Vivian's Lesson

by Elizabeth W. Grierson

He led her away, and the docile animal followed him quietly, for Breton cows are accustomed to being led out to graze, and soon the two were picking their way gingerly over the quaking bog, which was still soft with the winter rain. Once arrived at the other side, where there was a strip of short, sweet grass, the boy slipped the rope from Nanette’s horns, and, climbing a short way up the side of the hill, he lay down in the sun and began to think.

Poor little fellow! his thoughts were always the same, and they were sometimes so confused that he could hardly tell whether the things he thought about were real or not. They floated through his brain, broken up and confused, like the colours in a kaleidoscope, and there were only two things that he was ever quite certain about. One was that he had not always lived in the low thatched cottage which he had just left; the other, that he was an English boy, and not a French one.

There were other things which he remembered vaguely, and which he was sure were real, although the old woman at the cottage, Madame Genviève, as she was called, always said that they were but feverish dreams that had fixed themselves in his brain during the illness which he had had after he had come to live with her.

This illness had taken away his memory, so she told him, and had filled his head with strange fancies, and had made him forget that he was her grandson, and had always lived in Paris until his mother died, and his father—her son Jacques—had brought him to the little cottage in the Montagnes Noirs to be the comfort of his old grandmother’s failing years.

But somehow Pierre did not believe all this, although he had learned to hold his tongue: for at first, when he used to talk of a strange memory which was always in his mind, and would speak the language which came easiest to his tongue, she would look round anxiously as if she feared that some one might hear him, and then she would fly into a passion, and scold him, and even beat him; and afterwards, when her anger had cooled, and the fear had gone out of her eyes, she would stroke his head, and tell him that those were but sick fancies, which he must be careful to hide, in case the inspector down at Châteauneuf should hear about him, and take him away and shut him up in an institution, as he did to all people who thought such thoughts.

So Pierre learned to hold his tongue and keep his thoughts to himself. This had been easy at first, when the least effort to think made his head ache as though it would split; but it was more difficult now that the fine weather, and the long days spent in the open air, were making his poor little body, and his mind too, stronger.

To-day as he lay on the hillside in the sun these thoughts were clearer than ever. He remembered a big station, all lit up, and he was there with some one else, a grown-up man it seemed to him, who did not call him Pierre, but some other name which had quite a different sound. Bah! he did not remember, but that did not matter. Perhaps the name would come into his mind later, as other things had come. The gentleman had gone away somewhere, and had told him to wait, and he had waited. Then some other men had passed, carrying bags, and talking to one another. They were gentlemen, he could remember that, wearing warm coats with fur collars. As he was looking at them, suddenly the face of one of them grew into a coarse, bad face, with a stubbly beard and a patch over one eye, and it seemed to him that he wanted to catch that man very much. So he ran after him, and cried, ‘I know you! I know you!’ The man had passed, but he turned round, and, lo and behold! he had a gentleman’s face once more. Then, somehow, Pierre was in a railway carriage with the gentleman and his friends, and the train was moving, and he wanted to get out; but one of the men laughed and said something about his knowing too much. And then it seemed that in this strange memory he struggled, and tried to scream, and some one put his hand over his mouth. And then he tried to bite the hand; he remembered his teeth going into the soft flesh, then he must have fallen, for he felt a dreadful pain at the back of his head, and everything stopped for a while; and when he woke up he was in the little box-bed in the thatched cottage on the moor, and the old woman was sitting cowering over the peat-fire talking to a stranger, who presently put some money in her hand and went away.

The story was very vague and confused. There was much about it which he could not understand, and when he tried to remember any more his head always ached; but somehow he knew that it was true, and he knew too that he was an English boy, though why an English boy should be living with an old woman in the heart of the Montagnes Noirs was more than he could make out.

But slowly a great determination was forming itself in his poor confused mind, and that was that one day he would run away. He knew that somewhere, to the north, over these hills, lay St Brieuc, and St Brieuc was near the sea. So much he had learned from the neighbouring peasants whom he saw occasionally, though very, very rarely, and they knew, because at Easter-time they drove their lean pigs and cows to sell at the market there. And over the sea was England.