'I am sorry to have kept you waiting,' he said, as politely as though he were addressing an equal, 'but I had to finish this – it is a letter to the Head of the Great Seminary.'
When the young man said nothing, he went on, with a slight wave of the paper in his hand: 'We had a letter from your mother yesterday. I have it here.'
Gilles stiffened, surprised and a little startled.
'My mother? She has written – to you?'
'Why yes. You have always been aware that it is her greatest wish that you should enter the Church? Now, for reasons best known to herself, she is asking that you should be taken to the Seminary at once in order to begin your theological studies and prepare for your entry into the priesthood.'
Gilles was on his feet in a moment. He felt a choking sensation, as though chains were being suddenly drawn tight about his chest.
'At once? But this is only March, and the school year not yet over. Besides—'
'You may complete it at the Seminary more profitably than you could do here.'
'Possibly. But that is not really the point. My mother is exceeding her rights in requiring me to enter the Seminary straight away.'
Now it was the Abbé Grinne's turn to stiffen. He was not accustomed to hearing a pupil take this tone.
'What do you mean? Are you and she not in agreement as regards your future?'
'By no means! Of course she has never made any secret of her wish to see me wear the cloth, and when I was a child I saw little enough against it. At first because I scarcely knew what it meant and then because I liked the idea of copying my godfather – and my teachers. But as long as a year ago I made it clear to my mother that I was not sure of my vocation – and two months since I wrote to her, saying I wanted to do something else with my life. Admittedly, she has never answered my letter.'
'Had you talked to her about it before?'
Gilles smiled bitterly. 'There is no talking to my mother, sir. She seemed to listen to what I was saying to her but I wonder if she even heard! But all the same, the fact remains that I do not wish to be a priest and she has no right to force me.'
Francois Grinne did not answer at once. He studied the young man, while his thin fingers, stained yellow with the tobacco which was his only indulgence, rolled Marie-Jeanne Goëlo's letter thoughtfully between them. He was not particularly surprised by this violent reaction, for from the day when he first learned that the boy was destined for the priesthood he had watched him discreetly and had formed his own doubts as to his supposed vocation. Gilles' was a passionate, occasionally violent nature, but reserved also and oddly controlled in a way far beyond his age.
The Abbé studied his pupil in silence, with as much attention as if he were seeing him for the first time, yet with a curiosity altogether new. Gilles was very tall, both for his age and for a Breton. There was still something bony and unfinished about his long legs and broad shoulders, but the arrogant way he carried his blond head, with its unruly curls and the natural grace of movement which enabled him to carry off even his ugly black suit with elegance, all promised a man of great assurance and for the present marked him out from his companions.
When he reached the face, the Abbé had the curious impression that he was looking at it for the first time, perhaps because he had not really seen it for a long time. It was no longer the childish face it had been but a man's face already, despite the youthful softness of the thin, sardonic lips. The features were delicate but clean and proud, there was power in the jaw and arrogance in the slightly aquiline nose, while the eyes, so light a blue as to be almost grey under their straight, faintly upward-slanting brows, the eyes whose gaze Yann Maodan had found so disconcerting, contained a glint of ice. The hands, too, though ill-cared for, were excellently shaped… Everything, in short, about this careless-looking youth proclaimed the passionate vitality of a breed not easy to discipline – combined with an attraction perilous for a man of God.
If his mother hopes to make a country priest of him, then she can never have looked at him, the Abbé thought, amazed and somewhat alarmed by the result of his examination. The women will all run mad after him, and that will cause trouble in plenty. Of course, if he could hope for a bishopric or an abbey it would be all to the good. Unfortunately he will be prevented from rising by his birth. Looks like a lord but born the wrong side of the blanket. Not a good augury.
Uneasy at the long silence, Gilles plucked up courage to ask: 'You are very silent, sir. May I ask what you are thinking?'
The Abbé repressed a sigh. His duty to the mother did not permit of his taking sides. So he merely observed quietly: 'I was thinking that you are mistaken. In actual fact your mother has every right over you, even the right to have you taken to the Seminary by force – and brought back by the law should you take it into your head to run away! Which you are very well aware of! But tell me why you do not wish to serve God.'
Gilles levelled bright eyes at the young priest.
'Is there no other way to serve God than in a priest's robe?' he asked insolently. 'I had thought that every man who did the work he was born to and obeyed God's laws was a good servant of His!'
'I do not deny it. But your mother believes that you were born for just that life – and she loves you.'
'No!'
The word shot out, almost taking the Abbé in the face. He uttered a horrified protest.
'Say no more! How can you blaspheme so?'
'Why should the plain truth be a blasphemy? My mother loves only God. Not only did she not want me, my coming wrecked a life she had intended to be wholly divorced from this world. It hurts her even to look at me because for her I am sin incarnate, the image of the man who came between her and divine love, forcing her to remain a prisoner of a world she detests. That is why she insists on my becoming a priest, because that way she will be forgiven, sanctified. Sacrifice for sacrifice, Father! But she is not Abraham and I do not believe that God has ever asked my life of her.'
Once again there was silence. Disarmed, the priest felt suddenly heavy-hearted and there was a bitter load on his conscience as he looked at the young rebel, obstinately refusing to take on himself a sin that was not his. He felt that the mother's intransigence was doubling the weight of original sin on the child's soul and that for her the tonsure would be the only true baptism for her child. And he was aware of a great pity. But it was a pity he had no right to express.
Emerging from behind his desk, he went to Gilles and laid a hand on the boy's arm, feeling it tremble under his touch.
'Go back to your class and prepare yourself,' he murmured with a sigh. 'I will take you to the seminary myself in an hour's time. That will be better than sending you with the Father Censor. Afterwards – and this I promise you – I will come back here and write to your mother to tell her my private opinion. That is the best I can do for you.'
He did not say what that opinion was. Gilles bowed his head, overwhelmed by what he saw as his condemnation, and, too depressed even to give the vice-principal a proper bow, he turned and left the study.
Out in the courtyard he came up against the storm which had been sweeping the bay since early morning, a foretaste of the equinoctial gales. In that enclosed space, its violence seemed concentrated. The wind raced across the ground, flattening the winter's dead weeds and picking up the gravel. A window somewhere, left unfastened, banged with a tinkle of broken glass.
The future seminarist stood for a moment in the midst of that broad open space, letting the raging wind buffet his body and take hold of his hair, so that it streamed out like a pennant from a masthead. He wished he could remain there for ever and never have to move, a figure turned to stone. The storm did him good, he would not have liked to see what he considered as the wreck of his life taking place to soft sunshine and birdsong. This was a fine introduction to hell.
All at once he heard a dull crash behind him, a deep, echoing boom like a drumbeat. He turned and saw that one of the great double entrance doors to the college had
yielded to the pressure of the wind and was banging against the wall. The porter whose job it was to watch it must have fastened it badly.
Through the gap, Gilles saw dead branches and other rubbish being swept along the street. Everything the gale picked up in its passing, seemed to be on the run, as though moved by a life of its own. It was then that Gilles first saw that miraculously open doorway as a sign, as a kind of invitation, because he knew now that nothing and no one could turn Marie-Jeanne Goëlo from her purpose and that if he once let himself be shut up in the seminary, no power on earth but open flight would ever get him out. So what was he waiting for?
The door banged again, as though impatiently. Without another moment's thought, Gilles darted towards it, suddenly afraid that the porter would emerge and heave it inexorably shut again. In one bound he was over the threshold and sprinting down the street towards the cornmarket.
Forgetting the resentment which had kept him away from it for two months, he made instinctively for the harbour, as representing sanctuary and also escape to far-off places. His first thought was to hide in some warehouse until nightfall and then slip aboard the first vessel he came across. There could be no question of returning to the Rue St Gwenael because that was the first place they would look for him. He had not much time, for within an hour he must be in a place of safety.
But as he was speeding as fast as his long legs would carry him through the Porte St Salomon, the smell of hot pancakes assailed him and made him pause and almost deflected him from his purpose by reminding him how hungry he was. The bowl of broth he had swallowed at dawn was a long way away, especially since his landlady's parsimony encouraged the maidservant to make it elegantly thin. Moreover he had left the thick hunks of lightly buttered brown bread which should have sustained him until evening in the classroom, along with his books. And when Gilles was hungry, his brain was less efficient.
He slowed down and felt mechanically in his pockets in the hope that the few farthings which constituted his whole wealth might miraculously have multiplied themselves. His mother, of course, had always regarded pocket money as a snare of the devil. Naturally, he found no such luck, but he did manage to scrape together enough to purchase two big maize cakes.
They were gobbled up in an instant, leaving a delicious fragrance of salt butter on the young man's lips and a great gaping void still in his stomach.
But the brief pause necessary to eat his slender meal had given him time for thought and he realized the foolishness of his initial plan. What would he find at the harbour beyond fishing smacks or perhaps, with luck, the odd coaster which could put him off somewhere on the Breton coast, whereas he was dreaming of America? If he did not fall a prey to scoundrels like the Nantais who would ship him off in quite the wrong direction.
Besides, his combative nature and the need he had to look things in the face made him reluctant to run away until he had played his last card. And that last card was his godfather. The Abbé de Talhouët loved him enough to understand his lack of a vocation for the religious life and to help him at need. Several times already the abbé had tried to warn Marie-Jeanne tactfully against a too hasty decision. The rector of Hennebont was a friend and confidant to Gilles, a man whom he had now and then permitted to glimpse his deepest aspirations and the humiliation he felt at being unable to lay claim to a father. And although the abbé had twice prevented his godson from going to sea, once with M. d'Orvilliers' fleet at the start of the war with England and again the previous year when the Duc de Lauzun sailed from Quiberon for the reconquest of Senegambia, it had been more in the nature of a pious hope than a definite prohibition.
'Wait a while yet, child. You are not ready and life at sea is hard. You would not go very far, or rise very high; a lowly rank and menial tasks to perform. You would need some great occasion—'
And now that great occasion had arrived: a great country was fighting for its freedom, a lion was held captive by a mouse. Surely among such people even a bastard should be able to redeem himself! But if he was to seize the chance he must see the abbé again, and that meant going back to Hennebont, with the risk of coming up against Marie-Jeanne and getting the law set on his heels. It was a hard choice, and not one he had time to examine closely.
Nevertheless, Gilles retraced his steps, back from the fish market towards the upper part of the town, cursing himself for a fool as he went because in order to reach Hennebont he would have to pass by St Yves again and that was a grave disadvantage, to say nothing of the waste of time.
He was still hesitating when a shout went up suddenly from the other end of the street he was climbing.
'There he is! Catch him!'
An icy shiver ran down Gilles' spine. The ringing cry had come from a police sergeant who was now sprinting rapidly up the street with two men at his heels. In a flash, Gilles saw that he was lost, he would be recaptured, dragged to the seminary, locked in, perhaps flung into a lightless, airless cell until he consented to accept the tonsure. His flight had been discovered already and that unconscionable hypocrite the Abbé Grinne, for all his show of sympathy, had not hesitated to set the law after him. He was going to be taken up publicly in the street, like a common vagrant.
He swore through his teeth, crossing himself automatically as he did so, and cast a desperate glance around him. Then he saw the horse. It was the most beautiful one he had ever seen. In fact it was so beautiful it seemed like a miracle. It was as if it had sprung out of the ground for the sole purpose of coming to his rescue.
It was standing under the archway of the Grand Monarque inn, tied up there, no doubt, to wait until its master, some wealthy traveller, had dined. But to the young fugitive it was like a vision.
Gilles did not give himself time to think. He no sooner set eyes on the miraculous animal than he literally swooped upon it, quite forgetting that he had never ridden anything more challenging than a donkey or the abbe's mule. To unhitch the horse and leap on to its back, with more agility than skill, was the work of the moment and it all happened so quickly that an ostler who was ambling up with a nosebag on his arm stopped dead, too startled even to cry 'Stop thief'. Digging his heels hard into the animal's sides, Gilles was already bearing down on the approaching policemen, knocking over a harmless citizen who had been keeping his head down against the wind and had not seen him coming.
The sergeant's men stepped aside just in time to let him through.
'That's a damn fool way to go on!' grumbled the sergeant, who had been obliged to flatten himself uncomfortably against the wall to avoid being run down. 'What's more, he's made us lose sight of our quarry. If I wasn't in a hurry, I'd have a word or two to say to that young man!'
With that the three men, who had in fact no interest at all in Gilles, went on their way in pursuit of a chicken thief they had caught sight of in the market. Meanwhile the young man thundered past St Yves, convinced that every law officer in France was on his heels, and on into open country, already fighting what was to become an epic struggle with the elements and his unfamiliar mount.
Because things were not going by any means smoothly for him. The rider was worse than inexperienced, the horse mettlesome and furthermore wholly terrified by the gale. As luck would have it the animal had not been unsaddled and Gilles, clinging to the bridle, was occupied first in trying to stay in the saddle and secondly in doing what he could to steer his mount in its blind career. He found himself fighting the first real battle of his life for mastery of the beautiful creature which had laid its spell upon him. Three times his feet left the stirrups but he never lost his hold on the strip of leather gripped in his hands, not even when the horse was dragging him along the ground where the worn stones of the old Roman road still stuck up here and there. Three times he got somehow back into the saddle, bruised and shaken, his clothes torn and covered in mud, but filled with a fiercer determination, so that in the end he got the better of the animal. By the time the two of them reached St Anne d'Auray a kind of truce had been established, d
ue perhaps in part to a certain exhaustion on the part of the horse, which had slowed to what, for an unaccustomed rider, was a more or less tolerable canter. As they passed the old church of St Anne's, its grey tower lost in the racing clouds of a sky scarcely lighter in colour, Gilles muttered a grateful prayer to heaven that he had been saved from breaking his neck, even though he had been indulging in nothing more nor less than highway robbery.
Somewhat disturbed by the unpleasant thought that after this he was little better than a gaol bird, he promised himself to make his peace with heaven as soon as might be. Then he put the matter right out of his mind and thought instead, with a kind of delicious guilt, that he was on the road to Hennebont and that in Hennebont was Judith!
It was the first time for a long while that he had allowed himself to think of her, and to think of her with a kind of tremulous hope. He discovered now that she had been at the bottom of almost everything he had done since going back to school and that the great longing for fame, fortune and independence which possessed him had no other aim than one day to compel her admiration and transform her scorn into marvellous love. Until then, he had banished her picture from his mind, especially at night when the memory of Manon set a fire in his loins. It was too easy to substitute her body for the servant girl's and that, to Gilles, seemed a kind of profanation.
After St Anne, it was necessary to slow to a walk, for the old Roman road degenerated to little more than a rutted track. The ruts were fresh, deep and slippery, indicating that heavy wagons had passed that way. Gilles thought of the troops that had passed through Vannes the previous night, the guns of Anhalt's regiment and the battalion of Turenne's whose fine uniforms and gleaming weapons he had envied. They could not be far ahead, for the marks were very recent, and would certainly be encamped at Hennebont that night.
Falcon 1 - The Lure of the Falcon Page 7