"'No, no,' cried the old man, passionately;'my son is not left me; my son is dead; he was torn in pieces by the mill-wheel of Orthez. I am not your father; you are not—you never were, you never can be—my son; this is the first word of the secret I have to tell you.'
"'What do you tell me!' cried Raymond, in amazement! 'Your disavowal was not, then, a deception, prompted by paternal affection! What! are you not my father? and was that generous creature, sacrificed for my sake, indeed your son!'
"'He was my child, my only child! the only living being attached to me by the ties of blood—the only creature who would have listened to my last agonized sigh at my hour of death. And see what was his fate, for me! I allowed him to venture for my sake amongst the ferocious people; see to what an end his devotion and gratitude to you had led him!' So saying, the unfortunate old man uncovered the mutilated remains of his unfortunate son, rescued from the stream, and transported to the spot by the compassionate care of Arnauton d'Espaigne. The body lay on a rustic couch, enveloped in a white shroud, which is always, according to the usage of the country, prepared long before death, a taper of yellow wax shed its feeble rays on the corpse'."
The grief and lamentations of Guilhem are interrupted by the rites which then take place; the men wringing their hands, and gesticulating, and cursing the cruelty of the world: the women weeping and wailing; and one of those endowed with poetical powers, improvising a lament over the body, uttering her words in a melancholy cadence, deeply expressive of the grief of all.
"'Alas, Gratien!' she moaned; 'thou hast then left us! thou hast deserted thy aged father—gone without a pressure of the hand! Gratien, may God receive thy soul! To live is to suffer. Life is like the wheel by which thou wert torn. Thou wert in the right to fly it. Happy child! thou art gone to a place where there are no Cagots, no men to persecute thee; thou wilt know now who were the ancestors from whom we descend. Thou hast no more use for the pruning-knife and the infamous axe. No more toil nor suffering await thee; no more contempt nor outrage! Accursed be the wheel, oh, Gratien, which crushed thee! never may the torrent wash out thy blood which stains it; let it turn for ever red and bloody! No bell tolled for thy soul; but the thunder and the wind, oh, Gratien! Toll louder still—no bell for the Cagot! But Heaven weeps with us, the trees groan with us. Old man! thou dost not weep alone. Adieu, dear Gratien, thy body is returned to thy cabin; but thy soul, escaped the demon, is fled on a beam of the moon to the great house of heaven! Yes, he cries—I am in heaven; I am telling the Cagots, our ancestors, that their children are still in suffering!'"
Guilhem, comforted by the tenderness of Raymond, recovers in some degree his self-possession, and proceeds to relate to the young knight the manner of his falling, when an infant, into his charge. The narrative is as follows:—
"'In 1360, twenty-six years ago, when I was myself thirty-nine years of age, the event happened which I have now to tell you. I was a Cagot from my birth, by my parents and my ancestors—a proscribed outcast of unkind nature, like these you see around—poor, ignorant, timid, and a mark for insult and contempt. I had already suffered much; for God, alas! had given me a heart formed to feel and to love; yet long habits of endurance had, in great measure, rendered it callous and insensible, unaided as I was by intellectual culture.
"'I married a woman of my race; but, after a year, she died, leaving me in lonely widowed sorrow, with one child. Alas! he has just rejoined his mother, and rude is the journey which has conducted him to her!
"'At this period, as you know, and as I afterwards learnt from the mouth of your venerable preceptor, the holy hermit, all France was overrun with bands of marauders and robbers of every nation, called the late-comers.[47] Béarn was no more free from them than other parts of the kingdom. One day, I was returning from Oloron, my heart more sad than usual,—cursing men and life, for I had been the object of new injuries,—when a chief of one of these predatory bands suddenly presented himself before me; and, addressing me, said: 'Good man, will you do a kind action? Take this infant, abandoned to my men-at-arms by an unfaithful servant. I have saved it from their inhumanity: it has that about it which will pay your trouble.' I saw that he held in his arms a child, who was weeping bitterly; when I looked on its lovely face—round, innocent, and rosy—my heart was touched, and I accepted the charge.