Carette of Sark | Page 5

Carr�� might have become Mistress Hamon instead of Madame Martel--and very much better for her if she had.
For Martel, in spite of his taking ways and the polished manners of his courting days, had proved anything but a good husband, and he had wound up a long period of indifference and neglect with a grievous bodily assault which had stirred the clan spirit of the Islanders into active reprisal. They would make of it an object-lesson to the other Island girls which would be likely to further the wooings of the Island lads for a long time to come.
Martel, you see, came from Guernsey, but he was only half a Guernsey man at that. His father was a Manche man from Cherbourg, who happened to get wrecked on the Hanois, and settled and married in Peter Port. Paul Martel had grown up to the sea. He had sailed to foreign parts and seen much of the world. He was an excellent sailor, and when he tired of a roving life turned his abilities to account in those peculiar channels of trade which the situation of the Islands and their ancient privileges particularly fitted them for. The Government in London had, indeed, tried, time after time, to suppress the free-trading, and passed many laws and ordinances against it, but these attempts had so far only added zest to the business, and seemed rather to stimulate that which they were intended to suppress.
Martel was successful as a smuggler, and might in time have come to own his own boat and run his own cargoes if he had kept steady.
The Government now and again had harsh fits which made things difficult for the time being in Guernsey, and at such times the smaller islands were turned to account, and the goods were stored and shipped from there. And that is how he came to frequent Sercq and made the acquaintance of Rachel Carr��.
George Hamon, I know, never to his dying day forgave himself for having been the means of bringing Martel to Sercq, and truly he got paid for it as bitterly as man could.
Martel might, indeed, have found his way there in any case, but that, to Hamon, did not in any degree lessen the weight of the fact that it was he brought him there to assist in some of his free-trading schemes. And if he had guessed what was to come of it, he would never have handled keg or bale as long as he lived rather than, with his own hand, spoil his life as he did.
For a time they were very intimate, he and Martel. Then Martel made up to Rachel Carr��, and their friendship turned to hatred, the more venomous for what had gone before.
But even George Hamon admits that Paul Martel was an unusually good-looking fellow, with very attractive manners when he chose, and a knowledge of the world and its ways, and of men and women, beyond the ordinary, and he won Rachel Carr��'s heart against her head and in the teeth of her father's opposition.
Perhaps if her mother had been alive things might have been different. But she died when Rachel was eight years old, and her father was much away at the fishing, for the farm was poorer then than it became afterwards, and Martel found his opportunities and turned them to account.
I do not pretend to understand fully how it came about--beyond the fact that the little god of love goes about his work blindfold, and that women do the most unaccountable things at times. Even in the most momentous matters they are capable of the most grievous mistakes, though, on the other hand, that same heart instinct also leads them at times to wisdom beyond the gauging of man's intelligence. A man reasons and keeps tight hand on his feelings; a woman feels and knows; and sometimes a leap in the dark lands one safely, and sometimes not.
To make a long story short, however, Paul Martel and Rachel Carr�� 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 Carr��, lived lonely on his little farm of Belfontaine, by Port �� 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 Fr��gond��e with a view to discovering them. And perhaps Rachel understood all that perfectly well. She was her father's daughter, and Philip Carr�� was one of the most intelligent and