy furniture across the hall and putting it against the stout oak door. None of their servants was to be seen; they must have run away. The Comtesse sat down on the stairs. "I do not think it is any good doing that," she said tonelessly to her husband and sons. "If we resist, they will certainly kill us, but if we do not resist they may have pity."

  But her men did not even hear her. She had not supposed that they would. Every primitive instinct had been roused in them by the mob they had seen through the windows, surging through their garden, trampling their flowers underfoot, hackling at their yew hedges and rose trees, men armed with any weapon they had been able to lay their hands on-pikes, axes, hay-forks, flaming torches, cudgels, anything-a mob gone mad with hate and no longer human. The Comte and his sons, in their rage, were hardly human either. Their only idea of defending their own was the furious jungle method of tooth and claw. Having barricaded the door and primed their muskets, they each went to a window of the hall. They fired through the windows until the chateau was on fire, the door battered in, and the mob upon them; and then they drew their swords. Four skillful swordsmen, wrought up to the highest pitch of fury and ecstasy in defense of all they love, can hold a mob at bay for quite a long time. Charles found a fierce mad joy in it, that was not diminished when he saw his eldest brother die; he only fought more wildly. He was fighting with one man when another wounded him in the thigh with a pike. Then a flung stone struck him on the head. A whirling darkness seemed all about him then, lit with flashes of flame.

  It seemed to possess him for a long time, a scorching darkness that was hot upon his body as the f
lames of the burning chateau had been hot, and shouted in his ears as the mob had done. It had a horrible smell too, that nauseating smell of unwashed bodies and filthy clothes that is the very breath of poverty. He tried to get away from it, twisting this way and that, but it would not let him go; it had bound chains upon him and they bit into his flesh. Sometimes he shouted back at it, and when he did that, he thought that his mother came to him and gave him a drink, and then he was quiet. It seemed to go on like this for an eternity, and then slowly and intermittently the quality of the darkness changed. Sometimes it became cool and very quiet and instead of the smell of poverty there came the scent of the pines. His mother came more often and he was conscious that she had grown young. He had grown young too. He was a small boy again and he had come through the snowy forest to his first midnight mass. He was kneeling, staring at the crib and the Christmas tree with its lighted candles, and all about him there echoed the lovely chanting of the mass. He wriggled his cold toes in their snowboots and sniffed the scent of the fir tree mixed with the smell of the incense and candle grease, and he was happy. He blinked at the candles and wished he could have one. If he could have one, he thought, he would carry it home very carefully through the forest, and he would not let it blow out.

  But he could not carry it home because he could not walk. He was lying flat on his back, and when he tried to move, his head hurt him. He was not a boy, either. He was a man, and sick and pressed upon by a load of intolerable wretchedness that was not only of the body. But the scent of the pines was with him, it came borne on a cool breeze through some open window. And there were candles, two of them; he was lying blinking up at them, and at the shape of a cross outlined starkly against a pale shimmer of light. And they were chanting the mass. No, not chanting it, saying it. And two voices only, an old man’s voice and a woman’s voice answering. He supposed it was his mother. He shut his eyes and listened, and darkness flowed back again, but this time a darkness entirely purged of terror.

  He opened his eyes, and though the candles had been put out, the light was brighter, and outside in the forest there was birdsong. It was summer, he remembered. His mother was coming towards him slowly with head bent, carrying something very carefully in her hands, as though it were an exceedingly precious gift-something that could be easily smashed-like youth or joy. He spoke her name gently, a pet name that he had for her. She stopped then and looked up, and she was not his mother, she was a slim woman wearing a peasant girl’s simple gray dress, with dark hair cut short like a boy’s. She put what she was carrying on a stool, and it was only a cup of milk after all, and came and stood looking down at him. Perhaps a couple of years ago she had been young and beautiful, but she was neither of these things now, and rage rose again in the heart of the man looking up at her because of the things that happened to women in France in these days. Then she smiled, and her face was transfigured. There were stars in her eyes when she smiled, and a light upon her face, and her mouth took on the curves of happiness that the contours of her worn face had lost. She was so young when she smiled that she looked like a little girl. Charles loved her then, at once and forever.

  "What did you call me?" she asked.

  "Something I call my mother. I thought you were she."

  Her smile died and the light in her face went out like a blown candle, but the compassion that took its place was so deep that it seemed to reach out to him and hold him. Because of it, his grief did not quite overwhelm him then, or destroy him in the days that followed.

  They were strange days of angry misery and hopelessness, with a queer attempt at happiness trying to struggle up through the anger, in which the bewildering kaleidoscope of impressions that tumbled about him gradually fell into shape. He was lying on a hard bed behind the altar of the little church in the pine woods, he discovered, suffering from burns and concussion, and a wound in the leg that was not healing as satisfactorily as it should. They had carried him here from the chateau, the Curé told him; the church had seemed the best place to hide him, safer than the presbytery.

  The old man was vague about those who had performed this act of mercy, though his burnt and still bandaged hands and arms suggested that he might have had something to do with it, but the woman in the peasant’s dress, whose name was Therese, answered his questions more fully when they were alone together.

  3

  The Curé had been away from the village, visiting a dying woman at an outlying farm, when the mob had come to the chateau. They were a part of that multitude that was now surging across France, an army of starving peasants and men come up from the jails and slums of the towns like rats from sewers, suffering and maddened men who had forgotten pity, but still knew the meaning of justice and had taken it into their own hands. Therese spoke of these men with a sort of agonized compassion, but Charles, the new Comte de Colbert, could feel for them nothing but a loathing that at times shook and exhausted him as though it were a fever. The Cure, returning home with a companion from the farm, had seen the smoke from the burning chateau, and had run there. The mob had looted what they could from the chateau, and then the flames had driven them away. They did not drive the Cure away; he got in through a window and found the bodies of his friends. Finding Charles still alive he had dragged him out first. He would have gone back if he could and brought out the dead too, but by the time he got Charles out, that was no longer possible.

  "He did it alone?" asked Charles, lying with his face turned away from Therese while she replied quietly and truthfully to his questions.

  “The villagers were afraid to go with him to the chateau, but a few men-your servants, I think-who had run away to the village, followed behind him and hid in the forest, and it was they who carried you here." She got up and left him. She had an unerring instinct for knowing when he wanted to be let alone.

  Later, looking from his own stalwart frame to the bent body of the little old Cure, he said with a lift of his scorched eyebrows and a grim attempt at a smile, "You are a stronger man than I thought, mon Pere."

  "I’d never have got you through the window, my son, without the help of Thérese," confessed the old man. "She’s a tough young woman."

  "Thérése?" ejaculated Charles.

  "She had come with me from the farm," said the Curé placidly. "I had told her she was not to follow me inside the chateau, but when I had dragged you to the window there she was just climbing through."

  He went ambling off to the vestry to make his bed. He slept in the vestry so as to be able to look after Charles at night. Thérese slept at the presbytery with the Curé’s housekeeper. Who was this dear and brave woman? Charles, loving her, taking from her the happiness that she seemed able to bring him whenever she came near him-like a gift in her two hands-a gift so strange in the midst of so much wretchedness. Yet he knew nothing at all about her. She was easy and friendly with him, a compassionate and most skillful nurse, yet there was that in her reticence that forbade questioning, and a dignity that might have been chilling had she not been so vital and loving a creature. And the Curé, whenever questioned, ambled off to do something or other, and Charles as yet was unable to get up and follow him.

  But the day came when he was able. Limping, he followed the old man into the vestry.

  "Mon Pere, who is Thérese?" he demanded, holding on to the table. His voice was harsh and his face hard because he loved her so much, and his legs were trembling beneath him.

  "My son," said the Curé mildly, "do not address me in my own vestry as though at a pistol’s point."

  "I must know, mon Pere. You do not understand. I must know."

  The old man looked at him keenly and saw how it was with him. "Sit down," he said abruptly. Charles sat down and they faced each other across the table. The old man’s gaze held the younger man’s steadily for a moment or two, as though he were trying to prepare him for yet another disaster, and then he looked down at his knotted old hands claspedupon the table, and began to speak quietly, as if to himself, as though Charle
s were not there in front of him.

  "I will tell you about Therese. Perhaps I should have told you before. Do you remember that Carmelite convent at Clermont, by the bridge? You may never have noticed it. A gloomy looking little place with high walls around it. My sister was prioress there. Some weeks ago the Terror reached Clermont. I will not speak of what happened, either in the town or the convent. Yet always in these times of judgment there is a remnant that is saved-one here, two there. To me it is one of the signs that God still lives. You were saved from the burning chateau. My sister and one novice, a young woman called Marie Therese, were saved from the Carmel. For a few days they stayed hidden in some hovel in the town; then, dressed as peasants, they set out to come to me. That was all my poor sister could think of, that she must get to her brother. They walked by night and hid by day, and begged their food as they could. They reached Pierre Guerin’s armhouse at the edge of the parish, and there my sister was taken very ill. They sent for me and it was a great joy to us both, a joy that we took as a gift from the good God and as a mark of His providence, that I could be with her when she died. There remained the problem of the novice Marie Therese. They would not keep her at the farm, and so I decided to bring her back with me, to be cared for by my good housekeeper, until we decided what to do. Coming here, we saw the smoke from the chateau, and you know what happened then."