Lazarre | Page 3

a beautiful memory if passers-by did not contribute their share; a threat the marble duly executed on account of the dampness of the church and the hardness of men's hearts. But it was impossible to disturb a religious service. So she coaxed the boy, dragging behind her, down the ambulatory beside the oasis of chapel, where the singers, sitting side-wise, in rows facing each other, chanted the Venite. A few worshipers from the close, all of them women, pattered in to take part in this daily office. The smithy hammers rang under organ measures, and an odor of cooking sifted down from the arcades.
Outside the church big fat-bellied pigeons were cooing about the tower or strutting and pecking on the ground. To kill one was a grave offense. The worst boy playing in the lane durst not lift a hand against them.
Very different game were Eagle and the other alien whom she led past the red faced English children.
"Good day," she spoke pleasantly, feeling their antagonism. They answered her with a titter.
"Sally Blake is the only one I know," she explained in French, to her companion who moved feebly and stiffly behind her dancing step. "I cannot talk English to them, and besides, their manners are not good, for they are not like our peasants."
Sally Blake and a bare kneed lad began to amble behind the foreigners, he taking his cue smartly and lolling out his tongue. The whole crowd set up a shout, and Eagle looked back. She wheeled and slapped the St. Bat's girl in the face.
That silent being whom she had taken under her care recoiled from the blow which the bare kneed boy instantly gave him, and without defending himself or her, shrank down in an attitude of entreaty. She screamed with pain at this sight, which hurt worse than the hair-pulling of the mob around her. She fought like a panther in front of him.
Two men in the long narrow lane leading from Smithfield, interfered, and scattered her assailants.
You may pass up a step into the graveyard, which is separated by a wall from the lane. And though nobody followed, the two men hurried Eagle and the boy into the graveyard and closed the gate.
It was not a large enclosure, and thread-like paths, grassy and ungraveled, wound among crowded graves. There was a very high outside wall: and the place insured such privacy as could not be had in St. Bat's church. Some crusted stones lay broad as gray doors on ancient graves; but the most stood up in irregular oblongs, white and lichened.
A cat call from the lane was the last shot of the battle. Eagle valiantly sleeked her disarrayed hair, the breast under her bodice still heaving and sobbing. The June sun illuminated a determined child of the gray eyed type between white and brown, flushed with fullness of blood, quivering with her intensity of feeling.
"Who would say this was Mademoiselle de Ferrier!" observed the younger of the two men. Both were past middle age. The one whose queue showed the most gray took Eagle reproachfully by her hands; but the other stood laughing.
"My little daughter!"
"I did strike the English girl--and I would do it again, father!"
"She would do it again, monsieur the marquis," repeated the laugher.
"Were the children rude to you?"
"They mocked him, father." She pulled the boy from behind a grave-stone where he crouched unmoving as a rabbit, and showed him to her guardians. "See how weak he is! Regard him--how he walks in a dream! Look at his swollen wrists--he cannot fight. And if you wish to make these English respect you you have got to fight them!"
"Where is Ernestine? She should not have left you alone."
"Ernestine went to the shops to obey your orders, father."
The boy's dense inertia was undisturbed by what had so agonized the girl. He stood in the English sunshine gazing stupidly at her guardians.
"Who is this boy, Eagle?" exclaimed the younger man.
"He does not talk. He does not tell his name."
The younger man seized the elder's arm and whispered to him.
"No, Philippe, no!" the elder man answered. But they both approached the boy with a deference which surprised Eagle, and examined his scarred eyebrow and his wrists. Suddenly the marquis dropped upon his knees and stripped the stockings down those meager legs. He kissed them, and the swollen ankles, sobbing like a woman. The boy seemed unconscious of this homage. Such exaggeration of her own tenderness made her ask,
"What ails my father, Cousin Philippe?"
Her Cousin Philippe glanced around the high walls and spoke cautiously.
"Who was the English girl at the head of your mob, Eagle?"
"Sally Blake."
"What would Sally Blake do if she saw the little king of France and Navarre ride into the church lane, filling it with his retinue, and heard the royal salute