He returned to the house only after dark, to swallow some food and fall asleep without uttering more than a dozen words. He had become as taciturn as his mother, although she was not the one to notice it, plunged as she was in her own interminable prayers. But Rozenn worried for both and studied the young man's face for the progress of a disease which she divined all too well.
She caught Marie-Jeanne one evening as she was putting on her black cloak to go to evening service.
'Take your mind off heaven for a while and look at this world,' she told her roughly. 'Look at your son. He doesn't eat any more, he no longer laughs, he hardly even speaks… Can you not see he is unhappy?'
Gilles' mother was thirty-three and looked fifty, but her narrow face lightened in a smile and the dark eyes below the widow's cap which she had worn ever since the birth of her child shone with a fanatical flame.
'Unhappy? Because he has heard the Voice which turns him away from the world and its vanities? He no longer laughs or talks, you say? Rejoice, then, you stupid creature, instead of bemoaning it. If he is silent, it is the better to hear God calling him. Blessed be His Holy Name to all eternity! Now leave me. I am late.'
And away she went, almost at a run, before Rozenn, disheartened, could make a move to detain her. After all, it had been foolish to have tried to interest this broken-hearted woman in the child of whose existence she seemed for the most part scarcely aware. Now that he spent most of his time at school, she hardly spoke to him, except to bid him good morning and good night and to inquire if he had said his prayers. Apart from that, her glance rested on him no more than if he had been made of glass, like the window panes.
'She sees nothing and hears nothing!' the old woman fumed. 'God! Heaven! The Church! She can think of nothing else and at this very minute she will be telling her confessor, the Abbé Séveno, and the rector in the village that Gilles has been touched with grace! And what does it matter if the child is miserable! Grace? A likely tale! And a fine priest he'll be making if he's lovesick already!'
But Rozenn knew that there was nothing to be done and for the first time in her life she found the holidays too long for her and felt that the time when Gilles must leave a place so full of peril and return to Vannes could not come soon enough.
She did not know it but in this she was at one with Gilles himself. The boy could not understand what was happening to him, the dull ache that had lodged itself like a tiny gnawing worm in his chest, the image that haunted him day and night, the burning desire to see again, even for a moment, the face which obsessed him. He had come a long way from the Abbé Delourme's stern warnings, inveighing against woman and her wiles. No echo of those reached him now, he only thought that God was both cruel and unfair to have let him see Judith when she could never be more than an impossible dream to him. And, in his innocence, he longed to go away for ever…
But his need to see the girl again was stronger than reason. On All Hallows Eve, the day before he was due to go back to college, he made up his mind to do his duty and attend the mass for the dead at Notre Dame du Paradis, the principal church of Hennebont. He knew that the whole town would be there.
And Judith, of course, was there, leaning on her father's arm. But at first he hardly recognized the little fury who had done her best to gouge his eyes out in the demure young lady, her curls tucked away inside a brown hooded cloak, who moved sedately and with downcast eyes up the nave towards the seats reserved for the nobility and gentry.
Hidden behind a pillar, he saw her smooth hair shining like copper in the candlelight and when she raised her eyes to the altar their brilliance, sparkling like black diamonds, pierced him to the heart.
All through the interminable service he remained rooted in the shadow of his pillar, without so much as a glance for the choir and the officiating clergy in their black and silver copes, with the agonizing feeling that his life would end the moment he took his eyes from Judith.
But when the final Requiem thundered out under the ancient arches, swelling from the strong throats of the good people of Hennebont, he did what any young man does who sees the girl he loves in church and literally hurled himself towards the holy water stoup to be ready to offer it to her as she passed.
He waited a long time, in the growing fear that she might have gone out by another door, for he had seen her father go by with old Madame de La Foret, who was as deaf as a post and crippled with rheumatism, on his arm.
He saw her finally, among the last of the congregation, walking with a girl of her own age who was as dark as she was auburn but with a pair of very bright green eyes. Gilles stepped forward quickly and, plunging his hand so eagerly into the granite basin that his sleeve was wet to the elbow, held it out to her all dripping.
A tremor ran through her and for an instant her dark eyes met the young man's blue ones, then came to rest austerely on his wet hand.
'Still as clumsy as ever, I see,' she said, making no move to lift her own to meet it.
'Eternal rest to all departed souls,' he murmured, aware to his horror that his voice was shaking.
Judith made no answer. She simply stood and stared at him insolently from a few feet away while her companion, clearly thrilled by the adventure, whispered something in her ear.
'Amen!' Judith said at last. 'But our prayers for the dead do not give you the right to offer me holy water! Oh Azénor,' she added forcibly to her friend, 'do stop pestering me to introduce this young man to you! One cannot present every Tom, Dick or Harry to a gentlewoman! As for you, Sir, I thought I asked you to forget you ever knew my name? Much less my face!'
'But who is he?' young Azénor persisted, evidently unable to contain her curiosity. 'I have never seen him before!'
'It doesn't matter. But if you must know, his name is Gilles Goëlo. He is going to be a village priest. Come on. We mustn't miss the procession.'
And she moved on, out into the grey daylight, borne on the last rolls of the organ.
Gilles never knew how long he stood there, by the holy water basin, his feet rooted to the cold flagstones where a few withered leaves swirled in the rain-laden wind, his hand still in the air, shattered by her contempt and with a weight like lead about his heart.
He might have stood there until Judgment Day if the pealing of the bells and the shrill voices of the choristers breaking into a psalm had not dragged him out of his trance. He saw the procession coming towards him from the far end of the church, the great silver cross swaying forward slowly against the blue of the banners, the solemn-faced priests with mourning vestments on their backs. An unfamiliar lump came into his throat, a lump which may have been to do with fear. It was as though the church were performing the obsequies of his own life and hopes, reminding him of his fate.
'Going to be a village priest! Going to be a village priest…'
The scornful voice filled his ears, rising above the tolling of the bells, the din of choir and organ. A kind of panic seized him and he fled then, pushing past the groups of people standing by the graveyard, awaiting the procession, and hurtling down the steep hill to the river until the foggy November air had swallowed him up.
Reaching home, he found Rozenn busy laying the table with a white cloth, ready to put out the cider, pancakes and curds for the dead who, that night, were permitted to revisit their old homes on earth. But Gilles paid no heed to her.
He went straight to the chest where his clothes were kept and dragged out all his possessions, stuffing them into an old seaman's duffle bag, working with such nervous haste that the old woman was alarmed.
'Blessed St Anne! What ever are you about, child? Are you going away?'
'Yes… I'm going… now, this minute! I must go… I must go back to school—'
'But there's no hurry! The coach for Vannes does not leave until tomorrow. And your mother—'
Gilles gripped Rozenn's arms and kissed her on both wrinkled cheeks, knocking her muslin coif askew.
'Say goodbye to her for me! Tell her – tell her I'l
l write to her. It will be all the same to her. I'm going down to the waterfront. In three hours the tide will be up and I'll find a boat to take me back to Vannes. God bless you, dear Rozenn!'
She was frightened suddenly by the catch in his voice and by the white, drawn face which at that moment had lost all its childish curves. She put her arms round him and hugged him, in an effort to make him stay.
'Gilles! My little one… Are you truly going to Vannes? You promise me?'
He gave a harsh little laugh, so sad that it made her want to weep.
'Oh yes, to Vannes! Where else should I go? I must go back to school and continue my studies. Am I not to be a village priest one day? Who wouldn't be impatient with such a brilliant future ahead of him?'
He wrenched himself out of the old woman's arms and the door slammed dully behind him. Rozenn sat down abruptly on a settle, listening to the fast-fading footsteps of the boy whom she loved like her own son, more perhaps, since her love was given of her own free choice.
'Dear god!' she murmured. 'It is worse than I thought.'
And all night long, while she tended the fire which had to be kept burning until daybreak so that the dead souls might warm themselves, Rozenn sat in the chimney corner and listened to the passing bell, for that, too, must keep tolling until dawn, and praying in her simple heart for God to be merciful to Gilles and not test him too cruelly.
'He is so young,' she muttered, over and over again. 'So young! He has not learned to suffer…'
Chapter Two
The Man from Nantes
St Yves College, originally a Jesuit foundation, stood in the faubourg of Auray, outside the walls of Vannes. It was not an inviting place. It comprised a large, gravelled courtyard, overrun with weeds and some austere, somewhat dilapidated buildings which, situated as they were on the downhill side of the courtyard, were prone to collect the water on rainy days, transforming the classrooms into a succession of swamps. A square tower, known as the 'Barbin', in one corner, served as a place of punishment and occupied a sufficiently prominent position to keep its function constantly before the inmates. The classrooms themselves were rudely flagged and furnished with high chairs, which had at least the advantage of keeping the teachers dry, and rows of wooden forms on which the pupils sat with their books on their knees. There they froze in winter and sat with their feet in the water whenever it rained and the concierge forgot to put straw on the floor.
They were taught French, mathematics, physics, history and geography in small doses and Latin in enormous ones. Discipline was strict and intellectual activity narrow and sternly controlled. For picking up a fragment of a news sheet in the street one day and slipping it into his books, Gilles had received twenty strokes of the cane and spent an hour in prayer on his knees on the hard stones of the chapel.
To all this he returned without enthusiasm yet at the same time with a curious sense of security. Within St Yves' leprous walls, echoing with the rolling periods of Cicero and the sayings of Ecclesiastes, Judith's tantalizing image faded into the mists of legend. She seemed to belong to the mysterious world of lakes and trees and to the people whose slender forms haunted the nearby woods of Paimpont, once the old forest of Broceliande. She was a fairy glimpsed in a dream, she was Morgan, she was Vivian… she was no longer altogether Judith and that in itself was some help to the boy's peace of mind.
As regards his studies, he could not have been called devoted to them. History, geography and the natural sciences he loved, but his reports were bad on account of his unshakeable aversion to the inevitable Latin, and also because his masters could not view the combination of daring and independence in his character with anything but alarm. That apart, he did not dislike the arts, while as for mathematics, he looked upon them like relations, useful if not visited too often. All in all, he was an average pupil but not one the good fathers of St Yves looked to to shed academic lustre on the college.
He returned to the same small room in the Rue St Gwenael that he had always lived in, in the house of a spinster who, in return for a modest rental, provided him with bed and a none too lavish board. The bed was in a cramped, ill-furnished room, devoid of curtains or carpet, although the tall window and dusty panelling smacked of better days. Morever Gilles could roast chestnuts in the hearth in winter to fill up the corners left unsatisfied by his hostess's meagre fare. In fact he felt much more at home there than in his mother's house because he could be alone here with his dreams and the modest treasures which constituted all his worldly goods, a few clothes, sadly plain, various toilet articles and some shells and curious stones picked up on his wanderings along the shore and about the countryside. These were books, too, mostly those he needed for his studies but including two works shockingly unsuitable for a future priest. There were The Age of Louis XIV by Monsieur de Voltaire and Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and he revelled in both of them.
These things made up the little private world in which Gilles hoped to find himself again after his flight from Kervignac. But he soon realized that this was impossible, for Judith invaded even his reading. Alexander the Great's beautiful captives or Queen Cleopatra all took on a curious likeness to her, with flaming hair and smooth, luminous flesh. Then he would hurl the book furiously into a corner and all night long would toss and turn on his seaweed mattress, unable to go to sleep. Sometimes, towards morning, he did manage to doze off. But the dreams that came to him with this sudden awakening of his manhood carried him into unsuspected chasms from which he awoke panting and drenched with sweat, with his heart pounding in his breast.
These wretched dreams left him deeply worried and ashamed. So much so that when Christmas approached he dared not tell them to his father confessor and failed to put in an appearance at Confession as the college rules required. On the day when he should have presented himself, along with the rest of his class, for this ritual cleansing of the soul, he stayed at home, feigning illness. Nor was it entirely feigned, because the mere thought of evoking Judith's unconsciously voluptuous form in a dark and dusty confessional, reeking of damp and the stale breath of the unseen priest, made him feel sick. And he swore to himself that if, when he went back, he were obliged to go to chapel after all, then he would say nothing about the things that haunted his nights and filled his heart, even if it meant lying to God Himself.
He knew that this was dealing a severe blow to the contract his mother had made with Heaven in his name, but he found himself taking a kind of bitter delight in his new rebellion, like a taste of revenge. He felt as if he were confronting God face to face.
On the day after his pretended illness, he left the house in the Rue St Gwenael at his usual time and was walking past the cathedral in the cold greyness of the early morning on his way to St Yves when he met one of his schoolfellows, a boy named Jean-Pierre Quérelle, the son of the best shipwright in the harbour. Jean-Pierre had his books under his arm but he was running as fast as he could in quite the opposite direction to the college. Gilles, partly out of a natural waywardness and partly from pride, was not in the habit of making friends with those of his fellows who possessed proper fathers, but his curiosity got the better of him and he called out:
'Where are you off to so fast, Jean-Pierre Quérelle? You know you're going away from St Yves? Lost your compass?'
The other boy halted.
'Never mind college,' he said, with a shrug. 'Didn't you hear the guns at cockcrow? They say the St Nicolas, Monsieur de Sainte-Pasane's ship that has not been heard of for so long, has just entered harbour. I want to see it! Are you coming? She's from the East Indies—'
Gilles needed no second invitation. In the eighteen months since France had been at war with England and the two countries had been laying into one another with great quantities of chain shot and cutlasses all over the Atlantic, a ship returned from the Antilles had become a rare occurrence, especially in the port of Vannes. For the most part the great pyramids of sail that beat about the oceans of the world would put into the quays of L'Orient,
home of the Great Indies Company, or of Nantes, capital of the French slave trade. But Sainte-Pasane, with the stubborn independence of a true descendant of the old Venetü, was a shipowner who had never seen the point of bringing home his vessels from whatever part of the world to any anchorage but that outside the tiny bottle-glass windows of his own counting house.
Despite the mist and the cold, which was unusual for this part of Brittany, for it was freezing hard, a crowd had gathered at the port. It was a joyful crowd, echoing with the click of sabots and crested with white caps like the sea in stormy weather.
The St Nicolas was there, huge and broad-bellied, settling into the misty river like a hen onto her nest. Only this hen had had a hard time of it. The colours of her hull were worn with salt. Her sails, now being furled by the skeletal seamen performing acrobatic miracles on her yards, were patched and dirty. As for the seamen themselves, with their prophetic beards and dirt-ingrained skins, they looked more like savages than honest Bretons. But not all the scars of their sufferings could extinguish the joy of this triumphant return, their holds full of indigo, sugar and precious woods to be exchanged for gold crowns chinking on mahogany counters, and silver coins gleaming in calloused palms, and made into fabulous tales to be told amid the smoke of the long clay pipes and the smell of rough cider in Mamm'Goz's tavern.
Perched on a bollard where they had clambered for a better view over the crowd, the two boys craned their necks to watch it all with sparkling eyes. Jean-Pierre was the first to speak. Gritting his teeth, he declared abruptly:
'I want to go to sea! Next time the St Nicolas sails, I shall go with her.'
Falcon 1 - The Lure of the Falcon Page 3