Noémi. Baring-Gould Sabine

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СКАЧАТЬ as a fool, that your bravery is that of a fool, that your thoughts – aye, your thoughts of plunder and murder against the Bishop of Sarlat, your old owl – towhit, towhoo! are the thoughts of a fool. No – I do not care for the name of a fool."

      "Why did you run up the steps? Why did you cry to me to desist from knocking out the posts? Why concern yourself a mite about me, if you so despise me?" gasped the girl, and it seemed as though the words shot like flames from her lips.

      "Because we are of like blood – that is all!" answered Jean, coolly.

      "Like blood! Hear him – hear him! He and I —he– he and I of like blood, and he a del' Peyra! And I – I am a Noémi!"

      "So – Noémi! That is your name?"

      "And I," continued the girl in her raging wrath, "I – learn this – I am the child of Le Gros Guillem. Have you ever heard of the Gros Guillem?" she asked in a tone of triumph, like the blast of a victor's trumpet.

      Jean lowered his staff, and looked steadily at her. His brows were contracted, his lips were set firm.

      "So!" he said, after a pause. "The daughter of Gros Guillem?"

      "Aye – have you heard of him?"

      "Of course I have heard of him."

      "And of the del' Peyras who ever heard?" asked the girl with mockery and scorn, and snapped her fingers.

      "No – God be thanked! – of the del' Peyras you have never heard as of the Gros Guillem."

      "The grapes – the grapes are sour!" scoffed the girl.

      "I wonder at nothing you have done," said the boy sternly, "since you have told me whence you come. Of the thorn – thorns; of the nettle – stings; of the thistle – thistles – all after their kind. No! God be praised!" The boy took off his cap and looked up. "The Gros Guillem and my father, Ogier del' Peyra, are not to be spoken of in one sentence here, nor will be from the White Throne on the Day of Doom."

      Looking steadily at the girl seething with anger, with mortified pride, and with desire to exasperate him, he said —

      "I should never have thought that you sprang from the Gros Guillem. The likeness must be in the heart, it is not in the face."

      "Have you seen my father?" asked the girl.

      "I have never seen him, but I have heard of him."

      "What have you heard?"

      "That he is very tall and spider-like in build; they call him 'le gros' in jest, for he is not stout, but very meagre. He has long hands and feet, and a long head with red hair, and pale face with sunspots, and very faint blue eyes, under thick red brows. That is what I am told Le Gros Guillem is like. But you – "

      "Describe me – go on!"

      "No!" answered Jean. "There is no need. You see yourself every day in the glass. When there is no glass you look at yourself in the water; when no water, you look at yourself in your nails."

      "When there is no water, I look at myself in your eyes, and see a little brown creature there – that is me. Allons!"

      She began to laugh. Much of her bad temper had flown; she was a girl of rapidly changing moods.

      It was true that she was mirrored in Jean del' Peyra's eyes. He was observing her attentively. Never before had he seen so handsome a girl, with olive, transparent skin, through which the flush of colour ran like summer lightning in a summer cloud – such red lips, such rounded cheek and chin; such an easy, graceful figure! The magnificent burnished black hair was loose and flowing over her shoulders; and her eyes! – they had the fire of ten thousand flints lurking in them and flashing out at a word.

      "How come you here?" asked Jean, in a voice less hard and in a tone less indifferent than before. "This place, La Roque Gageac, is not one for a daughter of Le Gros Guillem. Here we are French. At Domme they are English, and that is the place for your father."

      "Ah!" said the girl in reply, "among us women French or English are all the same. We are both and we are neither. I suppose you are French?"

      "Yes, I am French."

      "And a Bishop's man?"

      "I live on our own land – Del Peyraland, at Ste. Soure."

      "And I am with my aunt here. My father considers Domme a little too rough a place for a girl. He has sent me hither. At the gates they did not ask me if I were French or English. They let me through, but not my father's men. They had to ride back to Domme."

      "He cannot come and see you here?"

      The girl laughed. "If he were to venture here, they would hang him – not give him half an hour to make his peace with Heaven! – hang him – hang him as a dog!"

      "So! – and you are even proud of such a father!"

      "So! – and even I am proud to belong to one whose name is known. I thank my good star I do not belong to a nobody of whom none talk, even as an Ogier del' Peyra."

      "You are proud of your father – of Le Gros Guillem!" exclaimed Jean; and now his brow flushed with anger, and his eye sparkled. "Proud of that routier and rouffien, 2 who is the scourge, the curse of the country round! Proud of the man that has desolated our land, has made happy wives into wailing widows, and glad children into despairing orphans; who has wrecked churches, and drunk – blaspheming God at the time – out of the gold chalices; who has driven his sword into the bowels of his own Mother Country, and has scorched her beautiful face with his firebrands! I know of Le Gros Guillem – who does not? – know of him by the curses that are raised by his ill deeds, the hatred he has sown, the vows of vengeance that are registered – "

      "Which he laughs at," interrupted Noémi.

      "Which he laughs at now," pursued the boy angrily, and anger gave fluency to his tongue. "But do you not suppose that a day of reckoning will arrive? Is Heaven deaf to the cries of the sufferers? Is Humanity all-enduring, and never likely to revolt – and, when she does, to exact a terrible revenge? The labourer asks for naught but to plough his land in peace, the merchant nothing but to be allowed to go on his journey unmolested, the priest has no higher desire than to say his Mass in tranquillity. And all this might be but for Le Gros Guillem and the like of him. Let the English keep their cities and their provinces; they belong to them by right. But is Le Gros Guillem English? Was Perducat d'Albret English? What of Le petit Mesquin? of the Archpriest? of Cervolle? Were they English? Are those real English faces that we fear and hate? Are they not the faces of our own countrymen, who call themselves English, that they may plunder and murder their fellow-countrymen and soak with blood and blast with fire the soil that reared them?"

      Noémi was somewhat awed by his vehemence, but she said —

      "Rather something to be talked about than a nothing at all."

      "Wrong, utterly wrong!" said Jean. "Rather be the storm that bursts and wrecks all things than be still beneficent Nature in her order which brings to perfection? Any fool can destroy; it takes a wise man to build up. You – you fair and gay young spirit, tell me have you ever seen that of which you speak so lightly, of which you jest as if it were a matter of pastime? Have you gone tripping after your father, treading in his bloody footprints, holding up your skirts lest they should touch the festering carcases on either СКАЧАТЬ