The Battle of the Strong. Gilbert Parker
now,” answered Delagarde.
“Nothing is different at all, of course,” returned d’Avranche carelessly, yet with the slightest touch of condescension, as he held out his hand. Turning to the Chevalier, he said: “Monsieur, I congratulate you on having such a champion”—with a motion towards Ranulph. “And you, monsieur, on your brave protector”—he again saluted the girl at the window above.
“I am the obliged and humble servant of monsieur, and monsieur,” responded the little gentleman, turning from one to the other with a courtly bow, the three-cornered hat under his arm, the right foot forward, the thin fingers making a graceful salutation. “But I—I think—I really think I must go back to prison. I was not formally set free. I was out last night beyond the hour set by the Court. I lost my way, and—”
“Not a bit of it,” d’Avranche interrupted. “The centeniers are too free with their jailing here. I’ll be guarantee for you, monsieur.” He turned to go.
The little man shook his head dubiously. “But, as a point of honour, I really think—”
D’Avranche laughed. “As a point of honour, I think you ought to breakfast. A la bonne heure, monsieur le chevalier!”
He turned again to the cottage window. The girl was still there. The darkness over the sun was withdrawn, and now the clear light began to spread itself abroad. It was like a second dawn after a painful night. It tinged the face of the girl; it burnished the wonderful red-brown hair falling loosely and lightly over her forehead; it gave her beauty a touch of luxuriance. D’Avranche thrilled at the sight of her.
“It’s a beautiful face,” he said to himself as their eyes met and he saluted once more.
Ranulph had seen the glances passing between the two, and he winced. He remembered how, eleven years ago, Philip d’Avranche had saved the girl from death. It galled him that then and now this young gallant should step in and take the game out of his hands—he was sure that himself alone could have mastered this crowd.
“Monsieur—monsieur le chevalier!” the girl called down from the window, “grandpethe says you must breakfast with us. Oh, but come you must, or we shall be offended!” she added, as Champsavoys shook his head in hesitation and glanced towards the prison.
“As a point of honour—” the little man still persisted, lightly touching his breast with the Louis Quinze cane, and taking a step towards the sombre prison archway. But Ranulph interfered, drew him gently inside the cottage, and, standing in the doorway, said to some one within:
“May I come in also, Sieur de Mauprat?”
Above the pleasant welcome of a quavering voice came another, soft and clear, in pure French:
“Thou art always welcome, without asking, as thou knowest, Ro.”
“Then I’ll go and fetch my tool-basket first,” Ranulph said cheerily, his heart beating more quickly, and, turning, he walked across the Place.
CHAPTER VI
The cottage in which Guida lived at the Place du Vier Prison was in jocund contrast to the dungeon from which the Chevalier Orvilliers du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir had complacently issued. Even in the hot summer the prison walls dripped moisture, for the mortar had been made of wet sea-sand, which never dried, and beneath the gloomy tenement of crime a dark stream flowed to the sea. But the walls of the cottage were dry, for, many years before, Guida’s mother had herself seen it built from cellar-rock to the linked initials over the doorway, stone by stone, and every corner of it was as free from damp as the mielles stretching in sandy desolation behind to the Mont es Pendus, where the law had its way with the necks of criminals.
In early childhood Madame Landresse had come with her father into exile from the sunniest valley in the hills of Chambery, where flowers and trees and sunshine had been her life. Here, in the midst of blank and grim stone houses, her heart travelled back to the chateau where she lived before the storm of persecution drove her forth; and she spent her heart and her days in making this cottage, upon the western border of St. Heliers, a delight to the quiet eye.
The people of the island had been good to her and her dead husband during the two short years of their married life, and had caused her to love the land which necessity made her home. Her child was brought up after the fashion of the better class of Jersey children, wore what they wore, ate what they ate, lived as they lived. She spoke the country patois in the daily life, teaching it to Guida at the same time that she taught her pure French and good English, which she herself had learned as a child, and cultivated later here. She had done all in her power to make Guida Jersiaise in instinct and habit, and to beget in her a contented disposition. There could be no future for her daughter outside this little green oasis of exile, she thought. Not that she lacked ambition, but in the circumstances she felt that ambition could yield but one harvest to her child, which was marriage. She herself had married a poor man, a master builder of ships, like Maitre Ranulph Delagarde, but she had been very happy while he lived. Her husband had come of an ancient Jersey family, who were in Normandy before the Conqueror was born; a man of genius almost in his craft, but scarcely a gentleman according to the standard of her father, the distinguished exile and now retired watchmaker. If Guida should chance to be as fortunate as herself, she could ask no more.
She had watched the child anxiously, for the impulses of Guida’s temperament now and then broke forth in indignation as wild as her tears and in tears as wild as her laughter. As the girl grew in health and stature, she tried, tenderly, strenuously, to discipline the sensitive nature, bursting her heart with grief at times because she knew that these high feelings and delicate powers came through a long line of ancestral tendencies, as indestructible as perilous and joyous.
Four things were always apparent in the girl’s character: sympathy with suffering, kindness without partiality, a love of nature, and an intense candour.
Not a stray cat wandering into the Place du Vier Prison but found an asylum in the garden behind the cottage. Not a dog hungry for a bone, stopping at Guida’s door, but was sure of one from a hiding-place in the hawthorn hedge of the garden. Every morning you might have seen the birds in fluttering, chirping groups upon the may-tree or the lilac-bushes, waiting for the tiny snow-storm of bread to fall from her hand. Was he good or bad, ragged or neat, honest or a thief, not a deserting sailor or a homeless lad, halting at the cottage, but was fed from the girl’s private larder behind the straw beehives among the sweet lavender and the gooseberry-bushes. No matter how rough the vagrant, the sincerity and pure impulse of the child seemed to throw round him a sunshine of decency and respect.
The garden behind the house was the girl’s Eden. She had planted upon the hawthorn hedge the crimson monthly rose, the fuchsia, and the jonquil, until at last the cottage was hemmed in by a wall of flowers; and here she was ever as busy as the bees which hung humming on the sweet scabious.
In this corner was a little hut for rabbits; in that, there was a hole dug in the bank for a hedgehog; in the middle a little flower-grown enclosure for cats in various stages of health or convalescence, and a small pond for frogs; and in the midst of all wandered her faithful dog, Biribi by name, as master of the ceremonies.
Madame Landresse’s one ambition had been to live long enough to see her child’s character formed. She knew that her own years were numbered, for month by month she felt her strength going. And yet a beautiful tenacity kept her where she would be until Guida was fifteen years of age. Her great desire had been to live till the girl was eighteen. Then—well, then might she not perhaps leave her to the care of a husband? At best, M. de Mauprat could not live long. He had at last been forced to give up the little watchmaker’s shop in the Vier Marchi, where for so many years, in simple independence, he had wrought, always putting by, from work done after hours, Jersey bank-notes and gold, to give Guida a dot, if not worthy of her, at least a guarantee against reproach when