The Monkey-Flowers

by A. T. Quiller-Couch

 

The Monkey-Flowers

BY A. T. QUILLER-COUCH
("Q")

SOME of you may recollect the story of Loose-heels, otherwise Lucille's, where the road above the fishing-village branches into two, with a sign-post at the angle; and of the marsh behind it and the two Outlandish Ladies who dwelt there and died and left the monkey-flowers which bloom to this day in the marsh and along the banks of the stream below. But I did not tell you how the stream brought them to Monsieur Benest; and indeed Monsieur Beucst did not come into the tale at all. "One thing at a time." said the Mayor of Tregarrick, when a thief stole a watch with a second-hand.

When first Monsieur Benest appeared in the village with his wooden leg and took lodgings with Mrs. Carnarthur, next door to the three Pilchards, every one set him down for a Guernsey merchant; and so for a whole week, though a good many whispered. nobody asked his business openly—for where the trade was concerned our folks used to say that a still tongue makes a wise head, and acted on it. But in the end Parson Morth let out and made no secret that the lodger was a French prisoner of war on parole, and had been chef de hune, or chief petty officer, of the "Embuscade" frigate captured a year before by Sir John Warren. In this action Monsieur Benest had lost his leg. and perhaps the loss accounts for the indulgence shown him on leaving hospital; though the parson hinted that many Frenchmen of high birth found it prudent, during the Terror, to change their names and take up with callings below their real rank. Certainly it seems odd that a mere petty officer should have been allowed to live on parole beside a haven where, for two pounds and less, he might have found a boat any night of the week to smuggle him over to Roscoff. But there he was, and there he stayed; and Parson Morth, as the nearest justice of the peace, seemed quite easy in mind over it.

Well, as it turned out, the parson had no call to trouble. In the course of the first week he and his prisoner marked out the bounds together—Talland Church gate to the east; to the west the white stone over the Udder mark; these were for coast walks—and up the coombe, inland, the cross-roads below Loose-heels. These were the limits, and Monsieur Benest kissed the book upon them.

And after a while the folks came to know he would lose his life sooner than pass one of those boundaries by a yard. When his walks brought him to one or the other, it would be wheel and turn and home again like a man who could look the world in the face. At first, though, he walked very little—being awkward, as yet, with his wooden leg—and seemed happier tending the big geranium on Mrs. Carnarthur's house-wall, or pottering about the quay and chattering with the children or letting them chatter. The youngsters worshipped him, not for the halfpennies only—though he usually had one to spare and on feast-days, when the sweet-stalls arrived, he would go about with his skirt-pockets bulging—but for his stories and rhymes and the smile he had with them, and because he was never too busy to drop his gardening and be umpire at "tig" or "prisoners' bars." As for stories, he was a walking cabinet des fées, and to this day the little ones on the quay-side chant over the boats a rigmarole which they do not understand and you might take for a mere string of meaningless sounds, but which in fact is the traditional form of a song which Monsieur Benest taught to their little great-grandfathers:—

⁠"Papa, les p'tits bateaux
{em|4}}Qui vout l'eau,
{em|3}}Ont ils jambes?
{em|4}}—Mais oui, petit bêta.
S'ils n'en avaient pas, ils n'march raient pas!"

Also he taught them "Giroflé, Girofla," and "Sur le Pont d'Avignon," and "Savez Vous Planter les Choux" (this was for the very smallest), and "La Tour, Prends Garde" (to the tune of which they played "King of the Castle"), and "Compagnons de la Marjolaine," with its jolly chorus:—

"Gai, gai, dessus quai!"

In short, Monsieur Benest and his wooden leg and snuff-box and brown redingote and queer, three-cornered hat endeared themselves to every one; and old Zebedee Minards even offered "for love" to slip him across one night to the French coast, and was both puzzled and distressed at the wrath the offer aroused.

"There, there," he said; "the Lord knows we don't want 'ee to go. If 'twas only to pleasure ourselves, we'd keep 'ee 'long with us forever."

 

As nearly as I ran discover, Monsieur Benest had been lodging for close on a year in the village when the two Outlandish Ladies arrived by night and took up their abode in the cottage which came to be known as Loose-heels. No doubt, too, there was plenty of talk and speculation about them during the first week or two; but Parson Morth alone knew their nationality for certain—a "foreigner" in Cornwall is any one who comes from beyond Tamar—and, for the rest, Monsieur Benest's head was no better than a sieve for gossip.

So it was partly by chance he learned that they were compatriots. One spring afternoon he had stumped up the coombe and was facing about for the return journey, when from behind the garden hedge of the cottage—a stone's throw and more beyond the sign-post which was his boundary—there came to him a voice singing in his own language:—

"Vive Henri Quatre,
Vive le Roi Vaillante!—
Ce diable à quatre
A le triple talent
De boire et de battre
Et d'être un vert galaut..."

The voice was tremulous and perhaps a trifle uncertain of its upper notes; but it fetched Monsieur Benest right about face again. He stared at the hedge long and earnestly, but all he could see that day was a pea-stick waving above it.

He came again, however—not the next day, but the day after—and was rewarded by a glimpse of a "bassorny," or purplish, cap within the gateway, beside which Parson Morth had reined up for his usual exchange of greetings.

"Bon jour, Mamzelle Henriette"—this was all the French the parson knew. And the lady would answer in English:

"Good-day, Parson Morth."

"And Mamzelle Lucille?"

"Ah, just the same, my God! All the day stare—stare. But if you had known her beforetime, in the old days, so beeautiful, so gifted! All the same, I think she loves the flowers."

Monsieur Benest did not, of course, hear this conversation. Yet he slackened his pace as he drew near the sign-post and, I believe, would have halted and pretended to tie up a shoe-lace if his wooden leg had allowed.

He had scarcely turned homeward before Parson Morth overtook him and, in passing, gave him good-day as usual with the pun fetched out of his little store of Latinity.

"'Morning to you, Monsieur Benefit. Si vales, bene est—hey?"

And now Monsieur Benest became very cunning indeed. He bought a fishing-rod.

There are, I suppose, half a dozen trout at most in the stream—or, as we proudly call it, "the revvur"—between the village and Loose-heels; but I never spy one without a thought for his ancestors whom Monsieur Benest used to hook so apologetically and so hastily restore. The poor man started with no knowledge of the art and to the end would sigh whenever his top-piece quivered with a bite. But he was forced to acquire at least a show of expertness to deceive the wayfarers, for the stream runs close beside the road, and in the end, it is even asserted, the fish came to enjoy disconcerting him, and

For the hook strove a-good
Them to entaugle."

You must, understand that Monsieur Benest had no foolish illusions about the bassorny cap so cruelly separated from him by fifty yards of road and his word of honor. He knew, as did every one in the village, that the tenants of the cottage were two elderly ladies of whom one, for some reason or other, never appeared; and that they bought neither fish nor butcher's meat nor bread, but, apart from the pint of milk which the parson sent down every morning from his dairy, must depend for food upon their garden. They must be poor, then—often hungry, perhaps—these compatriots of his, shipwrecked like him, and so close to him, upon this odd angle of an unfriendly land. Also they were of gentle birth, and brave: she must be of the true blood of France who quavered out "Vive Henri Quatre" so resolutely over her digging and hoeing. Ah! Did Monsieur Benest know what it cost sometimes to chant "Gai, gai, dessus le quai!" with the proper spirit? He had thoughts, once or twice, of questioning the parson about them. But, no, he decided; he had no right to intrude upon their secret.

He was unaware that tongues wagged in wonder how the Outlandish Ladies supported life, and when a withering suspicion began to blow upon them over the mysterious disappearance of sheep from Carne farm, up the valley, he caught no breath of it. It so happened that on the fatal day in July when the populace—Parson Morth being away on a visit to Exeter—took the law into their own hands and broke into the cottage to search. Monsieur Benest had pretermitted his angling for a stroll along the cliffs. But on his return Mrs. Carnarthur brought in the tea-tray and her speech was loosened.

"It was a burning and a wanton shame ... A dirty nibble! but the parson would teach them yet ... two poor ladies that wouldn't hurt a fly; and one, they tell me, so horrible to look upon that the first sight drove them to doors and out through the garden. Yes, sir. some horrible disease or other ... but only think of that pack of cowards thrusting in upon two poor women!"

Monsieur Benest set down the tea pot, caught up his hat and stick and stumped out of the house. The most of the folks were indoors at tea, discussing the afternoon's sensation; the few he encountered got no greeting from him. He looked neither to right nor to left, heard neither the chatter of stream nor the splash of his friends the trout as they rose at the evening flies. He reached the sign-post and walked past it—yes, for the first and last time in his life—without so much as a thought for his parole. The gate of the cottage stood ajar, and he pushed it wide with his stick.

There were signs of trampling on the flower beds; but the whole garden blitzed with flowers—tall hollyhocks, carnations, sweet-peas, sweet-williams and ten-week stocks—above all, with the yellow monkey-flowers which grew so profusely in the marshy soil by the lower hedge. The air was weighted with the scent of mignonette and of the honeysuckle which climbed the wall and almost choked the climbing roses.

The cottage door stood ajar also. He thrust this open, too, and for the first time stood face to face with the little lady in the bassorny cap—Mademoiselle Henriette.

She sat by the deal table, with one arm flung across it and her small body bowed in grief. At her feet lay a scattered, trodden posy of the monkey-blossoms. In her abandonment she had not heard even the tap-tap of his wooden leg on the slates of the path. But she sprang to her feet and faced him, across the yellow blossoms.

"Mademoiselle. I have just learned—but it is infamous! Allow me—I also am French, and though you do not know me, perhaps——"

He stammered and came to a halt, for in her eyes he read more than woe. They were accusing—yes, accusing—him. Of what? What had he done?

"You, monsieur! You—a French officer!"

"But what has that to do with it?"

"Your parole, monsieur—have you forgotten it? Listen, then! We know how to suffer, we Frenchwomen—the little one here who is dead, and I, who shall soon be with her—but we have kept ourselves from dishonoring our country to the end. It will soon be the end indeed, sous-officier: now go—go!"

She stamped her small foot on the yellow flowers, and poor Monsieur Benest turned and fled from her; nay, taking a short cut toward the sign post in his haste, plunged his wooden leg deep in the marsh, wrenched it out of its strap, and tumbled helpless, overwhelmed with shame, as he heard the door shut behind him and the bolt drawn.

 

He never passed the sign-post again; never again caught a glimpse of Mademoiselle Henriette's bassorny cap. Three days later, as you know, Parson Morth broke into the cottage and discovered her seated, dead and stiff, her hands stained with digging her sister's grave.

And the cottage never had another tenant. Only Monsieur Benest continued to eye it wistfully as he cast his flies in the stream below and pondered on his offense, which Mademoiselle Henriette had died without forgiving.

But one July, two years after her death, a patch of gold appeared on the marsh beneath the hedge—a patch of the monkey-flower. Some seeds of it apparently had been blown thither or carried down by the stream.

Next July the patch had doubled its length.

"The flowers are traveling toward me," said Monsieur Benest.

And year by year the stream brought them nearer. That was a terrible July for him when they came within two feet of the sign-post; but he would not stretch a hand beyond it.

"She coquets with her forgiveness, poor Mademoiselle Henriette. But I can wait. I must not dishonor my country at the last."

Before the next July he had made sure of one plant at least on his side of the sign-post; and fished beside it day after day, waiting for the first blossom to open. But when the happy morning came and Monsieur Benest knelt beside his prize, be drew back a hand.

"But is it quite open?" he asked. "Better wait—since all is safe—for the sun to warm it a little longer."

And he waited, until the trout began to think themselves completely forgotten. To remind him, one of them took a fly with a splash right under his nose. Then Monsieur Benest started, and his fingers closed on the yellow blossom.

"She has forgiven," said he; "and now I can forgive myself."