The Wife of Martin Guerre

by Janet Lewis

  “I was at Luchon,” he said, coming close to them, without hesitation, “soaking my old carcass and my scabby hide in that unspeakable mud. It smells of bad eggs, pah, but it is warm, and that feels good. There I learned of your being home again, and I came to stretch my legs before your fire. Eh, Martin, we shall have much to say of Picardy, eh, and other matters less heroic.” He laughed, thrusting his thumbs through his belt, but the man whom he addressed neither laughed nor smiled but regarded him with a somewhat puzzled countenance.

  “Eh, Martin?” repeated the soldier, and, indicating by a nod of his head Martin’s younger sister, “Is this your wife?”

  “My friend of Rochefort,” said Martin slowly, “I cannot for the life of me remember when or where we met. I am not so certain that we ever met at all.”

  The soldier cocked his head to one side, and then, with the gesture of a man who feels the leg of a spavined horse, bent quickly, and grasping Martin below the left knee, gave the leg a sharp squeeze and then a slap. Straightening himself abruptly, he announced:

  “Certainly, you do not remember me! You are not even sure you know me, eh? Impostor! You are Monsieur Martin Guerre, my friend? You return from the mass, you are neat and proper, you have a great distaste for the smelly old soldier! You are nothing but a fraud. The true Martin Guerre—I knew him very well. There was a man. He could see beyond the dirt on the face of a friend. He lost a leg before St. Quentin in the year fifty-seven.”

  There was a dead silence, during which Martin Guerre lifted his left eyebrow the while he contracted the right, a trick, as his sister remembered, which had been characteristic of his father.

  Then Uncle Pierre said:

  “Brute! You have the manners of a pig. Take yourself away before you force me to roll you in the dirt.”

  “I do not go away so easily,” said the soldier from Rochefort. The man whom he had accused still regarded him calmly, and slowly remarked:

  “Doubtless he wishes me to bribe him to leave. I have heard that there was employed under the Duke of Savoy a man who resembled me greatly in feature. Perhaps it was he who lost a leg.”

  “Ventre de Dieu,” exclaimed the soldier with increased impatience and scorn. “I knew him well, the true Martin Guerre. He was a Gascon and he lost his left leg at the battle of St. Laurent before St. Quentin. It is all one to me if this man is a rogue. He is your relative, not mine. If he had been Martin Guerre, he would have known me.”

  And with many oaths he turned back to the inn, of which all the windows now stood wide open as those within tried to see and hear what went on; he was still cursing under his breath and in more languages than one as he disappeared within the shadow of the doorway, but he made no further effort to have his story believed.

  “He is malicious,” said Pierre Guerre with indignation, as the small party proceeded on the way to the farm.

  “He was disappointed,” said Martin. “He thought to find a welcome with good lodging and food for a week. I do not grudge him the food, but I cannot have him sitting about every evening telling stories of gallant adventures—which I did not commit—before my wife, who is so sick.”

  The curé said nothing, but Martin’s sister and uncle discussed the matter of having the soldier apprehended.

  “Let it pass,” said Martin. “It was a mistake; there is truly a man who resembles me. I have heard of him more than once. And the fellow was disappointed. Had he been less foul with disease I would have brought him home with us anyway, to hear the news from Spain.” To the priest he added, “I could wish that this had not happened.”

  The priest nodded, said nothing, but the sister continued indignant and voluble, and when they reached the farm, and found Bertrande waiting for them in the kitchen, she burst at once into an account of the adventure.

  “Imagine it,” exclaimed Uncle Pierre as the young woman paused for breath. “Only imagine it! He leaned over, this pig of a man, and pinched Martin below the knee as if he had been a horse for sale at the market. I wonder that he did not offer to look at his teeth.”

  “He called Martin a rogue,” repeated the sister, ever more indignant. “Worse than that,” said the brother-in-law. “He called Martin an impostor.”

  Bertrande, looking from one hot, excited face to another, turned at last her brilliant eyes full upon her husband’s quiet countenance, in a look of triumph and scorn.

  “At last,” she cried suddenly in a strange hoarse voice, “at last, dear God, Thou wilt save me!”

  She pressed her hands to her temples, then turned, and ran from the room.

  “Go with her,” said Martin, his face immediately full of concern. “Go with her quickly, my sister. Do you not see? She is ill.” To the priest he said, “You understand to what a pass it has come? I would give half my farm if this soldier from Rochefort had never come to Luchon. This will unsettle her reason.”

  The sister, who had followed Bertrande, found her kneeling beside the bed, clutching the coverlet in agony. To all questions and reproaches she answered only:

  “I am dying, I am dying. I beg of you, send for my nurse.”

  She was delivered that night in great suffering of a daughter who died before she had lived an hour. Bertrande herself was very ill, and in the fever which followed the birth of the child, asked only to see the soldier from Rochefort. To humor her, for he thought her hours were numbered, the curé sent for the soldier, but the man was not to be found. He had not lingered at Artigues. He had been seen at St. Gaudens some days later. After that all trace of him was lost. However, the curé caused to be written down and properly witnessed and signed the accounts of those who heard the soldier’s accusation, and these papers he brought to the invalid. Immediately after she had received them, the condition of Madame Guerre began to improve, a fact which could not fail to impress not only the curé but her entire family.

  “She is mad,” they said to each other, “but if we humor her and are patient, God willing, she may recover.”

  The improvement continued. She gained strength slowly but steadily and was soon able to walk about a little in her room, but she refused steadily to leave the Chamber. She refused likewise to see her husband, to admit him to her room, or in any way to have anything to do with him. Everyone on the farm could see how heavily this weighed upon the master. He was as patient as ever with his people, and as kind, but there was little merriment.

  “Madame is not herself since her illness,” the housekeeper said to the priest, “and it is breaking the Master’s heart.”

  The priest sought out Martin Guerre, and found him at work in the fields. Together they sat down in the shade of the beech trees, and the priest said:

  “Who would have thought that kindness could have worked so much sorrow!”

  Martin shook his head.

  “There would have been no sorrow, Father, if I had not tried to run away from my father’s anger. The trouble begins there. But what shall I do to help her? Once she asked me to leave her.”

  The priest surveyed his friend intently. If this man were not indeed his friend and the son of his friend, surely his eyes would betray him.

  “And you refused to leave?” the priest said.

  “At that time I refused,” said the man before him, evenly, his sad eyes meeting those of the priest without hesitation. “I thought that to leave her then would but confirm her in this madness, and that I should be deserting her to years of pain—as if I were to fasten upon her the guilt of a sin—” he hesitated—“a sin of which she must not be accused.”

  His voice was vehement, and he stopped speaking abruptly, overcome with emotion. To the priest, who knew the voice, who knew the face, there could be no doubt whatever but that the grief, the concern and the humility were real. He passed a hand over his forehead and looked away toward the empty wheat field.

  “My son,” he answered at last, “I do not know what to advise you. What you have said is true. If you run away—if you disappear again—it will look like an admiss
ion of guilt. Unless, of course, you go with my consent and knowledge, leaving word of where you may be found, and denying the accusation of the fellow from Rochefort. It is conceivable that your absence might improve the condition of your wife. Your presence but adds continual fuel to the fire. The spirit is ill, and it has need of rest to heal itself, of rest as well as prayer. But you cannot leave the farm indefinitely. Your people have need of you. The parish, also—I have need of you. Is there no journey you could make about some business of the farm?”

  Martin shook his head.

  “The business of the farm is all in the parish of Artigues.”

  “You left a sum of money with your uncle when you were a boy. I think that it has never been spent. Take it, and journey to Toulouse and there purchase a gift for Our Lady. Be home again before the snow. Say farewell to your wife before you go.”

  “She will not speak to me,” said the man with a wry smile. “But I shall say farewell to you before I go. I must help them with the wheat harvest before I leave. Meanwhile”—he hesitated—“let us say nothing of the matter until it is accomplished. There will be less talk.”

  The priest nodded, and blessed him. Martin Guerre returned to his work.

  A few days later Bertrande herself sent for Pierre Guerre. The honest man found her seated in the high-backed chair near the curtained bed, but as he approached her, she rose.

  “I have sent for you, my uncle,” she said in a low voice, “because you are still the head of our family, and I must beseech your help.”

  The room was cool, and to the diminished vitality of the invalid it seemed even cold. She stood wrapped in her black wool capuchon, the hood thrown back on her shoulders. Her illness had aged her, but there showed in her face such poise and clarity of spirit that the uncle was unaccountably moved.

  “Sit down, my child,” he said gently. “You will tire yourself.”

  She shook her head.

  “I ask you to believe me, believe me at last, when I say to you now, ‘I am not mad.’ All my household believe me to be mad. I have only yourself to whom to look for help.”

  “I believe you, my child,” he answered quietly. “Sit down. Look, I will sit down beside you on the coffer.”

  “I have no proof,” said she, “unless the story of the soldier from Rochefort can be considered proof.”

  “It is a strange story,” replied the uncle. “I was angered that day, but since then, the picture seems to move, like people changing places in a dance. If there is another man who resembles Martin, this must be the man. You are Martin’s wife, and you would be the first to know. Moreover, he has behaved strangely of late.”

  “In what manner?” said Bertrande.

  “He came to me demanding a sum of money which he left with me before he ran away. I replied that the money had made part of the sum for the purchase of the lower fields. It was a matter of which his father had approved. The purchase was made after his father’s death, according to his father’s plan.”

  “I remember,” said Bertrande. “What then?”

  “He was angered,” said Pierre shortly.

  “I understand,” said Bertrande slowly. “He wishes money in hand in order to leave us. Now that he fears detection, now that he has pillaged us, now that he has almost killed me, he will go away.” She began to weep and hid her face in her hands.

  A deliberate, abiding wrath grew in the old uncle as he watched her bent head and listened to her sobs. “Madame,” he said, striking with his clenched hand upon his knee, “give me your permission to accuse this man of his crime. He shall not leave us unpunished.”

  Bertrande could hardly speak for her tears. But:

  “Accuse him, punish him, do as you like with him, only rid me of his presence,” she implored.

  Less than a week later armed men from Rieux arrived at the farm and arrested the master of the house. They brought him in irons from the field to the kitchen for a final identification by Bertrande. His own men followed after, angry and sullen. Standing beside the master’s chair, before the hearth, Bertrande identified him as the man who had claimed, but falsely, to be her husband.

  “I accuse him,” she said clearly, “of being an impostor and not the true Martin Guerre.”

  It was the first time since the birth of the child that she had left her room. Uncle Pierre stood beside her. It was evident that the men from Rieux had been expected.

  Sanxi, seeing his father in chains, burst into a passion of weeping, flung himself, first upon his father, and then, kicking and scratching, upon the two guardsmen.

  “Madame,” said his father quietly, above the turmoil thus raised, “is it indeed you who do this to me?”

  Bertrande bowed her head, and turned her back upon him.

  The man sighed, and nodded, as if to himself. Then, turning to the housekeeper, he asked that the youngest child be brought. The old woman, all in tears, held up the little one to his father to be kissed. The people of the farm crowded about, and the priest, entering in haste, cried to the men-at-arms:

  “This is folly—you do not know what you are doing!” He stretched out his hands and would have prevented their departure.

  “Let be,” said the prisoner, still quietly. “It is not the fault of the men. They must do as they have been commanded.” And then, addressing his people, he said: “Good-by, my children. God willing, I shall return to you safely.”

  “It is a mistake,” said the priest again to the guardsmen. “You do not understand that the woman is mad.”

  But the guard moved forward, with the prisoner between them, through the wide doorway into the courtyard of the farm. The housekeeper, Sanxi and the other servants followed closely behind them. There was some delay in the courtyard as a horse was brought for the prisoner. Bertrande, who had continued to stand with her back to the room, her eyes upon the hearth, turned now and looked about her. She was entirely alone. In the courtyard the servants shouted their last farewells. She heard Sanxi’s voice.

  “Good-by, my father, my dear father!”

  II. Rieux

  The accusation had been made at Rieux, since Artigues was too small a place to boast a court, and thither Bertrande went with her uncle, Pierre, and the servants who were to be called as witnesses. She stayed in the house of her mother’s sister, occupying the same room which she had been given on her earlier visit, and in which the sun had always seemed to shine through western windows in the morning. But this time the sun shone from the east, as it should do, and Bertrande marveled that she had ever felt confused about the direction. In the same fashion she marveled that she should have permitted herself to be deceived concerning the identity of the man who had called himself her husband. Her present belief was inescapable and plain, and yet she found herself alone in it, alone, that is, save for the support of honest Pierre. She left in Artigues a house in which the very servants looked at her askance. Of Martin’s four sisters, two had not hesitated to declare that they thought her malicious. They said openly, so that the report returned to her:

  “For years during Martin’s absence she was sole mistress of the farm. Now she cannot bear to be put back into her proper place. She has a greed of authority, and of money. She was severe to us before we married, severe and miserly. This is all a plan to destroy Martin and possess the farm.”

  The other sisters, particularly the youngest, defended her. She had done no more in the management of the estate and of the family than their mother would have required her to do, and her strange fancy that Martin was not her husband had arisen from the grief of the long separation. They were sure that she was insane. The charity and the coldness were alike difficult for Bertrande; and at Rieux, even her aunt supported the claim of the impostor.

  “My poor child,” she said to Bertrande, “your years of suffering have told on your brain in a strange way. Why, I have known the boy all his life! Of course I shall testify in his favor, if I am asked, and when the courts have decided that he is really your husband, perhaps you
will have some peace, although it’s all a great pother to go through with in order to convince a wife of what she ought to know without help.”

  At the first session of the court the crime was formally charged to the prisoner of misrepresentation and theft. Bertrande then demanded through Pierre Guerre, and in fact only because of the uncle’s insistence, that the prisoner be made to do penance publicly, that he pay a fine to the king, and that he pay to herself the sum of ten thousand livres. She was then asked to state her reasons for the accusation.

  “My lords,” she began, “there is the testimony of the soldier from Rochefort.”

  She was interrupted.

  “We ask you for your testimony only,” they reminded her.

  She bent her head, and after a moment, told them just what she had told the priest. Upon being questioned further, she added:

  “I also found it curious, upon remarking the prisoner at sword practice with my son, that Martin Guerre should fence so awkwardly; he was known to be distinguished in the art.”

  The prisoner smiled, and shrugged his shoulder slightly. A brief smile also flitted across the face of one of the judges, and Bertrande, seeing it, exclaimed:

  “You may smile, my lord, and my testimony may seem innocent to you and of small importance, but I swear by God and all His holy angels that this man is not my husband. Of that I am certain, though I should die for it.”

  “Well, we shall inquire, Madame, we shall inquire,” said the justice, and called for the accused to be examined.

  The prisoner stepped forward with an easy manner, as if he stood before his own hearth. He explained that during his absence he had served the King of Spain, that he had traveled extensively both through Spain and France, and that he had not known until he came to Rieux, some three years earlier, that his parents were dead; that upon learning that he was head of the house, he had made all haste to return to his wife and child, and had endeavored in every way to make up for his past neglect. He furnished the names and addresses of people who could verify the story of his wanderings. He told of his return to Artigues, of how Pierre Guerre, his uncle, had been the first person in the village to recognize and welcome him, and averred that Pierre had been to him in all things friendly until he, Martin, had found reason to question Pierre about the disposition of a certain sum of money which he had left in the care of his uncle. Since that time, he said, his uncle had sought to destroy him. He even hinted in conclusion that an attempt had been made upon his life.