while Marche-a-Terre and Pille-Miche, sitting on the polished benches on each side of the long table, cut the cake and spread it with the rich yellow butter from which the milk spurted as the knife smoothed it. Galope-Chopine placed the beakers full of frothing cider before his guests, and the three Chouans began to eat; but from time to time the master of the house cast side-long glances at Marche-a-Terre as he drank his cider.
“Lend me your snuff-box,” said Marche-a-Terre to Pille-Miche.
Having shaken several pinches into the palm of his hand the Breton inhaled the tobacco like a man who is making ready for serious business.
“It is cold,” said Pille-Miche, rising to shut the upper half of the door.
The daylight, already dim with fog, now entered only through the little window, and feebly lighted the room and the two seats; the fire, however, gave out a ruddy glow. Galope-Chopine refilled the beakers, but his guests refused to drink again, and throwing aside their large hats looked at him solemnly. Their gestures and the look they gave him terrified Galope-Chopine, who fancied he saw blood in the red woollen caps they wore.
“Fetch your axe,” said Marche-a-Terre.
“But, Monsieur Marche-a-Terre, what do you want it for?”
“Come, cousin, you know very well,” said Pille-Miche, pocketing his snuff-box which Marche-a-Terre returned to him; “you are condemned.”
The two Chouans rose together and took their guns.
“Monsieur Marche-a-Terre, I never said one word about the Gars—”
“I told you to fetch your axe,” said Marche-a-Terre.
The hapless man knocked against the wooden bedstead of his son, and several five-franc pieces rolled on the floor. Pille-Miche picked them up.
“Ho! ho! the Blues paid you in new money,” cried Marche-a-Terre.
“As true as that’s the image of Saint-Labre,” said Galope-Chopine, “I have told nothing. Barbette mistook the Fougeres men for the gars of Saint-Georges, and that’s the whole of it.”
“Why do you tell things to your wife?” said Marche-a-Terre, roughly.
“Besides, cousin, we don’t want excuses, we want your axe. You are condemned.”
At a sign from his companion, Pille-Miche helped Marche-a-Terre to seize the victim. Finding himself in their grasp Galope-Chopine lost all power and fell on his knees holding up his hands to his slayers in desperation.
“My friends, my good friends, my cousin,” he said, “what will become of my little boy?”
“I will take charge of him,” said Marche-a-Terre.
“My good comrades,” cried the victim, turning livid. “I am not fit to die. Don’t make me go without confession. You have the right to take my life, but you’ve no right to make me lose a blessed eternity.”
“That is true,” said Marche-a-Terre, addressing Pille-Miche.
The two Chouans waited a moment in much uncertainty, unable to decide this case of conscience. Galope-Chopine listened to the rustling of the wind as though he still had hope. Suddenly Pille-Miche took him by the arm into a corner of the hut.
“Confess your sins to me,” he said, “and I will tell them to a priest of the true Church, and if there is any penance to do I will do it for you.”
Galope-Chopine obtained some respite by the way in which he confessed his sins; but in spite of their number and the circumstances of each crime, he came finally to the end of them.
“Cousin,” he said, imploringly, “since I am speaking to you as I would to my confessor, I do assure you, by the holy name of God, that I have nothing to reproach myself with except for having, now and then, buttered my bread on both sides; and I call on Saint-Labre, who is there over the chimney-piece, to witness that I have never said one word about the Gars. No, my good friends, I have not betrayed him.”
“Very good, that will do, cousin; you can explain all that to God in course of time.”
“But let me say good-bye to Barbette.”
“Come,” said Marche-a-Terre, “if you don’t want us to think you worse than you are, behave like a Breton and be done with it.”
The two Chouans seized him again and threw him on the bench where he gave no other sign of resistance than the instinctive and convulsive motions of an animal, uttering a few smothered groans, which ceased when the axe fell. The head was off at the first blow. Marche-a-Terre took it by the hair, left the room, sought and found a large nail in the rough casing of the door, and wound the hair about it; leaving the bloody head, the eyes of which he did not even close, to hang there.
The two Chouans then washed their hands, without the least haste, in a pot full of water, picked up their hats and guns, and jumped the gate, whistling the “Ballad of the Captain.” Pille-Miche began to sing in a hoarse voice as he reached the field the last verses of that rustic song, their melody floating on the breeze:—
“At the first town
Her lover dressed her
All in white satin;
“At the next town
Her lover dressed her
In gold and silver.
“So beautiful was she
They gave her veils
To wear in the regiment.”
The tune became gradually indistinguishable as the Chouans got further away; but the silence of the country was so great that several of the notes reached Barbette’s ear as she neared home, holding her boy by the hand. A peasant-woman never listens coldly to that song, so popular is it in the West of France, and Barbette began, unconsciously, to sing the first verses:—
“Come, let us go, my girl,
Let us go to the war;
Let us go, it is time.
“Brave captain,
Let it not trouble you,
But my daughter is not for you.
“You shall not have her on earth,
You shall not have her at sea,
Unless by treachery.
“The father took his daughter,
He unclothed her
And flung her out to sea.
“The captain, wiser still,
Into the waves he jumped
And to the shore he brought her.
“Come, let us go, my girl,
Let us go to the war;
Let us go, it is time.
“At the first town
Her lover dressed her,”
Etc., etc.
As Barbette reached this verse of the song, where Pille-Miche had begun it, she was entering the courtyard of her home; her tongue suddenly stiffened, she stood still, and a great cry, quickly repressed, came from her gaping lips.
“What is it, mother?” said the child.
“Walk alone,” she cried, pulling her hand away and pushing him roughly; “you have neither father nor mother.”
The child, who was rubbing his shoulder and weeping, suddenly caught sight of the thing on the nail; his childlike face kept the nervous convulsion his crying had caused, but he was silent. He opened his eyes wide, and gazed at the head of his father with a stupid look which betrayed no emotion; then his face, brutalized by ignorance, showed savage curiosity. Barbette again took his hand, grasped it violently, and dragged him into the house. When Pille-Miche