Читать книгу A Fire of Driftwood: A Collection of Short Stories (D. K. Broster) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - D. K. Broster - Страница 6

II

Our Lady of Succour, with the Child in her arms, looked down with the same grave pity on her own untended altar and at the figure lying at the foot of the shallow steps before it. Partly on account of the sanctity of the original Madonna at Guingamp, partly because the chapel was so small, it had escaped iconoclastic attention. On either side of the gracious figure still stood the attendant saints: St. Yves, in his notary’s dress, and Ste. Anne, with the child Virgin at her side – saints dear to Bretons of north and south, of Tréguier and Auray. But no priest served the altar now, and it was seldom that anyone was seen in the little chapel saying the Litany of Our Lady of Succour, as many had once done, with devotion and faith.

Yet the tender and pitying face had been the first to greet Charles de Beaumanoir’s eyes when, after his deep swoon, he opened them to find himself lying at the foot of the altar. The memory of his long night of agony in the barley-field, whither, without any conscious motive, he had dragged himself to die, of the thirst that was worse than the pain, and of the culminating anguish, were blurred in the merciful unconsciousness in which they had ended. His brain was too dulled now to be acutely sensible of suffering, and still less of the presence of others in the body of the church – from which, indeed, the chapel was cut off by its position in a line with the high altar. He was alone in a great silence at the feet of the Mother of God, and he was not uncontent, gazing at her with the fixity of eyes only partly conscious of what they were looking at, until the twilight began to enshroud her.

When dusk had fallen came a surgeon and his assistant, and, after some parley, probed his injured limb and set and dressed it by the light of a couple of lanterns. Before the operation was over the young Royalist had fainted twice; at its beginning he had contrived to express an opinion that it was not worth the trouble of doing, and at its end the surgeon was much of the same advice.

“I would not have done it but for orders,” he muttered as he rose. “Poor devil! Since it is done, could one get some woman of the village to sit up with him to-night?”

“What! With a Chouan!” exclaimed his assistant. “Ma foi! not likely!” And the old surgeon, too busy to waste his time in useless commiseration, gathered up his tools and went.

A little later that evening, happening to meet his Commandant in the street, he was by him borne off to sup at the Maire’s, where that officer was quartered. And Adèle, presiding at her father’s table, found the talk veering round to the subject of the wounded Royalist prisoner.

“Well, if we took only one,” remarked the Commandant with some complacency, “he is at least an officer. By the way, was it not you who captured him, citoyenne? From the description I had from Captain Larive, I think it must have been you.”

“My daughter,” observed the Maire rather pompously, “though a good Republican as any, could not pass by the distress of an injured foe. The female heart, citizen Commandant, is ever thus constituted.”

“And well for us,” returned the soldier, “that it is so. A man might envy the Chouan. Citoyenne Adèle, I drink to Beauty’s charity!” And he lifted his glass with a bow to Adèle, who simpered becomingly, while the surgeon looked at her and had an idea.

He contrived to draw her aside after the meal.

“Citoyenne,” he said abruptly, “could you find it in your heart to do a further act of kindness?”

Adèle, who preferred the Commandant’s conversation, stared at him.

“I am sure I don’t know,” she replied impatiently. “What is it?”

“That poor devil of a Vendéan we picked up in the barley. He hasn’t a soul to look after him, and he needs it badly. I have more than enough of our own men to see to to-night.”

“You want me to go and sit up with him – to nurse him?”

M. Guillon nodded. “If you could manage it.”

“Thank you!” exclaimed the girl indignantly. “I have something better to do than to – – ” She stopped, feeling uncomfortable under his gaze. “Is he very ill?” she asked in a softer tone. “What should I have to do?”

He told her. She balanced the idea for a moment in her mind.

“Oh, I couldn’t!” she said at last, with a little shudder. “I feel quite faint when I think of that leg of his. . . . Perhaps when he is better. . . .”

The surgeon shrugged his shoulders and turned away. “You’ll not be wanted then, my girl,” he growled. “Confound them! They are all alike!”

And so Charles de Beaumanoir went alone through that night, and the next, and the next. It is true that he did not know it, and, indeed, in the midst of delirium many figures swept by him, and one stayed – a figure that in some way was always the same, though sometimes it wore the face of his mother, dead these many years, and sometimes of his betrothed wife, far away in England; and now it was a peasant girl’s; and once there stooped over him, with infinite pity in her eyes, a lady in a faded blue mantle and a tarnished crown.