VI
Below, just beyond a fork in the dusty stage-road, Remy Mariette, commissioner of highways, was finishing his day’s work of filling with gravel the deeper ruts and holes. He was a lithe, brown, ruddy-cheeked young man, known far and wide as a great worker, whether alone or in company. To-day he was alone. It happened that he was not only road commissioner, road laborer, mason, and the best bass of the choir; he was also the village constable. In the inner pocket of his frayed working coat was the secret warrant for the taking of Gerald Bertello. That document had been very much on his mind for the past few days, because, as he himself expressed it, “constabling was a new job for him.” However, he was not thinking, just then, of the cares of his office. He was thinking that before going home, he had plenty of time to skip up the hill and see whether the old gravestones were as badly off as reported at the last town meeting. If so, it meant another job for him; a good one, too, at mason’s wages. He swung briskly up the slope, his crowbar as staff. He might need it to pry at the fallen stone.
Well, well, a man asleep. Queer place to choose. Drunk, perhaps? Hey, there, you man asleep!
The constable leaned over the sleeper, and then drew back in mingled disgust and amazement. The disgust was for the criminal, the amazement because a criminal so clever should thus easily be caught. He knew his quarry in an instant. He recognized Gerald Bertello, in former years a summer-time figure making himself and his comrades mightily at home among the mountains. Gerald Bertello’s name and face had often been shown on the screen at the Monday movies. Looked the kind that might turn desperate, too. Just as well he had brought along the bar, in case. With his foot, yet not unkindly, he prodded the sleeper, once, twice, three times, and yet again. Gerald Bertello did not stir. Suddenly the young constable, who had a fading-flower wife whom he loved, and who was therefore wise beyond his years in the lore of hearts and pulses, knelt down by the man’s side.
When he rose, it was with a strange sense of he knew not what complexities. He was not given to self-analysis. But, because of the good French blood in his veins, he took off his cap, and bowed his head, very simply and sincerely, yet almost mechanically, in the presence of death. He was young for a constable, scarcely seven years older than the boy Royal. Indeed, the two had long been friends in that wide countryside. They were Remy and Royal together. Not without a touch of envy, Royal had last spring congratulated him on his appointment. Ah, this would be something to tell Royal about, when they should meet again; a queer boy, always wanting to know queer things!
Puzzled as to his immediate duty, the young man meditated a moment, then made a swift decision. Best leave everything untouched, and seek help and counsel from his elders, in the village below. He gazed at the sleeper’s cap, the cigars, the scattered bread, the little American flag left from last Decoration Day; but he did not alter anything he saw. Some sense of strict procedure in such cases constrained him.
Before descending the slope, he looked up curiously into the sky, to note what birds might be abroad. He remembered the crows he had seen early that morning in his new orchard; some of them were plucking deep bites from his ripest apples. So from his coat he took the warrant, and buttoned it into the pocket of his soldier shirt. Then he spread his coat carefully over the sleeper’s face, its profile half lost among the brown pine leaves and the sparse vine-wreaths springing up through them. He even succeeded in covering the hand lying against the edge of the fallen stone. He wondered whether the man had cried aloud for help. He noted, partly as a constable’s duty and partly as something to tell to the boy Royal, that the hand seemed to be stretched out in a dumb gesture, whether of hope or of despair, toward the stone and the writing on the stone,—
“I know that my Redeemer liveth,
And that”
The last line, in the stiff italic of the eighteen-thirties, was blotted out by lichens and earth-stains, but Remy Mariette knew the words well. They were in a chant the choir often sang. To-day they hurt him; since kneeling by that sleeper with the still heart, he had been thinking incessantly, with a tightening pain in his throat, of the flower-like wife at home. He leaned on his iron bar an instant, and shivered. The sun had gone away from that place. From a far wood a hermit thrush poured out its exquisite, passionless hymn of Paradise. Then it seemed to the young man that all the sadness in the world was brooding over the hill with the graves.