Part 4

Yet the adventure appealed to Brent, and Beaucourt had taken a mysterious grip of his manhood. As he sat and stared at the reddening stove and fed it with wood from the heap beside him, he could see the women and children and a few men coming back to live among these ruins, unfortunates obsessed by the tradition of “home.” He saw little Manon Latour trudging along the road from Bonnière and standing with blank face and hopeless eyes before this shell of a house. He saw old women grubbing in the ruins, bent figures bowed down and trying to clean the rubbish and the fallen beams and rafters from the floors. He saw men working savagely at little shanties, or hammering at some extemporized roof, and always with an eye on the sky. It would rain; it would blow. The gardens were full of weeds and rubbish, and would need cleaning before crops could be grown. The thing seemed almost beyond human patience.

What would they make of Beaucourt—these poor people? Would they have the heart and the courage to begin life over again?

Brent found himself becoming fascinated by the tragedy of this French village, a tragedy that was one of the bleeding wounds in the side of France. He was strangely yet humanly curious to see what would happen, and more than half tempted to lend a hand in the healing of it. The job would be a man’s job, better than punching holes in tickets, scribbling in a ledger, or passing groceries across the counter of a shop.

Still—it was no more than a dream, and Brent felt sleepy.

“I wonder what will turn up,” was his thought as he took off his boots and dragged the wire bed nearer the stove. Placing his carpet-bag to serve as a pillow, he lay down and wrapped his greatcoat round him.

And it was still a dream, and no more than a dream, when Brent fell asleep.

VIII

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.”

IX

So these two went back to the battered old red house with the patches of white plaster still hanging to the walls of its rooms, and the blue February sky showing where its roof should have been. The window of the kitchen looked along the Rue de Picardie and all the broken and jagged outlines of the village, etched with black rafters and the rawness of fractured brick. The snapped spire of the church was the colour of amethyst. White clouds floated above the beeches of the Bois du Renard.

Manon lingered for a moment at this window, her hands clenched, something between pity and anger in her eyes. Beaucourt mattered to the little Frenchwoman in a way that no restless dweller in cities could understand. It had formed the background of her memories, a quiet place where she had made a little song of the day’s work, a place where life had been rich in the emotions that are her religion to a woman. She had been proud of her café, proud of her linen, of her garden. Her happiness had made Beaucourt what no other place in the world could be to her. As the old Frenchman had put it, “The roots of life were deep down under the ruins.”

There were other memories, perhaps, thoughts that left a sour taste in her mouth, but Manon was thinking of the happier days. She had forgotten Brent, forgotten her hunger, as she stood looking out upon the ruins; and Brent waited like a man in the doorway of a church, some sanctuary that he had not the right to enter, feeling her at her prayers, wise enough not to disturb her. Her sadness was like a sweet smell of incense and the soft obscurity of some shrine. She was no mere material woman,—just a pretty, white-skinned, dark-eyed creature, with a beautiful bosom and a soft throat. Manon Latour had a soul, a little white fire burning in her heart. That was what Brent felt about her, the Brent who asked for those dear moments of mystery in a woman, for the flash of that spiritual fineness that can fill the eyes with a mist of tears. He did not want money; he craved for self-expression,—the simple human things, nearness to someone who was a little better than himself.

Manon’s lingering at the gap in the wall that had been a window lasted but a few seconds. She turned to Brent with a soft animation that played like sunlight across the deeps of her seriousness.

“Forgive me, Monsieur Paul.”

He smiled and handed her a box of matches.

“You will find a candle down there, and all that you need. I’m afraid I have not lit the stove.”

Her eyes seemed to question him. “Is it that you are wiser and a little more sensitive than other men? You can hold back.”

She went out into the passage, and Brent took her place at the window, lounging in the sunlight with his hands in his pockets, and recasting the metal of his vision. For a few short hours life had seemed solid and real, centred in that cellar in ruined Beaucourt, a life of quaint adventure, a boyish game played with the elements of existence as the counters. All this had changed with the return of Manon Latour. Brent felt himself adrift—on the edge again of a casual vagabondage. He was surrendering that cellar and all that it contained, food, shelter, even the vague inspiration that had been born in it. He saw himself packing his bag and marching.

“Monsieur.”

He had been so absorbed in these thoughts that he had not heard her re-enter the kitchen. He was struck by her seriousness. She, too, had been thinking.

“How long have you been in Beaucourt?”

“Since yesterday,” said Brent.

She sat down on the box.

“Since yesterday. And in my cellar I find food for many days, a bed, plates, blankets, all that a man would think of—if——”

She paused, looking up at him.

“What I did yesterday will be useful to you to-day.”

He smiled as he spoke.

“There is the beginning of a little home for you, madame. I washed the blankets; they have not been used since I washed them, and they will be dry by to-night. The food was collected by me—in Beaucourt.”

She interrupted him.

“Then—you meant to stay in Beaucourt?”

His face remained turned to the window, and she saw it in profile.

“I had thought of it. Just a whim, you know, the whim of a man who was starting life over again. By the way, the matches and the candles belonged to me. I can leave you two boxes—and if I may take one candle?”

Her eyes were dark with some emotion that Brent did not fathom.

“And where will you go?”

He refused to look at her.

“Oh, anywhere. It does not matter.”

“There is nothing that does not matter. And—you want your breakfast. Shall we have it up here in the sunlight?”

Brent’s chin swung round. He stared.

“Just as you please.”

She got up.

“I must light the stove. Or perhaps you are more clever at it than I am. Supposing I wash those plates. I can find some more boxes and make a table and seats here. And I have a packet of coffee in my bag.”

“Mon Dieu!” said Brent. “Life is good. I’ll go and light that stove.”

He went about the work like a thoroughly practical man, trying to limit the day’s outlook to that one word “breakfast,” and refusing to see anything sentimental in lighting a stove and boiling a saucepan of water.

“Anyhow, I shall start the day with a meal,” he said to himself; “I wonder what she will make of this place when I have gone?”

But Manon—the woman—kept intruding herself upon Brent’s prosaic philosophy.

“Mon ami—I want more water, and there is no bucket.”

Brent went upstairs with the bucket and filled it at the well.

“We ought to have a cistern,” she said when he returned; “it would save so much trouble.”

Brent was conscious of a shock of surprise. She seemed to be thinking in twos, while he was carefully limiting the future to one. But then—Brent knew very little about women. He had not learnt to divide the sex into its two groups, the woman who can be bought, and the woman who cannot. The woman who can be bought had always thought Brent a fool, because he had made a mystery where no mystery existed. Brent was an incorrigible romanticist, and your material woman detests romance. She suffers it in novels, but finds the thing a damnable nuisance when it comes gesturing and dreaming and getting itself mixed up with the very obvious furniture of her very obvious little life. The woman who could not be bought understood Brent at once. She was ready to trust him—but that did not help Brent to understand Manon Latour.

Manon had contrived a table and two seats in the kitchen, and had spread a clean handkerchief with a pink border to give a touch of feminine refinement to the deal box that formed the table. That handkerchief fascinated Brent. He stood staring at it while she was down below making the coffee. He supposed that she had taken that bit of pink and white stuff out of her bag. It was one of those little touches of colour, of imagination, that are like the opening of a flower, or the voice of a bird when the leaves are still in bud upon the trees.

Then he heard her calling him. She had one of those pleasant, animated French voices, soft and expressive, a voice that was made to chatter happily about a house.

“Mon ami—will you help?”

He met her on the stairs.

“The candle is burning out, and I do not know where to find another. Besides—they are so expensive; we must use more daylight. Be careful—it is very hot.”

She gave him the pewter coffee-pot, and was ready to follow with the rest of the meal. And she had a surprise for Brent—a little pat of fresh butter laid out on a rice-paper serviette.

“Allons!”

They sat down at the table, with the blue sky for a roof. The day was warm, a day that heartened the world with a breath of the spring, and the coffee was fragrant, exquisite. Brent spread some of the fresh butter on a biscuit, and looked vaguely sad.

“It is very pleasant here,” he said.

Manon was cutting herself a slice of bully beef.

“What children we are! And a child is the most inquisitive thing in the world.”

He gave her a sudden, yet shy look.

“Are you inquisitive?”

“Well, of course. But I do not catechize a friend.”

Brent gulped a mouthful of hot coffee, put the cup down, and stared at the pink and white handkerchief in the middle of the table.

“I would like to think I was that.”

She understood his hesitation and kept silent. Brent was still staring, the fingers of his right hand holding the cup.

“I am supposed to be dead,” he said with a kind of unwilling abruptness.

Manon put a slice of corned beef upon his plate.

“A good man has reasons.”

He raised his eyes to hers.

“A good man?—Well—perhaps! You see—I made a mess of life over there in England. I do not mean to go back.”

Manon’s eyes held his.

“You wish to become a Frenchman?”

Brent smiled one of those human and half-whimsical smiles.

“Perhaps—I want to make a fresh start. I’m not the sort of man who makes money; I’m too easy-going. I have always liked the things that you can’t buy.”

“I know what you mean,” said Manon. “One can’t buy happiness, can one?”

Brent’s eyes lit up.

“Now—how did you find that out?”

“I don’t think I ever found it out, mon ami. It’s the sort of thing I always knew. I suppose my mother gave it me. And yet, half the world never finds it out, and dies grumbling.”

Brent looked at her as though he had discovered a miracle.

“Extraordinary!—I always knew it—somehow, but the people I happened to live with did not believe in that sort of foolishness. I suppose my wife was an unhappy woman; she was always wanting something she had not got and she was always wanting the wrong thing—something that meant money. Well, of course, it fell on me.”

She gave him a look that was like a sympathetic caress.

“What a fool! And so——?”

“I smashed. Then, of course, she hated me. I was a failure—according to her ideas. If I had had a little pity, I might have got up again; but I did not get any pity. A man does like to have his head stroked, you know. Then the war came, and I got away.”

He drank his coffee and Manon refilled his cup.

“How did you manage it?” she asked.

“Manage what?”

“To be dead.”

He looked a little embarrassed, and then he told her.

“When my friend was killed down there in the orchard, I had an idea, an inspiration. He had no wife or children, no one who cared. So I buried myself in his grave, and took his name. It was so simple. I wanted to disappear, and to begin life over again.”

She was silent for a while, and her eyes seemed to be looking at a picture—a picture of this Englishman’s life. Her silence troubled Brent. He began to fidget.

“Perhaps it was a coward’s trick,” he suggested; “what do you think?”

“It is not easy to judge.”

Manon sat very still—realizing that he was in earnest.

“So you have turned Frenchman?”

He gave her a shy look.