small dog who does not mind whether he is noticed or not, provided he is permitted to be present. He heard his father’s brief account of his wanderings. He listened to the servants as they poured out to his father their stories of everything that had taken place since his departure, eight years ago. He even listened unnoticed while Uncle Pierre went over the business of the house with his father. And in the evening there were violins and flutes, roast meat as if it were a fête day, and neighbors riding in from miles around to welcome his father home. Sanxi had not known that his own household could be so gay. The very walls of the kitchen were animated and seemed to tremble in the ruddy glow from the chimney. The copper vessels winked and blazed. The glazed pottery on the dresser also gave back the quivering light, and his father’s armor, as he flung himself back in his chair, or rose to meet a newcomer, was momentarily like the sky of an autumn sunset. But the seasons are tyrannical for the farmer. In the morning the flutes and violins were put away, and before dawn the men were about the usual work of the farm. The master to the fields, the mistress to the dairy—everything was just as usual until evening, and then, after supper before the hour for prayers, there was much talk by the fireplace of foreign lands, sieges and marches, the slaying of heretics, and finally, instead of his mother saying, “Prayers, my friends,” there was the master of the house, like Sanxi’s grandfather, announcing,
“My children, it is time for prayer.”
The estate prospered surprisingly after the return of the master. The vigor of the man was contagious, and he had a way of noticing the work that a servant was doing and saying a word of approval that the old master had never had. For Bertrande, as for Sanxi, it was a new life, almost a new world. Gladly she surrendered the responsibilities of the farm to her husband’s care, and surrendered herself to his love. From having been a widow for eight years, she was suddenly again a wife. The loneliness of the house was dissipated. Even when there were not old friends come from a distance to greet Martin Guerre, even when the priest was not established in the corner of the hearth to hear accounts of the world below the mountains, there was good conversation in the house, and sometimes music, and Sanxi flourished and grew manly in the companionship of a hero. His newly-found father was no less to him.
At the end of a few months Bertrande found herself with child. She rejoiced thereat, and she also trembled, for at times a curious fear assailed her, a fear so terrible and unnatural that she hardly dared acknowledge it in her most secret heart. What if Martin, the roughly bearded stranger, were not the true Martin, the one whom she had kissed farewell that noonday by the side of the freshly planted field? Her sin, if such indeed were a fact, would be most black, for had she not experienced an instinctive warning? On the night of his return, overcome by desire and astonishment, she had trembled in his embrace and murmured again and again:
“Martin, it is so strange, I cannot believe it to be true.”
To which the bearded traveler had replied:
“Poor little one, you have been too long alone.”
In the morning her fear had vanished, Martin’s family and friends, the servants, the very animals of the place, it seemed, affirming his identity, and putting her heart at peace.
So she had been happy, and had rejoiced in the presence of this new Martin even more than in that of the old, and it was not until she began to feel the weight of the child in her body that the fear returned. Even so, it did not stay. It was like the shadow of a dark wing sweeping suddenly across the room, and then departing swiftly as it had come, leaving all things standing as usual under the cold, normal light of day. But one day, seeing Martin returning from a ride with Sanxi, and seeing the easy comradeship between the two, she said aloud:
“It is not possible that this man should be Martin Guerre. For Martin Guerre, the son of the old master, proud and abrupt, like the old master, could never in this world speak so gaily to his own son. Ah! unhappy woman that I am, so to distrust the Good God who has sent me this happiness! I shall be punished. But this is also punishment in itself.”
No one heard her speak, and, weeping bitterly, she withdrew to her own room where she remained until a servant came to find her at the hour of the evening meal. Nevertheless, in spite of her contrition, she could not refrain, the moment that they were left alone that evening, from accusing her husband of being other than the man he represented, and of asking for proof of his identity.
She had expected passionate proof or passionate denial. The man before her regarded her gravely, even tenderly, and said:
“Proof? But why proof? You have seen me. You have felt the touch of my lips. Behold my hands. Are they not scarred even as you remember them? Do you remember the time my father struck me and broke my teeth? They are still broken. You have spoken with me; we have spoken together of things past. Is not my speech the same? Why should I be other than myself? What has happened to give you this strange notion?”
Bertrande replied in a barely audible voice:
“If you had been Martin Guerre you would perhaps have struck me just now.”
He answered with gentle surprise:
“But because I struck you on the day we were married, is that a reason I should strike you now? Listen to me, my dearest. Am I who speak to you now more different from the young man who left you, than that young man was different from the child you married?”
“When you left me,” said Bertrande, “you resembled your father in flesh and spirit. Now you resemble him only in the flesh.”
“My child,” said her husband, ever more gravely, “my father was arrogant and severe. Just, also, and loving, but his severity sent from home his only son. For eight years I have traveled among many sorts and conditions of men. I have been many times in danger of death. If I return to you with a greater wisdom than that which I knew when I departed, would you have me dismiss it, in order again to resemble my father? God knows, my child, and the priest will so instruct you, that a man of evil ways may by an act of will so alter all his actions and his habits that he becomes a man of good. Are you satisfied?”
“And then,” said Bertrande, in a still smaller voice, marshaling her last argument, “Martin Guerre at twenty had not the gift of the tongue. His father, also, was a silent man.”
At this her husband, hitherto so grave, burst into a laugh which made the Chamber echo, and still laughing, with his broad hand he wiped the tears from her wet face.
“My darling, how funny you are,” he said. “Weep no more. Every Gascon has the gift of the tongue. Some employ it, some do not. Since I am become no longer arrogant and severe, I choose to employ my gift.” Then, more gently, he continued. “Madame, you are demented. It happens sometimes to women who are with child. Pay no attention to it. It will pass, and when your time is over, you will look back to this with astonishment.”
“Perhaps that is it,” said Bertrande in acquiescence. “For God knows I do not wish you to be otherwise than my true husband. When I went to visit my aunt in Rieux, being in a strange town, I became confused as to the directions, and not until I left that house did it seem to me, when I was within doors, that the east was not the west. So it must be with me now. For when I look at you it seems to me that I see the flesh and bone of Martin Guerre, but in them I see dwelling the spirit of another man.”
“When I was in Brittany,” said her husband, “I heard a strange story of a man who was also a wolf, and there may also have been times when the soul of one man inhabited the body of another. But it is also notorious that men who have been great sinners have become saints. What would become of us all if we had no power to turn from evil toward good?”
And so he led her on to talk of other matters, of foreign
