CHAPTER III.
BEHIND THE GREAT GATE.
That was the tale of the giant scissors as it was told to Joyce in thepleasant fire-lighted room; but behind the great gates the true storywent on in a far different way.
Back of the Ciseaux house was a dreary field, growing drearier andbrowner every moment as the twilight deepened; and across its roughfurrows a tired boy was stumbling wearily homeward. He was not more thannine years old, but the careworn expression of his thin white face mighthave belonged to a little old man of ninety. He was driving two unrulygoats towards the house. The chase they led him would have been alaughable sight, had he not looked so small and forlorn plodding alongin his clumsy wooden shoes, and a peasant's blouse of blue cotton,several sizes too large for his thin little body.
The anxious look in his eyes changed to one of fear as he drew nearerthe house. At the sound of a gruff voice bellowing at him from the endof the lane, he winced as if he had been struck.
"Ha, there, Jules! Thou lazy vagabond! Late again! Canst thou neverlearn that I am not to be kept waiting?"
"But, Brossard," quavered the boy in his shrill, anxious voice, "it wasnot my fault, indeed it was not. The goats were so stubborn to-night.They broke through the hedge, and I had to chase them overthree fields."
"Have done with thy lying excuses," was the rough answer. "Thou shalthave no supper to-night. Maybe an empty stomach will teach thee when mycommands fail. Hasten and drive the goats into the pen."
There was a scowl on Brossard's burly red face that made Jules's heartbump up in his throat. Brossard was only the caretaker of the Ciseauxplace, but he had been there for twenty years,--so long that he felthimself the master. The real master was in Algiers nearly all the time.During his absence the great house was closed, excepting the kitchen andtwo rooms above it. Of these Brossard had one and Henri the other.Henri was the cook; a slow, stupid old man, not to be jogged out ofeither his good-nature or his slow gait by anything that Brossardmight say.
Henri cooked and washed and mended, and hoed in the garden. Brossardworked in the fields and shaved down the expenses of their living closerand closer. All that was thus saved fell to his share, or he might nothave watched the expenses so carefully.
Much saving had made him miserly. Old Therese, the woman with thefish-cart, used to say that he was the stingiest man in all Tourraine.She ought to know, for she had sold him a fish every Friday during allthose twenty years, and he had never once failed to quarrel about theprice. Five years had gone by since the master's last visit. Brossardand Henri were not likely to forget that time, for they had beenawakened in the dead of night by a loud knocking at the side gate. Whenthey opened it the sight that greeted them made them rub their sleepyeyes to be sure that they saw aright.
There stood the master, old Martin Ciseaux. His hair and fiercelybristling mustache had turned entirely white since they had last seenhim. In his arms he carried a child.
Brossard almost dropped his candle in his first surprise, and his wondergrew until he could hardly contain it, when the curly head raised itselffrom monsieur's shoulder, and the sleepy baby voice lisped something ina foreign tongue.
"By all the saints!" muttered Brossard, as he stood aside for his masterto pass.
"It's my brother Jules's grandson," was the curt explanation thatmonsieur offered. "Jules is dead, and so is his son and all thefamily,--died in America. This is his son's son, Jules, the last of thename. If I choose to take him from a foreign poorhouse and give himshelter, it's nobody's business, Louis Brossard, but my own."
With that he strode on up the stairs to his room, the boy still in hisarms. This sudden coming of a four-year-old child into their daily lifemade as little difference to Brossard and Henri as the presence of thefour-months-old puppy. They spread a cot for him in Henri's room whenthe master went back to Algiers. They gave him something to eat threetimes a day when they stopped for their own meals, and then went on withtheir work as usual.
It made no difference to them that he sobbed in the dark for his motherto come and sing him to sleep,--the happy young mother who had pettedand humored him in her own fond American fashion. They could notunderstand his speech; more than that, they could not understand him.Why should he mope alone in the garden with that beseeching look of alost dog in his big, mournful eyes? Why should he not play and be happy,like the neighbor's children or the kittens or any other young thingthat had life and sunshine?
Brossard snapped his fingers at him sometimes at first, as he would havedone to a playful animal; but when Jules drew back, frightened by hisforeign speech and rough voice, he began to dislike the timid child.After awhile he never noticed him except to push him aside or tofind fault.
It was from Henri that Jules picked up whatever French he learned, andit was from Henri also that he had received the one awkward caress, andthe only one, that his desolate little heart had known in all the fiveloveless years that he had been with them.
A few months ago Brossard had put him out in the field to keep the goatsfrom straying away from their pasture, two stubborn creatures, whoseself-willed wanderings had brought many a scolding down on poor Jules'shead. To-night he was unusually unfortunate, for added to the wearychase they had led him was this stern command that he should go to bedwithout his supper.
He was about to pass into the house, shivering and hungry, when Henriput his head out at the window. "Brossard," he called, "there isn'tenough bread for supper; there's just this dry end of a loaf. You shouldhave bought as I told you, when the baker's cart stopped herethis morning."
Brossard slowly measured the bit of hard, black bread with his eye, and,seeing that there was not half enough to satisfy the appetites of twohungry men, he grudgingly drew a franc from his pocket.
"Here, Jules," he called. "Go down to the bakery, and see to it thatthou art back by the time that I have milked the goats, or thou shaltgo to bed with a beating, as well as supperless. Stay!" he added, asJules turned to go. "I have a mind to eat white bread to-night insteadof black. It will cost an extra son, so be careful to count the change.It is only once or so in a twelvemonth," he muttered to himself as anexcuse for his extravagance.
It was half a mile to the village, but down hill all the way, so thatJules reached the bakery in a very short time.
Several customers were ahead of him, however, and he awaited his turnnervously. When he left the shop an old lamplighter was going down thestreet with torch and ladder, leaving a double line of twinkling lightsin his wake, as he disappeared down the wide "Paris road." Jules watchedhim a moment, and then ran rapidly on. For many centuries the oldvillage of St. Symphorien had echoed with the clatter of wooden shoes onits ancient cobblestones; but never had foot-falls in its narrow,crooked streets kept time to the beating of a lonelier little heart.
The officer of Customs, at his window beside the gate that shuts in theold town at night, nodded in a surly way as the boy hurried past. Onceoutside the gate, Jules walked more slowly, for the road began to windup-hill. Now he was out again in the open country, where a faint lightlying over the frosty fields showed that the moon was rising.
Here and there lamps shone from the windows of houses along the road;across the field came the bark of a dog, welcoming his master; two oldpeasant women passed him in a creaking cart on their glad way home.
At the top of the hill Jules stopped to take breath, leaning for amoment against the stone wall. He was faint from hunger, for he had beenin the fields since early morning, with nothing for his midday lunch buta handful of boiled chestnuts. The smell of the fresh bread tantalizedhim beyond endurance. Oh, to be able to take a mouthful,--just onelittle mouthful of that brown, sweet crust!
He put his face down close, and shut his eyes, drawing in the deliciousodor with long, deep breaths. What bliss it would be to have that wholeloaf for his own,--he, little Jules, who was to have no supper thatnight! He held it up in the moonlight, hungrily looking at it on everyside. There was not a broken place to be found anywhere on
its surface;not one crack in all that hard, brown glaze of crust, from which hemight pinch the tiniest crumb.
For a moment a mad impulse seized him to tear it in pieces, and eatevery scrap, regardless of the reckoning with Brossard afterwards. Butit was only for a moment. The memory of his last beating stayed hishand. Then, fearing to dally with temptation, lest it should master him,he thrust the bread under his arm, and ran every remaining step ofthe way home.
Brossard took the loaf from him, and pointed with it to the stairway,--amute command for Jules to go to bed at once. Tingling with a sense ofinjustice, the little fellow wanted to shriek out in all his hunger andmisery, defying this monster of a man; but a struggling sparrow might aswell have tried to turn on the hawk that held it. He clenched his handsto keep from snatching something from the table, set out so temptinglyin the kitchen, but he dared not linger even to look at it. With afeeling of utter helplessness he passed it in silence, his facewhite and set.
Dragging his tired feet slowly up the stairs, he went over to thecasement window, and swung it open; then, kneeling down, he laid hishead on the sill, in the moonlight. Was it his dream that came back tohim then, or only a memory? He could never be sure, for if it were amemory, it was certainly as strange as any dream, unlike anything he hadever known in his life with Henri and Brossard. Night after night he hadcomforted himself with the picture that it brought before him.
He could see a little white house in the middle of a big lawn. Therewere vines on the porches, and it must have been early in the evening,for the fireflies were beginning to twinkle over the lawn. And the grasshad just been cut, for the air was sweet with the smell of it. A woman,standing on the steps under the vines, was calling "Jules, Jules, it istime to come in, little son!"
But Jules, in his white dress and shoulder-knots of blue ribbon, wastoddling across the lawn after a firefly.
Then she began to call him another way. Jules had a vague idea that itwas a part of some game that they sometimes played together. It soundedlike a song, and the words were not like any that he had ever heardsince he came to live with Henri and Brossard. He could not forget them,though, for had they not sung themselves through that beautiful dreamevery time he had it?
"Little Boy Blue, oh, where are you? O, where are you-u-u-u?"
He only laughed in the dream picture and ran on after the firefly. Thena man came running after him, and, catching him, tossed him uplaughingly, and carried him to the house on his shoulder.
Somebody held a glass of cool, creamy milk for him to drink, and by andby he was in a little white night-gown in the woman's lap. His head wasnestled against her shoulder, and he could feel her soft lips touchinghim on cheeks and eyelids and mouth, before she began to sing:
"Oh, little Boy Blue, lay by your horn, And mother will sing of the cows and the corn, Till the stars and the angels come to keep Their watch, where my baby lies fast asleep."
Now all of a sudden Jules knew that there was another kind of hungerworse than the longing for bread. He wanted the soft touch of those lipsagain on his mouth and eyelids, the loving pressure of those restfularms, a thousand times more than he had wished for the loaf that he hadjust brought home. Two hot tears, that made his eyes ache in their slowgathering, splashed down on the window-sill.
Down below Henri opened the kitchen door and snapped his fingers to callthe dog. Looking out, Jules saw him set a plate of bones on the step.For a moment he listened to the animal's contented crunching, and thencrept across the room to his cot, with a little moan. "O-o-oh--o-oh!" hesobbed. "Even the dog has more than I have, and I'm _so_ hungry!" He hidhis head awhile in the old quilt; then he raised it again, and, with thetears streaming down his thin little face, sobbed in a heartbrokenwhisper: "Mother! Mother! Do you know how hungry I am?"
A clatter of knives and forks from the kitchen below was the onlyanswer, and he dropped despairingly down again.
"She's so far away she can't even hear me!" he moaned. "Oh, if I couldonly be dead, too!"
He lay there, crying, till Henri had finished washing the supper dishesand had put them clumsily away. The rank odor of tobacco, stealing upthe stairs, told him that Brossard had settled down to enjoy his eveningpipe. Through the casement window that was still ajar came the faintnotes of an accordeon from Monsieur Greville's garden, across the way.Gabriel, the coachman, was walking up and down in the moonlight, playinga wheezy accompaniment to the only song he knew. Jules did not notice itat first, but after awhile, when he had cried himself quiet, the faintmelody began to steal soothingly into his consciousness. His eyelidsclosed drowsily, and then the accordeon seemed to be singing somethingto him. He could not understand at first, but just as he was droppingoff to sleep he heard it quite clearly:
"Till the stars and the angels come to keep Their watch, where my baby lies fast asleep."
Late in the night Jules awoke with a start, and sat up, wondering whathad aroused him. He knew that it must be after midnight, for the moonwas nearly down. Henri was snoring. Suddenly such a strong feeling ofhunger came over him, that he could think of nothing else. It was like agnawing pain. As if he were being led by some power outside of his ownwill, he slipped to the door of the room. The little bare feet made nonoise on the carpetless floor. No mouse could have stolen down thestairs more silently than timid little Jules. The latch of the kitchendoor gave a loud click that made him draw back with a shiver of alarm;but that was all. After waiting one breathless minute, his heart beatinglike a trip-hammer, he went on into the pantry.
The moon was so far down now, that only a white glimmer of light showedhim the faint outline of things; but his keen little nose guided him.There was half a cheese on the swinging shelf, with all the bread thathad been left from supper. He broke off great pieces of each in eagerhaste. Then he found a crock of goat's milk. Lifting it to his mouth, hedrank with big, quick gulps until he had to stop for breath. Just ashe was about to raise it to his lips again, some instinct of danger madehim look up. There in the doorway stood Brossard, bigger and darker andmore threatening than he had ever seemed before.
"IT FELL TO THE FLOOR WITH A CRASH."]
A frightened little gasp was all that the child had strength to give. Heturned so sick and faint that his nerveless fingers could no longer holdthe crock. It fell to the floor with a crash, and the milk spattered allover the pantry. Jules was too terrified to utter a sound. It wasBrossard who made the outcry. Jules could only shut his eyes and crouchdown trembling, under the shelf. The next instant he was dragged out,and Brossard's merciless strap fell again and again on the poorshrinking little body, that writhed under the cruel blows.
Once more Jules dragged himself up-stairs to his cot, this time bruisedand sore, too exhausted for tears, too hopeless to think of possibleto-morrows.
Poor little prince in the clutches of the ogre! If only fairy talesmight be true! If only some gracious spirit of elfin lore might reallycome at such a time with its magic wand of healing! Then there would beno more little desolate hearts, no more grieved little faces withundried tears upon them in all the earth. Over every threshold where achild's wee feet had pattered in and found a home, it would hang itsguardian Scissors of Avenging, so that only those who belong to thekingdom of loving hearts and gentle hands would ever dare to enter.
The Gate of the Giant Scissors Page 3