A Hero of Romance Part 43

Bertie was to put on his clothes and dress. So Bertie dressed. All the time the woman kept up a series of exclamations. More than once it was all that the man could do to prevent her laying hands upon the boy. He himself stood looking grimly on, every now and then seeming to grunt out a recommendation to the woman to restrain her indignation.

When the boy was dressed he unceremoniously took him by the collar of the coat and marched him from the room. The old crone brought up the rear, shrieking out reproaches as they went.

In this way they climbed down the rickety stairs, Bertie first--a most uncomfortable first; the man next, holding his coat collar, giving him little monitory jerks, in the way the policeman had done down Piccadilly; the woman last, raining abuse upon the unfortunate youngster's head. This was another stage on the journey to the Land of Golden Dreams.

Across the room below to the front door. There was a temporary pause.

The old crone gave the boy two sounding smacks, one on each side of the head, given with surprising vigour considering her apparent age.

Then the man raised his foot, sabot and all, and kicked the young gentleman into the street!

Then Bertie felt sure that the captain had forgotten to pay his bill.

He stood for a moment in the narrow street, not unnaturally surprised at this peremptory method of bidding a guest farewell. But it would have been quite as well if he had stood a little less upon the order of his going; for the crone, taking advantage of his momentary pause, caught off her slipper and flung it at his head. This, too, was delivered with vigour worthy of a younger arm, and as it struck Bertie fairly on the cheek he received the full benefit of the lady's strength. The other slipper followed, but that Bertie just dodged in time. Still, he thought that under the circ.u.mstances, perhaps, he had better go. So he went.

But not unaccompanied.

A couple of urchins had witnessed his unceremonious exit, and they had also seen the slippers aimed. The whole proceeding seemed to strike them in a much more humorous light than it did Bertie, and to mark their enjoyment of the fun they danced about and shrieked with laughter.

As Bertie began to slink away the man said to them something which seemed to make them p.r.i.c.k up their ears. They followed Bertie, pointing with their fingers.

"V'la un Anglais! C'est un larron! au voleur! au voleur!"

What it was they shrieked in their shrill voices Bertie had not the least idea, but he knew it was unpleasant to be pointed and shouted at, for their words were caught up by other urchins of their cla.s.s, and soon he had a force of ragam.u.f.fins shrieking close at his heels.

"V'la un Anglais! un Anglais! C'est un lar--r--ron!"

The stress which they laid upon the _larron_ was ear-splitting.

As he went, his following gathered force. They were a ragged regiment.

Some hatless, some shoeless, all stockingless; for even those who wore sabots showed an inch or two of naked flesh between the ends of their breeches and the tops of their wooden shoes.

As Bertie found his way into the better portions of the town the procession created a sensation. Shopkeepers came to their doors to stare, the loungers in the cafes stood to look. Some of the foot-pa.s.sengers joined the rapidly-swelling crowd.

The boy with his sullen face pa.s.sed on, his lips compressed, his eyes with their dogged look. What the hubbub was about, why they followed him, what it was they kept on shouting, he did not understand. He knew that the captain had left him, and left him penniless. What he was himself to do, or where he was going, he had not the least idea. He only knew that the crowd was hunting him on.

There was not one friendly face among those around him--not one who could understand. The boys seemed like demons, shrieking, dancing, giving him occasional shoves. Separately he would have tackled any one of them, for they could not despise him for being English more heartily than he despised them for being French. But what could he do against that lot?--a host, too, which was being reinforced by men. For the cry "Un Anglais!" seemed to be infectious, and citizens of the grimier and more popular type began to swell the throng and shriek "Un Anglais!" with the boys.

One man, a very dirty and evil-looking gentleman, laying his two hands on Bertie's shoulders, started running, and began pus.h.i.+ng him on in front of him. This added to the sport. The cavalcade broke into a trot. The shrieks became more vigorous. Suddenly Bertie, being pushed too vigorously from behind, and perhaps a little bewildered by the din, lost his footing and fell forward on his face. The man, taken unawares, fell down on top of him. The crowd shrieked with laughter.

A functionary interfered, in the shape of a _sergent de ville_. He wanted to know what the disturbance was about. Two or three dozen people, who knew absolutely nothing at all about it, began explaining all at once. They did not render the matter clearer. Nor did the man who had pushed Bertie over. He was indignant; not because he had pushed Bertie over, but because he had fallen on him afterwards. He evidently considered himself outraged because Bertie had not managed to enjoy a monopoly of tumbling down.

The policeman, not much enlightened by the explanations which were poured upon him, marched Bertie off to the _bureau de police_. They manage things differently in France, and the difference is about as much marked in a police station as anywhere else. Bertie found himself confronted by an official who pelted him with questions he did not understand, and who was equally at a loss to understand the observations he made in reply. Then he found himself locked up. It is probable that while he was held in durance vile an attempt was made to discover an interpreter; it would appear from what followed that if such an attempt were made, it was made in vain.

The afternoon pa.s.sed away. Still the boy was left to enjoy his own society. He had plenty of leisure to think; to wonder what was going to happen to him--what was the next page which was to be unfolded in the history of his adventures. He had leisure to learn that he was getting hungry. But no one brought him anything to eat.

At last, just as he was beginning to think that he surely was forgotten, an official appeared, who, without a word, took him by the collar of his coat--he had been taken a good many times by the collar of his coat of late--led him straight out of the station-house, through some by-streets to the outskirts of the town.

Then, when he had taken him some little distance outside the walls, and a long country road stretched away in front, he released the lad's collar, and with a very expressive gesture, which even Bertie was not at a loss to understand, he bade him take himself away.

And Bertie took himself away, walking smartly off in the direction in which the sergeant pointed--away from the town. The policeman watched him for some time, standing with his hands in his pockets; and then, when a curve in the road took the lad out of sight, he returned within the walls.

It was already evening. The uncertain weather which had prevailed during the last few days still proved its uncertainty. The day had been fine, the evening was clouded. The wind was high, and, blowing from the north-west, blew the clouds tumultuously in scurrying ma.s.ses across the sky.

The country was bare, nearly treeless. It was very flat. The scant fields of Finistere offered no protection from the weather, and but little pleasure to the eye. It was a bleak, almost barren country, with but little natural vegetation--harsh, stony, and inhospitable.

Along the wind-swept road he steadily trudged. He knew not whither he was going, not even whence he came. He was a stranger in a strange land. The captain had asked him whether he spoke French; he supposed, therefore, that this land was France. But the captain had confused him--bidden him ask for tickets for Constantinople. Even Bertie's scanty geographical knowledge told him that Constantinople was not France. On the other hand, the same scant store suggested that it needed a longer flight than they had taken to bring him into Turkey.

A very slight knowledge of French would have enabled him to solve the question. If he had only been able to ask, Where am I? The person asked might have taken him to be an English lunatic in a juvenile stage of his existence, but would probably have replied. Unfortunately this knowledge was wanting. If sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, it is also, and not seldom, very much the other way.

Nearly all that night Bertie went wandering on. The darkness gathered.

The wind seemed to whistle more loudly when the darkness came, but there was no escape from it for him. Seen in the light of cl.u.s.tering shadows the country seemed but scantily peopled. He scarcely met a soul. A few peasants, a cart or two--these were the only moving things he saw. And when the darkness deepened he seemed to be alone in all the world.

A house or two he pa.s.sed, even some villages, in which there were no signs of life except an occasional light gleaming through a wayside window. He made no attempt to ask for food, or drink, or shelter. How could he have asked? As he went further and further from the town he began to come among the Breton aborigines; and in Brittany, as in Wales, you find whole hamlets in which scarcely one of the inhabitants has a comprehensible knowledge of the language of the country which claims them as her children. Even French would have been of problematic service in the parts into which he had found, or rather lost his way, and he was not even aware that there was a place called Brittany, and a tongue called Breton. He was a stranger in a strange land indeed!

It was a horrible night, that first one he spent wandering among the wilds of Finistere. After he had gone on and on and on, and never seemed to come to anything, and the winds shrieked louder, and he was hungry and thirsty and weary and worn, and there was nothing but blackness all around and the terror-stricken clouds whirling above his head, somewhere about midnight he thought it was time he should find some shelter and rest.

So he clambered over a stone wall which bound the road on either side, and on the other side of this stone wall he ventured to lie down. It was not comfortable lying; there was no gra.s.s, there were thistles, nettles, weeds, and stones--plenty of stones. On this bed he tried to take some rest, trusting to the wall to shelter him.

In vain. It requires education to become accustomed to a bed of stones. All things come by custom, but those who are used to sheets find stony soil disagreeable ground. Bertie gave it up. The wind seemed to come through the c.h.i.n.ks in the wall with even greater bitterness than if there had been no wall at all. The stones were torture. There was nothing on which he could lay his head. So he got up and struck across the field, seeking for a sheltered place in which to lie. For another hour or so he wandered on, now sitting down for a moment or two, now kneeling, and feeling about with his hand for comfortable ground. In an open country, on a dark and windy night, it is weary searching for one's bed, especially in a country where stones are more plentiful than gra.s.s.

In his fruitless wanderings, confused by the darkness and the strangeness of the place, Bertie went over the same ground more than once. Without knowing it, meaning to go forwards, he went back. When he suspected that this was the case, his helplessness came home to him more forcibly than it had done before. What was he to do if he could not tell the way he had come from the way he was going?

At last he blundered on some trees. He welcomed them as though they had been friends. He sat down at the foot of one, and found that the ground was coated by what was either moss or gra.s.s. Compared to his bed of stones it was like a bed of eider-down. It was quite a big tree, and he found that he could so lean against it that it would serve as a very tolerable barrier against the wind at his back.

At the foot of this tree he sat down, and pillowing his head against the trunk he sought for sleep. But sleep was coy, and would not come on being wooed. The utter solitude of his position kept him wakeful.

Robinson Crusoe's desolation was scarcely more complete; his helplessness was not so great. It came upon Bertie, as it came upon Crusoe in his lonely island, that he was wholly in the hands of G.o.d.

The teachings which he had been taught at his mother's knee, and which seemed to go into one ear and out of the other, proved to be the bread which is cast upon the waters, returning after many days. He remembered with startling vividness how his mother had told him that G.o.d holds us all in the hollow of His hand: he understood the meaning of that saying now.

He was so sleepy, so tired out and out, that from very weariness he forgot that he was hungry and athirst. Yet, in some strange fantastic way, the thought, despite his weariness, prevented him from sleeping--that the winds which whistled through the night were the winds of G.o.d. The winds of G.o.d! And it seemed to him that all things were of G.o.d, the darkness and the solitude, and the mysterious place.

Who shall judge him? Who shall say that it was only because he was in trouble that he had such thoughts? It is something even if in times of trouble we think of G.o.d. "G.o.d is a very present help in times of trouble," has been written on some page of some old book.

Bertie was so curiously impressed by a sense of the presence of the Almighty G.o.d that he did what he had not done for a very long time--he got up, and kneeling at the foot of the friendly tree, he prayed. And it is not altogether beyond the range of possibility that, when he again sought rest, it was because of his prayer that G.o.d sent sleep unto his eyes.

Chapter XXII

THE END OF THE JOURNEY

Throughout the day which followed, and throughout the night, and throughout the succeeding days and nights, Bertie wandered among the wilds of Finistere, and among its lanes and villages. How he lived he himself could have scarcely told. The misfortunes which had befallen him since he had set out on his journey to the Land of Golden Dreams had told upon him. He became ill in body and in mind. He needed rest and care, good food and careful nursing. What he got was no food, or scarcely any, strange skies to shelter him, a strange land to serve him as his bed.

It was fortunate that summer was at hand. Had it been winter he would have lain down at night, and in the morning they would have found him dead. But he was at least spared excessive cold. The winds were not invariably genial. The occasional rain was not at all times welcome--to him at least, whatever it might have been to the thirsty earth--but there was no frost. If frost had come he would certainly have died.

What he ate he scarcely knew. Throughout the whole of his wanderings he never received food from any human being. He found his breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper in the fields and on the hedges. A patch of turnips was a G.o.dsend. There was one field in particular in which grew both swedes and turnips. It was within a stone's-throw of a village; to reach it from the road you had to scramble down a bank. To this he returned again and again. He began to look upon it almost as his own.

Once, towards evening, the farmer saw him getting his supper. The farmer saw the lad before the lad saw him. He stole upon him unawares, bent upon capturing the thief. He had almost achieved his purpose, and was within half a dozen yards of the miscreant, when, not looking where he was going in his anxiety to keep his eyes upon the pilferer, he caught his sabot in a hole, and came down upon his knees. As he came he gave vent to a deep Breton execration.

Startled, Bertie looked behind and saw the foe. He was off like the wind. When the farmer had regained, if not his temper, at least his perpendicular, he saw, fifty yards ahead, a wild-looking, ragged figure tearing for his life. The Breton was not built for speed. He perceived that he might as well attempt to rival the swallow in its flight as outrun the boy. So he contented himself with shaking his fists and shouting curses after the robber of his turnip field.