Carette of Sark | Page 6

make a long story short, however, Paul Martel and Rachel Carré
were married, to the great surprise of all Rachel's friends and to the
great grief of her father.
Martel built a little cottage at the head of the chasm which drops into
Havre Gosselin, and her father, Philip Carré, lived lonely on his little
farm of Belfontaine, by Port à la Jument, with no companion but his
dumb man Krok.
Rachel seemed quite happy in her marriage. There had been many
predictions among the gossips as to its outcome, and sharp eyes were
not lacking to detect the first signs of the fulfilment of prophecy, nor
reasons for visits to the cottage at La Frégondée with a view to
discovering them. And perhaps Rachel understood all that perfectly
well. She was her father's daughter, and Philip Carré was one of the
most intelligent and deep-thinking men I have ever met.
Her nearest neighbour and chief friend was Jeanne Falla of Beaumanoir,
widow of Peter Le Marchant, whose brother John lived on Brecqhou
and made a certain reputation there both for himself and the island. She
was old enough to have been Rachel's mother, and Rachel may have
confided in her. If she did so her confidence was never abused, for
Jeanne Falla could talk more and tell less than any woman I ever knew,
and that I count a very great accomplishment.
She was a Guernsey woman by birth, but had lived on Sercq for over
twenty years. Her husband was drowned while vraicking a year after
they were married, and she had taken the farm in hand and made more
of it than ever he would have done if he had lived to be a hundred, for
the Le Marchants always tended more to the sea than to the land,
though Jeanne Falla's Peter, I have been told, was more shore-going

than the rest. She had no child of her own, and that was the only lack in
her life. She made up for it by keeping an open heart to all other
children, whereby many gained through her loss, and her loss turned to
gain even for herself.
When Rachel's boy came she made as much of him as if he had been
her own. And the two between them named him Philip Carré after his
grandfather,--instinct, maybe, or possibly simply with the idea of
pleasing the old man, whose heart had never come fully round to the
marriage,--happily done, whatever the reason.
For Martel, outside business matters, which needed a clear head and all
a man's wits about him unless he wanted to run himself and his cargoes
into trouble, soon proved himself unstable as water. The nature of his
business tended to conviviality. Successful runs were celebrated, and
fresh ones planned, and occasional losses consoled, in broached kegs
which cost little. Success or failure found equal satisfaction in the
flowing bowl, and no home happiness ever yet came out of a
bung-hole.
Then, too, Rachel Carré had been brought up by her father in a simple,
perhaps somewhat rigorous, faith, which in himself developed into
Quakerism. I have thought it not impossible that in that might be found
some explanation of her action in marrying Paul Martel. Perhaps her
father drew the lines somewhat tightly, and her opening life craved
width and colour, and found the largest possibilities of them in the
rollicking young stranger. Truly he brought colour enough and to spare
into the sober gray of her life. It was when the red blood started under
his vicious blows that their life together ended.
Martel had no beliefs whatever, except in himself and his powers of
outwitting any preventive officer ever born.
Rachel Carré's illusions died one by one. The colours faded, the gray
darkened. Martel was much away on his business; possibly also on his
pleasures.
One night, after a successful run, he returned home very drunk, and

discovered more than usual cause for resentment in his wife's
reproachful silence. He struck her, wounding her to the flowing of
blood, and she picked up her boy and fled along the cliffs to
Beaumanoir where Jeanne Falla lived, with George Hamon not far
away at La Vauroque.
Jeanne Falla took her in and comforted her, and as soon as George
Hamon heard the news, he started off with a neighbour or two to
Frégondée to attend to Martel.
In the result, and not without some tough fighting, for Martel was a
powerful man and furious at their invasion, they carried him in bonds
to the house of the Sénéchal, Pierre Le Masurier, for judgment. And M.
le Sénéchal, after due consideration, determined, like a wise man, to rid
himself of a nuisance by flinging it over the hedge, as one does the
slugs that eat