Three leagues, then, the road ran, and turned into a puzzle.
It joined with another and a larger road at right angles.
David stood, uncertain, for a while, and then sat himself to
rest upon its side.
Whither these roads led he knew not. Either way there seemed to
lie a great world full of chance and peril. And then, sitting
there, his eye fell upon a bright star, one that he and Yvonne
had named for theirs. That set him thinking of Yvonne, and he
wondered if he had not been too hasty. Why should he leave her
and his home because a few hot words had come between them? Was
love so brittle a thing that jealousy, the very proof of it,
could break it? Mornings always brought a cure for the little
heartaches of evening. There was yet time for him to return
home without any one in the sweetly sleeping village of Vernoy
being the wiser. His heart was Yvonne's; there where he had
lived always he could write his poems and find his happiness.
David rose, and shook off his unrest and the wild mood that had
tempted him. He set his face steadfastly back along the road he
had come. By the time he had retravelled the road to Vernoy,
his desire to rove was gone. He passed the sheepfold, and the
sheep scurried, with a drumming flutter, at his late footsteps,
warming his heart by the homely sound. He crept without noise
into his little room and lay there, thankful that his feet had
escaped the distress of new roads that night.
How well he knew woman's heart! The next evening Yvonne was at
the well in the road where the young congregated in order that
the curé might have business. The corner of her eye
was engaged in a search for David, albeit her set mouth seemed
unrelenting. He saw the look; braved the mouth, drew from it a
recantation and, later, a kiss as they walked homeward
together.
Three months afterwards they were married. David's father was
shrewd and prosperous. He gave them a wedding that was heard of
three leagues away. Both the young people were favourites in
the village. There was a procession in the streets, a dance on
the green; they had the marionettes and a tumbler out from
Dreux to delight the guests.
Then a year, and David's father died. The sheep and the cottage
descended to him. He already had the seemliest wife in the
village. Yvonne's milk pails and her brass kettles were
bright—ouf! they blinded you in the sun when you passed that
way. But you must keep your eyes upon her yard, for her flower
beds were so neat and gay they restored to you your sight. And
you might hear her sing, aye, as far as the double chestnut
tree above Père Gruneau's blacksmith forge.
But a day came when David drew out paper from a long-shut
drawer, and began to bite the end of a pencil. Spring had come
again and touched his heart. Poet he must have been, for now
Yvonne was well-nigh forgotten. This fine new loveliness of
earth held him with its witchery and grace. The perfume from
her woods and meadows stirred him strangely. Daily had he gone
forth with his flock, and brought it safe at night. But now he
stretched himself under the hedge and pieced words together on
his bits of paper. The sheep strayed, and the wolves,
perceiving that difficult poems make easy mutton, ventured from
the woods and stole his lambs.
David's stock of poems grew larger and his flock smaller.
Yvonne's nose and temper waxed sharp and her talk blunt. Her
pans and kettles grew dull, but her eyes had caught their
flash. She pointed out to the poet that his neglect was
reducing the flock and bringing woe upon the household. David
hired a boy to guard the sheep, locked himself in the little
room at the top of the cottage, and wrote more poems. The boy,
being a poet by nature, but not furnished with an outlet in the
way of writing, spent his time in slumber. The wolves lost no
time in discovering that poetry and sleep are practically the
same; so the flock steadily grew smaller. Yvonne's ill temper
increased at an equal rate. Sometimes she would stand in the
yard and rail at David through his high window. Then you could
hear her as far as the double chestnut tree above Père
Gruneau's blacksmith forge.
M. Papineau, the kind, wise, meddling old notary, saw this, as
he saw everything at which his nose pointed. He went to David,
fortified himself with a great pinch of snuff, and said:
"Friend Mignot, I affixed the seal upon the marriage
certificate of your father. It would distress me to be obliged
to attest a paper signifying the bankruptcy of his son. But
that is what you are coming to. I speak as an old friend. Now,
listen to what I have to say. You have your heart set, I
perceive, upon poetry. At Dreux, I have a friend, one Monsieur
Bril—Georges Bril. He lives in a little cleared space in a
houseful of books. He is a learned man; he visits Paris each
year; he himself has written books. He will tell you when the
catacombs were made, how they found out the names of the stars,
and why the plover has a long bill. The meaning and the form of
poetry is to him as intelligent as the baa of a sheep is to
you. I will give you a letter to him, and you shall take him
your poems and let him read them. Then you will know if you
shall write more, or give your attention to your wife and
business."
"Write the letter," said David, "I am sorry you did not speak
of this sooner."
At sunrise the next morning he was on the road to Dreux with
the precious roll of poems under his arm. At noon he wiped the
dust from his feet at the door of Monsieur Bril. That learned
man broke the seal of M. Papineau's letter, and sucked up its
contents through his gleaming spectacles as the sun draws
water. He took David inside to his study and sat him down upon
a little island beat upon by a sea of books.
Monsieur Bril had a conscience. He flinched not even at a mass
of manuscript the thickness of a finger length and rolled to an
incorrigible curve. He broke the back of the roll against his
knee and began to read. He slighted nothing; he bored into the
lump as a worm into a nut, seeking for a kernel.
Meanwhile, David sat, marooned, trembling in the spray of so
much literature. It roared in his ears. He held no chart or
compass for voyaging in that sea. Half the world, he thought,
must be writing books.
Monsieur Bril bored to the last page of the poems. Then he took
off his spectacles, and wiped them with his handkerchief.
"My old friend, Papineau, is well?" he asked.
"In the best of health," said David.
"How many sheep have you, Monsieur Mignot?"
"Three hundred and nine, when I counted them yesterday. The
flock has had ill fortune. To that number it has decreased from
eight hundred and fifty."
"You have a wife and home, and lived in comfort. The sheep
brought you plenty. You went into the fields with them and
lived in the keen air and ate the sweet bread of contentment.
You had but to be vigilant and recline there upon nature's
breast, listening to the whistle of the blackbirds in the
grove. Am I right thus far?"
"It was so," said David.
"I have read all your verses," continued Monsieur Bril, his
eyes wandering about his sea of books as if he conned the
horizon for a sail. "Look yonder, through that window, Monsieur
Mignot; tell me what you see in that tree."
"I see a crow," said David, looking.
"There is a bird," said Monsieur Bril, "that shall assist me
where I am disposed to shirk a duty. You know that bird,
Monsieur Mignot; he is the philosopher of the air. He is happy
through submission to his lot. None so merry or full-crawed as
he with his whimsical eye and rollicking step. The fields yield
him what he desires. He never grieves that his plumage is not
gay, like the oriole's. And you have heard, Monsieur Mignot,
the notes that nature has given him? Is the nightingale any
happier, do you think?"
David rose to his feet. The crow cawed harshly from his tree.
"I thank you, Monsieur Bril," he said, slowly. "There was not,
then, one nightingale among all those croaks?"
"I could not have missed it," said Monsieur Bril, with a sigh.
"I read every word. Live your poetry, man; do not try to write
it any more."
"I thank you," said David, again. "And now I will be going back
to my sheep."
"If you would dine with me," said the man of books, "and
overlook the smart of it, I will give you reasons at length."
"No," said the poet, "I must be back in the fields cawing at my
sheep."
Back along the road to Vernoy he trudged with his poems under
his arm. When he reached his village he turned into the shop of
one Zeigler, a Jew out of Armenia, who sold anything that came
to his hand.
"Friend," said David, "wolves from the forest harass my sheep
on the hills. I must purchase firearms to protect them. What
have you?"
"A bad day, this, for me, friend Mignot," said Zeigler,
spreading his hands, "for I perceive that I must sell you a
weapon that will not fetch a tenth of its value. Only last I
week I bought from a peddlar a wagon full of goods that he
procured at a sale by a commissionaire of the crown. The sale
was of the château and belongings of a great lord—I know not
his title—who has been banished for conspiracy against the
king. There are some choice firearms in the lot. This
pistol—oh, a weapon fit for a prince!—it shall be only forty
francs to you, friend Mignot—if I lose ten by the sale. But
perhaps an arquebuse—"
"This will do," said David, throwing the money on the counter.
"Is it charged?"
"I will charge it," said Zeigler. "And, for ten francs more,
add a store of powder and ball."
David laid his pistol under his coat and walked to his cottage.
Yvonne was not there. Of late she had taken to gadding much
among the neighbours. But a fire was glowing in the kitchen
stove. David opened the door of it and thrust his poems in upon
the coals. As they blazed up they made a singing, harsh sound
in the flue.
"The song of the crow!" said the poet.
He went up to his attic room and closed the door. So quiet was
the village that a score of people heard the roar of the great
pistol. They flocked thither, and up the stairs where the
smoke, issuing, drew their notice.
The men laid the body of the poet upon his bed, awkwardly
arranging it to conceal the torn plumage of the poor black
crow. The women chattered in a luxury of zealous pity. Some of
them ran to tell Yvonne.
M. Papineau, whose nose had brought him there among the first,
picked up the weapon and ran his eye over its silver mountings
with a mingled air of connoisseurship and grief.
"The arms," he explained, aside, to the curé,
"and crest of Monseigneur, the Marquis de Beaupertuys."
