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Page 8
In the confused clamour of harsh Breton speech that arose, as neighbours
rushed to separate the two and friends took one side or the other,
Antoine strode away with a brain on fire and a mind intent on one
object--to prove the lie at once.
To go to the Valley of Dwarfs in order to spy on Marie and Geoffroi was
impossible to him. But he marched straight off to Marie's cottage. He
knew she would deny the charge, and her word was as good as the Blessed
Gospel: but he longed to hear the denial from her lips. He pictured her
as she would look when she spoke: the hurt, innocent expression of her
candid eyes: her rosy cheeks flushing a deeper red under her demure
snow-white cap: her child-like lips uttering earnest and indignant
protestation. When he reached the cottage, he found the door locked; no
one was about; he leaned his elbows on the low, stone wall in front and
waited.
Presently clattering sabots were heard coming down the road, and he
perceived old Jeanne Le Gall trudging along, her back nearly bent double
under a large bundle of dried sea-weed. She and her goat lived in the
low, rubble-built hovel, that adjoined the Pierr�s' cottage, and from
her lonely, eccentric habits, and uncanny appearance, she had the
reputation of being a sorceress. Antoine called to her to know where
Marie was.
"Gone to the widow Conan's," mumbled the old woman, her strange eyes
gleaming under the sprays of sea-weed, "she and her father and mother,
all of them."
She deposited her load, and hobbled off again, fixing her eyes on
Antoine as she turned away, but saying nothing more.
Antoine strolled a little down the lane, seated himself on the steps of
the cross at the corner, and waited--evening was drawing on and they
were sure to return before dark.
Presently the cluck, cluck of the sabots was heard again, and old Jeanne
slowly approached him from behind. She said something in her toothless,
mumbling way, and held out a crumpled bit of paper in her shaking hand.
He opened it and read, scrawled as if in haste, in ill-spelt Breton:
"I go to a baptism at St. Jean-du-Pied, and cannot return before
sun-down. Meet me at the cross on the hill-side at six o'clock, as I
fear to pass through the valley alone in the dark. Marie."
As he studied the writing, the old woman's mumblings became more
articulate. She was saying, "'Twas the child Conan should have brought
it an hour ago. But he is ever good-for-nothing, and forgot it."
Antoine looked at the sun, which was already westering, and perceived
that he must set out to meet Marie in half-an-hour. He got up and walked
slowly towards the sandy shore of the little inlet, wide and wet at low
tide, on the other side of which lay his own home. He walked slowly, but
he felt as if he were hurrying at a headlong pace. The thought kept
going round and round in his brain like a little torturing wheel, which
nothing would stop, that after all Marie _was_ going to the Dwarf's
Valley this evening, just as Geoffroi had said. Geoffroi's words were
still sounding in his ears, and his right hand was clenched, as he had
clenched it when the whirlwind of anger first convulsed him.
He entered his own cottage, hardly knowing what he did.
Old Aim�e was bending over the cauldron, cutting up cabbage for the
soup.
"Good-bye, Grandmother," he said. "I am going to the Dwarf's Valley."
Aim�e looked up at him out of her keen old eyes.
"And why are you going there in the dark?" she said, "'Tis an evil
meeting place after the sun has set."
"Why do you say meeting place, Grandmother Whom do you think I am going
to meet there?"
"The blessed Saints protect you," she replied, "less you should meet
Whom you would not."
Antoine strode out again, without saying more. He fancied he was in the
Valley of Dwarfs already, about to meet Marie. He saw the weird, gnarled
trunks of trees on either hand, that grew among--sometimes writhed
around--the huge fantastic boulders: the dark cave-like recesses, formed
strangely between and under them where the dwarfs lay hidden to emerge
at dusk: the sides of the ravine towering up stern and gloomy on either
hand: and high above all against the sky, the grey stone cross at which
he was to meet Marie. He saw it all as if he were there, and the ground
beneath him, as he tramped on, seemed unreal. Twilight was already
falling over the rocks and the grey sea: there were no lights in the
village, except such as shone here and there in a cottage window: the
distant roar of the sea was heard, as it dashed over a long line of
rocks two or three miles out, but there was hardly any other sound: the
place indeed seemed God-abandoned, like some long-forgotten strand of a
dead world, with the skeleton house on the rock above for its forsaken
citadel.
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