It was, perhaps, some instinct of etiquette or of consideration which caused the two Bretons to allow M. des Graves to proceed some way with his repast before the younger, jerking his thumb in an upward direction, asked news of the sick man. The priest told them that he was a trifle better; that there was a little hope.
“Then you must eat, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Mathurin, and he pushed towards him an enormous mound of the good salt butter of Brittany.
“Dame! and drink, too,” added his son, seizing the jug of cider. “We will drink with a good heart to the young man’s recovery.”
“I should like to know how you found him,” observed the priest. “Was it by chance?”
“It was, and it was not,” answered Mathurin sententiously. “It was because we started to go into Savenay the day after the battle—Oh, I must tell you, Monsieur l’Abbé, that Marie-Pierre was all for joining the Vendeans himself; he even had the musket down”—he pointed to the usual musket hung over the hearth—“but there was not time. Well . . . Where was I?—Marie-Pierre, you tell his Reverence.”
The young Breton took a long drink from the cider jug. “It was like this,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “All the day of the battle we kept close indoors; we heard firing in the distance, and later hussars came riding through the village. Some demanded drink, and their swords were dripping. But, as your Reverence knows, we are about nine miles from Savenay, and off the main road, and few fugitives got as far as this; they were cut down on the way. We heard the hussars boasting how many they had killed in cold blood. We were very sad, for it is true that I wanted, like many more of our parts, to join the Vendeans. And we were very anxious, my father and I, to go to Savenay to learn exactly what fate had befallen them, though we knew well enough that they were beaten. But we were afraid to go without a good reason, lest the Blues should take us for spies. Then we had the idea of taking in some fodder for the patriots’ cavalry as a pretext. So we started early on the morning of Christmas Eve; it was very cold and almost snowing, and when we began to get near to Savenay the roads were thick with corpses, so that we had often to go at a foot’s pace to avoid driving over them. In some places they were stripped and piled up on top of each other by the roadside; you could see that they had been shot down in batches. It was so dreadful that at last we turned back; we had not the heart to go on into Savenay, and from the sound they were still shooting the prisoners there.
“And as, having turned back, we passed the wood of Blanche-Couronne, where we heard that the Vendeans had made their last stand, my father said to me: ‘Marie-Pierre, what if there were any Royalists still alive in there?’ And I said: ‘No, mon père, it is not possible, first because the Blues would have massacred them by this time, and secondly because of the cold of last night.’ But my father, inspired no doubt by Heaven, said: ‘Still, it would be a deed very acceptable to God and His Mother, the consoler of the afflicted, if we went to see.’ And, pardieu, Monsieur l’Abbé, I was nothing loth, but I knew not what we should do if the Blues found us in there, for their patrols were passing along the road every few minutes, and we had already had difficulty with them. But the Blessed Virgin put it into our heads that if we were questioned we should say that we were gone to strip the dead brigands, for we felt sure that the Blues would not object to that. So we drove the cart a little way up a track that went through the wood, that it should not be seen from the road, and got out to see if there were any living.
“There were not more than a couple of score Vendeans there, but they were all dead, and the snow was beginning to fall on them. We walked through, very sad at heart, to the edge of the wood that looks towards Savenay, and there, under a tree, in what had been a pool of blood, I saw a young man in uniform, with a peasant lying dead across him. It was the uniform, though it was very old and faded, which caught my eye, and I said to my father: ‘See, there is a Republican officer, the only Blue here.’ And then I went a little nearer, out of curiosity, and suddenly, praise to Sainte Anne, I saw the white scarf and the Sacred Heart. And I was filled with pity that he should be lying there dead, young and handsome, with a great wound in his breast. At any rate, I thought, it will be a pious act to lift off the dead man, and since this young seigneur was in his lifetime a good Christian (for I saw that he had died with his rosary in his hand), to fold his hands and put the crucifix of the chaplet between them. My father agreed, and together we lifted the dead peasant off the young man’s body. . . . But when I touched the officer it seemed to me that he was still warm, and I cried to my father, but he said: ‘No, he is dead; look at all the blood; and, besides, as you said yourself, the cold.’ Nevertheless I put my ear to the Vendean’s heart, and I thought that I could hear it beating. So we lifted him carefully and quickly, and carried him to the cart, and put him in and covered him with the fodder, and drove home.”
Marie-Pierre terminated abruptly, and took another long drink of cider. Putting down the jug, he added: “We said the rosary in turns all the way, for if the Blues had discovered the Vendean in our cart, we should never have seen Christmas Day.”
“May God reward you,” said the priest, very moved. “It is not in the power of man.”