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Barbarians, a fiction by Robert W. Chambers |
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Chapter 15. Carillonette |
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_ CHAPTER XV. CARILLONETTE Sticky Smith and Kid Glenn remained a week at Sainte Lesse, then left with the negroes for Calais to help bring up another cargo of mules, the arrival of which was daily expected. A peloton of the Train-des-Equipages and three Remount troopers arrived at Sainte Lesse to take over the corral. John Burley remained to explain and interpret the American mule to these perplexed troopers. Morning, noon, and night he went clanking down to the corral, his cartridge belt and holster swinging at his hip. But sometimes he had a little leisure. Sainte Lesse knew him as a mighty eater and as a lusty drinker of good red wine; as a mighty and garrulous talker, too, he became known, ready to accost anybody in the quiet and subdued old town and explode into French at the slightest encouragement. But Burley had only women and children and old men on whom to practice his earnest and voluble French, for everybody else was at the front. Children adored him--adored his big, silver spurs, his cartridge belt and pistol, the metal mule decorating his tunic collar, his six feet two of height, his quick smile, the even white teeth and grayish eyes of this American muleteer, who always had a stick of barley sugar to give them or an amazing trick to perform for them with a handkerchief or coin that vanished under their very noses at the magic snap of his finger. Old men gossiped willingly with him; women liked him and their rare smiles in the war-sobered town of Sainte Lesse were often for him as he sauntered along the quiet street, clanking, swaggering, affable, ready for conversation with anybody, and always ready for the small, confident hands that unceremoniously clasped his when he passed by where children played. As for Maryette Courtray, called Carillonnette, she mounted the bell-tower once every hour, from six in the morning until nine o'clock in the evening, to play the passing of Time toward that eternity into which it is always and ceaselessly moving. After nine o'clock Carillonnette set the drum and wound it; and through the dark hours of the night the bells played mechanically every hour for a few moments before Bayard struck. Between these duties the girl managed the old inn, to which, since the war, nobody came any more--and with these occupations her life was full--sufficiently full, perhaps, without the advent of John Burley. They met with enough frequency for her, if not for him. Their encounters took place between her duties aloft at the keyboard under the successive tiers of bells and his intervals of prowling among his mules. Sometimes he found her sewing in the parlour--she could have gone to her own room, of course; sometimes he encountered her in the corridor, in the street, in the walled garden behind the inn, where with basket and pan she gathered vegetables in season. There was a stone seat out there, built against the southern wall, and in the shadowed coolness of it she sometimes shelled peas. During such an hour of liberty from the bell-tower he found the dark-eyed little mistress of the bells sorting various vegetables and singing under her breath to herself the carillon music of Josef Denyn. "Tray chick, mademoiselle," he said, with a cheerful self-assertion, to hide the embarrassment which always assailed him when he encountered her. "You know, Monsieur Burley, you should not say '_tres chic_' to me," she said, shaking her pretty head. "It sounds a little familiar and a little common." "Oh," he exclaimed, very red. "I thought it was the thing to say." She smiled, continuing to shell the peas, then, with her sensitive and slightly flushed face still lowered, she looked at him out of her dark blue eyes. "Sometimes," she said, "young men say '_tres chic_.' It depend on when and how one says it." "Are there times when it is all right for me to say it?" he inquired. "Yes, I think so.... How are your mules today?" "The same," he said, "--ready to bite or kick or eat their heads off. The Remount took two hundred this morning." "I saw them pass," said the girl. "I thought perhaps you also might be departing." "Without coming to say good-bye--to _you_!" he stammered. "Oh, conventions must be disregarded in time of war," she returned carelessly, continuing to shell peas. "I really thought I saw you riding away with the mules." "That man," said Burley, much hurt, "was a bow-legged driver of the Train-des-Equipages. I don't think he resembles me." As she made no comment and expressed no contrition for her mistake, he gazed about him at the sunny garden with a depressed expression. However, this changed presently to a bright and hopeful one. "Vooz ate tray, tray belle, mademoiselle!" he asserted cheerfully. "Monsieur!" Vexed perhaps as much at her own quick blush as his abrupt eulogy, she bit her lip and looked at him with an ominously level gaze. Then, suddenly, she smiled. "Monsieur Burley, one does _not_ so express one's self without reason, without apropos, without--without encouragement----" She blushed again, vividly. Under her wide straw hat her delicate, sensitive face and dark blue eyes were beautiful enough to inspire eulogy in any young man. "Pardon," he said, confused by her reprimand and her loveliness. "I shall hereafter only _think_ you are pretty, mademoiselle--mais je ne le dirais ploo." "That would be perhaps more--_comme il faut_, monsieur." "Ploo!" he repeated with emphasis. "Ploo jamais! Je vous jure----" "_Merci_; it is not perhaps necessary to swear quite so solemnly, monsieur." She raised her eyes from the pan, moving her small, sun-tanned hand through the heaps of green peas, filling her palm with them and idly letting them run through her slim fingers. "L'amour," he said with an effort--"how funny it is--isn't it, mademoiselle?" "I know nothing about it," she replied with decision, and rose with her pan of peas. "Are you going, mademoiselle?" "Yes." "Have I offended you?" "No." He trailed after her down the garden path between rows of blue larkspurs and hollyhocks--just at her dainty heels, because the brick walk was too narrow for both of them. "Ploo," he repeated appealingly. Over her shoulder she said with disdain: "It is not a topic for conversation among the young, monsieur--what you call _l'amour_." And she entered the kitchen, where he had not the effrontery to follow her. That evening, toward sunset, returning from the corral, he heard, high in the blue sky above him, her bell-music drifting; and involuntarily uncovering, he stood with bared head looking upward while the celestial melody lasted. And that evening, too, being the fete of Alincourt, a tiny neighbouring village across the river, the bell-mistress went up into the tower after dinner and played for an hour for the little neighbour hamlet across the river Lesse. All the people who remained in Sainte Lesse and in Alincourt brought out their chairs and their knitting in the calm, fragrant evening air and remained silent, sadly enraptured while the unseen player at her keyboard aloft in the belfry above set her carillon music adrift under the summer stars--golden harmonies that seemed born in the heavens from which they floated; clear, exquisitely sweet miracles of melody filling the world of darkness with magic messages of hope. Those widowed or childless among her listeners for miles around in the darkness wept quiet tears, less bitter and less hopeless for the divine promise of the sky music which filled the night as subtly as the scent of flowers saturates the dusk. Burley, listening down by the corral, leaned against a post, one powerful hand across his eyes, his cap clasped in the other, and in his heart the birth of things ineffable. For an hour the carillon played. Then old Bayard struck ten times. And Burley thought of the trenches and wondered whether the mellow thunder of the great bell was audible out there that night. _ |
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