What a strange idea! “Who set them up?” asked the Duchesse.
Mère Salaun shook her head. “We do not know. Fetch Madame’s crêpe from the hearth, Corentine.”
Little Yvot fidgeted. “But, Madame,” he broke in, in his shrill voice, “nobody set them up. A long while ago they were a queen’s ladies, and a magician turned them into stones. And on one night in the year, on Midsummer Eve, they leave their places one by one and go to the pool to drink—because you see, Madame, they were alive once, and they are still thirsty. Some people think they eat, too, and put food for them. And as they go in turn to drink you can see the gold underneath, and the rich ornaments, in the place they have left!”
“And do people go on that night to take it?” asked Mme de Trélan as he paused for breath.
Yvot’s eyes grew bigger and his tanned little face paled, while his grimy hand made a rapid sign of the cross over himself. “God forbid! There was a man once—he went to get the gold—folks begged him not to. He never came back!”
“Well, what happened to him?” asked Valentine, interested less in the tale than in the narrator—and somewhat appalled at the gigantic pancake, nearly a quarter of an inch in thickness, which had appeared before her.
“The menhir came back from the pond and caught him! He is underneath it to-day—the one they call La Bossue, the Hunchback. You can hear him groaning and praying to be let out sometimes. He has been there for seventy years!”
At this climax one of the smaller children burst into tears, and Yvot was angrily commanded by his mother to get on with his dinner. But she, too, signed herself.
Nevertheless Valentine found herself among the stone avenues that evening. No news had come yet, but the Allée was at such a short distance from the farm that if it came she could easily be informed.
So she walked among the menhirs, Les Vieilles, Les Veilleuses, and the menhirs watched her as she went, and she knew it. They were yellow with lichen, rust-red with it, grey with it; the heather was about their deep roots, older than the oldest trees. Ancient, terrible, venerable, four ranks of them, they marched for ever up the rise and over it towards some invisible goal. Valentine de Trélan with her forty-five years felt very young, very ignorant beside them.