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 Carré.
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 Carré, 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 Carré'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 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 one's cabbages. Martel came from Guernsey and was not wanted in Sercq. To Guernsey therefore he should go, with instructions not to return to Sercq lest worse should follow. Hence the procession that disturbed the slumbers of the Creux Road that day.
CHAPTER II
HOW RACHEL CARRÉ WENT BACK TO HER FATHER
"You paid off some of your old score up there, last night, George," said one of the men who had stood watching the boat which carried Martel back to Guernsey.
"Just a little bit," said Hamon, as he rubbed his hand gently over a big bruise on the side of his head. "He's a devil to fight and as strong as an ox;" and they turned and followed the Sénéchal and Philip Carré through the
