Short story classics (Foreign), Vol. 5, French II

The courier for Langres, however, had long since gone. Cowed and awkward, she took her way stumblingly toward the chief inn of the borough, and with trembling voice asked shelter for the night. But the inn was crowded, and the aubergiste, who did not care to harbor "one of those birds from over yonder," counseled her to push on to the cabaret at the far end of the village.

La Bretonne passed on, and, more trembling and awkward than ever, knocked at the door of that cabaret, which, properly speaking, was but a cantine for laborers. The cabaretière also eyed her askance, scenting doubtless a "discharged" from the Centrale, and finally refused her on the plea that she had no bed to give her.

La Bretonne dared not insist, but with bowed head pursued her way, while at the bottom of her soul rose and grew a dull hatred for that world which thus repulsed her.

She had no other resource than to gain Langres afoot.

Toward the end of November, night comes quickly. Soon she found herself enveloped in darkness, on a grayish road that ran between two divisions of the forest, and where the north wind whistled fiercely, choked her with dust, and pelted her with dead leaves.

After six years of sedentary and recluse life her legs were stiff, the muscles knotted and her feet, accustomed to sabots, pinched and bruised by her new slippers. At the end of a league she felt them blistered and herself exhausted. She dropped upon a pile of stones by the wayside, shivering and asking herself if she was going to be forced to perish of cold and hunger in this black night, under this icy breeze, which froze her to the marrow.

All at once, in the solitude of the road, she seemed to hear the droning notes of a voice singing. She listened and distinguished the air of one of those caressing and monotonous chants with which one soothes young children.

She was not alone, then!

She struggled to her feet and in the direction from which the voice came, and there, at the turn of a crossroad, perceived a reddish light streaming through the branches. Five minutes later she was before a mud-walled hovel, whose roof, covered by squares of sod, leaned again the rock, and whose window had allowed to pass that beckoning ray.

With anxious heart she decided to knock.

The chant ceased instantly and a woman opened the door, a peasant woman, no older than La Bretonne herself, but faded and aged by work. Her bodice, torn in places, displayed the skin tanned and dirty; her red hair escaped disheveled from under a soiled stuff cap, and her gray eyes regarded with amazement the stranger whose face had in it something of touching loneliness.

"Good evening!" said she, lifting yet higher the sputtering lamp in her hand; "what do you desire?"

"I am unable to go on," murmured La Bretonne, in a voice broken by a sob; "the city is far, and if you will lodge me for the night, you will do me a service.... I have money; I will pay you for the trouble."

"Enter," replied the other, after a moment's hesitancy; "but why," continued she, in a tone more curious than suspicious, "did you not sleep at Auberive?"

"They would not give me a lodging," lowering her blue eyes and taken with a sudden scruple, "be--because, see you, I come from the Maison Centrale."

"So! the Maison Centrale! but no matter--enter--I fear nothing, having known only misery. Moreover, I've a conscience against turning a Christian from the door on a night like this. I'll give you a bed and a slice of cheese."

And she pulled from the eaves some bundles of dried heather and spread them as a pallet in the corner by the fire.

"Do you live here alone?" demanded La Bretonne, timidly.

"Yes, with my gâchette, going on seven years now. I earn our living by working in the wood."

"Your man, then, is dead?"

"Yes," said the other bruskly, "the gâchette has no father. Briefly, to each his sorrow! But come, behold your straw, and two or three potatoes left from supper. It is all I can offer you--"

She was called by a childish voice coming from a dark nook, separated from the room by a board partition.

"Good night!" she repeated, "the little one cries; I must go, but sleep you well!"

And taking up the lamp she passed into the closet, leaving La Bretonne crouched alone in the darkness.

Stretched upon her heather, after she had eaten her supper, she strove to close her eyes, but sleep would not come to her. Through the thin partition she heard the mother still softly talking to the child, whom the arrival of a stranger had wakened, and who did not wish to go to sleep again.

The mother soothed and fondled it with words of endearment that somehow strangely disturbed La Bretonne. That outburst of simple tenderness seemed to waken a confused maternal instinct in the soul of that girl condemned in the past for having stifled her new-born.

"If things had not gone so badly with me," thought La Bretonne, sorrowfully, "_it_ would have been the same age as this little one here."

At that thought and at the sound of that childish voice, a sickening shudder seemed to shake her very vitals; something soft and tender to spring up in that soured heart, and an increasing need for the relief of tears.

"But come, come, my little one," the mother cried, "to sleep you must go! And if you are good and do as I say, to-morrow I'll take you to the Sainte-Catherine's Fair!"

"The fête of little children, mama; the fête of little children, you mean?"

"Yes, my angel, of little children."

"And the day when the good Sainte-Catherine brings playthings to the babies, mama?"

"Sometimes--yes."

"Then why doesn't she bring playthings to our house, mama?"

"We live too far away, perhaps; and then--we are too poor."

"She brings them only to rich babies, then, mama? But why, mama, why, I say? I should love to see playthings!"

"Eh, bien! some day you may, if you are very good--to-night, perhaps, if you are wise and go to sleep soon."

"I will, then, mama, I will right away, so she can bring them to-morrow."

The little voice ceased; there was a long silence; then a long breath, even and light!

The child slept at last--the mother also.