Chapter XLVII: How a Vow Was Kept

When the dawn broke Louis was still alive. It was all that could be said; yet when the cold daylight was fully come, and the priest could get a clearer view of his face, drowned as it was in the waves of an unfathomable sleep, he thought that it looked a little less deathlike. And surely his breathing was more natural.

He stayed by him all that day, and when night came a mattress was placed for him on the floor of the loft. The good Bretons were impressed to tears by his determination to remain with the wounded man instead of continuing his journey towards safety, and, set against the privilege of having a priest in their dwelling, the danger of his presence appeared negligible.

And next morning, early, ere the rush-light was extinguished, Louis stirred a little and opened eyes that were indeed unseeing, but which at least had the light of life in them. He did not know M. des Graves, but, too weak even to turn his head on the pillow, accepted his good offices like a child. Sometimes he seemed on the point of recognising his nurse, at others he was perfectly indifferent to his presence. Later in the day, with the assistance of Madame Gloannec, M. des Graves set about examining and dressing his injuries. Even his lesser hurts were not fully healed, and as for the sabre thrust which had transfixed him, the priest was little short of horrified at the methods which the peasants in their well-meaning ignorance and their want of appliances had followed. But for Louis’ youth and constitution, he must have succumbed already to such bungling treatment; perhaps it was even now too late to save him.

The operation was over at last.

“One sees that you have studied, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Madame Gloannec, collecting the scattered dressings and strips of linen.

“A little, in my youth,” answered the priest absently, looking down at his semi-conscious patient, who lay between them moaning faintly. “I am afraid that we have hurt him. My poor child. . . .” He laid his hand on the Vicomte’s forehead, gently smoothing off it the tendrils of brown hair, caught there by the sweat of fever and weakness.

“You love him, mon père,” said the Breton woman softly. “Ah well, so do I—as if he were my own son. He was like a son to me—when he could speak.”

“Was he ever able to tell you his name?” asked M. des Graves. “I suppose not.”

“Mais si, Monsieur l’Abbé. Saint-Ermay. But you did not ask it when you came, and we never thought——”

“Nor I. I never hoped or guessed. Yet I was led here. . . . Yes, I have known and loved him always.” He was still passing his hand over the hot, damp brow, and Louis had ceased to moan and was lying quiet.

“He loves you too, that is plain,” said Madame Gloannec, coming round to the priest’s side. “See, although he does not know you, that eases the pain—your hand there! And he has suffered enough already, God knows. But I will stay with him now, mon père, if you will go down and eat some soup with Mathurin and Marie-Pierre. . . . Let us see, my child, if I cannot get you to sleep.”

She sat down by the bed, and as M. des Graves went down the rickety stairs he heard her crooning gently the old Breton song of the miller girl of Pontaro, with its strange monotonous refrain on two notes, that was like the turning of the mill-wheel—

“Ha ma mel a drei
Diga-diga-di;
Ha ma mel a ia
Diga-diga-da.”

In the kitchen Marie-Pierre, having taken off an iron pot from its tripod over the open fire, was pouring its steaming contents into a large bowl. His demeanour was serious and responsible; his father, sitting forward on the settle with his hands on his knees, watched him with something of the expression of the two oxen whose placid and magnificently-horned heads protruded into the apartment, their bodies being without, but their manger, as usual, within the cottage. The arrival of M. des Graves appeared a little to agitate father and son, for he had not as yet taken any meal with them, but finally the three sat down at the table to their _soupe à choux_.

It was, perhaps, some instinct of etiquette or of consideration which caused the two Bretons to allow M. des Graves to proceed some way with his repast before the younger, jerking his thumb in an upward direction, asked news of the sick man. The priest told them that he was a trifle better; that there was a little hope.

“Then you must eat, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Mathurin, and he pushed towards him an enormous mound of the good salt butter of Brittany.

“Dame! and drink, too,” added his son, seizing the jug of cider. “We will drink with a good heart to the young man’s recovery.”

“I should like to know how you found him,” observed the priest. “Was it by chance?”

“It was, and it was not,” answered Mathurin sententiously. “It was because we started to go into Savenay the day after the battle—Oh, I must tell you, Monsieur l’Abbé, that Marie-Pierre was all for joining the Vendeans himself; he even had the musket down”—he pointed to the usual musket hung over the hearth—“but there was not time. Well . . . Where was I?—Marie-Pierre, you tell his Reverence.”

The young Breton took a long drink from the cider jug. “It was like this,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “All the day of the battle we kept close indoors; we heard firing in the distance, and later hussars came riding through the village. Some demanded drink, and their swords were dripping. But, as your Reverence knows, we are about nine miles from Savenay, and off the main road, and few fugitives got as far as this; they were cut down on the way. We heard the hussars boasting how many they had killed in cold blood. We were very sad, for it is true that I wanted, like many more of our parts, to join the Vendeans. And we were very anxious, my father and I, to go to Savenay to learn exactly what fate had befallen them, though we knew well enough that they were beaten. But we were afraid to go without a good reason, lest the Blues should take us for spies. Then we had the idea of taking in some fodder for the patriots’ cavalry as a pretext. So we started early on the morning of Christmas Eve; it was very cold and almost snowing, and when we began to get near to Savenay the roads were thick with corpses, so that we had often to go at a foot’s pace to avoid driving over them. In some places they were stripped and piled up on top of each other by the roadside; you could see that they had been shot down in batches. It was so dreadful that at last we turned back; we had not the heart to go on into Savenay, and from the sound they were still shooting the prisoners there.

“And as, having turned back, we passed the wood of Blanche-Couronne, where we heard that the Vendeans had made their last stand, my father said to me: ‘Marie-Pierre, what if there were any Royalists still alive in there?’ And I said: ‘No, mon père, it is not possible, first because the Blues would have massacred them by this time, and secondly because of the cold of last night.’ But my father, inspired no doubt by Heaven, said: ‘Still, it would be a deed very acceptable to God and His Mother, the consoler of the afflicted, if we went to see.’ And, pardieu, Monsieur l’Abbé, I was nothing loth, but I knew not what we should do if the Blues found us in there, for their patrols were passing along the road every few minutes, and we had already had difficulty with them. But the Blessed Virgin put it into our heads that if we were questioned we should say that we were gone to strip the dead brigands, for we felt sure that the Blues would not object to that. So we drove the cart a little way up a track that went through the wood, that it should not be seen from the road, and got out to see if there were any living.

“There were not more than a couple of score Vendeans there, but they were all dead, and the snow was beginning to fall on them. We walked through, very sad at heart, to the edge of the wood that looks towards Savenay, and there, under a tree, in what had been a pool of blood, I saw a young man in uniform, with a peasant lying dead across him. It was the uniform, though it was very old and faded, which caught my eye, and I said to my father: ‘See, there is a Republican officer, the only Blue here.’ And then I went a little nearer, out of curiosity, and suddenly, praise to Sainte Anne, I saw the white scarf and the Sacred Heart. And I was filled with pity that he should be lying there dead, young and handsome, with a great wound in his breast. At any rate, I thought, it will be a pious act to lift off the dead man, and since this young seigneur was in his lifetime a good Christian (for I saw that he had died with his rosary in his hand), to fold his hands and put the crucifix of the chaplet between them. My father agreed, and together we lifted the dead peasant off the young man’s body. . . . But when I touched the officer it seemed to me that he was still warm, and I cried to my father, but he said: ‘No, he is dead; look at all the blood; and, besides, as you said yourself, the cold.’ Nevertheless I put my ear to the Vendean’s heart, and I thought that I could hear it beating. So we lifted him carefully and quickly, and carried him to the cart, and put him in and covered him with the fodder, and drove home.”

Marie-Pierre terminated abruptly, and took another long drink of cider. Putting down the jug, he added: “We said the rosary in turns all the way, for if the Blues had discovered the Vendean in our cart, we should never have seen Christmas Day.”

“May God reward you,” said the priest, very moved. “It is not in the power of man.”

“Indeed,” commented Mathurin, who was evidently living through the scene again, “it was no wonder that I disbelieved Marie-Pierre when he said that the young man was not dead, for I do not know how he lived through the cold of the night.”

“I think,” said his son, “that it was the cold which stopped the flow of blood. And then, on the other hand, perhaps the body of the peasant kept some warmth in him for a time.”

“I wonder who it was,” said M. des Graves, running over the names of those who remained at the time of his capture.

“A young man,” replied Marie-Pierre. “He had been shot through the breast.”

“God rest him,” said the priest, and “Amen” said the two Bretons, crossing themselves.

So neither Toussaint Lelièvre’s rosary nor his own body had been given in vain. And since, in a way he did not dream of, he had kept his word to Louis, he would not probably have minded that no one ever knew.

* * * * * *

A little metal crucifix was hanging on a beam at the foot of the bed. Surely it had not been there before! And though it was a perfectly ordinary crucifix, and had evidently been much used—indeed, just because it was so worn—Louis seemed somehow to recognise it, seemed even to have seen it recently. It was rather puzzling.

A tiny noise suggestive of snipping made him remove his gaze from this source of bewilderment to a greater. At a short distance a grey-haired man was standing, with his back to him, by a small table on which was a bowl and a heap of something white. It was from him, apparently, that the snipping proceeded. But though he was clad in the short vest and very full pleated breeches with which occasional glimpses of Mathurin and Marie-Pierre had rendered Louis familiar, the back of his head belonged to neither of the Gloannecs. It was too young for one, and too old for the other. And yet he had seen it before. . . . His pulses began to quicken. Why did it suggest amice and chasuble, and candles under bending boughs at daybreak?. . . . He must be delirious . . . and yet—that head had known the tonsure.

The Vicomte’s languid curiosity was all at once transmuted into an emotion much more vivid, and his heart suddenly began to beat suffocatingly. He tried vainly to move, whispering a name.

The scissors dropped from M. des Graves’ hand, and he was at the bedside. “My child, my child, lie still! Yes, I am here. I was not killed. No; no questions—you shall know everything in its proper time. You have been very ill, but now, by God’s mercy, you are going to get well. . . . No, I am not going to leave you. I have already been here—some time. When you have drunk something and gone to sleep again, perhaps we will talk a little.”

Surprise on surprise. Louis did go to sleep again, and for a very long time, for when he woke again it was dusk, and a candle was burning. His eyes searched instantly for M. des Graves, for surely his presence was only a dream, difficult to disentangle from the others. But the priest was seated there close to the bed, reading his breviary with those unnecessary spectacles. A sense of enormous content invaded the young man, so that he was satisfied to lie for some appreciable time, merely looking at him, before he attempted to speak. Then he said, with astonishing difficulty, something quite other than he had meant to say. “What . . . have you . . . done . . . with your cassock?”

M. des Graves started. He put down his book, swept off his spectacles, and leaning forward, said with a smile of amusement: “Have I shocked you by this dress, my child?”

“No,” replied Louis, weighing the question quite seriously, his gaze roaming over the intricate pale blue embroideries of the priest’s vest. “No . . . I rather like it. But please tell me why . . . I don’t understand . . . and I cannot——” He frowned, and, struggling visibly to express himself, broke off like a child that has not words to say what it means.

The smile died from about M. des Graves’ mouth as he saw a painful flush beginning to creep over the horribly thin face. “I understand, my dear boy,” he said gently. “It is difficult to talk, is it not, but you would like to listen. Very well, then, I will tell you; but you must not ask any questions.”

And he told him very simply, dwelling little on the unspeakable orgy of horrors which had made of Nantes a name even more vilely stained than that of Paris, how, after his capture, he had been imprisoned there at Le Bouffay, how day after day those who survived its pestilential conditions had been led out to die, yet his turn never came; how one night the jailor had come to him, had led him, uncomprehending, through many passages, and had thrust him with scarcely a word outside the prison gate, where two men awaited him in a boat; how he had voyaged along the Loire, where the river rolled down the corpses of the drowned by hundreds to the burial that their butchers denied them, and, passed on from village to village, had come at last to the house where Marie-Pierre awaited him. . . . On the necessary heavy bribery of the jailor at Nantes, in which he had had no part, on the strangely complete arrangements outside he laid little stress; had Louis been less weak and dazed he would certainly have wanted to know whose hand had set this mysterious machinery in motion. But he accepted the miracle, as he had been bidden, without comment, and if M. des Graves knew or suspected what power had delivered him from the jaws of death he did not communicate his knowledge. He only told the young man that his deliverance was of none of his own seeking, and ending authoritatively, “There, now you must go to sleep again,” got up and settled the pillow and the bedclothes, and lifted Louis—grown very light now—into a more suitable position for repose.

Thereafter, for Louis, this falling asleep and waking, this unfruitful wish to converse and this contentment with silence, recurred for very many days.