Guess if her companion was loth to obey her.
They moved on for some time almost in silence. Cecil’s thoughts were busy with a picture too—not the less vivid because only her own imagination had painted it. Her deep, dreamy eyes passed over the landscape actually before them without catching one of its details: they were looking on a desolate stony plain, cracked and calcined by a fierce Indian sun—a few plumy palms in the background, and the rocky bed of a river half dried up—in the foreground a crowd of wild barbaric soldiery, with savage, swarthy features, bareheaded or white-turbaned; mingled with these were horsemen in the uniform of our light dragoons, sabring right and left mercilessly. In the very centre of the mêlée was one figure, round which all the others seemed to group themselves as mere accessories. She saw, very distinctly, the dark, determined face, set, every line of it, in an unspeakable ferocity, with a world of murderous meaning in the gleaming eyes—so distinctly that it drove out the remembrance of the same man’s face, expressive of nothing but passionless indifference, though she looked upon it but a few minutes since under the gray branches of the olive. She almost heard his clear, imperious tones cheering on and rallying his troopers, when a ruder voice broke her reverie.
“Halte là!”
If there was one thing that miserable muleteer-boy ought to have known better than another, it was the insuperable objection entertained by the Provençal peasant to any thing like trespass on his territory (the touchiness of the propriétaire bears generally an inverse ratio to the extent of his possessions); yet, to make a short cut of about two hundred yards, he had led his party through a gap in the low stone wall over a strip of ground belonging to the very man who was least likely to overlook the intrusion. Jean Duchesne had a bad name in the neighborhood, and deserved it thoroughly; he was surly enough when sober (which was the exception), but when drunk there were no bounds to his blind, brutish ferocity, and his great personal strength made him a formidable antagonist. He was not an agreeable object to contemplate, that gaunt giant, as he stood there in his squalid, tattered dress, with rough, matted hair, and face flushed by recent intemperance, and flecked with livid stains of past debauches. You may see many such crowding round the guillotine or the tumbrel in pictures of the French Revolution.
It is very odd that one can not write or read those two words without a boiling of the blood, a tingling at the fingers’ ends, and a tightening of the muscles of the forearm—ineffably absurd when excited by a recollection seventy years old! Yet so it is. You may talk of oppression till you are tired; you may catalogue all the wrongs that Jacques Bonhomme endured before his day of retaliation came; you may bring in your pet illustration of “the storm that was necessary to clear the atmosphere;” but you will never make some of us feel that the guilt of an Order—had it been blacker by a hundred shades—palliated the Massacre of its Innocents. If the Marquis and Mousquetaire only had suffered, they might have laid down their lives cheerfully, as they would have done the stake of any other lost game; and as for the priests, it was their privilege to be martyrs. But think of those fair matrons, and gentle girls, and delicate mignonnes, that had been petted from their childhood, cooped up in the foul courts of the Abbaye and La Force, with even the necessaries of life begrudged them, till the light died in their eyes and the gloss faded from their tresses; and then brought out to die in the chill, misty Brumaire morning, howled at and derided by the swarm of bloodsuckers, till they cowered down, not in fear, but sickening horror, welcoming Samson and his satellites as friends and saviors. Remember, too, that there was scarcely an exception to the rule of patient courage, calm self-sacrifice, and pride of birth that never belied itself. Dubarry might shriek on the scaffold, but the Rohans died mute.
Of all the digressions we have indulged in, this is perhaps the most unwarrantable; and, though it has relieved me unspeakably, I hereby tender a certain amount of contrition for the same. Revenons à nos moutons—though there was very little of the sheep in the appearance of Jean Duchesne, whose demeanor (when we left him) you will recollect was decidedly aggressive. It was evident that the mule-boy thought mischief 35 was brewing, for he twisted his features—irregular and tumbled enough already—into divers remarkable contortions expressive of remorse and terror.
“Who, then, dares to trespass on my lands? Do you think we sow our crops for your cursed mules to trample on?”
He spoke in a hoarse, thick voice (suggestive of spirituous liquors), and in the disagreeable Provençal dialect, which must have altered strangely since the time of the troubadours: brief as his speech was, it found room for more than one of those expletives which are nowhere so horribly blasphemous as in the south of France.
Cecil had started slightly at the first interjection, which broke her day-dream, but she was not otherwise alarmed or discomposed: she seemed to regard the propriétaire simply as an unpleasant obstacle to their progress, and glanced at Mr. Fullarton as if she expected him to clear it away. The latter was not good at French, but he did manage to express their sorrow if they had done any harm unconsciously, and their wish to retire instantly. “Not before paying,” was the reply. “Quinze francs de dedommagemens; et puis, filez aux tous les diables!”
Women are not expected to carry purses or any other objects of simple utility; but why Mr. Fullarton should have left his at home on this particular day is between himself and his own conscience. The party very soon realized the fact that they could muster about a hundred and fifty centimes among them.