The girl laughed. "If he were to venture here, they would hang him—not give him half an hour to make his peace with Heaven!—hang him—hang him as a dog!"
"So!—and you are even proud of such a father!"
"So!—and even I am proud to belong to one whose name is known. I thank my good star I do not belong to a nobody of whom none talk, even as an Ogier del' Peyra."
"You are proud of your father—of Le Gros Guillem!" exclaimed Jean; and now his brow flushed with anger, and his eye sparkled. "Proud of that routier and rouffien, [2] who is the scourge, the curse of the country round! Proud of the man that has desolated our land, has made happy wives into wailing widows, and glad children into despairing orphans; who has wrecked churches, and drunk—blaspheming God at the time—out of the gold chalices; who has driven his sword into the bowels of his own Mother Country, and has scorched her beautiful face with his firebrands! I know of Le Gros Guillem—who does not?—know of him by the curses that are raised by his ill deeds, the hatred he has sown, the vows of vengeance that are registered——"
[ [2] A routier, a brigand who harassed the roads; a rouffien, a dweller in the rocks, rouffes.
"Which he laughs at," interrupted Noémi.
"Which he laughs at now," pursued the boy angrily, and anger gave fluency to his tongue. "But do you not suppose that a day of reckoning will arrive? Is Heaven deaf to the cries of the sufferers? Is Humanity all-enduring, and never likely to revolt—and, when she does, to exact a terrible revenge? The labourer asks for naught but to plough his land in peace, the merchant nothing but to be allowed to go on his journey unmolested, the priest has no higher desire than to say his Mass in tranquillity. And all this might be but for Le Gros Guillem and the like of him. Let the English keep their cities and their provinces; they belong to them by right. But is Le Gros Guillem English? Was Perducat d'Albret English? What of Le petit Mesquin? of the Archpriest? of Cervolle? Were they English? Are those real English faces that we fear and hate? Are they not the faces of our own countrymen, who call themselves English, that they may plunder and murder their fellow-countrymen and soak with blood and blast with fire the soil that reared them?"
Noémi was somewhat awed by his vehemence, but she said—
"Rather something to be talked about than a nothing at all."
"Wrong, utterly wrong!" said Jean. "Rather be the storm that bursts and wrecks all things than be still beneficent Nature in her order which brings to perfection? Any fool can destroy; it takes a wise man to build up. You—you fair and gay young spirit, tell me have you ever seen that of which you speak so lightly, of which you jest as if it were a matter of pastime? Have you gone tripping after your father, treading in his bloody footprints, holding up your skirts lest they should touch the festering carcases on either side the path he has trod?"