Flower of the Gorse. Tracy Louis
though Madeleine and Barbe were screaming frantically, and the old caretaker's voice cracked with reiteration of the prefect's commands.
Tollemache was soon out of sight round the angle of the tower, and the two Breton girls ran to the other parapet to watch for his reappearance. Not so Yvonne. The dread notion possessed her that she might see Laurence Tollemache dashed to his death on those cruel rocks some sixty feet beneath, and she knew that, once witnessed, the horrific spectacle would never leave her vision. So she waited spellbound in front of the altar, and gazed mutely at some tawdry images that stood there. Could they help, these grotesque caricatures of heavenly beings, carved and gilded wooden blocks with curiously inane eyes and thick lips? Her senses seemed to be atrophied. She was aware of a feeling of dull annoyance when the boy, attracted by the screams and Père Jean's shrill vehemence, came running from his post, and thus would surely miss the second appearance of her father and Mère Pitou. But the young peasant was quick witted. He had seen the "pilgrims" turn and resume the ascent; so he dashed into the belfry, because he could thence obtain a rare view of an event that he had often heard of but never seen, – a man swinging himself round Sainte Barbe's tower by the shepherd's hooks, such being the local name of the series of rings.
So the bell tolled its deep, strong notes, and simultaneously Madeleine and Barbe shrieked in a wilder pitch of frenzy. Tollemache had just swung round the second angle of the tower. His left hand had caught the outermost ring on that side; but the staple yielded, and he vanished.
"Ah, mon Dieu! he has fallen!" cried Barbe, collapsing forthwith in a faint.
Fortunately Madeleine saved her from a nasty tumble on the rough stones; though she herself was nearly distraught with terror. Père Jean raced off down the right-hand flight of steps, moving with remarkable celerity for so old a man, and gasping in his panic:
"Mille diables! What will M'sieu' le Préfet say now?"
Evidently the caretaker feared lest Sainte Barbe's miraculous powers should not survive so severe a test. Yet his faith was justified. A shout was heard from the tower's hidden face.
"Je m'en fiche de ça!" was the cry. "I'm right as a nail. I've got to return the way I came – that's all."
Yvonne listened as one in a dream. She saw her father and Madame Pitou crossing the plateau. For an instant her eyes dwelt on the features of the frightened boy peering through an embrasure in the belfry. From some point beneath came the broken ejaculations of Père Jean, who was craning his neck from some precarious perch on the edge of the precipice to catch a glimpse of the mad American's shattered body. Madeleine was sobbing hysterically over the prostrate Barbe, and endeavoring with nervous fingers to undo the stiff linen coif round the unconscious girl's throat.
Now, after leaving the cottage, Yvonne had looked at the chapel, the entrance to which lay at the foot of the left-hand stairway. The sanctuary had a belfry of its own, a narrow, circular tower, pierced with lancet windows beneath a pointed roof. These windows were almost on a line with and about ten feet distant from the top of the wall of rock left by the excavation that provided a site for the building. Through one of them, which faced the causeway, could be seen a tiny white statue of Sainte Barbe. No more striking position could have been chosen for it. The image was impressive by reason of its very unexpectedness.
Hardly conscious of her action, Yvonne turned to the saint now to invoke her help. She murmured an incoherent prayer, and as she gazed distraught at the Madonna-like figure, so calm, so watchful in its aery, she heard the rhythmic clank of iron as the rings moved in their sockets. One fleeting glance over the left parapet revealed Tollemache in the act of swinging himself to the pair of rings above the rock that gave foothold.
Again he peered down at her, twisting his head awkwardly for the purpose. "Nothing much to it," he laughed, jerking out breathless words. "Of course it was a bit of a twister when that ring came away; but – "
He was safe. Yvonne deigned him no further heed. She hurried to Barbe's side.
"For goodness' sake help me to shake her and slap her hands!" she cried to Madeleine. "Monsieur Tollemache has spoiled the day for us already, and Mère Pitou will be ill if she thinks Barbe is hurt."
Barbe, vigorous little village girl, soon yielded to drastic treatment, and was eager as either of her friends to conceal from her mother the fact that she had fainted.
Tollemache, feeling rather sheepish in face of Yvonne's quiet scorn, strolled to the top of the steps down which Père Jean had scuttled. The old man's voice reached him in despairing appeal.
"M'sieu'! Speak, if you are alive! Speak, pour l'amour de Dieu!"
"Hello there!" he cried. "What's the row about? Here I am!"
Père Jean gazed up with bulging eyes, and himself nearly fell over the precipice. "Ah, Dieu merci!" he quavered. "But, M'sieu', didn't you hear me telling you that the prefect – "
"What's the matter?" broke in Ingersoll's quiet tones. "You all look as if you had seen a daylight ghost."
"I behaved like a vain idiot," explained Tollemache, seeing that none of the girls was minded to answer. "I tried to climb round the tower by those rings, and scared Yvonne and the others rather badly."
"How far did you go?"
"Oh, I was on the last lap; but a ring gave way."
Ingersoll knew the place of old, and needed no elaborate essay on the danger Tollemache had escaped. His grave manner betokened the depth of his annoyance.
"What happened then?" he said. "I went back, of course."
"Where did the ring break?"
"It didn't break. I pulled the staple out. That one – you see where the gap is."
Ingersoll leaned over the parapet. A glance sufficed.
"You crossed the valley face of the tower twice?" he said.
"Couldn't help myself, old sport."
"Then you described yourself with marvelous accuracy, – a vain idiot, indeed!"
"Dash it all!" protested Tollemache. "I've only done the same as scores of Frenchmen."
"Many of whom lost their lives. You had a pretty close call. Lorry, I'm ashamed of you!"
Mère Pitou added to Tollemache's discomfiture by the biting comment that her man had got round the tower, whereas he had failed.
Altogether it was a somewhat depressed party that was shown round the quaint old chapel of the patroness of armorers and artillerists by Père Jean, who had lost a good deal of his smiling bonhomie, and eyed Tollemache fearfully, evidently suspecting him of harboring some fantastic design of dropping from the gallery to the floor, or leaping from the chapel roof to the cliff.
Their spirits revived, however, as they descended a steep path to Sainte Barbe's well. Every chapel of Saint Barbara has, or ought to have, a well, and that at Le Faouet (three syllables, please, and sound the final T when you are in Brittany) is specially famous for its prophetic properties in affairs of the heart. Thus, a spring bubbles into a trough surmounted by a canopy and image of the saint. In the center of the trough, beneath two feet of limpid water, the spring rises through an irregular orifice, roughly four inches square, and all unmarried young people who visit the shrine try to drop pins into the hole. Success at the first effort means that the fortunate aspirant for matrimony will either be married within a year or receive a favorable offer.
So, after luncheon, which had been carried by a boy from the village on the hill opposite the Pilgrims' Way, the girls produced a supply of pins. Barbe was the first to try her luck. Three pins wriggled to the floor of the well; but a fourth disappeared, and Mère Pitou took the omen seriously.
"You will be married when you are twenty-one, ma petite," she said, "and quite soon enough, too. Then your troubles will begin."
Madeleine failed six times, and gave up in a huff. Yvonne's second pin vanished.
"O, là, là!" cried Mère Pitou, still deeply interested in this consultation of the fates. "Mark my words, you'll refuse the first and take the second!"
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