The Battle Of The Strong: Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The cottage in which Guida lived at the Place du Vier Prison was in
jocund contrast to the dungeon from which the Chevalier Orvilliers du
Champsavoys de Beaumanoir had complacently issued. Even in the hot summer
the prison walls dripped moisture, for the mortar had been made of wet
sea-sand, which never dried, and beneath the gloomy tenement of crime a
dark stream flowed to the sea. But the walls of the cottage were dry,
for, many years before, Guida's mother had herself seen it built from
cellar-rock to the linked initials over the doorway, stone by stone, and
every corner of it was as free from damp as the mielles stretching in
sandy desolation behind to the Mont es Pendus, where the law had its way
with the necks of criminals.

In early childhood Madame Landresse had come with her father into exile
from the sunniest valley in the hills of Chambery, where flowers and
trees and sunshine had been her life. Here, in the midst of blank and
grim stone houses, her heart travelled back to the chateau where she
lived before the storm of persecution drove her forth; and she spent her
heart and her days in making this cottage, upon the western border of St.
Heliers, a delight to the quiet eye.

The people of the island had been good to her and her dead husband during
the two short years of their married life, and had caused her to love the
land which necessity made her home. Her child was brought up after the
fashion of the better class of Jersey children, wore what they wore, ate
what they ate, lived as they lived. She spoke the country patois in the
daily life, teaching it to Guida at the same time that she taught her
pure French and good English, which she herself had learned as a child,
and cultivated later here. She had done all in her power to make Guida
Jersiaise in instinct and habit, and to beget in her a contented
disposition. There could be no future for her daughter outside this
little green oasis of exile, she thought. Not that she lacked ambition,
but in the circumstances she felt that ambition could yield but one
harvest to her child, which was marriage. She herself had married a poor
man, a master builder of ships, like Maitre Ranulph Delagarde, but she
had been very happy while he lived. Her husband had come of an ancient
Jersey family, who were in Normandy before the Conqueror was born; a man
of genius almost in his craft, but scarcely a gentleman according to the
standard of her father, the distinguished exile and now retired
watchmaker. If Guida should chance to be as fortunate as herself, she
could ask no more.

She had watched the child anxiously, for the impulses of Guida's
temperament now and then broke forth in indignation as wild as her tears
and in tears as wild as her laughter. As the girl grew in health and
stature, she tried, tenderly, strenuously, to discipline the sensitive
nature, bursting her heart with grief at times because she knew that
these high feelings and delicate powers came through a long line of
ancestral tendencies, as indestructible as perilous and joyous.

Four things were always apparent in the girl's character: sympathy with
suffering, kindness without partiality, a love of nature, and an intense
candour.

Not a stray cat wandering into the Place du Vier Prison but found an
asylum in the garden behind the cottage. Not a dog hungry for a bone,
stopping at Guida's door, but was sure of one from a hiding-place in the
hawthorn hedge of the garden. Every morning you might have seen the birds
in fluttering, chirping groups upon the may-tree or the lilac-bushes,
waiting for the tiny snow-storm of bread to fall from her hand. Was he
good or bad, ragged or neat, honest or a thief, not a deserting sailor or
a homeless lad, halting at the cottage, but was fed from the girl's
private larder behind the straw beehives among the sweet lavender and the
gooseberry-bushes. No matter how rough the vagrant, the sincerity and
pure impulse of the child seemed to throw round him a sunshine of decency
and respect.

The garden behind the house was the girl's Eden. She had planted upon the
hawthorn hedge the crimson monthly rose, the fuchsia, and the jonquil,
until at last the cottage was hemmed in by a wall of flowers; and here
she was ever as busy as the bees which hung humming on the sweet
scabious.

In this corner was a little hut for rabbits; in that, there was a hole
dug in the bank for a hedgehog; in the middle a little flower-grown
enclosure for cats in various stages of health or convalescence, and a
small pond for frogs; and in the midst of all wandered her faithful dog,
Biribi by name, as master of the ceremonies.

Madame Landresse's one ambition had been to live long enough to see her
child's character formed. She knew that her own years were numbered, for
month by month she felt her strength going. And yet a beautiful tenacity
kept her where she would be until Guida was fifteen years of age. Her
great desire had been to live till the girl was eighteen. Then--well,
then might she not perhaps leave her to the care of a husband? At best,
M. de Mauprat could not live long. He had at last been forced to give up
the little watchmaker's shop in the Vier Marchi, where for so many years,
in simple independence, he had wrought, always putting by, from work done
after hours, Jersey bank-notes and gold, to give Guida a dot, if not
worthy of her, at least a guarantee against reproach when some great man
should come seeking her in marriage. But at last his hands trembled among
the tiny wheels, and his eyes failed. He had his dark hour by himself,
then he sold the shop to a native, who thenceforward sat in the ancient
exile's place; and the two brown eyes of the stooped, brown old man
looked out no more from the window in the Vier Marchi: and then they all
made their new home in the Place du Vier Prison.

Until she was fifteen Guida's life was unclouded. Once or twice her
mother tried to tell her of a place that must soon be empty, but her
heart failed her. So at last the end came like a sudden wind out of the
north; and it was left to Guida Landresse de Landresse to fight the fight
and finish the journey of womanhood alone.

This time was the turning-point in Guida's life. What her mother had been
to the Sieur de Mauprat, she soon became. They had enough to live on
simply. Every week her grandfather gave her a fixed sum for the
household. Upon this she managed, that the tiny income left by her mother
might not be touched. She shrank from using it yet, and besides, dark
times might come when it would be needed. Death had once surprised her,
but it should bring no more amazement. She knew that M. de Mauprat's days
were numbered, and when he was gone she would be left without one near
relative in the world. She realised how unprotected her position would be
when death came knocking at the door again. What she would do she knew
not. She thought long and hard. Fifty things occurred to her, and fifty
were set aside. Her mother's immediate relatives in France were scattered
or dead. There was no longer any interest at Chambery in the watchmaking
exile, who had dropped like a cherry-stone from the beak of the blackbird
of persecution upon one of the Iles de la Manche.

There remained the alternative more than once hinted by the Sieur de
Mauprat as the months grew into years after the mother died--marriage; a
husband, a notable and wealthy husband. That was the magic destiny de
Mauprat figured for her. It did not elate her, it did not disturb her;
she scarcely realised it. She loved animals, and she saw no reason to
despise a stalwart youth. It had been her fortune to know two or three in
the casual, unconventional manner of villages, and there were few in the
land, great or humble, who did not turn twice to look at her as she
passed through the Vier Marchi, so noble was her carriage, so graceful
and buoyant her walk, so lacking in self-consciousness her beauty. More
than one young gentleman of family had been known to ride through the
Place du Vier Prison, hoping to get sight of her, and to offer the view
of a suggestively empty pillion behind him.

She had, however, never listened to flatterers, and only one youth of
Jersey had footing in the cottage. This was Ranulph Delagarde, who had
gone in and out at his will, but that was casually and not too often, and
he was discreet and spoke no word of love. Sometimes she talked to him of
things concerning the daily life with which she did not care to trouble
Sieur de Mauprat. In ways quite unknown to her he had made her life
easier for her. She knew that her mother had thought of Ranulph for her
husband, although she blushed whenever--but it was not often--the idea
came to her. She remembered how her mother had said that Ranulph would be
a great man in the island some day; that he had a mind above all the
youths in St. Heliers; that she would rather see Ranulph a master
ship-builder than a babbling ecrivain in the Rue des Tres Pigeons, a
smirking leech, or a penniless seigneur with neither trade nor talent.
Guida was attracted to Ranulph through his occupation, for she loved
strength, she loved all clean and wholesome trades; that of the mason, of
the carpenter, of the blacksmith, and most of the ship-builder. Her
father, whom she did not remember, had been a ship-builder, and she knew
that he had been a notable man; every one had told her that.

.........................

"She has met her destiny," say the village gossips, when some man in the
dusty procession of life sees a woman's face in the pleasant shadow of a
home, and drops out of the ranks to enter at her doorway.

Was Ranulph to be Guida's destiny?

Handsome and stalwart though he looked as he entered the cottage in the
Place du Vier Prison, on that September morning after the rescue of the
chevalier, his tool-basket on his shoulder, and his brown face enlivened
by one simple sentiment, she was far from sure that he was--far from
sure.

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