"O, là, là! See, then, the best of good luck for each one of us this year!"
Although Mère Pitou's rotund body, like Falstaff's, was fat and scant o' breath, and the Pilgrims' Way was steep and rocky, some reserve of energy enabled her to clap her hands and scream the tidings of high fortune when the notes of a deep-toned bell pealed from an alp still hidden among the trees.
Three girls, fifty paces higher up the path, halted when they heard that glad cry—and, indeed, who would not give ear to such augury?
"Why should the clang of a bell foretell good luck, Mother?" cried Barbe, the youngest, seventeen that September day, and a true Breton maid, with eyes like sloes, and cheeks the tint of ripe russet apples, and full red lips ever ready to smile shyly, revealing the big, white, even teeth of a peasant.
"Mother" signaled that explanations must await a more opportune moment.
"Madame Pitou can't utter another word," laughed Yvonne, the tallest girl of the trio.
"She has had some secret on the tip of her tongue all day," said Madeleine, who was so like Barbe that she might have been an elder sister; though the sole tie between the two was residence in the same village. "Don't you remember how she kept saying in the train?—'Now, little ones, ask Sainte Barbe to be kind to you. She'll hear your prayers a kilometer away, even though you whisper them.'"
"Yes, and Mama would have liked us to begin singing a hymn when we started from the foot of the hill, but she thought Monsieur Ingersoll and Monsieur Tollemache would only be amused," put in Barbe.
"They would certainly have been amused before Madame Pitou reached the top, singing!" tittered Yvonne.
"Is it possible that I shall ever be as stout as Mama?" murmured Barbe, and the mere notion of such a catastrophe evoked a poignant anxiety that was mirrored in her eyes.
"Ah, Mignonne, now you know the form your petition to Sainte Barbe must take," smiled Yvonne.
"It's all very well for you, Yvonne, to chaff us smaller ones," pouted Madeleine. "You're tall, and slim, and fair, and you carry yourself like the pretty American ladies who come to Pont Aven in the season, the ladies who wear such simple clothes, and hardly look a year older than their daughters, and walk leagues in men's boots, and play tennis before déjeuner. Of course you can't help being elegant. You're American yourself."
The recipient of this tribute turned it aside deftly. "Sometimes I think I am more Breton than American," she said.
"Yes, everyone says that," agreed Barbe loyally. "Next year, Yvonne, they'll make you Queen of the Gorse."
With the innocence of youth, or perhaps with its carelessness, Barbe had raised a topic as prickly as the gorse itself, because Madeleine had been a maid of honor that year, and might reasonably expect the regal place in the succeeding Fête of the Fleurs d'Ajonc. Happily, Yvonne, if endowed with a sense of humor, was eminently good-natured and tactful.
"Nothing of the sort," she replied. "My father will never allow me to be photographed, and there would be a riot in Pont Aven if the shops couldn't sell picture postcards of the Queen."
"Hurry up!" cried single-minded Barbe. "Let's pray to Sainte Barbe before Mother comes, or she'll be telling me what I must ask for, and I mean to take your advice, Yvonne."
Two faces were turned instantly toward the invisible shrine of the puissant saint, and it would place no heavy strain on the intellect to guess what favors were sought. But Yvonne hesitated. She had not been reared in the precise religious faith of her companions. Opinions garnered in the Bohemian atmosphere of John Ingersoll's studio were in ill accord with the uncompromising dogma taught in the convent on the hill overlooking the estuary of the Aven and labored by every sermon preached in the picturesque church near the bridge.
Yet at that instant some words uttered by her father reached her ears, and, moved by sudden impulse, she raised her eyes to the tiny arch of light that marked the spot near the summit where the interlacing branches of the avenue of elms came to an end.
"Sweet Lady Barbara," she breathed, "if you have it in your power to favor us poor mortals, please give my dear father a happy year!"
The bell, after a few seconds of silence, renewed its clamor, and the pretty unbeliever accepted the omen. Her friends, of course, regarded the answer as more than propitious: it was an assurance, an undoubted promise of saintly intercession.
"I love Mama more than anyone in the world, but I couldn't bear to measure a meter round my waist," said Barbe confidently.
"Even though I may never be Queen, it is something to have been a maid of honor," said Madeleine, demurely conciliatory now that her prayer was safely lodged.
Yvonne heard, but paid no heed. She was looking at the three people approaching the ledge of rock on which she and the others were standing.
Madame Pitou, like the girls, wore the costume of Brittany, conforming, of course, to the time-honored fashion that allots a special headgear to womankind in each district. Thus the coif supplies an unerring label of residence. A woman from Pont Aven would recognize a woman from Riec and another from Concarneau though she had never seen either before in her life; while all three would unite, without possibility of error, in saying of a fourth, "She comes from Auray."
The two men in Mère Pitou's company were just as surely classed by their attire as the women by their coifs. Both were artists, and each obeyed the unwritten law which says that he who would paint must don a knickerbocker suit, wear a wide-brimmed felt hat, disregard collar buttons, and display a loosely knotted necktie. Ingersoll, the elder, was content with clothes of brown corduroy which had seen many, if not better, days. His boots were strong and hobnailed, and his easy stride up the rough and uneven track would reassure one who doubted the stamina of his seemingly frail body. Tollemache, who affected gray tweed, a French gray silk tie, gray woolen stockings, and brown brogues, looked what he was, a healthy young athlete who would be equally at home on springy heather whether carrying an easel or a gun.
Tollemache had caught Mère Pitou's arm when she announced the message of the bell.
"One more outburst like that, my fairy, and we'll have to carry you up the remainder of the hill," he grinned.
"Mon Dieu! but I'm glad I made the best part of the pilgrimage in a train and a carriage!" twittered Madame. "Yet, though I dropped, I had to warn the little ones that the dear saint knew they were coming to her shrine."
"Is that what it means?"
"What else? A pity you are not a good Catholic, Monsieur Tollemache, or you might be granted a favor today."
"Oh, come now! That's no way to convert a black Presbyterian. Tell me that Sainte Barbe will get my next picture crowned by the Academy, and I'll fall on my knees with fervor."
"Tcha! Even a saint cannot obtain what Heaven does not allow."
Ingersoll laughed. "Mère Pitou may lose her breath; but she never loses her wit," he said. "Now I put forward a much more modest request. Most excellent Sainte Barbe, send me some mad dealer who will empty my studio at a thousand francs a canvas!"
Yvonne heard these words; yet, be it noted, she asked the saint to make her father happy, not prosperous. It was then that the bell rang a second time.
"Tiens!" exclaimed Madame Pitou. "The saint replies!"
"Like every magician, you achieve your effect by the simplest of contrivances—when one peeps behind the scenes," said Ingersoll. "Old Père Jean, custodian of the chapel, who will meet us at the summit, keeps a boy on guard, so that all good pilgrims may be put in the right frame of mind by hearing the bell accidentally. The boy saw our girls first, and then spied us. Hence the double tolling. Now, Madame, crush me! I can see lightning in your eye."
"Mark my words, Monsieur Ingersoll, the saint will send that dealer, and he will certainly be mad, since none but a lunatic would pay a thousand francs for any picture of yours."
Ingersoll seized her free arm. "Run her up, for Heaven's sake, Tollemache!" he cried in English. "Her tongue has scarified me every day for eighteen years, and age cannot wither, nor custom stale, its infinite variety."
Laughing, struggling, crying brokenly that ces Américains would be the death of her, and tripping along the while with surprising lightness of foot,—for Mère Pitou had been noted as the best dancer of the gavotte at any pardon held within a radius of ten miles of Pont Aven,—she was hurried to the waiting girls.
"Ah, that rascal of a father of yours!" she wheezed to Yvonne, relapsing into the Breton language, as was her invariable habit when excited, either in anger or mirth. "And this other overgrown imp! When they're beaten in argument they try to kill me. Gars! A nice lot I'm bringing to the holy chapel!"
"Never mind, chère maman," said the girl, taking her father's place, and clasping the plump arm affectionately. "When we descend the other side of the hill you'll have them at your mercy. Then you can tell them what you really think of them."
"They know now. Artists, indeed! Acrobats, I call them! Making sport of a poor old woman! Not that I'm astonished at anything Monsieur Ingersoll does. Everybody admits that he is touched here," and she dabbed a fat finger at her glistening forehead, "or he wouldn't bury himself alive in a Brittany village, because he really has talent. But that hulking Monsieur Tollemache ought to be showing off his agility before you girls instead of lugging me up the Pilgrims' Way. Cré nom! When little Barbe's father—Heaven rest his soul!—met me here one fête day before we were married, he wouldn't rest till he had swung himself round Sainte Barbe's tower by the shepherd's hooks; and me screaming in fright while I watched him, though bursting with pride all the time, since the other girls were well aware that he was only doing it to find out if I cared whether or not he fell and broke his neck."
"What's that?" inquired Tollemache; for Madame Pitou was speaking French again. "Where is this tower?"
"Oh, you'll shiver when you see it! You Americans eat so much beef that you can never leave the earth. That's why Frenchmen fly while you walk."
"Or run, my cabbage. You must admit that we can run?"
"The good Lord gave you those long legs for some purpose, no doubt."
"Well, Maman, we offered our petitions. What did you ask for?" said Yvonne.
Madame flung up her hands with a woebegone cry. "May the dear saint forgive me, but the monkey chatter of those two infidels put my prayer clean out of my head!"
"Gee whizz!" exclaimed Tollemache. "This time I'll run in earnest, or I'll catch it hot and strong," and he made off.
"No harm done," said Ingersoll. "Mère Pitou has all she wants in this world, and will enter the next with pious confidence."
For once the elderly dame kept a still tongue. Like every Breton woman, she was deeply religious, and rather given to superstition, and the momentary lapse that led her to forget a carefully thought out plea for saintly aid caused a pang of real distress.
Yvonne guessed the truth, and sympathized with her. "Father dear," she said, "promise now, this minute, that you will bring us all here again next year on Barbe's fête day, and that we shall fall on our knees while Madame offers her prayer, or she will be unhappy all day."
Ingersoll read correctly the look of reproach his daughter shot at him, and was genuinely sorry. He too understood the tribulation that had befallen his friend.
"By Jove!" he said instantly, "better than that, though I make the promise willingly, Madame Pitou and I must do immediate penance for our sins—she for neglect and I for irreverence—by going halfway down the hill again and toiling back."
He was by no means surprised when Mère Pitou took at his word. Away they went, and Yvonne did not fail to grasp the meaning of her father's significant glance toward the belfry as he turned on his heel. On no account was the boy to miss the arrival of yet a third batch of pilgrims!
Now, the belfry stood on the farther edge of a tiny plateau of rock and gorse that crowned the summit. On the left was Père Jean's cottage with its stable and weaving shed. Among the trees in the background rose the diminutive spire of Sainte Barbe's chapel, and it was evident that the slope of the hill was precipitous, because spire and treetops, though quite near, were almost on a level with the girl's eyes. From the side of the belfry a paved causeway led to a quaintly carved and weather-beaten open-air altar, and long flights of broad steps fell thence on one hand to the door of the chapel and on the other to the first of many paths piercing the dense woodland of the hillside.
Père Jean, a sprightly and wizened old peasant dressed in white linen, was already chatting with Tollemache and the other two girls. The boy, thinking the avenue was clear, had gone to the cottage for a tray of picture postcards.
Yvonne followed, and sent him to his lookout with definite instructions. "Make no mistake," she said, "and we'll buy at least a franc's worth of cards later." Then she rejoined her friends.
"Yes, I've seen it done," Père Jean was saying. "Sailors were the best; but the shepherds were brave lads too. Nowadays it is forbidden by the prefect."
"Why? Were there many accidents?" inquired Tollemache.
"Oh, yes, a few. You see, it seems easy enough at the commencement; but sometimes the heart failed when the body was swinging over the cliff. It is fatal to look down."
Madeleine's shoulders were bent over a low parapet. Yvonne, leaning on her, saw that the caretaker was talking of the feat that Barbe's father had accomplished many years earlier. The altar at the end of the causeway was shielded by a squat, square tower. In its walls, about six feet above the causeway, some iron rings were visible. They hung loose; but their staples were imbedded in the masonry, and each ring was about a yard apart from its fellow. A mass of rock gave ready access to the first pair; but thenceforth the venturesome athlete who essayed the passage must swing himself in air, gripping a ring alternately in the left hand and in both hands.
On one side, the left, the tower sank only to the level of the path beneath; but a glance over the opposite parapet revealed an awesome abyss.
Madeleine shuddered when she felt Yvonne's hand. "To think that men should be so foolish as to risk their lives in such a way!" she murmured.
"I suppose that anyone who let go was killed?" said Tollemache.
"Mais, non, M'sieu'," Père Jean assured him. "The blessed saint would not permit that. No one was ever killed, I'm told. But the prefect has forbidden it these twenty years."
"Are the rings in good condition?"
"Certainly, M'sieu'. Where now does one get such iron as was made in those days?"
"Let's test some of 'em, anyhow," said Tollemache, and before the horrified girls realized what he meant he had leaped from parapet to rock, and was clinging to a couple of rings.
"Oh, Monsieur Tollemache!" screamed Barbe.
"Please come back, Monsieur!" cried Madeleine.
"Hi! Hi! It is forbidden by the prefect!" bellowed Père Jean.
But Yvonne, though angry and pallid with fright, only said, "Don't be stupid, Lorry. I should never have thought you would show off in that silly manner."
She spoke in English. Tollemache, gazing down at her in a comical, sidelong way, answered in the same language.
"I'm not showing off. Do you think that any Frenchman ever lived who could climb where I couldn't?"
"No one said a word about you."
"Yes. Mère Pitou said I'd shiver when I saw the place. Now watch me shiver!"
He swung outward. Even in her distress, Yvonne noticed that he took a strong pull at each ring before trusting his whole weight to it. But she made no further protest, nor uttered a sound; though Madeleine and Barbe were screaming frantically, and the old caretaker's voice cracked with reiteration of the prefect's commands.
Tollemache was soon out of sight round the angle of the tower, and the two Breton girls ran to the other parapet to watch for his reappearance. Not so Yvonne. The dread notion possessed her that she might see Laurence Tollemache dashed to his death on those cruel rocks some sixty feet beneath, and she knew that, once witnessed, the horrific spectacle would never leave her vision. So she waited spellbound in front of the altar, and gazed mutely at some tawdry images that stood there. Could they help, these grotesque caricatures of heavenly beings, carved and gilded wooden blocks with curiously inane eyes and thick lips? Her senses seemed to be atrophied. She was aware of a feeling of dull annoyance when the boy, attracted by the screams and Père Jean's shrill vehemence, came running from his post, and thus would surely miss the second appearance of her father and Mère Pitou. But the young peasant was quick witted. He had seen the "pilgrims" turn and resume the ascent; so he dashed into the belfry, because he could thence obtain a rare view of an event that he had often heard of but never seen,—a man swinging himself round Sainte Barbe's tower by the shepherd's hooks, such being the local name of the series of rings.
So the bell tolled its deep, strong notes, and simultaneously Madeleine and Barbe shrieked in a wilder pitch of frenzy. Tollemache had just swung round the second angle of the tower. His left hand had caught the outermost ring on that side; but the staple yielded, and he vanished.
"Ah, mon Dieu! he has fallen!" cried Barbe, collapsing forthwith in a faint.
Fortunately Madeleine saved her from a nasty tumble on the rough stones; though she herself was nearly distraught with terror. Père Jean raced off down the right-hand flight of steps, moving with remarkable celerity for so old a man, and gasping in his panic:
"Mille diables! What will M'sieu' le Préfet say now?"
Evidently the caretaker feared lest Sainte Barbe's miraculous powers should not survive so severe a test. Yet his faith was justified. A shout was heard from the tower's hidden face.
"Je m'en fiche de ça!" was the cry. "I'm right as a nail. I've got to return the way I came—that's all."
Yvonne listened as one in a dream. She saw her father and Madame Pitou crossing the plateau. For an instant her eyes dwelt on the features of the frightened boy peering through an embrasure in the belfry. From some point beneath came the broken ejaculations of Père Jean, who was craning his neck from some precarious perch on the edge of the precipice to catch a glimpse of the mad American's shattered body. Madeleine was sobbing hysterically over the prostrate Barbe, and endeavoring with nervous fingers to undo the stiff linen coif round the unconscious girl's throat.
Now, after leaving the cottage, Yvonne had looked at the chapel, the entrance to which lay at the foot of the left-hand stairway. The sanctuary had a belfry of its own, a narrow, circular tower, pierced with lancet windows beneath a pointed roof. These windows were almost on a line with and about ten feet distant from the top of the wall of rock left by the excavation that provided a site for the building. Through one of them, which faced the causeway, could be seen a tiny white statue of Sainte Barbe. No more striking position could have been chosen for it. The image was impressive by reason of its very unexpectedness.
Hardly conscious of her action, Yvonne turned to the saint now to invoke her help. She murmured an incoherent prayer, and as she gazed distraught at the Madonna-like figure, so calm, so watchful in its aery, she heard the rhythmic clank of iron as the rings moved in their sockets. One fleeting glance over the left parapet revealed Tollemache in the act of swinging himself to the pair of rings above the rock that gave foothold.
Again he peered down at her, twisting his head awkwardly for the purpose. "Nothing much to it," he laughed, jerking out breathless words. "Of course it was a bit of a twister when that ring came away; but——"
He was safe. Yvonne deigned him no further heed. She hurried to Barbe's side.
"For goodness' sake help me to shake her and slap her hands!" she cried to Madeleine. "Monsieur Tollemache has spoiled the day for us already, and Mère Pitou will be ill if she thinks Barbe is hurt."
Barbe, vigorous little village girl, soon yielded to drastic treatment, and was eager as either of her friends to conceal from her mother the fact that she had fainted.
Tollemache, feeling rather sheepish in face of Yvonne's quiet scorn, strolled to the top of the steps down which Père Jean had scuttled. The old man's voice reached him in despairing appeal.
"M'sieu'! Speak, if you are alive! Speak, pour l'amour de Dieu!"
"Hello there!" he cried. "What's the row about? Here I am!"
Père Jean gazed up with bulging eyes, and himself nearly fell over the precipice. "Ah, Dieu merci!" he quavered. "But, M'sieu', didn't you hear me telling you that the prefect——"
"What's the matter?" broke in Ingersoll's quiet tones. "You all look as if you had seen a daylight ghost."
"I behaved like a vain idiot," explained Tollemache, seeing that none of the girls was minded to answer. "I tried to climb round the tower by those rings, and scared Yvonne and the others rather badly."
"How far did you go?"
"Oh, I was on the last lap; but a ring gave way."
Ingersoll knew the place of old, and needed no elaborate essay on the danger Tollemache had escaped. His grave manner betokened the depth of his annoyance.
"What happened then?" he said. "I went back, of course."
"Where did the ring break?"
"It didn't break. I pulled the staple out. That one—you see where the gap is."
Ingersoll leaned over the parapet. A glance sufficed.
"You crossed the valley face of the tower twice?" he said.
"Couldn't help myself, old sport."
"Then you described yourself with marvelous accuracy,—a vain idiot, indeed!"
"Dash it all!" protested Tollemache. "I've only done the same as scores of Frenchmen."
"Many of whom lost their lives. You had a pretty close call. Lorry, I'm ashamed of you!"
Mère Pitou added to Tollemache's discomfiture by the biting comment that her man had got round the tower, whereas he had failed.
Altogether it was a somewhat depressed party that was shown round the quaint old chapel of the patroness of armorers and artillerists by Père Jean, who had lost a good deal of his smiling bonhomie, and eyed Tollemache fearfully, evidently suspecting him of harboring some fantastic design of dropping from the gallery to the floor, or leaping from the chapel roof to the cliff.
Their spirits revived, however, as they descended a steep path to Sainte Barbe's well. Every chapel of Saint Barbara has, or ought to have, a well, and that at Le Faouet (three syllables, please, and sound the final T when you are in Brittany) is specially famous for its prophetic properties in affairs of the heart. Thus, a spring bubbles into a trough surmounted by a canopy and image of the saint. In the center of the trough, beneath two feet of limpid water, the spring rises through an irregular orifice, roughly four inches square, and all unmarried young people who visit the shrine try to drop pins into the hole. Success at the first effort means that the fortunate aspirant for matrimony will either be married within a year or receive a favorable offer.
So, after luncheon, which had been carried by a boy from the village on the hill opposite the Pilgrims' Way, the girls produced a supply of pins. Barbe was the first to try her luck. Three pins wriggled to the floor of the well; but a fourth disappeared, and Mère Pitou took the omen seriously.
"You will be married when you are twenty-one, ma petite," she said, "and quite soon enough, too. Then your troubles will begin."
Madeleine failed six times, and gave up in a huff. Yvonne's second pin vanished.
"O, là, là!" cried Mère Pitou, still deeply interested in this consultation of the fates. "Mark my words, you'll refuse the first and take the second!"
The old lady darted a quick look at Ingersoll; but he was smiling. He had schooled himself for an ordeal, and his expression did not change. Tollemache, too, created a diversion by seizing a pin, holding it high above the surface of the water, whereas each of the girls had sought apparently to lessen the distance as much as possible, and dropping it out of sight straight away.
"Look at that!" he crowed. "My girl will say snap as soon as I say snip. Here's her engagement ring!"
Plunging his left hand into a pocket, he brought to light the ring and staple torn from Sainte Barbe's tower. When hanging with one hand to the last hold-fast, on the wall overlooking sixty feet of sheer precipice, he had calmly pocketed the ring that proved treacherous.
Evidently Laurence Tollemache was a young man who might be trusted not to lose his head in an emergency.
Mère Pitou was not to be persuaded to tempt fortune, and Ingersoll, who was sketching the well rapidly and most effectively, was left alone, because Barbe, who would have called him to come in his turn, was bidden sharply by her mother to mind her own business.
Tollemache and Yvonne climbed the rocky path together when they began the return journey to Le Faouet. In the rays of the afternoon sun the rough granite boulders sparkled as though they were studded with innumerable small diamonds.
"Haven't you forgiven me yet, Yvonne?" he said, noticing her distrait air.
She almost started, so far away were her thoughts. "Oh, let us forget that stupidity," she replied. "I was thinking of something very different. Tell me, Lorry, has my father ever spoken to you of my mother?"
"No," he said.
"Do you know where she is buried?"
"No."
She sighed. Her light-hearted companion's sudden taciturnity was not lost on her. Neither Madame Pitou, Ingersoll's friend and landlady during eighteen years, nor Tollemache, who worked with him daily, could read his eyes like Yvonne, and she knew he was acting a part when he smiled because Sainte Barbe's well announced that she would be married at the second asking. And the odd thing was that she had endeavored to drop the first pin so that it would not fall into the fateful space. None but she herself had noted how it plunged slantwise through the water as though drawn by a lodestone.
Even Tollemache nursed a grievance against the well's divination. "I say," he broke in, "that pin proposition is all nonsense, don't you think?"
For some occult reason she refused to answer as he hoped she would. "You never can tell," she said. "Mère Pitou believes in it, and she has had a long experience of life's vagaries."
From some distance came Madeleine's plaint. "Just imagine! Six times! In six years I shall be twenty-five. I don't credit a word of it—so there! At the last pardon Peridot danced with me all the afternoon."
Even little Barbe was not satisfied. "Mama said the other day," she confided, "that I might be married before I was twenty."
Ingersoll and Mère Pitou, bringing up the rear, were silent; Madame because this hill also was steep, and Ingersoll because of thoughts that came unbidden. In fact, Sainte Barbe had perplexed some of her pilgrims.
On the morning of December 4 in that same year a postman walked up the narrow path leading to the front door of Mère Pitou's house in the Rue Mathias, Pont Aven, and handed in a bundle of letters. The family was at breakfast, the petit déjeuner of coffee and rolls that stays the appetite in every French household until a more substantial meal is prepared at noon. The weather was mild and bright, though a gusty sou'westerly wind was blowing; so door and windows were open.
Barbe saw the postman ere he unlatched the garden gate, and rose excitedly, nearly upsetting a cup in her haste.
"Why, what's the rush?" cried Ingersoll. "And who in the world are all these letters for?"
"Father dear, have you forgotten the date? This is Barbe's name day," said Yvonne.
"Oh, that's the explanation of tonight's festivity," laughed Ingersoll. "Sorry. It quite slipped my mind. Of course she has wagonloads of friends who make a point of remembering these things. Lucky Barbe! And, by the way, Madame, what about those pictures which the Lady of Le Faouet was to dispose of? It's high time she was getting busy. Here are three months sped and—if anything rather a slump in Ingersolls. Actually, my best commission thus far is a series of picture postcards of Le Pouldu—with benefits deferred till next season."
"Perhaps the good saint knew that you kept your tongue in your cheek while you were seeking her help," retorted Madame.
"Impossible. It was lolling out. You ungrateful one, didn't I climb the hill twice for your sake?"
Barbe exchanged a friendly word with the postman, who was well aware of the cause of this sudden increase in the mail delivery at the cottage. Then she ran in.
"One for you, M'sieu'—all the rest for me," she announced gleefully.
Ingersoll took his letter. It bore the Pouldu postmark and the printed name of a hotel. Usually such missives came from brother artists; but the handwriting on the envelop was essentially of the type that French hotelkeepers cultivate for the utter bamboozling of their foreign patrons. Yvonne glanced at it with some curiosity, and was still more surprised to see the look of humorous bewilderment on her father's face when he had mastered its contents.
"I take back everything I said, or even thought, about Sainte Barbe," he cried. "Learn how she has squelched me! The proprietor of the chief hotel at Le Pouldu offers four hundred francs for a picture of the plage with his hotel in the center. Certainly four hundred is a heap short of a thousand, which was the sum I named to her saintship; but then, a hôtelier isn't a dealer, and he promises to pay cash if the sketch is delivered in a week, because he wants it for a summer poster. Yvonne, have you finished breakfast? Run and find Peridot, there's a dear, and ask him if we can sail to Le Pouldu this morning. It'll save time to go by sea, and the tide will serve, I know. If Peridot says the weather is all right, drop in at Julia's, and invite Tollemache. We'll lunch gloriously with my hotel man, rub in the best part of the drawing afterward, and be back here in good time for the feast."
Yvonne hurried out. The hour was half-past eight, and the tide in the estuary of the Aven was already on the ebb. But she had not far to go. The Rue Mathias (nowadays glorified by a much more ambitious name) was not a minute's walk from the bridge that gives the village its name. Another minute brought her to the quay, where the brawling river escapes from its last millwheel, and tumbles joyously into tidal water. She was lucky. Peridot was there, mending a blue sardine net,—a natty, square-shouldered sailor, unusually fair for a Breton, though his blond hair was French enough in its bristliness, as a section of his scalp would have provided a first-rate clothes brush. He touched his cap with a smile when she appeared, and in answer to her query raised to the heavens those gray-green eyes which had earned him such a euphonious nickname.
"Yes, Mademoiselle Yvonne, we can make Le Pouldu by ten o'clock with this wind," he said. "We may get a wetting; but it won't be the first. Is—er—is Madeleine coming?"
"Not today. She promised to help Mère Pitou with tonight's supper. You will be there?"
"Wind and weather permitting, Ma'mselle. We go in your own boat, I suppose?"
"Yes. Can you allow fifteen minutes?"
"There will be plenty of water for the next half-hour."
Yvonne raced off again, this time to the Hotel Julia, not the huge modern annex,—that dominates the tiny marketplace of Pont Aven,—but the oldtime hostelry itself, tucked in snugly behind its four sycamores, like some sedate matron ever peering up in wonderment at its overgrown child across the street. In winter the habitués—the coterie of artists and writers who cluster under the wing of the famous Julia Guillou—eat in the dining room of the smaller hotel.
Crossing the terrace, a graveled part of the square shielded by the trees, Yvonne met Mademoiselle Julia herself, bustling forth to inspect eggs, poultry, and buckets of fish. This kindly, outspoken, resourceful-looking woman has tended and housed and helped at least two generations of painters. In her way she has done more for art than many academies.
"Is Monsieur Tollemache at breakfast, Mademoiselle?" inquired Yvonne.
Julia smiled broadly. Evidently it was the most natural thing imaginable that the pretty American girl, known to everyone in the village, should be asking the whereabouts of the stalwart youngster who would never be an artist, but was one of the hotel's most valued guests.
"Oui, ma chérie! I heard him shouting to Marie for three boiled eggs not so long ago. Out of three eggs one hatches a good meal. And how is your father? I haven't set eyes on him this week."
"He is so busy, Mademoiselle. There is so little daylight."
"Bring him to dinner on Sunday. We're roasting two of the biggest geese you ever saw!"
"He will be delighted, I'm sure."
Then Julia marched to conquer the venders of eatables. There would be a terrific argument; but the founder of modern Pont Aven would prevail.
Yvonne looked in through an open window of a delightful room, paneled in oak—on every panel a picture bearing a signature more or less eminent in the world of color. Tollemache was there, tapping his third egg.
"Lorry," she said, "Father and I are sailing to Le Pouldu. Will you come?"
"Will a duck swim?" was the prompt reply. "When do we start?"
"Soon. Be at the quay in ten minutes."
"By the clock. Plenty of oilskins in the locker?"
"Yes."
She sped away. A Frenchman, an artist who knew the Breton coast in all weathers, shook his head.
"Dangerous work, yachting off Finistère in December," he said. "What sort of boat are you going in?"
"Ingersoll's own tub, a vague—a sardine boat, you know."
"First-rate craft, of course. But mind you're not caught in a change of wind. The barometer is falling."
"Oh, as for that, we'll probably have Peridot in charge, and he was born with a caul; so he'll never be drowned. Even if he's not there, Ingersoll and Yvonne are good sailors, and I'm no fresh-water amateur."
"Well—good luck! I only ask you not to despise the Atlantic. Why is Ingersoll going to Le Pouldu at this time of the year?"
"Don't know, and don't care. It's an unexpected holiday for me; so my Salon study of the Bois d'Amour in winter must miss a day."
The Frenchman sighed; whether on account of the doubtful prospect before Tollemache's Salon picture or because of his own vanished youth, it would be hard to say.
"What a charming peasant girl—and how on earth did she acquire English with that perfect accent?" said a woman, a newcomer.
"She is the daughter of a celebrated American artist," explained the Frenchman.
"But why does she wear the Breton costume?"
"Because she has good taste."
"Oh! Is that a hit at current fashions?"
The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. "Madame asked for information," he said. "To wander off into an essay on clothes would be impolite."
Before nine o'clock the Hirondelle, registered No. 415 at Concarneau, was speeding down the seven kilometers of the Aven estuary on a rapid-falling tide. Owing to the force and direction of the wind it would have been a waste of time to hoist a sail, even in those reaches of the winding river where some use might have been made of it. Tollemache and Peridot (whose real name was Jean Jacques Larraidou) rigged two long sweeps, and Yvonne took the tiller, keeping the boat in mid-stream to gain the full benefit of the current. In forty minutes they were abreast of the fortlike hotel at Port Manech, the summer offshoot of the Hotel Julia, and a steel-blue line on the horizon, widening each instant, told of the nearness of the sea. It was an uneven line too, ever and anon broken by a white-capped hillock.
Peridot, pulling his oar inboard, poised himself erect for a few seconds with an arm thrown round the foremast, and gazed steadily seaward. "She'll jump a bit out there," he said; though the fierce whistling of the wind drowned his words. He was aware of that, because he converted both hands into a megaphone when he turned and shouted to Yvonne. "We'll take the inside passage, Ma'mselle."
Before attempting to hoist the foresail he rummaged in a locker and produced oilskin coats and sou'westers. There was no delay. The four donned them quickly. Yvonne had changed her Breton dress for a short skirt and coat of heather mixture cloth, because coif and collar of fine linen were ill adapted to seagoing in rough weather.
Peridot held up three fingers. The girl nodded. Peridot and Tollemache hauled at the sail, and Yvonne kept the boat in the eye of the wind until three reefs were tied securely. Then the Hirondelle swung round to her task. She careened almost to the port gunwale under the first furious lash of the gale, and a sheet of spray beat noisily on oilskins and deck. But the stanch little craft steadied herself, and leaped into her best pace.
Ingersoll dived into the cabin, and reappeared with his pipe alight, the bowl held in a closed and gloved hand. Tollemache made play with a cigarette. Peridot clambered aft to relieve Yvonne.
"We'll make Le Pouldu in little more than the hour," he said.
"It's blowing half a gale," said the girl.
"Yes. If the wind doesn't veer, we should have a record trip. But we shouldn't start back a minute after three o'clock."
"Oh, my father will see to that. Moreover, we're due at Mère Pitou's at six."
Peridot showed all his white teeth in a smile. Madeleine would be there. He meant to marry Madeleine. There was no use in asking her to wed until after the Festival of the Gorse Flowers next August, since her heart was set on being Queen. Once that excitement was ended, Heaven willing, Madeleine Demoret would become Madame Larraidou!
In taking the rudder the man was not showing any distrust of Yvonne's nerve; but there was just a possibility that a crisis might call for instant decision, when the only warning would come from that sixth sense which coastal fishermen develop in counteracting the sea's fitful moods.
Perhaps once during the hour—perhaps not once in a year—some monstrous wave would roar in from the Atlantic, seeking to devour every small craft in its path. No one can account for these phenomena. They may arise from lunar influence, or from some peculiar action of the tides; but that they occur, and with disastrous results if unheeded, every fisherman from Stornoway to Cadiz will testify. Their size and fury are more marked in a southwesterly gale than at any other time, and the only safe maneuver for a boat sailing across the wind is to bring her sharply head on to the fast-moving ridge, and ride over it. Yvonne knew of these occasional sea dragons, but had never seen one. She knew what to do too, and for an instant was vexed with Peridot. He read her thought.
"I'd trust my own life to you, Ma'mselle," he said gallantly; "but I'd never forgive myself if anything happened to you."
She smiled in spite of her pique. To make her voice heard without screaming, she put her lips close to his ear. "This time, if anybody goes, we all go," she cried. He shook his head. "No, no, Ma'mselle. The sea will never get me," he said. "Hold tight here. This is the bar."
Certainly, even among experienced yachtsmen, there would not be lacking those who might have regarded the Hirondelle's present voyage as a piece of folly. There is no wilder coast in Europe than the barrier of shaggy rock that France opposes to the ocean from St. Malo to Biarritz. At Finistère, in particular, each headland is not a breakwater, but a ruin. During heavy storms the seas dash in frenzy up a hundred feet of shattered cliff, the Atlantic having smashed and overthrown every sheer wall of rock ages ago.
Of course the adventurers were not facing a No. 8 gale. That, indeed, would have been rank lunacy. But the estuaries of the Aven and the Belon, joining at Port Manech, were sending down no inconsiderable volume of water to meet a strong wind, and the opposing forces were waging bitter war. A mile farther on a channel ran between the mainland and a group of rocks called Les Verrés. There the tide and wind would not be so greatly at variance, and the partly submerged reef would lessen the force of the sea; though the only signs of its existence were a patch of high-flung spray and a small tower, with a black buoy at its easterly extremity. This was what Peridot had called the "inside passage." To the landsman it was a figure of speech. To the sailor it meant seas diminished to half their volume as compared with the "dirt" outside.
The Hirondelle raced through the turmoil at the bar as though she enjoyed it, and, once the islets were to windward, the journey became exhilarating. None of the four people on board displayed the least concern. Indeed, they reveled in the excursion. When their craft swept into the sheltered cove at Le Pouldu, not without a tossing on another bar, and was brought up alongside the small quay, their flushed faces and shining eyes showed that they looked on the outing as a thoroughly enjoyable one.
They were ready for an early luncheon too, and did full justice to the menu. Afterward, while Ingersoll planned his picture, Yvonne and Tollemache strolled along the right bank of the Laita to the hamlet of Le Pouldu.