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Page 18
The girl with the mute, patient face had been the first to catch the
sounds of galloping hoofs. She had from birth been almost speechless,
with a paralysed tongue, but as if to compensate for this, her senses of
touch and hearing were extraordinarily acute. The daughter of the
aubergiste, she knew all who came and went along the road: the sights
and sounds of the road were her interest the life of it was her life.
She had heard in the faint, faint distance the galloping hoofs to the
West: off the great rocks to the West the fleet should first be
sighted: towards the West all one's senses seemed strained, on the alert
for signals of danger, or hope: and at the sound, the heart within
Annette's breast leaped with a sudden certainty of disaster.
Annette had never thought of love and marriage as possible for herself,
but Paul Gignol had gone with the fleet for the first time this summer,
and, for Annette, danger to the fleet meant danger to Paul. Paul and
Annette were kin on her mother's side, and he being an orphan and
adopted by her father, they had been brought up together like brother
and sister. This summer had separated them for the first time, and when
he bade her good-bye and sailed away, Annette felt like an uprooted
piece of heather cast loose on the roadside, and belonging nowhere. And
the first faint sounds of the hoofs on the road had struck on her ear as
a signal from Paul. She made no sign, only stood still with a beating
heart. And when the neighbours saw the dumb girl listening, they too
came out into the road, and heard the galloping, now growing more and
more distinct; and waited for the rider to appear on the ridge of the
hill, which, some half mile off, raised its purple outline against the
western sky.
They came out when they saw the dumb girl listening: for the keenness of
the perceptions with which her fragile body was endowed, was well known
among them, and was attributed to the direct agency of the unseen
powers; with whom indeed she had been acknowledged from her birth to
have closer relations than is the lot of ordinary mortals. For there
could be no doubt that Annette's mother had received an intimation of
some sort from the other world, the night before her child was born. She
had been found lying senseless in the moonlight on the hill-top, and had
never spoken from that hour till her death a week afterwards. As to what
she had met or seen, there were various rumours: some of the shrewder
gossips declaring that it was nothing but old Marie Gourdon, the
sorceress, who had frightened her by predicting in her mysterious
wisdom, which not the shrewdest of them dared altogether disregard, that
some strange calamity would attend the life of the child she was about
to bring forth; a child that had indeed turned out speechless, and of so
sickly a constitution that from year to year one hardly expected her to
live. Moreover, was it not the ill-omened figure of the old witch-woman,
that had hobbled into the auberge with the news that Christine Leroux
was lying like one dead by the roadside? On the other hand, however, it
was asserted with equal assurance, that she had seen in the moonlight,
with her own eyes, the evil spirit of the dunes: him of whom all
travellers by night must beware; for it was his pleasure to delude them
by showing lights as if of cottage windows on the waste land, where no
cottage was: while twice within living memory, he had kindled false
fires on the great rock out at sea, which they called Le G�ant, luring
mariners to their death: and woe betide the solitary wayfarer whose path
he crossed!
Annette's father knew what his wife had seen: and one winter evening
beside the peat-fire, as Annette was busy with her distaff, and he sat
smoking and watching the glowing embers, he told her her mother's story.
She and Paul's father, the elder Paul Gignol, had been betrothed in
their youth; but his fishing-smack had struck on the rocks one foggy
night, and gone down, and with it all his worldly wealth. And
Christine's father had broken off the match; for he had never been
favourable to it, and how was Paul to keep her now with nothing to look
to, but what might be picked up in the harbour? And Paul was like one
mad, and threatened to do her a bodily mischief, so that she was afraid
to walk out at night by herself: and her father offered him money to go
away: and he refused the money: but he went off at last, hiring himself
out on a cargo-boat, and declaring as he went, that one day yet, he
would meet Christine in the way, and have his revenge. And he was abroad
for years, and wedded some English woman in one of the British sea-port
towns, and at last was lost at sea on the very night on which Annette
was born.
"And his spirit it was, Annette, that appeared to your mother in the
road that night, the very hour that he died. For it was borne in on me
that he had met her in the way, as he had said, and I asked her, as she
lay a-dying, if it was Paul that she had seen; and she looked at me with
eyes that spoke as plain as the speech that she had lost: and said that
it was he."
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