“Good!” I said. “Has it an odour?”

  “No — and, yes. One is always aware of its presence, but really nobody can affirm it has an odour. It is curious,” he continued, looking at me, “it is very curious you should have asked me that, for all day I have been imagining I detected the presence of cythyl.”

  “Do you imagine so now?” I asked.

  “Yes, more than ever.”

  I sprang to the front door and tossed out the butterfly. The splendid creature beat the air for a moment, flitted uncertainly hither and thither, and then, to my astonishment, sailed majestically back into the café and alighted on the hearthstone. For a moment I was nonplussed, but when my eyes rested on the Purple Emperor I comprehended in a flash.

  “Lift that hearthstone!” I cried to the Brigadier Durand; “pry it up with your scabbard!”

  The Purple Emperor suddenly fell forward in his chair, his face ghastly white, his jaw loose with terror.

  “What is cythyl?” I shouted, seizing him by the arm; but he plunged heavily from his chair, face downward on the floor, and at the same moment a cry from the chemist made me turn. There stood the Brigadier Durand, one hand supporting the hearthstone, one hand raised in horror. There stood Max Fortin, the chemist, rigid with excitement, and below, in the hollow bed where the hearthstone had rested, lay a crushed mass of bleeding human flesh, from the midst of which stared a cheap glass eye. I seized the Purple Emperor and dragged him to his feet.

  “Look!” I cried; “look at your old friend, the Red Admiral!” but he only smiled in a vacant way, and rolled his head muttering; “Bait for butterflies! Cythyl! Oh, no, no, no! You can’t do it, Admiral, d’ye see. I alone own the Purple Emperor! I alone am the Purple Emperor!”

  And the same carriage that bore me to Quimperlé to claim my bride, carried him to Quimper, gagged and bound, a foaming, howling lunatic.

  * * * *

  This, then, is the story of the Purple Emperor. I might tell you a pleasanter story if I chose; but concerning the fish that I had hold of, whether it was a salmon, a grilse, or a sea trout, I may not say, because I have promised Lys, and she has promised me, that no power on earth shall wring from our lips the mortifying confession that the fish escaped.

  A wind-swept sky,

  The waste of moorland stretching to the west;

  The sea, low moaning in a strange unrest —

  A seagull’s cry.

  Washed by the tide,

  The rocks lie sullen in the waning light;

  The foam breaks in long strips of hungry white,

  Dissatisfied.

  BATEMAN.

  POMPE FUNÈBRE.

  IN THE DAYS when the keepers of the house shall tremble.

  WHEN I first saw the sexton he was standing motionless behind a stone. Presently he moved on again, pausing at times, and turning right and left with that nervous, jerky motion that always chills me.

  His path lay across the blighted moss and withered leaves scattered in moist layers along the bank of the little brown stream, and I, wondering what his errand might be, followed, pass ing silently over the rotting forest mould. Once or twice he heard me, for I saw him stop short, a blot of black and orange in the sombre woods; but he always started on again, hurrying at times as though the dead might grow impatient.

  For the sexton that I followed through the November forest was one of those small creatures that God has sent to bury little things that die alone in the world. Undertaker, sexton, mute, and gravedigger in one, this thing, robed in black and orange, buries all things that die unheeded by the world. And so they call it — this little beetle in black and orange — the “sexton.”

  How he hurried! I looked up into the gray sky where ashen branches, interlaced, swayed in unfelt winds, and I heard the dry leaves rattle in the tree tops, and the thud of acorns on the mould. A sombre bird peered at me from a heap of brush, then ran pattering over the leaves.

  The sexton had reached a bit of broken ground, and was scuffling over sticks and gulleys toward a brown tuft of withered grass above. I dared not help him; besides, I could not bring myself to touch him, he was so horribly absorbed in his errand.

  I halted for a moment. The eagerness of this live creature to find his dead and handle it; the odour of death and decay in this little forest world, where I had waited for spring when Lys moved among the flowering gorse, singing like a throstle in the wind — all this troubled me, and I lagged behind.

  The sexton scrambled over the dead grass, raising his seared eyes at every wave of wind. The wind brought sadness with it, the scent of lifeless trees, the vague rustle of gorse buds, yellow and dry as paper flowers.

  Along the stream, rotting water plants, scorched and frost-blighted, lay massed above the mud. I saw their pallid stems swaying like worms in the listless current.

  The sexton had reached a mouldering stump, and now he seemed undecided. I sat down on a fallen tree, moist and bleached, that crumbled under my touch, leaving a stale odour in the air. Overhead a crow rose heavily and flapped out into the moorland; the wind rattled the stark blackthorns; a single drop of rain touched my cheek. I looked into the stream for some sign of life; there was nothing, except a shapeless creature that might have been a blindworm, lying belly upward on the mud bottom. I touched it with a stick. It was stiff and dead.

  The wind among the sham paperlike gorse buds filled the woods with a silken rustle. I put out my hand and touched a yellow blossom; it felt like an immortelle on a funeral pillow.

  The sexton had moved on again; something, perhaps a musty spider’s web, had stuck to one leg, and he dragged it as he laboured on through the wood. Some little field mouse torn by weasel or kestrel, some crushed mole, some tiny dead pile of fur or feather, lay not far off, stricken by God or man or brother creature. And the sexton knew it — how, God knows! But he knew it, and hurried on to his tryst with the dead.

  His path now lay along the edge of a tidal inlet from the Groix River. I looked down at the gray water through the leafless branches, and I saw a small snake, head raised, swim from a submerged clot of weeds into the shadow of a rock. There was a curlew, too, somewhere in the black swamp, whose dreary, persistent call cursed the silence.

  I wondered when the sexton would fly; for he could fly if he chose; it is only when the dead are near, very near, that he creeps. The soiled mess of cobweb still stuck to him, and his progress was impeded by it. Once I saw a small brown and white spider, striped like a zebra, running swiftly in his tracks, but the sexton turned and raised his two clubbed forelegs in a horrid imploring attitude that still had something of menace under it. The spider backed away and sidled under a stone.

  When anything that is dying — sick and close to death — falls upon the face of the earth, something moves in the blue above, floating like a moat; then another, then others. These specks that grow out of the fathomless azure vault are jewelled flies. They come to wait for Death.

  The sexton also arranges rendezvous with Death, but never waits; Death must arrive the first.

  When the heavy clover is ablaze with painted wings, when bees hum and blunder among the white-thorn, or pass by like swift singing bullets, the sexton snaps open his black and orange wings and hums across the clover with the bees. Death in a scented garden, the tokens of the plague on a fair young breast, the gray flag of fear in the face of one who reels into the arms of Destruction, the sexton scrambling in the lap of spring, folding his sleek wings, unfolding them to ape the buzz of bees, passing over sweet clover tops to the putrid flesh that summons him — these things must be and will be to the end.

  The sexton was running now — running fast, trailing the cobweb over twigs and mud. The edge of the wood was near, for I could see the winter wheat, like green scenery in a theatre, stretching for miles across the cliffs, crude as painted grass. And as I crept through the brittle forest fringe, I saw a figure lying face downward in the wheat — a girl’s slender form, limp, motionless.

  The sexton darted under her breast.

  Then I threw myself down beside her, crying, “Lys! Lys!” And as I cried, the icy rain burst out across the moors, and the trees dashed their stark limbs together till the whole spectral forest tossed and danced, and the wind roared among the cliffs.

  And through the Dance of Death Lys trembled in my arms, and sobbed and clung to me, murmuring that the Purple Emperor was dead; but the wind tore the words from her white lips, and flung them out across the sea, where the winter lightning lashed the stark heights of Groix.

  Then the fear of death was stilled in my soul, and I raised her from the ground, holding her close.

  And I saw the sexton, just beyond us, hurry across the ground and seek shelter under a little dead skylark, stiff-winged, muddy, lying alone in the rain.

  In the storm, above us, a bird hovered singing through the rain. It passed us twice, still singing, and as it passed again we saw the shadow it cast upon the world was whiter than snow.

  Little gray messenger,

  Robed like painted Death,

  Your robe is dust.

  Whom do you seek

  Among lilies and closed buds

  At dusk?

  Among lilies and closed buds

  At dusk,

  Whom do you seek,

  Little gray messenger,

  Robed in the awful panoply

  Of painted Death?

  R. W. C.

  THE MESSENGER.

  All-wise,

  Hast thou seen all there is to see with thy two eyes?

  Dost thou know all there is to know, and so,

  Omniscient,

  Darest thou still to say thy brother lies?

  R. W. C.

  “THE bullet entered here,” said Max Tortin, and he placed his middle finger over a smooth hole exactly in the centre of the forehead.

  I sat down upon a mound of dry seaweed and unslung my fowling piece.

  The little chemist cautiously felt the edges of the shot-hole, first with his middle finger, then with his thumb.

  “Let me see the skull again,” said I.

  Max Fortin picked it up from the sod.

  “It’s like all the others,” he observed. I nodded, without offering to take it from him. After a moment he thoughtfully replaced it upon the grass at my feet.

  “It’s like all the others,” he repeated, wiping his glasses on his handkerchief. “I thought you might care to see one of the skulls, so I brought this over from the gravel pit. The men from Bannalec are digging yet. They ought to stop.”

  “How many skulls are there altogether?” I inquired.

  “They found thirty-eight skulls; there are thirty-nine noted in the list. They lie piled up in the gravel pit on the edge of Le Bihan’s wheat field. The men are at work yet. Le Bihan is going to stop them.”

  “Let’s go over,” said I; and I picked up my gun and started across the cliffs, Fortin on one side, Môme on the other.

  “Who has the list?” I asked, lighting my pipe. “You say there is a list?”

  “The list was found rolled up in a brass cylinder,” said the little chemist. He added: “You should not smoke here. You know that if a single spark drifted into the wheat — —”

  “Ah, but I have a cover to my pipe,” said I, smiling.

  Fortin watched me as I closed the pepper box arrangement over the glowing bowl of the pipe. Then he continued:

  “The list was made out on thick yellow paper; the brass tube has preserved it. It is as fresh to-day as it was in 1760. You shall see it.”

  “Is that the date?”

  “The list is dated ‘April, 1760.’ The Brigadier Durand has it. It is not written in French.”

  “Not written in French!” I exclaimed.

  “No,” replied Fortin solemnly, “it is written in Breton.”

  “But,” I protested, “the Breton language was never written or printed in 1760.”

  “Except by priests,” said the chemist.

  “I have heard of but one priest who ever wrote the Breton language,” I began.

  Fortin stole a glance at my face.

  “You mean — the Black Priest?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  Fortin opened his mouth to speak again, hesitated, and finally shut his teeth obstinately over the wheat stem that he was chewing.

  “And the Black Priest?” I suggested encouragingly. But I knew it was useless; for it is easier to move the stars from their courses than to make an obstinate Breton talk. We walked on for a minute or two in silence.

  “Where is the Brigadier Durand?” I asked, motioning Môme to come out of the wheat, which he was trampling as though it were heather. As I spoke we came in sight of the farther edge of the wheat field and the dark, wet mass of cliffs beyond.

  “Durand is down there — you can see him; he stands just behind the Mayor of St. Gildas.”

  “I see,” said I; and we struck straight down, following a sun-baked cattle path across the heather.

  When we reached the edge of the wheat field, Le Bihan, the Mayor of St. Gildas, called to me, and I tucked my gun under my arm and skirted the wheat to where he stood.

  “Thirty-eight skulls,” he said in his thin, high-pitched voice; “there is but one more, and I am opposed to further search. I suppose Fortin told you?”

  I shook hands with him, and returned the salute of the Brigadier Durand.

  “I am opposed to further search,” repeated Le Bihan, nervously picking at the mass of silver buttons which covered the front of his velvet and broadcloth jacket like a breastplate of scale armour.

  Durand pursed up his lips, twisted his tremendous mustache, and hooked his thumbs in his sabre belt.

  “As for me,” he said, “I am in favour of further search.”

  “Further search for what — for the thirty-ninth skull?” I asked.

  Le Bihan nodded. Durand frowned at the sunlit sea, rocking like a bowl of molten gold from the cliffs to the horizon. I followed his eyes. On the dark glistening cliffs, silhouetted against the glare of the sea, sat a cormorant, black, motionless, its horrible head raised toward heaven.

  “Where is that list, Durand?” I asked.

  The gendarme rummaged in his despatch pouch and produced a brass cylinder about a foot long. Very gravely he unscrewed the head and dumped out a scroll of thick yellow paper closely covered with writing on both sides. At a nod from Le Bihan he handed me the scroll. But I could make nothing of the coarse writing, now faded to a dull brown.

  “Come, come, Le Bihan,” I said impatiently, “translate it, won’t you? You and Max Fortin make a lot of mystery out of nothing, it seems.”

  Le Bihan went to the edge of the pit where the three Bannalec men were digging, gave an order or two in Breton, and turned to me.

  As I came to the edge of the pit the Bannalec men were removing a square piece of sail-cloth from what appeared to be a pile of cobblestones.

  “Look!” said Le Bihan shrilly. I looked. The pile below was a heap of skulls. After a moment I clambered down the gravel sides of the pit and walked over to the men of Bannalec. They saluted me gravely, leaning on their picks and shovels, and wiping their sweating faces with sunburned hands.

  “How many?” said I in Breton.

  “Thirty-eight,” they replied.

  I glanced around. Beyond the heap of skulls lay two piles of human bones. Beside these was a mound of broken, rusted bits of iron and steel. Looking closer, I saw that this mound was composed of rusty bayonets, sabre blades, scythe blades, with here and there a tarnished buckle attached to a bit of leather hard as iron.

  I picked up a couple of buttons and a belt plate. The buttons bore the royal arms of England; the belt plate was emblazoned with the English arms, and also with the number “27.”

  “I have heard my grandfather speak of the terrible English regiment, the 27th Foot, which landed and stormed the fort up there,” said one of the Bannalec men.

  “Oh!” said I; “then these are the bones of English soldiers?”

  “Yes,” said the men of Bannalec.

  Le Bihan was calling to me from the edge of the pit above, and I handed the belt plate and buttons to the men and climbed the side of the excavation.

  “Well,” said I, trying to prevent Môme from leaping up and licking my face as I emerged from the pit, “I suppose you know what these bones are. What are you going to do with them?”

  “There was a man,” said Le Bihan angrily, “an Englishman, who passed here in a dogcart on his way to Quimper about an hour ago, and what do you suppose he wished to do?”

  “Buy the relics?” I asked, smiling.

  “Exactly — the pig!” piped the mayor of St. Gildas. “Jean Marie Tregunc, who found the bones, was standing tfyere where Max Fortin stands, and do you know what he answered? He spat upon the ground, and said: ‘Pig of an Englishman, do you take me for a desecrator of graves?”

  I knew Tregunc, a sober, blue-eyed Breton, who lived from one year’s end to the other without being able to afford a single bit of meat for a meal.

  “How much did the Englishman offer Tregunc?” I asked.

  “Two hundred francs for the skulls alone.”

  I thought of the relic hunters and the relic buyers on the battlefields of our civil war.

  “Seventeen hundred and sixty is long ago,” I said.

  “Respect for the dead can never die,” said Fortin.

  “And the English soldiers came here to kill your fathers and burn your homes,” I continued.

  “They were murderers and thieves, but — they are dead,” said Tregunc, coming up from the beach below, his long sea rake balanced on his dripping jersey.

  “How much do you earn every year, Jean Marie?” I asked, turning to shake hands with him.

  “Two hundred and twenty francs, monsieur.”

  “Forty-five dollars a year,” I said. “Bah! you are worth more, Jean. Will you take care of my garden for me? My wife wished me to ask you. I think it would be worth one hundred francs a month to you and to me. Come on, Le Bihan — come along, Fortin — and you, Durand. I want somebody to translate that list into French for me.”

 

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