Berenger had stepped over the threshold, with his hat in his hand, as if the ruin were a sacred place to him, and stood gazing in a transfixed, deadened way. The captain asked where the remains were.
'Our people,' said the old man and the fisher, 'laid them by night in the earth near the church.'
Just then Berenger's gaze fell on something half hidden under the fallen timbers. He instantly sprang forward, and used all his strength to drag it out in so headlong a manner that all the rest hurried to prevent his reckless proceedings from bringing the heavy beams down on his head. When brought to light, the object proved to be one of the dark, heavy, wooden cradles used by the French peasantry, shining with age, but untouched by fire.
'Look in,' Berenger signed to Philip, his own eyes averted, his mouth set.
The cradle was empty, totally empty, save for a woollen covering, a little mattress, and a string of small yellow shells threaded.
Berenger held out his hand, grasped the baby-play thing convulsively, then dropped upon his knees, clasping his hands over his ashy face, the string of shells still wound among his fingers. Perhaps he had hitherto hardly realized the existence of his child, and was solely wrapped up in the thought of his wife; but the wooden cradle, the homely toy, stirred up fresh depths of feelings; he saw Eustacie wither tender sweetness as a mother, he beheld the little likeness of her in the cradle; and oh! that this should have been the end! Unable to repress a moan of anguish from a bursting heart, he laid his face against the senseless wood, and kissed it again and again, then lay motionless against it save for the long-drawn gasps and sobs that shook his frame. Philip, torn to the heart, would have almost forcibly drawn him away; but Master Hobbs, with tears running down his honest cheeks, withheld the boy. 'Don't ye, Master Thistlewood, 'twill do him good. Poor young gentleman! I know how it was when I came home and found our first little lad, that we had thought so much on, had been take. But then he was safe laid in his own churchyard, and his mother was there to meet me; while your poor brother--Ah! God comfort him!'
'Le pauvre Monsieur!' exclaimed the old peasant, struck at the sight of his grief, 'was it then his child? And he, no doubt, lying wounded elsewhere while God's hand was heavy on this place. Yet he might hear more. They said the priest came down and carried off the little ones to be bred up in convents.'
'Who?-where?' asked Berenger, raising his head as if catching at a straw in this drowning of all his hopes.
''Tis true,' added the fisherman. 'It was the holy priest of Nissard, for he send down to St. Julien for a woman to nurse the babes.'
'To Nissard, then,' said Berenger, rising.
'It is but a chance,' said the old Huguenot; 'many of the innocents were with their mothers in yonder church. Better for them to perish like the babes of Bethlehem than to be bred up in the house of Baal; but perhaps Monsieur is English, and if so he might yet obtain the child. Yet he must not hope too much.'
'No, for there was many a little corpse among those we buried,' said the fisher. 'Will the gentleman see the place?'
'Oh, no!' exclaimed Philip, understanding the actions, and indeed many of the words; 'this place will kill him.'
'To the grave,' said Berenger, as if he heard nothing.
'See,' added Philip, 'there are better things than graves,' and he pointed to a young green sucker of a vine, which, stimulated by the burnt soil, had shot up between the tiles of the floor. 'Look, there is hope to meet you even here.'
Berenger merely answered by gathering a leaf from the vine and putting it into his bosom; and Philip, whom only extreme need could have thus inspired, perceived that he accepted it as the augury of hope.
Berenger turned to bid the two men bear the cradle with them, and then followed the old man out into the PLACE, once a pleasant open paved square, now grass-grown and forlorn. On one side lay the remains of the church. The Huguenots had been so predominant at La Sablerie as to have engrossed the building, and it had therefore shared the general destruction, and lay in utter, desolate ruin, a mere shell, and the once noble spire, the mariner's guiding star, blown up with gun-cruel that ever desolated the country. Beyond lay the burial-ground, in unspeakable dreariness. The crossed of the Catholic dead had been levelled by the fanaticism of the Huguenots, and though a great dominant stone cross raised on steps had been re-erected, it stood uneven, tottering and desolate among nettles, weeds, and briers. There seemed to have been a few deep trenches dug to receive the bodies of the many victims of the siege, and only rudely and slightly filled in with loose earth, on which Philippe treading had nearly sunk in, so much to his horror that he could hardly endure the long contemplation in which his brother stood gazing on the dismal scene, as if to bear it away with him. Did the fair being he had left in a king's palace sleep her last sleep her last sleep amid the tangled grass, the thistles and briers that grew so close that it was hardly possible to keep from stumbling over them, where all memorials of friend or foe were alike obliterated? Was a resting-place among these nameless graves the best he could hope for the wife whose eyes he had hoped by this time would be answering his own-was this her shelter from foe, from sword, famine, and fire?
A great sea-bird, swooping along with broad wings and wild wailing cry, completed the weird dismay that had seized on Philip, and clutching at his brother's cloak, he exclaimed, 'Berry, Berry, let us be gone, or we shall both be distraught!'
Berenger yielded passively, but when the ruins of the town had been again crossed, and the sad little party, after amply rewarding the old man, were about to return to St. Julien, he stood still, saying, 'Which is the way to Nissard?' and, as the men pointed to the south, he added, 'Show me the way thither.'
Captain Hobbs now interfered. He knew the position of Nissard, among dangerous sandbanks, between which a boat could only venture at the higher tides, and by daylight. To go the six miles thither at present would make it almost impossible to return to the THROSTLE that night, and it was absolutely necessary that he at least should do this. He therefore wished the young gentleman to return with him on board, sleep there, and be put ashore at Nissard as soon as it should be possible in the morning. But Berenger shook his head. He could not rest for a moment till he had ascertained the fate of Eustacie's child. Action alone could quench the horror of what he had recognized as her own lot, and the very pursuit of this one thread of hope seemed needful to him to make it substantial. He would hear of nothing but walking at once to Nissard; and Captain Hobbs, finding it impossible to debate the point with one so dazed and crushed with grief, and learning from the fishermen that not only was the priest one of the kindest and most hospitable men living, but that there was a tolerable caberet not far from the house, selected from the loiterers who had accompanied them from St. Julien a trustworthy-looking, active lad as a guide, and agreed with the high tide on the morrow, either to concert measures for obtaining possession of the lost infant, or, if all were in vain, to fetch them off. Then he, with the mass of stragglers from St. Julien, went off direct for the coast, while the two young brothers, their two attendants, and the fishermen, turned southwards along the summit of the dreary sandbanks.
CHAPTER XXIV. THE GOOD PRIEST OF NISSARD
Till at the set of sun all tracks and ways
In darkness lay enshrouded. And e'en thus
The utmost limit of the great profound
At length we reach'd, where in dark gloom and mist
Cimmeria's people and their city lie
Enveloped ever.-ODYSSEY (MUSGROVE)
The October afternoon had set in before the brothers were the way to Nissard; and in spite of Berenger's excited mood, the walk through the soft, sinking sand could not be speedily performed. It was that peculiar sand-drift which is the curse of so many coasts, slowly, silently, irresistibly flowing, blowing, creeping in, and gradually choking all vegetation and habitation. Soft and almost impalpable, it lay heaped in banks yielding as air, and yet far more than deep enough to swallow up man and horse. Nay, tops of trees, summits of chimneys, told what it had already swallowed. The whole scene far and wide presented nothing but the lone, tame undulations, liable to be changed by every wind, and solitary beyond expression-a few rabbits scudding hither and thither, or a sea-gull floating with white, ghostly wings in the air, being the only living things visible. On the one hand a dim, purple horizon showed that the inhabited country lay miles inland; on the other lay the pale, gray, misty expanse of sea, on which Philip's eyes could lovingly discern the THROSTLE'S masts.