A solitary man whom I found working a loom in a cottage by the side of the river kept a ferryboat, and with his help I crossed again to the other bank. Wandering on with a somewhat vague purpose, I soon found myself—now under a gray sky—on a marshy flat, which a backwater of the Dordogne had almost made an island. Here there were many low shrubs of dwarf elder covered with berries; pools, and wide ditches, where the dark water scarcely moved, all fringed with tall reeds; while here and there was the gleam of a white flower upon the erect stem of a marsh-mallow. But what gave to this spot a strange and almost weird character was the number of great hoary willows, thirty or forty feet high, with gnarled and twisted boles, scattered over the dark green grass. It was a melancholy grove of fantastic dream-haunted willows, such as belongs to the South and the Virgilian muse:
'Umbrarum hic locus est, somni noctisque soporae.'
And the sad solitude, in which there was not a sound of moving leaf or singing bird, seemed to be peopled by the ghosts of men who were waiting and weeping out their hundred years on the Stygian shore.
Hoary willows, dark alders, and then the road. This led me to Le Buisson—a place possessed of the blue devils, and which exists merely out of compliment to the railway-junction here. Having made arrangements for returning to the inn, I wandered out again to look at the river in the gray evening, and at the bridge where it was predicted that I should go to the bottom if I remained in the little boat. I crossed fields from which tobacco and maize had lately been carried, and reached the bridge of evil prophecy. The river certainly seemed to be doing its best to sweep away the piers, and when it escaped from the arches it raised its voice to a roar; but it seemed to me that on one side the périssoire would have gone through gaily without being swamped. The cry of troubled water in the dusk fascinated me. I lingered, and yet felt the strong impulse to hurry back to the society of men, out of the sound of the angry river, whose slaty waves flashed out strange gleams. What is it in the gloom and horror of nature that so draws us and yet warns us to flee? The day was ending stormily. The poplars wailed, and bent under the lash of the rising wind; dark masses of cloud stood still in the sky, whilst others, torn and scattered below them, rushed hither and thither madly. Every few minutes the faint gleam of lightning, still far off, brought to the black woods along the hills a momentary return of radiance, as though it were the fitful flashing of the day's dying lamp.
The roaring and wailing of the turbid flood now seemed to be repeating in cruel mockery the despairing cries of all the drowning people who were ever the prey of the water-fiends that draw downward in whirlpools to depths where twilight passes into darkness, and take the form of the long waving weeds that look so innocent, but whose grasp is deadly, or guide the current that utters never a sound as it seizes its victim and bears him into an unfathomed gulf under the pitiless rock. A voice within me cried 'Home!' but home had I none anywhere of the staple sort: mine was like a home on wheels.
As I returned to the inn across the fields, I saw some scattered peasant figures moving slowly the same way under the wild sky; men with the ox that was weary like themselves, women with bundles of forage on their heads—melancholy forms or phantoms in the dusky air, at one with nature in unconscious sympathy. Then across the dim and dreary plain, where the narrow path was lost to sight after the first few yards, a railway lamp flashed like the large red eye of some unimaginable monster of the primordial marsh.
In the morning I was on the road to Cadouin. The air was keen and a little frosty, for the hour was early. Men were mowing the last crop of grass, which was powdered with rime. After the meadows came the woods, for the road went south, and was therefore carried over the hills which rise above the valley of the Dordogne. The woods were mainly of chestnut, and, under the action of the storm, followed by the first frost, many a nut lay shining on the road within its gaping prickly shell. After two or three miles of ascent the road sloped downward, and it was not long before I entered a very neat and trim little town, which, however, was altogether village-like. This was Cadouin, and in the centre stood its venerable Romanesque church. I entered the building, which was silent and very dim; not a soul was there but myself. Presently there was a moan in the tower, which seemed so far away: the clock was striking one of the quarters. Now the dim light brightened suddenly, for the sun had risen high enough to dart its rays through a window, and to flash upon a column the brilliant colours of the glass. With the exception of the apse, which is purely Romanesque, the interior of this church is Gothic of the Transition; but most of the capitals of the pier-columns have a plain Romanesque outline. There is no clerestory, the light being admitted from small round-headed windows in the aisle walls. Much of the building dates from the foundation of the abbey of Cadouin, in the early part of the twelfth century; but the existing cloisters, which are what is most remarkable here, date from the fifteenth century, and owe much of their interest to the partial transformation of their style which they afterwards underwent when the spirit of the Renaissance set in. The Gothic tracery of the arches that face the quadrangle unites the strength of stone with the delicacy of pencil drawing. In the late Gothic and Renaissance part, the ceilings are richly and floridly groined, angelic and other figures forming the termination of the low-reaching bosses, the groins converging in fan-like order towards elaborately-carved canopies against the wall. At one end of this wing is a doorway, the jambs and lintels of which are heavily over-worked with carvings very typical of the exuberant fancy of the early French Renaissance.
[Illustration: CLOISTERS OF THE ABBEY OF CADOUIN.]
For centuries Cadouin was a famous place of pilgrimage, in consequence of the claim laid by the abbey to the possession of the Holy Shroud. The following is the history of the celebrated relic, according to Jean Tarde:
'In the year 1100 Hugh, surnamed the Great, brother of the King of France, and Bishop of Le Puy, in Auvergne, having gone on a voyage beyond the seas with Godefrey de Bouillon, found means, after the taking of Jerusalem, to recover this holy relic, and, dying in Palestine, he left it in charge of a priest, his chaplain. The priest falling ill on board ship, and perceiving that his end was drawing near, gave the shroud into the hands of a clerk, a native of Périgord. He, after the death of his master, took a small barrel, in the middle of which he placed a partition. In one half he put the sacred sheet, and his drink in the other. In this manner he carried the relic back to his native land, and placed it in a church near Cadouin, of which he had charge. Fearing that someone might steal his treasure, he left it in the barrel, which he put away in a chest near the altar, showing it only to a few of the monks of Cadouin. But one day, while he was absent, fire broke out and gained the whole village. All that was in the church was consumed, excepting the chest that contained the barrel. The monks of Cadouin, informed of the fire, hastened to the spot, and, having broken open the chest, took away the barrel, and carried it to their own church. The clerk, on his return, asked for what had been taken from him; but the monks said that, inasmuch as they had risked their lives in saving it from the flames, it belonged to them. The difference was arranged in this wise: the clerk was received as a religious, and the keeping of the relic was entrusted to him during his lifetime. He himself thought it safer there than in a rural church.'