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This is the story which Sir Percy Blakeney, Bart., told to His Royal highness that evening in the Assembly Rooms at Bath.
The talk was of the recent events in France, the astounding fall
of Robespierre: the change in the whole aspect of the unfortunate
country: and His Royal Highness expressed his opinion that among
all those men who had made and fostered the Revolution, there
was not one who was anything but a scoundrel, a reprobate, a murderer,
and worker of iniquity.
Sir Percy then remarked: "I would not say that, sir. I have
known men-"
"You, Blakeney?" His Royal Highness broke in, with
an incredulous laugh.
"Even I, sir. May I tell you of one, at least, whose career
I happened to follow with great interest?"
And that is how the story came to be told.
"In Heaven's name, what has
happened to the child?"
This exclaimed Marianne Vallon when, turning from her wash-tub,
she suddenly caught sight of André at the narrow garden
gate.
"In Heaven's name!" she reiterated, but only to herself,
for Marianne was not one to give vent to her feelings before anyone,
not even before her own son.
She raised her apron and wiped her large, ruddy face first and
then her big, capable hands, all dripping with soapsuds; after
which she stumped across the yard to the gate: her sabots clacked
loudly against the stones, for Marianne Vallon was a good weight
and a fair bulk; her footsteps were heavy, and her movements slow.
No wonder that the good soul was, inwardly, invoking the name
of Heaven, for never in all his turbulent life had André
come home looking such a terrible object. His shirt and his breeches
were hanging in strips; his feet, his legs, the whole of his body,
and even his face, were plastered with mud and blood. Yes, blood!
Right across his forehead, just missing his right eye, fortunately,
there was a deep gash from which the blood was still oozing and
dripping down his nose. His lip was cut and his mouth swollen
out of all recognition.
"In Heaven's name!" she reiterated once more, and aloud
this time, "thou little good-for-nothing, what mischief hast
thou been in in now?"
Marianne waited for no explanation; obviously the boy was not
in a fit state to give her any. She just seized him by the wrist
and dragged him to her washtub. It was not much Marianne Vallon
knew of nursing or dressing of wounds, but her instinct of cleanliness
probably saved André life this day, as it had done many
a time before. Despite his protests, she stripped him to the skin;
then she started scrubbing.
Soap and water stung horribly, and André yelled as much
with impatience as with pain; he fought like a young demon, but
his mother, puffing like a fat pug dog, imperturbable and energetic,
scrubbed away until she was satisfied that no mud or dirt threatened
the festering of wounds. She ended by holding the tousled young
head under the pump, swilling it and the lithe, muscular body
down with plenty of cold water.
"Now dry thyself over there in the sun," she commanded
finally, satisfied that in his present state of dripping nudity
he couldn't very well get into mischief again. Then, apparently
quite unruffled by the incident, she went back to her washtub.
This sort of thing happened often enough; sometimes with less,
once or twice with even more disastrous results. Marianne Vallon
never asked questions, knowing well enough that the boy would
blurt out the whole story all in good time: she didn't even glance
round at him as he law stretched out full length, arms and legs
outspread, as perfect a specimen of the young male as had ever
stirred a mother's pride, the warm July sun baking his skin to
a deeper shade of brown and glinting on the ruddy gold of the
curls which clustered above his forehead and all around his ears.
"What a beautiful boy!" strangers had been heard to
exclaim when they happened to pass down the road and caught sight
of André Vallon bending to some hard task in garden or
field.
"What a beautiful boy!" more than one mother in the
village had sighed before now, half in tenderness, half in envy.
And "André Vallon is so handsome!" tall girls
not yet out of their teens would whisper, giggling, to one another.
If Marianne Vallon's heart swelled with pride when she overheard
some of this praise, she never showed it. No one really knew what
went on behind that large red face of hers, which some wag in
the village had once compared to a bladder of lard. People called
her hard and unfeeling because she was not wont to indulge in
those "Mon Dieu!"'s and "Sainte Vierge!"'s
when she passed the time of day with her neighbours, or in any
of the "Mon chou"'s and "Mon pigeon"'s
when she spoke to her André.
She just went about her business in and around her cottage, or
at the château when she wanted up there to do the washing,
uncomplaining, untiring, making the most of the meagre pittance
which was all that was left to her now of a once substantial fortune.
Her husband had died a comparatively rich man - measured by village
standards, of course. He had left his widow a roomy cottage, with
its bit of garden and a few hectares of land whereon she could
plant her cabbages, cultivate her vines, keep a few chickens and
graze a cow. But, bit by bit, the land had to be sold in order
to meet the ever growing burden of taxes, of seignorial dues,
to be paid by those who had so little to others who seemed to
have so much, of tithes and rents and rights, all falling on the
shoulders of the poor toilers of the land, while the seigneurs
were exempt from all taxation. Then came two lean years - drought
lasting seven months in each case, resulting in a total failure
of the crops and poor quality of the wine. André was ten
when the last piece of land was sold, which his father had acquired
and his mother tended with the sweat of her brow; he was twelve
when first he saw his mother stooping over her own washtub. Hitherto,
Annette from down the village had come daily to do the rough work
of the household; then one day she didn't come. André took
no notice. It was nothing to him that at dinner-time it was his
mother who brought in the soup tureen, that it was she who carried
away the plates and the knives, and that she disappeared into
the kitchen after dinner instead of sitting in the old wing chair
sipping her glass of wine, the one luxury she had indulged in
of late. Annette or Maman, what cared he who brought him
his dinner? He was just a child.
But when he saw his mother at the washtub with a huge coarse
apron round her portly person, her sleeves tucked up above those
powerful arms, the weight of which he had so often felt on the
rear part of his person when he had been a naughty boy, then he
began to ask questions.
And Marianne told him. He was only twelve at the time, and she
did not mince matters. The sooner he knew, the better. The sooner
he spared her those direct questions and those inquiring looks
out of his great dark eyes, the sooner, she thought, would he
become a fine man. So she told him that the patrimony which his
father had left in trust for him had all dwindled away, bit by
bit, because the tax collector's visits were getting more and
more frequent, the sums demanded more and more beyond her capacity
to pay. There were the imposts due to the seigneur, and the tallage
levied by the King; there were the rates due to the commune, and
the tithes due to the Church.
Pay! Pay! Pay! It was that all the time. And two years' drought,
during which the small revenues from the diminished land had shrunk
only two palpably. Pay! Pay! Pay! And there were the seignorial
rights. No corn or wine or live stock allowed to be sold in the
market until Monseigneur's wine and corn and live stock, which
he wished to sell, had all been disposed of. No wine press or
mill to be used, except those set up by Monseigneur and administered
by his bailiffs, who charged usurious prices for their use. Pay!
Pay! Pay! It was best that André should know. He was twelve
- almost a man. It was time that he knew.
And André had listened while Maman talked on that
cold December afternoon three years ago, when the fire no longer
blazed in the wide-open hearth because wood was scarce and no
one was allowed to purchase any until Monseigneur's requirements
were satisfied. André had listened, with those great inquiring
eyes fixed upon his mother, his fingers buried in the forest of
his chestnut curls, and his brows closely knit in the great endeavour
to take it all in. He wanted to understand; to understand poverty
as his mother explained it to him: the want of flour with which
to make bread, the want of wood wherewith to make a fire, even
the want of a bit of thread or a needle, simple tools with which
his breeches and shirts - which were forever torn - could, as
heretofore, be mended.
Poor? Yes, he was beginning to understand that he and Maman
were now poor as Annette and her father down in the village were
poor, so that Annette had to go and scrub floors in other people's
houses and wash other people's soiled linen so as to bring a few
sous home every day wherewith to buy salt and bread. Not that
this primitive idea of poverty worried the young brain overmuch.
It was not like a sudden descent from affluence to indigence.
It was some time now since his favourite dishes had been put upon
the table and since he had last wore a pair of shoes. The descent
into the present slough of want had been very gradual, and, childlike,
he had not noticed it.
Nor did his mother's lengthened homily make a very deep impression
upon his mind. From a race of children of the soil he had inherited
a sound measure of philosophy and a passionate love of the countryside.
While he could run about in the meadows, or watch the rabbits
at evening scurrying away across the fields, while he could pick
black berries in the hedgerows and gather the windfalls in the
neighbouring orchards, while he could scramble up the old walnut
trees and furtively touch the warm smooth eggs in the nests among
the branches, he was perfectly happy.
What he didn't like was when Marianne set him to do the tasks
which used to devolved on Annette. He didn't like scrubbing the
kitchen floor, and he hated wringing out the linen and hanging
it up to dry. But it never as much entered his dead to disobey.
Mother was not one of those whom anyone had ever though of disobeying,
André least of all. She was large and fat and comfortable,
and - especially in the olden days - she loved a good joke and
would laugh heartily till the tears rolled down her fat cheeks,
but she knew how to use the flat of her hand, as André
had often learned to his cost. She was not one of those who believed
in sparing the rod, and many a time had André gone to sleep
on his narrow plank bed lying on his side because it hurt him
to lie on his back.
But the fear of his mother's heavy hand did not really keep him
out of mischief. As he grew older the desire for mischief grew
up with him. A vague sense of injustice would, moreover, inflame
that desire until it led him to acts which caused not only Mother's
hand to descend upon him, but, also, of a certain hard stick,
which was very painful indeed. That time when he chased Lucile
Godart, the miller's daughter, all down the road and then kissed
her in sigh of Hector Talon, her fiancé, who was short,
fat, and bandy-legged, and was too slow in his movements to come
to her rescue, was a memorable occasion, for, though Hector had
not felt sufficiently valiant to administer punishment to the
young rascal, godar, the miller, had no such qualms. And André
got his punishment twice over, Mother's being by far the more
severe. But he said that it was worth it. To kiss a girl, he declared,
when she is placid and willing was well enough, but when she was
a little spitfire like Lucile and fought and scratched like a
wildcat, then to hold her down, kiss her throat and shoulder and,
finally, her mouth, that was as great a lark as ever came a man's
way - and well worth a whipping, or even two. What Lucile thought
about it he neither knew nor cared.
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