MARIANNE
Monsieur le Cure slid the
long chair up to my fire, bent his straight, black
body forward, and rubbing his chilled hands briskly
before the blazing logs, announced with a smile of
content:
“Marianne is out of jail.”
“Sacristi!” I exclaimed,
“and in mid-winter! It must be cold enough
in that hut of hers by the marsh poor old
girl.”
“And not a sou to be earned fishing,”
added the cure.
“Tell me about this last crime of hers,”
I asked.
Monsieur le Cure’s face
grew serious, then again the smile of content spread
to the corners of his firm mouth.
“Oh! Nothing very gruesome,”
he confessed, then after a moment’s silence
he continued slowly: “Her children needed
shoes and warm things for the winter. Marianne
stole sixty metres of nets from the fishing
crew at ’The Three Wolves’ she
is hopeless, my friend.” With a vibrant
gesture he straightened up in his chair and flashed
his keen eyes to mine. “For ten years I
have tried to reform her,” he declared.
“Bah!” and he tossed the stump
of his cigarette into the blaze.
“You nursed her once through
the smallpox,” said I, “when no one dared
go near her. The mayor told me so. I should
think that would have long ago persuaded her
to do something for you in return.”
“We go where we are needed,”
he replied simply. “She will promise me
nothing. One might as well try to make a faithful
parishioner of a gipsy as to change Marianne for the
better.” He brought his fist down sharply
on the broad arm of his chair. “I tell you,”
he went on tensely, “Marianne is a woman of
no morals and no religion a woman who allows
no one to dictate to her save a gendarme with a warrant
of arrest. Hardly a winter passes but she goes
to jail. She is a confirmed thief, a bad subject,”
he went on vibrantly. “She can drink as
no three sailors can drink and yet you
know as well as I do,” he added, lowering his
voice, “that there is not a mother in Pont du
Sable who is as good to her children as Marianne.”
“They are a brave little brood,”
I replied. “I have heard that the eldest
boy and girl Marianne adopted, yet they resemble their
mother, with their fair curly hair and blue eyes,
as much as do the youngest boys and the little girl.”
“Marianne has had many lovers,”
returned the cure gravely. “There is not
one of that brood of hers that has yet been baptized.”
An expression of pain crossed his face. “I
have tried hard; Marianne is impossible.”
“Yet you admit she has her qualities.”
“Yes, good qualities,”
he confessed, filling a fresh cigarette paper full
of tobacco. “Good qualities,” he reiterated.
“She has brought up her children to be honest
and she keeps them clean. She has never stolen
from her own village it is a point of honour
with her. Ah! you do not know Marianne as I know
her.”
“It seems to me you are growing
enthusiastic over our worst vagabond,” I laughed.
“I am,” replied the cure
frankly. “I believe in her; she is afraid
of nothing. You see her as a vagabond an
outcast, and the next instant, Parbleu! she
forces out of you your camaraderie even
your respect. You shake her by the hand, that
straight old hag with her clear blue eyes, her square
jaw and her hard face! She who walks with the
stride of a man, who is as supple and strong as a
sailor, and who looks you squarely in the eye and
studies you calmly, at times disdainfully even
when drunk.”
It was late when Monsieur le
Cure left me alone by my fire. I cannot say
“alone,” for the Essence of Selfishness,
was purring on my chest.
In this old normand house of
mine by the marsh, there comes a silence at this hour
which is exhilarating. Out of these winter midnights
come strange sounds, whirring flights of sea-fowl
whistle over my roof, in late for a lodging on the
marsh. A heavy peasant’s cart goes by,
groaning in agony under the brake. When the wind
is from the sea, it is like a bevy of witches shrilling
my doom down the chimney. “Aye, aye, ’tis
he,” they seem to scream, “the stranger the
s-t-r-a-n-g-e-r.” One’s mind is alert
at this hour one must be brave in a foreign
land.
And so I sat up late, smoking a black
pipe that gurgled in unison with the purring on my
chest while I thought seriously of Marianne.
I had seen her go laughing to jail
two months ago, handcuffed to a gendarme on the back
seat of the last car of the toy train. It was
an occasion when every one in the lost village came
charitably out to have a look. I remembered,
too, she sat there as garrulous as if she were starting
on a holiday a few of her old cronies crowded
about her. One by one, her children gave their
mother a parting hug there were no tears and
the gendarme sat beside her with a stolid dignity befitting
his duty to the Republique. Then the whistle
tooted twice a coughing puff of steam in
the crisp sunlight, a wheeze of wheels, and the toy
train rumbled slowly out of the village with its prisoner.
Marianne nodded and laughed back at the waving group.
“Bon voyage!” croaked
a little old woman, lifting her claw. She had
borrowed five francs from the prisoner.
“Au revoir!” laughed
back Marianne, but the words were faint, for the last
car was snaking around the bend.
Thus Marianne went to jail. Now
that she is back, she takes her return as carelessly
and unblushingly as a demi-mondaine does her
annual return from Dinard.
When Marianne was eighteen, they tell
me, she was the prettiest girl in Pont du Sable, that
is to say, she was prettier than Emilienne Daget at
Bar la Rose, or than Berthe Pavoisier, the daughter
of the miller at Tocqueville, who is now in Paris.
At eighteen, Marianne was slim and blonde; moreover,
she was as bold as a hawk, and smiled as easily as
she lied. At twenty, she was rated as a valuable
member of any fishing crew that put out from the coast,
for they found her capable during a catch, and steady
in danger, always doing her share and a little more
for those who could not help themselves. She is
still doing it, for in her stone hut on the edge of
the marsh that serves as shelter for her children
and her rough old self, she has been charitable and
given a winter’s lodging to three old wrecks
of the sea. There are no beds, but there are
bunks filled with marsh-hay; there is no furniture,
but there are a few pots and pans, and in one corner
of the dirt floor, a crackling fire of drift wood,
and nearly always enough applejack for all, and now
and then hot soup. Marianne wrenches these luxuries,
so to speak, out of the sea, often alone and single-handed,
working as hard as a gull to feed her young.
The cure was right; Marianne had her
good qualities I was almost beginning to
wonder to myself as I pulled drowsily at the black
pipe if her good qualities did not outweigh her bad
ones, when the Essence of Selfishness awakened and
yawned. And so it was high time to send this
spoiled child of mine to bed.
Marianne called her “ma belle
petite,” though her real name was Yvonne Yvonne
Louise Tourneveau.
Yvonne kept her black eyes from early
dawn until dark upon a dozen of the Pere Bourron’s
cows in her charge, who grazed on a long point of the
marsh, lush with salt grass, that lay sheltered back
of the dunes fronting the open sea.
Now and then, when a cow strayed over
the dunes on to the hard beach beyond to gaze stupidly
at the breakers, the little girl’s voice would
become as authoritative as a boy’s. “Eh
ben, tu saïs!” she would shout as she ran
to head the straggler off, adding some sound whacks
with a stick until the cow decided to lumber back
to the rest. “Ah maïs!” Yvonne
would sigh as she seated herself again in the wire-grass,
tucking her firm bronzed legs under a patched skirt
that had once served as a winter petticoat for the
Mere Bourron.
Occasionally a trudging coast guard
or a lone hunter in passing would call “Bonjour!”
to her, and since she was pretty, this child of fifteen,
they would sometimes hail her with “Ca va,
ma petite!” and Yvonne would flush and reply
bravely, “Mais oui, M’sieur, merci.”
Since she was only a little girl with
hair as black as a gipsy’s, a ruddy olive skin,
fresh young lips and a well-knit, compact body, hardened
by constant exposure to the sea air and sun, no one
bothered their heads much about her name. She
was only a child who smiled when the passerby would
give her a chance, which was seldom, and when she
did, she disclosed teeth as white as the tiny shells
on the beach. There were whole days on the marsh
when she saw no one.
At noon, when the cracked bell in
the distant belfry of the gray church of Pont du Sable
sent its discordant note quavering across the marsh,
Yvonne drew forth a sailor’s knife from where
it lay tucked safe within the breast of her coarse
chemise, and untying a square of blue cotton cloth,
cut in two her portion of peasant bread, saving half
the bread and half a bottle of Pere Bourron’s
thinnest cider for the late afternoon.
There were days, too, when Marianne
coming up from the sea with her nets, stopped to rest
beside the child and talk. Yvonne having no mother
which she could remember, Marianne had become a sort
of transient mother to her, whom the incoming tide
sometimes brought her and whom she would wait for
with uncertain expectancy, often for days.
One afternoon, early in the spring,
when the cows were feeding in the scant slanting shade
of the dunes, Yvonne fell asleep. She lay out
straight upon her back, her brown legs crossed, one
wrist over her eyes. She slept so soundly that
neither the breeze that had sprung up from the northeast,
stirring with every fresh puff the stray locks about
her small ears, or the sharp barking of a dog hunting
rabbits for himself over the dunes, awakened her.
Suddenly she became conscious of being grasped in
a pair of strong arms, and, awakening with a little
scream, looked up into the grinning face of Marianne,
who straightway gave her a big, motherly hug until
she was quite awake and then kissed her soundly on
both cheeks, until Yvonne laughed over her fright.
“Oh, mon Dieu! but I
was frightened,” sighed the child, and sat up
straight, smoothing back her tumbled hair. “Oh!
la! la!” she gasped.
“They are beauties, hein!”
exclaimed Marianne, nodding to an oozing basketful
of mackerel; then, kneeling by the basket, she plunged
her red hands under the slimy, glittering mass of
fish, lifting and dropping them that the child might
see the average size in the catch.
“Eh ben!” declared
Marianne, “some day when thou art bigger, ma
petite, I’ll take thee where thou canst make
some silver. There’s half a louis’
worth there if there’s a sou!” There was
a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes, as she bent over
her basket again, dressed as she was in a pair of
fisherman’s trousers cut off at the knees.
“One can play the lady on half
a louis,” she continued, covering her fish
from the sun with her bundle of nets. “My
man shall have a full bottle of the best to-night,”
she added, wiping her wet hands across her strong
bare knees.
“How much ‘cake’
does that old crab of a Bourron pay thee?” she
inquired, turning again to the child.
“Six sous a day, and
then my food and lodging,” confessed Yvonne.
“He won’t ruin himself,” muttered
Marianne.
“They say the girl at the Three
Wolves gets ten,” added the child with awe,
“but thou knowest how she must do
the washing besides.”
Marianne’s square jaw shut hard.
She glanced at Yvonne’s patched skirt, the one
that had been the Mere Bourron’s winter petticoat,
feeling its quality as critically as a fashionable
dressmaker.
“Sacristi!” she
exclaimed, examining a rent, “there’s one
door that the little north wind won’t knock
twice at before he enters. Keep still, ma
petite, I’ve got thread and a needle.”
She drew from her trousers’
pocket a leather wallet in which lay four two-sous
pieces, an iron key and a sail needle driven through
a ball of linen thread. “It is easily seen
thou art not in love,” laughed Marianne, as
she cross-stitched the tear. “Thou wilt
pay ten sous for a ribbon gladly some day when
thou art in love.”
The child was silent while she sewed.
Presently she asked timidly, “One eats well
there?”
“Where?”
But thou knowest there.”
“In the prison?”
“Mais oui,” whispered Yvonne.
“Of course,” growled Marianne,
“one eats well; it is perfect. Tiens!
we have the good soup, that is well understood; and
now and then meat and rice.”
“Oh!” exclaimed the child in awe.
“Mais oui,” assured Marianne with
a nod, “and prunes.”
“Where is that, the prison?” ventured
the child.
“It is very far,” returned
Marianne, biting off the thread, “and it is
not for every one either,” she added with a touch
of pride “only I happen to be an
old friend and know the judge.”
“And how much does it cost a day, the prison?”
asked Yvonne.
“Not that,” replied
Marianne, snipping her single front tooth knowingly
with the tip of her nail.
“Mon Dieu! and they give
you all that for nothing?” exclaimed the child
in astonishment. “It is chic, that,
hein!” and she nodded her pretty head
with decision, “Ah maïs oui, alors!”
she laughed.
“I must be going,” said
Marianne, abruptly. “My young ones will
be wanting their soup.” She flattened her
back against her heavy basket, slipped the straps
under her armpits and rose to her feet, the child
passing the bundle of nets to her and helping her shoulder
them to the proper balance.
“Au revoir, ma belle petite,”
she said, bending to kiss the girl’s cheek;
then with her free hand she dove into her trousers’
pocket and drew out a two-sous piece. “Tiens,”
she exclaimed, pressing the copper into the child’s
hand.
Yvonne gave a little sigh of delight.
It was not often she had two sous all to herself
to do what she pleased with, which doubles the delight
of possession. Besides, the Mere Bourron kept
her wages or rather, count of them, which
was cheaper on the back page of a greasy
book wherein were registered the births of calves.
“Au revoir,” reiterated
Marianne, and turned on her way to the village down
the trail that wound through the salt grass out to
the road skirting the bay. Yvonne watched her
until she finally disappeared through a cut in the
dunes that led to the main road.
The marsh lay in the twilight, the
curlews were passing overhead bound for a distant
mud flat for the night. “Courli! Courli!”
they called, the old birds with a rasp, the young
ones cheerfully; as one says “bonsoir.”
The cows, conscious of the fast-approaching dark, were
moving toward the child. She stood still until
they had passed her, then drove them slowly back to
the Pere Bourron’s, her two-sous piece
clutched safe in her hand.
It was dark when she let down the
bars of the orchard, leading into the farm-yard.
Here the air was moist and heavy with the pungent odour
of manure; a turkey gobbler and four timid hens roosting
in a low apple tree, stirred uneasily as the cows
passed beneath them to their stable next to the kitchen a
stable with a long stone manger and walls two feet
thick. Above the stable was a loft covered by
a thatched roof; it was in a corner of this loft,
in a large box filled with straw and provided with
a patchwork-quilt, that Yvonne slept.
A light from the kitchen window streamed
across the muddy court. The Pere and Mere Bourron
were already at supper. The child bolted the
stable door upon her herd and slipped into her place
at table with a timid “Bonsoir, m’sieur,
madame,” to her masters, which was acknowledged
by a grunt from the Pere Bourron and a spasm of coughing
from his spouse.
The Mere Bourron, who had the dullish
round eye of a pig that gleamed suspiciously when
she became inquisitive, had supped well. Now and
then she squinted over her fat jowls veined with purple,
plying her mate with short, savage questions, for
he had sold cattle that day at the market at Bonville.
Such evenings as these were always quarrelsome between
the two, and as the little girl did not count any
more than the chair she sat in, they argued openly
over the day’s sale. The best steer had
brought less than the Mere Bourron had believed, a
shrewd possibility, even after a month’s bargaining.
When both had wiped their plates clean with bread for
nothing went to waste there the child got
up and brought the black coffee and the decanter of
applejack. They at last ceased to argue, since
the Mere Bourron had had the final word. Pere
Bourron sat with closed fists, opening one now and
then to strengthen his coffee with applejack.
Being a short, thickset man, he generally sat in his
blouse after he had eaten, with his elbows on the table
and his rough bullet-like head, with its crop of unkempt
hair, buried in his hands.
When Yvonne had finished her soup,
and eaten all her bread, she rose and with another
timid “Bonsoir” slipped away to
bed.
“Leave the brindle heifer tied!”
shrilled madame as the child reached the courtyard.
“Mais, oui madame, it
is done,” answered Yvonne, and crept into her
box beneath the thatch.
At sixteen Yvonne was still guarding
the cows for the Bourrons. At seventeen she fell
in love.
He was a slick, slim youth named Jean,
with a soapy blond lock plastered under the visor
of his leather cap pulled down to his red ears.
On fête days, he wore in addition a scarlet neck-tie
girdling his scrawny throat. He had watched Yvonne
for a long time, very much as the snake in the fable
saved the young dove until it was grown.
And so, Yvonne grew to dreaming while
the cows strayed. Once the Pere Bourron struck
at her with a spade for her negligence, but missed.
Another night he beat her soundly for letting a cow
get stalled in the mud. The days on the marsh
now became interminable, for he worked for Gavelle,
the carpenter, a good three kilometres back
of Pont du Sable and the two could see each other
only on fête days when he met her secretly among the
dunes or in the evenings near the farm. He would
wait for her then at the edge of the woods skirting
the misty sea of pasture that spread out below the
farm like some vast and silent dry lake, dotted here
and there with groups of sleeping cattle.
She saw Marianne but seldom now, for
the latter fished mostly at the Three Wolves, sharing
her catch with a crew of eight fishermen. Often
they would seine the edge of the coast, their boat
dancing off beyond the breakers while they netted
the shallow water, swishing up the hard beach these
gamblers of the sea. They worked with skill and
precision, each one having his share to do, while
one the quickest was appointed
to carry their bundle of dry clothes rolled in a tarpaulin.
Marianne seemed of casual importance
to her now. We seldom think of our best friends
in time of love. Yvonne cried for his kisses which
at first she did not wholly understand, but which
she grew to hunger for, just as when she was little
she craved for all she wanted to eat for once and
candy.
She began to think of herself, too of
Jean’s scarlet cravat of his new
shoes too tight for him, which he wore with the pride
of a village dandy on fête days and Sundays and
of her own patched and pitifully scanty wardrobe.
“She has nothing, that little
one,” she had heard the gossips remark openly
before her, time and time again, when she was a child.
Now that she was budding into womanhood and was physically
twice as strong as Jean, now that she was conscious
of herself, she began to know the pangs of
vanity.
It was about this time that she bought
the ribbon, just as Marianne had foretold, a red ribbon
to match Jean’s tie, and which she fashioned
into a bow and kept in a paper box, well hidden in
the straw of her bed. The patched skirt had long
ago grown too short, and was now stuffed into a broken
window beyond the cow manger to temper the draught
from the neck of a sick bull.
She wore now, when it stormed, thick
woollen stockings and sabots; and another skirt
of the Mere Bourron’s fastened around a chemise
of coarse homespun linen, its colour faded to a delicious
pale mazarine blue, showing the strength and fullness
of her body.
She had stolen down from the loft
this night to meet him at the edge of the woods.
“Where is he?” were his
first words as he sought her lips in the dark.
“He has gone,” she whispered, when her
lips were free.
“Where?”
“Eh ben, he went away with the Pere Detour to the village madame
is asleep.”
“Ah, good!” said he.
“Mon Dieu! but you are
warm,” she whispered, pressing her cheek against
his own.
“I ran,” he drawled, “the
patron kept me late. There is plenty of work
there now.”
He put his arm around her and the
two walked deeper into the wood, he holding her heavy
moist hand idly in his own. Presently the moon
came out, sailing high among the scudding clouds,
flashing bright in the clear intervals. A white
mist had settled low over the pasture below them,
and the cattle were beginning to move restlessly under
the chill blanket, changing again and again their
places for the night. A bull bellowed with all
his might from beyond the mysterious distance.
He had evidently scented them, for presently he emerged
from the mist and moved along the edge of the woods,
protected by a deep ditch. He stopped when he
was abreast of them to bellow again, then kept slowly
on past them. They had seated themselves in the
moonlight among the stumps of some freshly cut poplars.
“Dis donc, what is the
matter?” he asked at length, noticing her unusual
silence, for she generally prattled on, telling him
of the uneventful hours of her days.
“Nothing,” she returned evasively.
“Mais si; bon Dieu! there is something.”
She placed her hands on her trembling knees.
“No, I swear there is nothing, Jean,”
she said faintly.
But he insisted.
“One earns so little,”
she confessed at length. “Ten sous
a day, it is not much, and the days are so long on
the marsh. If I knew how to cook I’d try
and get a place like Emilienne.”
“Bah!” said he, “you
are crazy one must study to cook; besides,
you are not yet eighteen, the Pere Bourron has yet
the right to you for a year.”
“That is true,” confessed
the girl simply; “one has not much chance when
one is an orphan. Listen, Jean.”
“What?”
“Listen is it true that thou dost
love me?”
“Surely,” he replied with an easy laugh.
“Listen,” she repeated
timidly; “if thou shouldst get steady work I
should be content ... to be...” But her
voice became inaudible.
“Allons!... what?” he demanded
irritably.
“To ... to be married,” she whispered.
He started. “Eh ben! en voila an idea!”
he exclaimed.
Forgive me, Jean, I have always had that idea ” She dried
her eyes on the back of her hand and tried hard to
smile. “It is foolish, eh? The marriage
costs so dear ... but if thou shouldst get steady work...”
“Eh ben!” he answered
slowly with his Normand shrewdness, “I don’t
say no.”
“I’ll help thee, Jean;
I can work hard when I am free. One wins forty
sous a day by washing, and then there is the harvest.”
There was a certain stubborn conviction
in her words which worried him.
“Eh ben!” he said
at length, “we might get married that’s
so.”
She caught her breath.
“Swear it, Jean, that thou wilt marry me, swear
it upon Sainte Marie.”
“Eh voila, it’s done. Oui,
by Sainte Marie!”
She threw her arms about him, crushing him against
her breast.
“Dieu! but thou art strong,” he
whispered.
“Did I hurt thee?”
“No thou art content now?”
“Yes I am content,” she sobbed,
“I am content, I am content.”
He had slipped to the ground beside
her. She drew his head back in her lap, her hand
pressed hard against his forehead.
“Dieu! but I am content,” she breathed
in his ear.
He felt her warm tears dropping fast upon his cheek.
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 glass, 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 passed, 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, washing the heavy coarse 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
fête 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 scrap 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 wishing 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 fishing-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 shell 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 shell
and grass. 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 shell and
listened again. The woman was choking not ten
yards ahead of her, almost within reach of a thin point
of matted grass 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 grass.
It held them both. Then she lifted her bodily
in her arms, swung her on her back and ran splashing
knee-deep in water to solid ground.
“Sacre bon Dieu!”
she sobbed as she staggered with her burden. “C’est
ma belle petite!”
For weeks Yvonne lay in the hut of
the worst vagabond of Pont du Sable. So did a
mite of humanity with black eyes who cried and laughed
when he pleased. And Marianne fished for them
both, alone and single-handed, wrenching time and
time again comforts from the sea, for she would allow
no one to go near them, not even such old friends as
Monsieur le Cure and myself that old
hag, with her clear blue eyes, who walks with the
stride of a man, and who looks at you squarely, at
times disdainfully even when drunk.