Chapter 1

THE MESSENGER.

Little gray messenger,
Robed like painted Death,
Your robe is dust.
Whom do you seek
Among lilies and closed buds

At dusk?

Among lilies and closed buds

At dusk,
Whom do you seek,
Little gray messenger,
Robed in the awful panoply
Of painted Death?

R. W. C.

THE MESSENGER.

All-wise,
Hast thou seen all there is to see with thy two eyes?

Dost thou know all there is to know, and so,

Omniscient,
Darest thou still to say thy brother lies?

R. W. C.

“The bullet entered here,” said Max Fortin, and he placed his middle finger over a smooth hole exactly in the centre of the forehead.

I sat down upon a mound of dry seaweed and unslung my fowling piece.

The little chemist cautiously felt the edges of the shot-hole, first with his middle finger, then with his thumb.

“Let me see the skull again,” said I.

Max Fortin picked it up from the sod.

“It’s like all the others,” he observed. I nodded, without offering to take it from him. After a moment he thoughtfully replaced it upon the grass at my feet.

“It’s like all the others,” he repeated, wiping his glasses on his handkerchief. “I thought you might care to see one of the skulls, so I brought this over from the gravel pit. The men from Bannalec are digging yet. They ought to stop.”

“How many skulls are there altogether?” I inquired.

“They found thirty-eight skulls; there are thirty-nine noted in the list. They lie piled up in the gravel pit on the edge of Le Bihan’s wheat field. The men are at work yet. Le Bihan is going to stop them.”

“Let’s go over,” said I; and I picked up my gun and started across the cliffs, Fortin on one side, Môme on the other.

“Who has the list?” I asked, lighting my pipe. “You say there is a list?”

“The list was found rolled up in a brass cylinder,” said the little chemist. He added: “You should not smoke here. You know that if a single spark drifted into the wheat--”

“Ah, but I have a cover to my pipe,” said I, smiling.

Fortin watched me as I closed the pepper-box arrangement over the glowing bowl of the pipe. Then he continued:

“The list was made out on thick yellow paper; the brass tube has preserved it. It is as fresh to-day as it was in 1760. You shall see it.”

“Is that the date?”

“The list is dated ‘April, 1760.’ The Brigadier Durand has it. It is not written in French.”

“Not written in French!” I exclaimed.

“No,” replied Fortin solemnly, “it is written in Breton.”

“But,” I protested, “the Breton language was never written or printed in 1760.”

“Except by priests,” said the chemist.

“I have heard of but one priest who ever wrote the Breton language,” I began.

Fortin stole a glance at my face.

“You mean--the Black Priest?” he asked.

I nodded.

Fortin opened his mouth to speak again, hesitated, and finally shut his teeth obstinately over the wheat stem that he was chewing.

“And the Black Priest?” I suggested encouragingly. But I knew it was useless; for it is easier to move the stars from their courses than to make an obstinate Breton talk. We walked on for a minute or two in silence.

“Where is the Brigadier Durand?” I asked, motioning Môme to come out of the wheat, which he was trampling as though it were heather. As I spoke we came in sight of the farther edge of the wheat field and the dark, wet mass of cliffs beyond.

“Durand is down there--you can see him; he stands just behind the Mayor of St. Gildas.”

“I see,” said I; and we struck straight down, following a sun-baked cattle path across the heather.

When we reached the edge of the wheat field, Le Bihan, the Mayor of St. Gildas, called to me, and I tucked my gun under my arm and skirted the wheat to where he stood.

“Thirty-eight skulls,” he said in his thin, high-pitched voice; “there is but one more, and I am opposed to further search. I suppose Fortin told you?”

I shook hands with him, and returned the salute of the Brigadier Durand.

“I am opposed to further search,” repeated Le Bihan, nervously picking at the mass of silver buttons which covered the front of his velvet and broadcloth jacket like a breastplate of scale armour.

Durand pursed up his lips, twisted his tremendous mustache, and hooked his thumbs in his sabre belt.

“As for me,” he said, “I am in favour of further search.”

“Further search for what--for the thirty-ninth skull?” I asked.

Le Bihan nodded. Durand frowned at the sunlit sea, rocking like a bowl of molten gold from the cliffs to the horizon. I followed his eyes. On the dark glistening cliffs, silhouetted against the glare of the sea, sat a cormorant, black, motionless, its horrible head raised toward heaven.

“Where is that list, Durand?” I asked.

The gendarme rummaged in his despatch pouch and produced a brass cylinder about a foot long. Very gravely he unscrewed the head and dumped out a scroll of thick yellow paper closely covered with writing on both sides. At a nod from Le Bihan he handed me the scroll. But I could make nothing of the coarse writing, now faded to a dull brown.

“Come, come, Le Bihan,” I said impatiently, “translate it, won’t you? You and Max Fortin make a lot of mystery out of nothing, it seems.”

Le Bihan went to the edge of the pit where the three Bannalec men were digging, gave an order or two in Breton, and turned to me.

As I came to the edge of the pit the Bannalec men were removing a square piece of sail-cloth from what appeared to be a pile of cobblestones.

“Look!” said Le Bihan shrilly. I looked. The pile below was a heap of skulls. After a moment I clambered down the gravel sides of the pit and walked over to the men of Bannalec. They saluted me gravely, leaning on their picks and shovels, and wiping their sweating faces with sunburned hands.

“How many?” said I in Breton.

“Thirty-eight,” they replied.

I glanced around. Beyond the heap of skulls lay two piles of human bones. Beside these was a mound of broken, rusted bits of iron and steel. Looking closer, I saw that this mound was composed of rusty bayonets, sabre blades, scythe blades, with here and there a tarnished buckle attached to a bit of leather hard as iron.

I picked up a couple of buttons and a belt plate. The buttons bore the royal arms of England; the belt plate was emblazoned with the English arms, and also with the number “27.”

“I have heard my grandfather speak of the terrible English regiment, the 27th Foot, which landed and stormed the fort up there,” said one of the Bannalec men.

“Oh!” said I; “then these are the bones of English soldiers?”

“Yes,” said the men of Bannalec.

Le Bihan was calling to me from the edge of the pit above, and I handed the belt plate and buttons to the men and climbed the side of the excavation.

“Well,” said I, trying to prevent Môme from leaping up and licking my face as I emerged from the pit, “I suppose you know what these bones are. What are you going to do with them?”

“There was a man,” said Le Bihan angrily, “an Englishman, who passed here in a dog-cart on his way to Quimper about an hour ago, and what do you suppose he wished to do?”

“Buy the relics?” I asked, smiling.

“Exactly--the pig!” piped the mayor of St. Gildas. “Jean Marie Tregunc, who found the bones, was standing there where Max Fortin stands, and do you know what he answered? He spat upon the ground, and said: ‘Pig of an Englishman, do you take me for a desecrator of graves?’”

I knew Tregunc, a sober, blue-eyed Breton, who lived from one year’s end to the other without being able to afford a single bit of meat for a meal.

“How much did the Englishman offer Tregunc?” I asked.

“Two hundred francs for the skulls alone.”

I thought of the relic hunters and the relic buyers on the battlefields of our civil war.

“Seventeen hundred and sixty is long ago,” I said.

“Respect for the dead can never die,” said Fortin.

“And the English soldiers came here to kill your fathers and burn your homes,” I continued.

“They were murderers and thieves, but--they are dead,” said Tregunc, coming up from the beach below, his long sea rake balanced on his dripping jersey.

“How much do you earn every year, Jean Marie?” I asked, turning to shake hands with him.

“Two hundred and twenty francs, monsieur.”

“Forty-five dollars a year,” I said. “Bah! you are worth more, Jean. Will you take care of my garden for me? My wife wished me to ask you. I think it would be worth one hundred francs a month to you and to me. Come on, Le Bihan--come along, Fortin--and you, Durand. I want somebody to translate that list into French for me.”

Tregunc stood gazing at me, his blue eyes dilated.

“You may begin at once,” I said, smiling, “if the salary suits you?”

“It suits,” said Tregunc, fumbling for his pipe in a silly way that annoyed Le Bihan.

“Then go and begin your work,” cried the mayor impatiently; and Tregunc started across the moors toward St. Gildas, taking off his velvet-ribboned cap to me and gripping his sea rake very hard.

“You offer him more than my salary,” said the mayor, after a moment’s contemplation of his silver buttons.

“Pooh!” said I, “what do you do for your salary except play dominoes with Max Fortin at the Groix Inn?”

Le Bihan turned red, but Durand rattled his sabre and winked at Max Fortin, and I slipped my arm through the arm of the sulky magistrate, laughing.

“There’s a shady spot under the cliff,” I said; “come on, Le Bihan, and read me what is in the scroll.”

In a few moments we reached the shadow of the cliff, and I threw myself upon the turf, chin on hand, to listen.

The gendarme, Durand, also sat down, twisting his mustache into needlelike points. Fortin leaned against the cliff, polishing his glasses and examining us with vague, near-sighted eyes; and Le Bihan, the mayor, planted himself in our midst, rolling up the scroll and tucking it under his arm.

“First of all,” he began in a shrill voice, “I am going to light my pipe, and while lighting it I shall tell you what I have heard about the attack on the fort yonder. My father told me; his father told him.”

He jerked his head in the direction of the ruined fort, a small, square stone structure on the sea cliff, now nothing but crumbling walls. Then he slowly produced a tobacco pouch, a bit of flint and tinder, and a long-stemmed pipe fitted with a microscopical bowl of baked clay. To fill such a pipe requires ten minutes’ close attention. To smoke it to a finish takes but four puffs. It is very Breton, this Breton pipe. It is the crystallization of everything Breton.

“Go on,” said I, lighting a cigarette.

“The fort,” said the mayor, “was built by Louis XIV, and was dismantled twice by the English. Louis XV restored it in 1739. In 1760 it was carried by assault by the English. They came across from the island of Groix--three shiploads--and they stormed the fort and sacked St. Julien yonder, and they started to burn St. Gildas--you can see the marks of their bullets on my house yet; but the men of Bannalec and the men of Lorient fell upon them with pike and scythe and blunderbuss, and those who did not run away lie there below in the gravel pit now--thirty-eight of them.”