The Chaplet of Pearls

‘Yes, yes! your mother! your mother! your mother!’ he cried, unable to let her out of his embrace; and then restraining himself as he saw her frightened eyes, in absolute fear of her spurning him, or struggling from him, ‘My sweet! my child! Ah! do you not know me?’ Then, remembering how wild this was, he struggled to speak calmly: ‘What are you called, my treasure?’

‘I am la petite Rayonette,’ she said, with puzzled dignity and gravity; ‘and my mother says I have a beautiful long name of my own besides.’

‘Berangere—my Berangere–’

‘That is what she says over me, as I go to sleep in her bosom at night,’ said the child, in a wondering voice, soon exchanged for entreaty, ‘Oh, hug me not so hard! Oh, let me go—let me go to her! Mother! mother!’

‘My child, mine own, I am take thee!—Oh, do not struggle with me!’ he cried, himself imploring now. ‘Child, one kiss for thy father;’ and meantime, putting absolute force on his vehement affection, he was hurrying to the chancel.

There Philip hailed them with a shout as of desperate anxiety relieved; but before a word could be uttered, down the stairs flew the Lady of Hope, crying wildly, ‘Not there—she is not—’ but perceiving the little one in the stranger’s arms, she held out her own, crying, ‘Ah! is she hurt, my angel?’

‘Unhurt, Eustacie! Our child is unhurt!’ Berenger said, with an agonized endeavour to be calm; but for the moment her instinct was so entirely absorbed in examining into the soundness of her child’s limbs, that she neither saw nor hear anything else.

‘Eustacie,’ he said, laying his hand on her arm, she started back, with bewildered eyes. ‘Eustacie—wife? do you not know me? Ah! I forgot that I am changed.’

‘You—you—’ she gasped, utterly confounded, and gazing as if turned to stone, and though at that moment the vibration of a mighty discharge of cannon rocked the walls, and strewed Philip’s bed with the crimson shivers of St. John’s robe, yet neither of them would have been sensible of it had not Humfrey rushed in at the same moment, crying, ‘They are coming on like friends, sir!’

Berenger passed his hand over his face. ‘You will know me WHEN—IF I return, my dearest,’ he said. ‘If not, then still, thank God! Philip, to you I trust them!’

And with one kiss on that still, cold, almost petrified brow, he had dashed away. There was a space of absolutely motionless silence, save that Eustacie let herself drop on the chancel step, and the child, presently breaking the spell, pulled her to attract her notice to the flowers. ‘Mother, here are the soucis for the poor gentleman’s broth. See, the naughty people had spoilt all the paths, and I rolled down and tore my frock, and down fell the beads, but be not angry, mother dear, for the good gentleman picked them up, and carried me up the bank.’

‘The bank!’ cried Eustacie, with a scream, as the sense of the words reached her ears. ‘Ah! no wonder! Well might thy danger bring thy father’s spirit;’ and she grasped the little one fervently in her arms, murmuring, ‘Thank, thank God, indeed! Oh! my precious one; and did He send that blessed spirit to rescue thee?’

‘And will you tie up my frock? and may I put the flowers into the broth?’ chattered Rayonette. ‘And why did he kiss me and hug me so tight? and how did he know what you say over me as we fall asleep?’

Eustacie clasped her tighter, with a convulsive, shudder of thankfulness; and Philip, but half hearing, and barely gathering the meaning of her mood, ventured to speak, ‘Madame–’

As if touched by an electric shock, Eustacie started up, as recalled to instant needs, and coming towards him said, ‘Do you want anything, sir? Pardon one who has but newly seen a spirit from the other world—brought by his child’s danger.’ And the dazed, trance-like look was returning.

‘Spirit!’ cried Philip. ‘Nay, Madame, it was himself. Ah! and you are she whom we have sought so long; and this dear child—no wonder she has Dolly’s face.’

‘Who—what?’ said Eustacie, pressing her temples with her hands, as if to retain her senses. ‘Speak; was yonder a living or dead man—and who?’

‘Living, thank God! and your own husband; that is, if you are really Eustacie. Are you indeed?’ he added, becoming doubtful.

‘Eustacie, that am I,’ she murmured. ‘But he is dead—they killed him; I swathe blood where he had waited for me. His child’s danger brought him from the grave.’

‘No, no. Look at me, sister Eustacie. Listen to me. Osbert brought him home more dead than alive—but alive still.’

‘No!’ she cried, half passionately. ‘Never could he have lived and left me to mourn him so bitterly.’

‘If you knew—’ cried Philip, growing indignant. ‘For weeks he lay in deadly lethargy, and when, with his left hand, he wrote and sent Osbert to you, your kinsfolk threw the poor fellow into a dungeon, and put us off with lies that you were married to your cousin. All believed, only he—sick, helpless, speechless, as he was—he trusted you still; and so soon as Mericour came, though he could scarcely brook the saddle, nothing would hold him from seeking you. We saw only ruin at La Sablerie, and well-nigh ever since have we been clapped up in prison by your uncle. We were on the way to Quinet to seek you. He has kept his faith whole through wounds and pain and prison and threats,—ay, and sore temptation,’ cried Philip, waxing eloquent; ‘and, oh, it cannot be that you do not care for him!’

‘Doubt not my faith, sir,’ said Eustacie, proudly; ‘I have been as true to him as if I had known he lived. Nor do I know who you are to question me.’

At this moment the child pressed forward, holding between her tow careful plump hands a red earthenware bowl, with the tisane steaming in it, and the yellow petals strewn over the surface. She and Philip had taken a great fancy to each other, and while her mother was busy with the other patients, she had been left to her quiet play with her fragments of glass, which she carried one by one to display, held up to the light, to her new friends; who, in his weak state, and after his long captivity, found her the more charming playmate because she so strangely reminded him of his own little sisters. She thought herself his little nurse, and missing from his broth the yellow petals that she had been wont to think the charm of tisane, the housewifely little being had trotted off, unseen and unmissed, across the quadrangle, over the embankment, where she had often gathered them, or attended on the ‘lessive’ on the river’s brink; and now she broke forth exultingly, ‘Here, here is the tisane, with all the soucis. Let me feed you with them, sir.’

‘Ah! thou sweet one,’ gasped Philip, ‘I could as soon eat them as David could drink the water! For these—for these–!’ and the tears rushed into his eyes. ‘Oh! let me but kiss her, Madame; I loved her from the first moment. She has the very face of my little sweeting, (what French word is good enough for her?) didst run into peril for me, not knowing how near I was to thee? What, must I eat it? Love me then.’

But the boarded door was thrown back, and ‘Madame, more wounded,’ resounded. The thrill of terror, the elastic reaction, at the ensuing words, ‘from the north gate,’ was what made Eustacie in an instant know herself to be not widow but wife. She turned round at once, holding out her hand, and saying with a shaken, agitated voice, ‘Mon frere, pardon me, I know not what I say; and, after all, he will find me bien mechante still.’ Then as Philip devoured her hand with kisses, and held it fast, ‘I must go; these poor men need me. When I can, I will return.’

‘Only let me have the little one,’ entreated Philip; ‘it is almost home already to look at her.’

And when Eustacie next looked in on them, they were both fast asleep.

She, poor thing, the only woman with brains among the many scared females in the garrison, might not rest or look the wonder in the face. Fresh sufferers needed her care, and related gallant things of ‘the Duke’s Englishman,’ things of desperate daring and prowess that sent the blood throbbing to her heart with exultation, but only to be followed by a pang of anguish at having let him go back to peril—nay, perhaps, to death—without a word of tenderness or even recognition. She imaged him as the sunny-faced youth who had claimed her in the royal castle, and her longing to be at his side and cling to him as his own became every moment more fervent and irresistible, until she gladly recollected the necessity of carrying food to the defenders; and snatching an interval from her hospital cares, she sped to the old circular kitchen of the monastery, where she found the lame baker vainly trying to organize a party of frightened women to carry provisions to the garrison of the bridge-tower.

‘Give some to me,’ she said. ‘My husband is there! I am come to fetch his dinner.’

The peasant women looked and whispered as if they thought that, to add to their misfortunes, their Lady of Hope had become distracted by grief; and one or two, who held the old faith, and were like the crane among the sparrows, even observed that it was a judgment for the profane name that had been given her, against which she had herself uniformly protested.

‘My husband is come,’ said Eustacie, looking round with shining eyes. ‘Let us be brave wives, and not let our men famish.’

She lifted a loaf and a pitcher of broth, and with the latter poised on her erect and graceful head, and elastic though steady step, she led the way; the others following her with a sort of awe, as of one they fancied in a superhuman state. In fact, there was no great danger in traversing the bridge with its lofty parapet on either side; and her mind was too much exalted and moved to be sensible of anything but a certain exulting awe of the battle sounds. There was, however, a kind of lull in the assault which had raged so fiercely ever since the fall of the officer, and the arrival of the reinforcements. Either the enemy had paused to take food, or were devising some fresh mode of attack; and as the line of women advanced, there started forth from under the arch a broad-shouldered, white-faced, golden-bearded personage, who cried joyously, ‘My dearest, my bravest! this for me!’ and lifted the pitcher from her head as he grasped her hand with a flesh and blood clasp indeed, but the bright-cheeked, wavy-haired lad of her dream withered away with a shock of disappointment, and she only looked up with wistful puzzled earnestness instead of uttering the dear name that she had so long been whispering to herself. ‘Dearest,’ he said, ‘this is precious indeed to me, that you should let me feast my eyes once more on you. But you may not tarry; the rogues may renew the attack at any moment.’

She had thought of herself as insisting on standing beside him and sharing his peril. Had he been himself she must have don so, but this was a stranger, whose claiming her made her shrink apart till she could feel the identity which, though she believed, she could not realize. Her hand lay cold and tremulous within his warm pressure, but he was too much wrought up and too full of joy and haste to be sensible of anything but of the brave affection that had dared all to come to him; and he was perfectly happy, even as a trumpet-call among the foe warned him to press her fingers to his lips and say, as his bright blue eye kindled, ‘God grant that we may meet and thank Him tonight! Farewell, my lost and found! I fight as one who has something to fight for.’

He might not leave his post, but he watched her with eyes that could not be satiated, as she recrossed the bridge; and, verily, his superabundant ecstasy, and the energy that was born of it, were all needed to sustain the spirits of his garrison through that terrible afternoon. The enemy seemed to be determined to carry the place before it could be relieved, and renewed the storm again and again with increasing violence; while the defenders, disheartened by their pertinacity, dismayed at the effects of the heavy artillery, now brought to bear on the tower, and direfully afraid of having the bridge destroyed, would have abandoned their barbican and shut themselves up within the body of the place, had not Berenger been here, there, and everywhere, directing, commanding, exhorting, cheering, encouraging, exciting enthusiasm by word and example, winning proud admiration by feats of valour and dexterity sprung of the ecstatic inspiration of new-found bliss, and watching, as the conscious defender of his own most beloved, without a moment’s respite, till twilight stillness sank on the enemy, and old Falconnet came to relieve him, thanking him for his gallant defence, and auguring that, by noonday tomorrow at latest, M. le Duc would succour them, unless he were hampered by any folly of this young Navarre.

Too blissful for the sense of fatigue, Berenger began to impart to the Commandant his delight, but the only answer he got was ‘Hope, yes, every hope;’ and he again recognized what he had already perceived, that the indistinctness of his utterance made him entirely unintelligible to the deaf Commandant, and that shouting did but proclaim to the whole garrison, perhaps even to the enemy’s camp, what was still too new a joy not to be a secret treasure of delight. So he only wrung the old Captain’s hand, and strode away as soon as he was released.

It was nearly dark, in spite of a rising moon, but beneath the cloister arch was torchlight, glancing on a steel head-piece, and on a white cap, both bending down over a prostrate figure; and he heard the voice he loved so well say, ‘It is over! I can do no more. It were best to dig his grave at once here in silence—it will discourage the people less. Renaud and Armand, here!’

He paused for a few minutes unseen in the shadow while she closed the eyes and composed the limbs of the dead soldier; then, kneeling, said the Lord’s Prayer in French over him. Was this the being he had left as the petted plaything of the palace? When she rose, she came to the arch and gazed wistfully across the moonlit quadrangle, beyond the dark shade cast by the buildings, saying to the soldier, ‘You are sure he was safe?’

‘My Eustacie,’ said Berenger, coming forward, ‘we meet in grave times!’

The relief of knowing him safe after the sickening yearnings and suspense of the day, and moreover the old ring of tenderness in his tone, made her spring to him with real warmth of gladness, and cry, ‘It is you! All is well.

‘Blessedly well, ma mie, my sweetheart,’ he said, throwing his arm round her, and she rested against him murmuring, ‘Now I feel it! Thou are thyself!’ They were in the dark cloister passage, and when he would have moved forward she clung closer to him, and murmured, ‘Oh, wait, wait, yet an instant—thus I can feel that I have thee—the same—my own!’

‘My poor darling,’ said Berenger, after a second, ‘you must learn to bear with both my looks and speech, though I be but a sorry shattered fellow for you.’

‘No, no,’ she cried, hanging on him with double fervour. ‘No, I am loving you the more already,—doubly—trebly—a thousand times. Only those moments were so precious, they made all these long years as nothing. But come to the little one, and to your brother.’

The little one had already heard them, and was starting forward to meet them, though daunted for a moment by the sight of the strange father: she stood on the pavement, in the full flood of the moonlight from the east window, which whitened her fair face, flaxen hair, and gray dress, so that she did truly look like some spirit woven of the moonbeams. Eustacie gave a cry of satisfaction: ‘Ah! good, good; it was by moonlight that I saw her first!’

Berenger took her in his arm, and held her to his breast with a sense of insatiable love, while Philip exclaimed, ‘Ay, well may you make much of her, brother. Well might you seek them far and wide. Such treasures are not to be found in the wide world.’

Berenger without answering, carried the little one to the step of the ruined high altar, and there knelt, holding Eustacie by the hand, the child in one arm, and, with the moon glancing on his high white brow and earnest face, he spoke a few words of solemn thanks and prayer for a blessing on their reunion, and the babe so wonderfully preserved to them.

Not till then did he carry her into the lamplight by Philip’s bed, and scan therein every feature, to satisfy his eyes with the fulfilled hope that had borne him through those darkest days, when, despairing of the mother, the thought of the child had still sustained him to throw his will into the balance of the scale between life and death. Little Berangere gazed up into his face silently, with wondering, grave, and somewhat sleepy eyes, and then he saw them fix themselves on his powder-grimed and blood-stained hands. ‘Ah! little heart,’ he said, ‘I am truly in no state to handle so pure a piece of sugar as thou; I should have rid myself of the battle-stains ere touching thee, but how recollect anything at such a moment?’

Eustacie was glad he had broken the spell of silence; for having recovered her husband, her first instinct was to wait upon him. She took the child from him, explaining that she was going to put her to bed in her own rooms up the stone stair, which for the present were filled with fugitive women and children who had come in from the country, so that the chancel must continue the lodging of Berenger and his brother; and for the time of her absence she brought him water to wash away the stains, and set before him the soup she had kept warm over her little charcoal brazier. It was only when thus left that he could own, in answer to Philip’s inquiries, that he could feel either hunger or weariness; nay, he would only acknowledge enough of the latter to give a perfect charm to rest under such auspices. Eustacie had dispatched her motherly cares promptly enough to be with him again just as in taking off his corselet he had found that it had been pierced by a bullet, and pursuing the trace, through his doublet, he found it lodged in that purse which he had so long worn next his heart, where it had spent its force against the single pearl of Ribaumont. And holding it up to the light, he saw that it was of silver. Then there returned on him and Philip the words they had heard two days before, of silver bullets forged for the destruction of the white moonlight fairy, and he further remembered the moment’s shock and blow that in the midst of his wild amaze on the river’s bank had made him gather his breath and strength to bound desperately upwards, lest the next moment he should find himself wounded and powerless.

For the innocent, then, had the shot been intended; and she running into danger out of her sweet, tender instincts of helpfulness, had been barely saved at the extreme peril of her unconscious father’s life. Philip, whose vehement affection for the little one had been growing all day, was in the act of telling Berenger to string the bullet in the place of the injured pearl, as the most precious heirloom of Ribaumont bravery, when Eustacie returned, and learning all, grew pale and shuddered as danger had never made her do before: but this strange day had almost made a coward of her.

‘And this is has spared,’ said Berenger, taking out the string of little yellow shells. ‘Dost know them, sweet heart? They have been my chaplet all this time.’

‘Ah!’ cried Eustacie, ‘poor, good Mademoiselle Noemi! she threaded them for my child, when she was very little. Ah! could she have given them to you—could it then not have been true—that horror?’

‘Alas! it was too true. I found these shells in the empty cradle, in the burnt house, and deemed them all I should ever have of my babe.’

‘Poor Noemi! poor Noemi! She always longed to be a martyr; but we fled from her, and the fate we had brought on her. That was the thought that preyed on my dear father. He grieved so to have left his sheep—and it was only for my sake. Ah! I have brought evil on all who have been good to me, beginning with you. You had better cast me off, or I shall bring yet worse!’

‘Let it be so, if we are only together.’

He drew her to him and she laid her head on his shoulder, murmuring, ‘Ah! father, father, were you but here to see it. So desolate yesterday, so ineffably blest today. Oh! I cannot even grieve for him now, save that he could not just have seen us; yet I think he knew it would be so.’

‘Nay, it may be that he does see us,’ said Berenger. ‘Would that I had known who it was whom you were laying down “en paix et seurte bonne!” As it was, the psalm brought precious thoughts of Chateau Leurre, and the little wife who was wont to sing it with me.’

‘Ah!’ said Eustacie, ‘it was when he sang those words as he was about to sleep in the ruin of the Temple that first I—cowering there in terror—knew him for no Templar’s ghost, but for a friend. That story ended my worst desolation. That night he became my father; the next my child came to me!’

‘My precious treasure! Ah! what you must have undergone, and I all unknowing, capable of nothing wiser than going out of my senses, and raging in a fever because I could convince no one that those were all lies about your being aught but my true and loving wife. But tell me, what brought thee hither to be the tutelary patron, where, but for the siege, I had over-passed thee on the way to Quinet?’

Then Eustacie told him how the Italian pedlar had stolen her letters, and attempted to poison her child—the pedlar whom he soon identified with that wizard who had talked to him of ‘Esperance,’ until the cue had evidently been given by the Chevalier. Soon after the Duke had dispatched a messenger to say that the Chevalier de Ribaumont was on the way to demand his niece; and as it was a period of peace, and the law was decidedly on his side, Madame de Quinet would be unable to offer any resistance. She therefore had resolved to send Eustacie away—not to any of the seaports whither the uncle would be likely to trace her, but absolutely to a place which he would have passed through on his journey into Guyenne. The monastery of Notre-Dame de l’Esperance at Pont de Dronne had been placed there, as well as a colony of silk-spinners, attracted by the mulberry-trees of the old abbey garden. These, however, having conceived some terror of the ghosts of the murdered monks, had entreated for a pastor to protect them; and Madame la Duchesse thought that in this capacity Isaac Gardon, known by one of the many aliases to which the Calvinist ministers constantly resorted, might avoid suspicion for the present. She took the persecuted fugitives for some stages in an opposite direction, in her own coach, then returned to face and baffle the Chevalier, while her trusty steward, by a long detour, conducted them to Pont de Dronne, which they reached the very night after to Chevalier had returned through it to Nid de Merle.

The pastor and his daughter were placed under the special protection of Captain Falconnet, and the steward had taken care that they should be well lodged in three rooms that had once been the abbot’s apartments. Their stay had been at first intended to be short, but the long journey had been so full of suffering to Isaac, and left such serious effects, that Eustacie could not bear to undertake it again, and Madame de Quinet soon perceived that she was safer there than at the chateau, since strangers were seldom admitted to the fortress, and her presence there attracted no attention. But for Isaac Gardon’s declining health, Eustacie would have been much happier here than at the chateau; the homely housewifely life, where all depended on her, suited her; and, using her lessons in domestic arts of nursing and medicine for the benefit of her father’s flock, she had found, to her dismay, that the simple people, in their veneration, had made her into a sort of successor to the patroness of the convent. Isaac had revived enough for a time to be able to conduct the worship in the church, and to instruct some his flock; but the teaching of the young had been more and more transferred to her, and, as he ingenuously said, had taught her more than she ever knew before. He gradually became weaker through more suffering, and was absolutely incapable of removal, when an attack by the Guisards was threatened. Eustacie might have been sent back to Quinet; but she would not hear of leaving him; and this first had been a mere slight attack, as if a mere experiment on the strength of the place. She had, however, then had to take the lead in controlling the women, and teaching them to act as nurses, and to carry out provisions; and she must then have been seen by some one, who reported her presence there to Narcisse—perhaps by the Italian pedlar. Indeed Humfrey, who came in for a moment to receive his master’s orders, report his watch, and greet his lady, narrated, on the authority of the lately enlisted men-at-arms, that M. de Nid de Merle had promised twenty crowns to any one who might shoot down the heretics’ little white diablesse.