IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!
By Stanley J. Weyman.
On the moorland above the old gray village of Carbaix, in Finistére—Finistére, the most westerly province of Brittany—stands a cottage, built, as all the cottages in that country are, of rough-hewn stones. It is a poor, rude place to-day, but it wore an aspect far more rude and primitive a hundred years ago—say on an August day in the year 1793, when a man issued from the doorway, and, shading his eyes from the noonday sun, gazed long and fixedly in the direction of a narrow rift which a few score paces away breaks the monotony of the upland level. This man was tall and thin and unkempt, his features expressing a mixture of cunning and simplicity. He gazed a while in silence, but at length uttered a grunt of satisfaction as the figure of a woman rose gradually into sight. She came on slowly, in a stooping posture, dragging behind her a great load of straw, which completely hid the little sledge on which it rested, and which was attached to her waist by a rope of twisted hay.
The figure of a woman—rather of a girl. As she drew nearer it could be seen that her cheeks, though brown and sunburned, were as smooth as a child’s. She looked scarcely eighteen. Her head was bare, and her short petticoats, of some coarse stuff, left visible bare feet thrust into wooden shoes. She advanced with her head bent and her shoulders strained forward, her face dull and patient. Once, and once only, when the man’s eyes left her for a moment, she shot at him a look of scared apprehension; and later, when she came abreast of him, her breath coming and going with her exertions, he might have seen, had he looked closely, that her strong brown limbs were trembling under her.
But the man noticed nothing in his impatience, and only chid her for her slowness. “Where have you been dawdling, lazy-bones?” he cried.
She murmured, without halting, that the sun was hot.
“Sun hot!” he retorted. “Jeanne is lazy, I think! Mon Dieu, that I should have married a wife who is tired by noon! I had better have left you to that never-do-well Pierre Bounat. But I have news for you, my girl.”
He lounged after her as he spoke, his low, cunning face—the face of the worst kind of French peasant—flickering with cruel pleasure, as he saw how she started at his words. She made no answer, however. Instead, she drew her load with increased vehemence towards one of the two doors which led into the building. “Well, well, I will tell you presently,” he called after her. “Be quick and come to dinner.”
He entered himself by the other door. The house was divided into two chambers by a breast-high partition of wood. The one room served for kitchen; the other, now half full of straw, was barn and granary, fowl-house and dove-cote, in one. “Be quick!” he called to her. Standing in the house-room, he could see her head as she stooped to unload the straw.
In a moment she came in, her shoes clattering on the floor. The perspiration stood in great beads on her forehead, and showed how little she had deserved his reproach. She sat down silently, avoiding his eyes; but he thought nothing of this. It was no new thing. It pleased him, if anything.