Noémi, Page 3

  CHAPTER III.

  THE WOLVES OUT.

  JEAN DEL' PEYRA was riding home, a distance of some fifteen miles fromLa Roque Gageac. His way led through forests of oak clothing the slopesand plateau of chalk. The road was bad--to be more exact, there was noroad; there was but a track.

  In times of civil broil, when the roads were beset by brigands,travellers formed or found ways for themselves through the bush, overthe waste land, away from the old and neglected arteries of traffic. Thehighways were no longer kept up--there was no one to maintain them inrepair, and if they were sound no one would travel on them who couldavoid them by a detour, when exposed to be waylaid, plundered, carriedoff to a dungeon, and put to ransom.

  To understand the condition of affairs, a brief sketch of the Englishdomination in Guyenne is necessary.

  By the marriage of Eleanor, daughter and heiress of William X., Earl ofPoitou and Duke of Aquitaine, with Henry of Anjou, afterwards Henry II.of England, in 1152, the vast possessions of her family were united tothose of the Angevin house, which claimed the English crown.

  By this union the house of Anjou suddenly rose to be a power, superiorto that of the French crown on the Gaulish soil, which it cut offentirely from the mouths of the Seine and the Loire, and nipped betweenits Norman and Aquitanian fingers. The natives of the South--speakingtheir own language, of different race, aspirations, character, fromthose in the North--had no traditional attachment to the French throne,and no ideal of national concentration about it into one great unity.Here and there, dotted about as islets in the midst of the Englishpossessions in the South, were feudal or ecclesiastical baronies, ortownships, that were subject immediately to the French crown, and exemptfrom allegiance to the English King; and these acted as germs,fermenting in the country, and gradually but surely influencing theminds of all, and drawing all to the thought that for the good of theland it were better that it should belong to France than to England.Such was the diocese and county of Sarlat. This had belonged to amonastic church founded in the eighth century, but it had been raised toan episcopal see in 1317, and had never wavered in its adherence to theFrench interest. Sarlat was not on the Dordogne, but lay buried,concealed in the depths of oak-woods, accessible only along narrowdefiles commanded at every point by rocky headlands; and the key to theepiscopal city was La Roque Gageac, the impregnable fortress and town onthe pellucid, rippling Dordogne--the town cramped to the steep slope,the castle nestling into an excavation in the face of the abrupt scarp.

  Nearly opposite La Roque stood an insulated block of chalk, withprecipices on all sides, and to secure this, in 1280, Philip III. ofFrance built on it a free town, exempt from all taxes save a triflinghouse-charge due to himself; which town he hoped would become a greatcommercial centre, and a focus whence French influence might radiate tothe south of the Dordogne. Unhappily the importance of Domme made it aprize to be coveted by the English, and in 1347 they took it. They wereexpelled in 1369, but John Chandos laid siege to it in 1380 and took itagain, and from that date it remained uninterruptedly in their handstill the end of the English power in Aquitaine. For three hundred yearshad Guyenne pertained to the English crown, many of the towns and mostof the nobility had no aspirations beyond serving the Leopards. Thecommon people were supremely indifferent whether the Fleur-de-lys or theLeopards waved above them, so long as they were left undisturbed. It wasprecisely because they had not the boon of tranquillity afforded them bysubjection to the English that they turned at last with a sigh ofdespair to the French. But it was to the Leopards, the hereditary coatof Guyenne, that they looked first, and it was only when the Leoparddevoured them that they inclined to the Lilies.

  The reason for this general dissatisfaction and alienation was theviolence of the nobility, and the freebooters, who professed to act forthe Crown of England, and to have patents warranting them to actlicentiously. These men, caring only for their own interests, doingnothing to advance the prosperity of the land, used their position,their power, to undermine and ruin it. They attacked the towns whetherunder the English or French allegiance--that mattered nothing--andforced the corporations to enter into compacts with them, whereby theyundertook to pay them an annual subvention, not to ensure protection,but merely to escape pillage. But even these _patis_, as they werecalled, were precarious, and did not cover a multitude of excuses forinfringement of the peace. If, for instance, a merchant of Sarlat was indebt to a man of Domme, the latter appealed to his feudal master, who,in spite of any _patis_ granted, swooped down on such members of thecommunity of Sarlat as he could lay hold of, and held them in durancetill not only was the debt paid, but he was himself indemnified for thetrouble he had taken in obtaining its discharge.

  If these things were done in the green tree, what in the dry?

  In addition to the feudal seigneurs in their castles, ruling over theirseigneuries, and nominally amenable to the English crown, there were the_routiers_, captains of free companies, younger sons of noble houses,bastards, runaway prisoners: any idle and vicious rascal who couldcollect thirty men of like kidney constituted himself a captain, madefor himself and his men a habitation by boring into the limestone orchalk rock, in an inaccessible position, whence he came down at pleasureand ravaged and robbed, burned and murdered indiscriminately, the landsand houses and persons of those, whether French or English, who hadanything to attract his greed, or who had incurred his resentment.

  When Arnaud Amanieu, Sire d'Albret, transferred his allegiance from theEnglish King to the King of France, he was seen by Froissart in Paris,sad of countenance, and he gave this as his reason: "Thank God! I amwell in health, but my purse was fuller when I warred on behalf of theKing of England. Then when we rode on adventures, there were always somerich merchants of Toulouse, of Condom, of La Reole, or Bergerac for usto squeeze. Every day we got some spoil to stuff our superfluities andjollities--alack! now all is dead and dull." That was the saying of agreat Prince, whom the King of France delighted to honour. Now hear thewords of a common _routier_: "How rejoiced were we when we rode abroadand captured many a rich prior or merchant, or a train of mules ladenwith Brussels cloths, or furs from the fair of Landit, or spices fromBruges, or silks from Damascus! All was ours, and we ransomed men at ourgood pleasure. Every day fresh spoil. The villages purveyed to us, andthe rustics brought us corn, flour, bread, litter, wines, meat, andfowl; we were waited on as kings, we were clothed as princes, and whenwe rode abroad the earth quaked before us."

  In this terrible time agriculture languished, trade was at a standstill.Bells were forbidden to be rung in churches from vespers till full day,lest they should direct the freebooters to villages that they mightravage. The towns fortified themselves, the villagers converted theirchurches into castles, and surrounded them with moats. Children wereplanted on all high points to keep watch, and give warning at the flashof a helmet. Wretched peasants spent their nights in islands inmid-river or in caves underground.

  No one who has not visited the country swept and re-swept by thesemarauders can have any conception of the agony through which the countrypassed. It is furrowed, torn, to the present day by the picks of theruffians who sought for themselves nests whence they might survey theland and swoop down on it, but above all by the efforts of the torturedto hide themselves--here burrowing underground like moles in mid-field,there boring out chambers in clefts of the rock, there constructing forthemselves cabins in the midst of mosquito-haunted marshes, and there,again, ensconcing themselves in profound depths of trackless forests.

  As Jean del' Peyra rode along, he shook his head and passed his handover his face, as though to free it from cobwebs that had gathered abouthis eyes and were irritating him. But these were no spider-threads: whatteased and confused him were other fibres, spun by that brown witch,Noemi.

  He was angry, indignant with her, but his anger and indignation were, asit were, trowel and prong that dug and forked the thoughts of her deepinto his mind. He thought of her stan
ding before him, quivering withwrath, the fire flashing and changing hue in her opalescent brown eyes,and the hectic flame running through her veins and tinging cheek andbrow. He thought of her voice, so full of tone, so flexible, asopalescent in melodious change as her eyes iridescent of light.

  That she--she with such a smooth face, such slim fingers--should talk ofcrime as a joke, exult over the misery of her fellows! A very leopard inlitheness and in beauty, and a very leopard in heart.

  Jean del' Peyra's way led down the head stream of the Lesser Beune. Thevalley was broad--one level marsh--and, in the evening, herons werequivering in it, stooping to pick up an eft or a young roach.

  "Ah! you vile creature!" sang forth Jean, as a black hare rose on hisleft and darted past him into the wood. "Prophet of evil! But what elsein these untoward times and in this evil world can one expect but omensof ill?"

  The track by which Jean descended emerged from the dense woods upon openground. As the Beune slid to a lower level, it passed under precipicesof rock, about a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet high; and thesecliffs, composed of beds of various softness, were horizontallychannelled, constituting terraces, each terrace unsupported below, orrather thrown forward over a vault. Moreover, there was not one of theseplatforms of rock that was not tenanted. In the evening, peasantsreturning from their work were ascending to their quarters by scramblingup the rocks where vertical, by means of notches cut in the stone, intowhich they thrust their hands and feet. Where the ledges overhung, themen were drawn up by ropes to the platforms above.

  But not only was this the case with men, but with their oxen. Jeanpassed and saluted a farmer who was in process of placing his beasts ina position of security for the night. His wife was above, in the rock,and was working a windlass by means of which an ox was being graduallylifted from the ground by broad bands passed under its belly, and so wasraised to the height of some thirty feet, where the beast, accustomed tothis proceeding, quickly stepped on to a narrow path cut in the rock,and walked to its stable, also rock-hewn in the face of the cliff.

  In another place was a woman with her children closing up the opening ofa grotto that was level with the soil. This was effected by a boardwhich fitted into a rebate in the rock, and then the woman, afterputting her children within, heaped stones and sods against the board todisguise it; and when this had been done to her satisfaction, shecrawled in by a hole that had been left for the purpose, and by a cordpulled after her a bunch of brambles that served to plug and disguisethis hole.

  Bitterness welled up in the heart of Jean as he noticed all theseefforts made by the poor creatures to place themselves in securityduring the hours of darkness.

  "Ah, Fontaineya!" called Jean to the farmer who was superintending theelevation of his second ox. "How goes the world with you?"

  "Bad, but might be worse--even as with you."

  "With me things are not ill."

  "Whence come you, then?"

  "From La Roque."

  "Aha! Not from Ste. Soure?"

  "No, I have been from home these fourteen days."

  "Then do not say things are not ill with you till you have been home,"remarked the peasant dryly.

  "What has happened?" asked Jean, his blood standing still with alarm.

  "The wolves have been hunting!"

  "What wolves?"

  "The red. Le Gros Guillem."

  "He has been to Ste. Soure?"

  "He has been to where Ste. Soure _was_."