Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. Janet Lewis
of his day. His father watched him quietly. When the boy had finished, his father said,
“That is all you have to say?”
“Yes, my father.”
“Very well. Kneel.”
Martin dropped on his knees, and his father, leaning forward, struck him with the knuckles of his right hand full upon the left side of his jaw. Martin said nothing. Madame Guerre caught her breath but made no outcry. In a moment Martin stood up and went to spit blood into the fire.
“Prayers, my children,” said the father.
The household, upon its knees, with bowed heads, attended to the prayers which the father repeated, and then, dispersing, went off to bed. Several hours later that evening when the house was quiet and only a small gleam of firelight shone through the folds of serge which enclosed their bed, Bertrande said to Martin:
“Are you awake?”
“Certainly. My jaw aches. He has broken me two teeth.”
“It was not just,” she whispered with indignation.
“Certainly it was just. I didn’t ask him if I might go. I was afraid that he might refuse me. But it was well done, was it not, to kill a bear?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied fervently. “Martin, you are brave.”
He said nothing to that, agreeing in his heart, but as he fell asleep, later, his arm rested on her shoulder. She had sided with him against the paternal authority, however just that authority might be. They were two, a camp within a camp. As for Bertrande, to her own surprise she began to understand that Martin belonged to her and that her affection for him was even greater than her respect and admiration for his father.
In the morning Madame Guerre, examining the damage done to her son’s teeth, wept, but did not protest against her husband’s severity.
“You understand, my son, it is necessary,” she said. “If you have no obedience for your father, your son will have none for you, and then what will become of the family? Ruin. Despair.”
“Yes, my mother, I understand,” said Martin.
No one but Bertrande had hinted that the punishment was arbitrary and severe, and nothing further was said by anyone about the matter.
But gradually Bertrande’s affection for her husband became a deep and joyous passion, growing slowly and naturally as her body grew. All about her, life flourished and increased itself, in field, in fold, in the rose-flushed bramble stems of spring before the green leaf unfurled, and in the vine leaves of autumn that lay like fire along the corded branches. She felt this passion within herself like the wine they drank in the early days of spring, light, tart, heady, and having a special fragrance, and her delight illuminated her love like the May sunshine pouring downward into the cupped wine. Early in her twentieth year she gave birth to a son, and her happiness seemed crowned and sanctified beyond anything she had ever dreamed. They called the boy Sanxi. His grandfather, receiving him in his arms a few minutes after his birth, rubbed his lips with garlic and touched them with a few sour drops of the wine of the country, welcoming him as a true Gascon. The boy thrived, and his mother thrived with him, as if they lent each other well-being.
Being the mother of an heir, Bertrande now received from her parents-in-law a new esteem which was manifest in little favors. This filled her with pride and contributed in no small measure to the grace with which she carried her dark head. More than ever she understood her position in the household, part of a structure that reached backward in time towards ancestors of whose renown one was proud and forward to a future in which Sanxi was a young man, in which Sanxi’s children were to grow tall and maintain, as she and Martin now helped to maintain, the prosperity and honor of the family.
Martin had been placed in full charge of certain labors of the farm, and more especially in charge of certain fields. He was responsible to his father for all he did, but the method and the details were in his own hands. It was a part of his progress toward the assumption of the full authority of the farm, which could not come to him until after his father’s death, but for which he must be early prepared.
His situation was moreover curious in this respect; for the extent of his father’s lifetime Martin would remain legally a minor. He might grow old, Sanxi might marry and have sons, but as long as the elder Guerre survived, so long was he absolute head of the house, and such liberty as Martin might enjoy was to be enjoyed only under his father’s rule. This was so well understood together with the necessity for the law, that it never occurred to Martin to suppose it might be otherwise. It was known throughout Languedoc that a father owned the privilege of freeing his son, if he chose, from the parental authority, but this could only be done through a deliberate and formal ceremony; and although there were fathers who sometimes so liberated their sons, if anyone had asked Martin Guerre what he thought of such a procedure, he would almost certainly have replied that he thought ill. All such authority as belonged to the cap d’hostal Martin Guerre wished to retain, however much he might personally suffer for the time being under such authority. After the lapse of years he expected himself to be cap d’hostal, and when that responsibility should rest upon him he would have need of all the accumulated authority of antiquity, even as his father had need of it now.
Martin resembled his father greatly, both physically and in disposition. Bertrande, who sometimes observed his smothered resentment, or impatience at his inferior position, understood both the impatience and the attitude which kept it in control, the acceptance of things as they were, and said quietly to herself:
“In his day he will make a protector for this family as like his own father as two men well may be, and for that thanks to God.”
Outwardly, Martin had the swarthy skin, the high forehead, the gray eyes, the flat, short nose, the lips, the high cleft chin of his father, and something of his father’s build. Too early labor at the plow had rounded his shoulders. Nevertheless he was a skillful swordsman and boxer, agile, tall, and well-developed for his years. “Not a pretty man,” as the servant had said, “but a very distinguished man.” His ugliness was ancestral, and that in itself was good.
People so reasonable, so devoted, so strongly loving and hard working should have been exempt, one feels, from the vagaries of a malicious fate. Nevertheless, the very virtues of their way of life gave rise to a small incident, and from that incident developed the whole train of misfortune which singled out Bertrande de Rols from the peace and obscurity of her tradition.
It was a day in autumn. The vintage was done and the winter wheat was being put in the ground. Since the men were not expected to return to the farm at noon, Bertrande had taken Martin’s lunch to him, and while he ate, she sat beside him on the sun-warmed, roughened earth at the edge of the field. She was bare-footed and bare-headed, the bodice of her gown open a little at the throat because of the noonday heat. The flesh at the edge of the gown was creamy, and the color deepened upward into a warm tan, growing richer and brighter on the rounded cheeks; and at the edge of the hair, in the shadow of the thick dark locks, the creamy color showed again, now moist from the sheltered heat. She watched her husband with tender, happy eyes. Before them, the cultivated ground slanted downward to a hazel copse. They could hear above them the murmur of the stream, reduced from its full summer flow, where it ran under the chestnut trees, before it circled the field, running below them through the copse and on into the narrowing valley. Across the valley and on the higher slopes, the beech and oak woods were tinged with gold and russet, and higher still a blue haze seemed to be gathering, like threads of smoke. Leaf, earth, and wine in the still sunlight gave forth the odors of their substances; the air was full of autumn fragrance. Martin, when he had finished his lunch, wrapped the fragments of bread and cheese and put them in his wallet. He returned the earthen wine jug to the hands of his wife and said:
“I am going away for a little while.”
Bertrande made an exclamation of surprise.
“You may well be astonished,” replied Martin. “This is the way of it. This morning I took from my father’s granary enough seed wheat to plant the half of this field.”
“You