Читать книгу The House of Adventure - Warwick Deeping - Страница 10

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The cellar of the Café de la Victoire was so snug and warm and Brent so healthily tired after his first long day in Beaucourt that he slept till nine o’clock, twelve sound wholesome hours.

Someone was moving about overhead in the kitchen. A box was overturned, and the clatter woke Brent. He sat up and listened to a sound that was surprising and singular because of its unexpectedness, an unexpectedness that was not without pathos. Brent sat very still, cursing the wire bed because it creaked even when he breathed and creaked most self-assertively. He could hear a woman weeping up above there, weeping her heart out with a passion that broke into little exclamations of anguish and despair: “O my little house!—what a tragedy!—What a ruin! Nothing left, not even a door.”

And Brent understood that Manon Latour had returned. His first sensation was one of puzzled discomfort. He did not know whether to climb the steps and add the embarrassment of an explanation to the tumult of her emotion, or whether he should lie hidden until she had recovered her self-control. Yet it seemed rather a negative piece of poltroonery for him to sit there in the cellar listening to the sound of her weeping. There was a nakedness about her grief that embarrassed Brent. Manon thought herself alone; she had thrown herself upon the bosom of Beaucourt’s solitude, and Brent felt like some Peeping Tom spying upon her nakedness.

In the end he did what the plain man and soldier in him wanted to do. Too much psychology might ruin any love affair; in life it is the emotions that matter. Brent went up the stone steps in his socked feet, walked along the short passage, and stood in the kitchen doorway, looking at Manon Latour.

She was sitting on a box, her hands covering her face as though she were praying, a little figure in black, a figure that was still tremulous with emotion. A bag lay on the floor beside the box. Brent noticed her muddy shoes, her black hat and cloak hung on a nail, and the pretty way her dark hair was wound like a wreath about her head. She had a mass of hair, lustrous as the surface of a freshly broken piece of coal, and its blackness contrasted with the characteristic pallor of her face and throat. Brent’s recollection of a year ago had left him the memory of a brave and very determined little woman with bright, dark eyes, a little woman who had faced him with a sang-froid that had impressed a man who had learnt to respect one thing and one thing only—courage. And now he saw her in tears over this wreck of a house, and her tears touched Brent’s heart. He had a feeling that these were not the tears of a woman who wept easily like an April sky. She was shocked, overwhelmed, discouraged.

“Madame!”

Her hands dropped from her face. She looked at Brent with eyes that accepted him as a Frenchman who had happened to wander in, another homeless soul lost in the ruins of Beaucourt.

“Good day, monsieur. It is a pleasant home-coming, is it not?—Perhaps one expects too much!”

She gave a little twitch of the shoulders.

“It appears that I have no chair to offer a visitor. My café has plenty of fresh air, but no furniture.”

Brent had felt instantly that the house was hers, and that he had no right to be in it; his sense of ownership vanished; the cellar had ceased to be his billet. He stood with one shoulder resting against the wall, considering the situation, while Manon was trying to remember him as some neighbour whose face had been part of the familiar life of Beaucourt. She saw a man in velveteen breeches and a black coat, with a dark blue scarf knotted round his neck, a man with a ruddy and rather delicate skin, a short brown beard, and a small moustache. His eyes were of that soft but intense blue that belonged to the north and the open air; intelligent eyes set well apart under a square forehead. He had a good-tempered, easy mouth. It was the face of an incomplex man, whimsical, a little sad. There was nothing distinctive about him, he was like thousands of other men, neither tall nor short, a very ordinary person, save perhaps for his eyes. They were a little unusual—less stupid and self-absorbed than the eyes of most men. There was something in them that appealed to the woman.

Manon did not recognize Brent.

“I am trying to remember you, monsieur.”

“I do not belong to Beaucourt.”

She noticed that he was without boots, and again she was puzzled, for his socks were clean. Either he had been in the house all the while, or he had left his boots on the doorstep. Brent saw that she was looking at his feet, and that she was puzzled.

“I spent the night in your cellar, madame, and my boots are down there.”

“How droll! I seem to have seen you before.”

“It was about a year ago.”

She was interested, challenged.

“Was it here?”

“Yes, here in Beaucourt.”

And then he put his head back and smiled.

“It is still there; the ground has not been touched.”

She stared. Her eyes changed from a deep brown to black; her face grew more serious, and seemed to show little shadow-marks under the eyes and about the mouth. She stood up, came a step nearer, and looked Brent straight in the face.

“Of what do you speak?”

“The treasure that you buried in the garden.”

He saw her face as a hard, white surface, and her eyes as two hard, black circles.

“But—who are you? It was an English soldier.”

“I was that English soldier, madame. Shall I prove it?”

“Yes.”

He went and groped in the cellar for his boots, and sitting on the top step, laced them on, while Manon Latour waited in the passage. A little widow who has kept a café, and has had half the men in the village in love with her, cannot but know something of man and of the very obvious habits of the creature. Also, a pretty woman who has a head on her shoulders is apt to get very bored with the perennial fools. They all tell the same tale; they all want the same reward. Manon had grown fastidious.

But this man puzzled her from the very beginning. What was he doing in French clothes, and why had he come back to Beaucourt? She chose the direct method, and asked him the reason.

Brent was knotting the lace of his left boot. He looked up over his shoulder and smiled.

“I had a dream——”

He saw that she was quite unconvinced.

“Why does one do certain things? Have you a reason for everything? My friend was buried here, that’s all.”

He got up and went out into the yard, and Manon followed him. Brent turned into the garden through the gate in the stone wall, and walked along the weedy path between the currant bushes and the dead stalks of last year’s cabbages. He stopped at the place where the shell had punched a hole through the wall, and where the stones lay scattered.

“Is the place as you remember it?”

Her eyes were still intensely black, her forehead worried.

“No.”

“And the difference?”

“The place was here—just in front of the stump of that old espalier. There was nothing but earth and weeds. No stones.”

“I put the stones there,” said Brent.

She gave him a quick gleam of the eyes.

“You?”

“Yes, after you had gone. I thought the thing would look more natural. Then I went to bury my friend. After that—I was taken prisoner.”

She remained calm, judicial, compelling herself to a cool realization of the fact that this man had kept faith with her, if all that she had buried there was under the soil. And then, another thought prompted her to ask him a question.

“You say, monsieur, that you came back to see the grave of your friend?”

She was aware of Brent’s blue eyes lighting up with a flicker of shrewdness and humour.

“No, I did not come back to rob you.”

“I had not accused you of that.”

“If the thought was there, it was natural.”

She felt ashamed of having asked him that question, and her face softened.

“It is all so strange. You come back as a Frenchman, and in French clothes.”

“That’s of no importance,” he said; “there is only one thing that matters at this moment—the proof that I did not rob you.”

“But—wait——”

She caught his arm as he turned to fetch a rusty spade he had seen lying among the rubbish in the yard.

“Supposing someone else had found it—and taken it away?”

“Then you would disbelieve me?”

She thought a moment.

“No.”

Brent went for the spade, threw the stones aside and began to dig. Manon did not move or offer to help. She stood and watched him, conscious of the sudden and peculiar intimacy that was joining her to this unexpected man. She was convinced that he had told her the truth.

Brent had opened a hole about a foot deep.

“Be careful,” she said suddenly; “the silver is in a big crock. You might strike it with a spade.”

Brent’s blue eyes flashed her a look of gratitude. She had thrown him a “Hail, comrade,” uttered one of those little, human confessions of faith that warm a man’s heart. She wanted him to understand that she believed in him, and that he should understand it before the spade turned up the truth. Brent treasured these words. They touched the pride of a man who had been a failure.

“How deep did you dig?” he asked.

“About half a metre—I had so little time.”

Brent thrust the spade softly into the soil and felt it jar on something solid. He glanced at Manon with an air of triumph.

“It is there.”

She looked down into the hole and then at Brent.

“You are a man of your word, monsieur. I thank you.”

Brent spaded out a little more of the soil, and then went on his hands and knees and began to grope in the hole. First he lifted out a big crock that was full of loose silver, one-franc, two-franc, and five-franc pieces. Below the crock lay a tin trunk painted a yellowish brown. Only a portion of the lid showed—the place where the crock had stood; the rest was covered with earth.

He looked questioningly at Manon Latour.

“Let it stay there,” she said.

And then she laughed.

“You will be thinking me a miser, monsieur, but all that belonged to my husband who is dead.”

“Shall I put the silver back in the same place?”

“Yes,—put it back, if you please, monsieur. That hole will make the safest bank I can think of.”

“I suppose there is no one watching us?” said Brent, feeling strangely happy at being included in the conspiracy.

She looked round the garden, remembering that it was hidden on three sides by its high stone wall.

“It is not likely. I saw no one in Beaucourt.”

Brent replaced the crock, and shovelled back the earth, and Manon helped him to pile the stones over the spot. She appeared to be thinking, but her silence was without embarrassment or constraint. Her face had become the face of a serious child, a child who was neither afraid nor unhappy.

“How is it you speak French so well?” she asked him with a child’s abruptness.

“A Frenchman taught me, while I was a prisoner.”

She nodded, and the nod seemed to suggest that she understood that he had reasons, but that she was not worrying her head about them.

“Tiens! but I am hungry—I had my cup of coffee and a slice of bread at four. Since then I have walked from Ste. Claire.”

Brent threw on a last stone. There was a healthy zest in the way she spoke of her hunger.

“And Paul has not had even that,” he said; “but your house has a store-room and a larder.”

“Then it is a miracle,” she answered.

“Come and see the miracle. It is right that you should take possession.”