Noémi. Baring-Gould Sabine

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      "No," answered the girl, and some of the colour went out of her face, leaving it the finest, purest olive in tint.

      "Then say no more about your wish to have a name as a routier and to be the terror of the countryside, till you have experienced what it is that terrorises the land."

      "One must live," said Noémi.

      "One may live by helping others to live – as does the peasant, and the artisan, as the merchant; or by destroying the life of others – as does the routier and the vulgar robber," answered Jean.

      Then Noémi caught his wrist and drew him aside under an archway. Her quick eye had seen the castellan coming that way; he had not been in the castle in the face of the rock, but in the town; and he was now on his way back. He would find the means of ascent broken, and must repair it before reaching his eyrie.

      "Who is the fool now?" said Jean del' Peyra. "You, who were knocking away the steps below you, calculating that if you destroyed that stair, you could still descend by the custodian's rope and windlass. See – he was not there. You would have been fast as a prisoner till the ladder was restored; and small bones would have been made of you, Gros Guillem's daughter, for playing such a prank as that!"

      Unseen they watched the man storming, swearing, angrily gathering up the pegs and wedges and the hammer, and ascending the riskful flight of steps to replace the missing pieces of wood in their sockets, and peg them firmly and sustainingly with their wedges.

      "What you did in your thoughtlessness, that your father and the like of him do in their viciousness, and do on a grander scale," said Jean. "They are knocking away the pegs in the great human ladder, destroying the sower with his harvest, the merchant with his trade, the mason, the carpenter, the weaver with their crafts, the scholar with his learning, the man of God with his lessons of peace and goodwill. And at last Le Gros Guillem and such as he will be left alone, above a ruined world on the wreckage of which he has mounted, to starve, when there is nothing more to be got, because the honest getters have all been struck down. Who is the fool now?"

      "Have done!" said the girl impatiently. "You have moralised enough – you should be a clerk!"

      "We are all made moralists when we see honesty trampled under foot. Well for you, Noémi, with your light head and bad heart – "

      "My bad heart!"

      "Aye, your bad heart. Well for you that you are a harmless girl and not a boy, or you would have followed quick in your father's steps and built yourself up as hateful a name."

      "I, a harmless girl?"

      "Yes, a harmless girl. Your hands are feeble, and however malicious your heart, you can do none a mischief, save your own self."

      "You are sure of that?"

      "Mercifully it is so. The will to hurt and ruin may be present, but you are weak and powerless to do the harm you would."

      "Is a woman so powerless?"

      "Certainly."

      She ran up a couple of steps, caught him by the shoulders, stooped, and kissed him on the lips, before he was aware what she was about to do.

      "Say that again! A woman is weak! A woman cannot ravage and burn, and madden and wound – not with a sword and a firebrand, but – "

      She stooped. The boy was bewildered – his pulses leaping, his eye on fire, his head reeling. She kissed him again.

      "These are her weapons!" said Noémi. "Who is the fool now?"

       CHAPTER III.

      THE WOLVES OUT

      Jean del' Peyra was riding home, a distance of some fifteen miles from La Roque Gageac. His way led through forests of oak clothing the slopes and plateau of chalk. The road was bad – to be more exact, there was no road; there was but a track.

      In times of civil broil, when the roads were beset by brigands, travellers formed or found ways for themselves through the bush, over the waste land, away from the old and neglected arteries of traffic. The highways were no longer kept up – there was no one to maintain them in repair, and if they were sound no one would travel on them who could avoid them by a détour, when exposed to be waylaid, plundered, carried off to a dungeon, and put to ransom.

      To understand the condition of affairs, a brief sketch of the English domination in Guyenne is necessary.

      By the marriage of Eleanor, daughter and heiress of William X., Earl of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine, with Henry of Anjou, afterwards Henry II. of England, in 1152, the vast possessions of her family were united to those of the Angevin house, which claimed the English crown.

      By this union the house of Anjou suddenly rose to be a power, superior to that of the French crown on the Gaulish soil, which it cut off entirely from the mouths of the Seine and the Loire, and nipped between its Norman and Aquitanian fingers. The natives of the South – speaking their own language, of different race, aspirations, character, from those in the North – had no traditional attachment to the French throne, and no ideal of national concentration about it into one great unity. Here and there, dotted about as islets in the midst of the English possessions in the South, were feudal or ecclesiastical baronies, or townships, that were subject immediately to the French crown, and exempt from allegiance to the English King; and these acted as germs, fermenting in the country, and gradually but surely influencing the minds of all, and drawing all to the thought that for the good of the land it were better that it should belong to France than to England. Such was the diocese and county of Sarlat. This had belonged to a monastic church founded in the eighth century, but it had been raised to an episcopal see in 1317, and had never wavered in its adherence to the French interest. Sarlat was not on the Dordogne, but lay buried, concealed in the depths of oak-woods, accessible only along narrow defiles commanded at every point by rocky headlands; and the key to the episcopal city was La Roque Gageac, the impregnable fortress and town on the pellucid, rippling Dordogne – the town cramped to the steep slope, the castle nestling into an excavation in the face of the abrupt scarp.

      Nearly opposite La Roque stood an insulated block of chalk, with precipices on all sides, and to secure this, in 1280, Philip III. of France built on it a free town, exempt from all taxes save a trifling house-charge due to himself; which town he hoped would become a great commercial centre, and a focus whence French influence might radiate to the south of the Dordogne. Unhappily the importance of Domme made it a prize to be coveted by the English, and in 1347 they took it. They were expelled in 1369, but John Chandos laid siege to it in 1380 and took it again, and from that date it remained uninterruptedly in their hands till the end of the English power in Aquitaine. For three hundred years had Guyenne pertained to the English crown, many of the towns and most of the nobility had no aspirations beyond serving the Leopards. The common people were supremely indifferent whether the Fleur-de-lys or the Leopards waved above them, so long as they were left undisturbed. It was precisely because they had not the boon of tranquillity afforded them by subjection to the English that they turned at last with a sigh of despair to the French. But it was to the Leopards, the hereditary coat of Guyenne, that they looked first, and it was only when the Leopard devoured them that they inclined to the Lilies.

      The reason for this general dissatisfaction and alienation was the violence of the nobility, and the freebooters, who professed to act for the Crown of England, and to have patents warranting them to act licentiously. These men, caring only for their own interests, doing nothing to advance the prosperity of the land, used their position, their power, to undermine and ruin it. They attacked the towns whether under the English or French allegiance СКАЧАТЬ