peasant farmers, but each had his plate, and beside it his metal spoon, fork, and knife, not a pocket-knife but a proper table one, a luxury introduced by François on his return from military service; from which the old farmer had drawn his conclusion that the outside world was full of changes.
Toussaint Lumineau looked worried and kept silence. His calm, strong face, though that of an old man, contrasted strangely with the deformed features of his eldest son, Mathurin. Formerly they had been alike; but since the misfortune of which they never spoke and which yet haunted the memories of all at La Fromentière, the son was only the grotesque suffering caricature of his father. The enormous head, covered with a bush of tawny hair, was sunk between his high, thickened shoulders. The width of chest, length of arms, and size of hands denoted a man of gigantic stature; but when this giant, supported by his crutches, stood up, one saw a poor twisted, thickened torso, with contorted powerless legs dragging after it; a prize-fighter's body terminating in two wasted limbs, capable at most of supporting it for a few seconds, and from which even, powerless as they now were, the life was gradually ebbing. Scarce thirty years of age, the beard which grew almost to his cheek-bones was grey in places. Above the muddy-veined cheek-bones, from out the tangled mass of hair and beard which gave him the appearance of a wild animal, shone a pair of deep blue eyes, small, sad-looking, whence would flash all suddenly the wild exasperation of one condemned to a living death, who counted each stage of his torture. It was as though one half of him were assisting with impotent rage at the slow agony of the other. His forehead was lined with wrinkles which made deep furrows between the eyebrows.
"Our poor eldest son, the handsomest of them all, what a wreck he is!" their mother used sorrowfully to say.
She had reason to pity him. Six years ago he had come home from his military service as handsome a fellow as when he went. The three years of barrack life had passed over his simple peasant nature, over his dreams of ploughing the land and harvesting, over the tenets of faith he held in common with his race, with scarce a trace of harm. Innate contempt of the life led in towns had been his protection. "Lumineau's eldest son is not like other lads; he is not a bit changed," was the verdict of the neighbours.
One evening when he had taken a waggon-load of corn to the flour-miller of Chalons, he came back with empty sacks, but beside him, sitting upon a pile of them, was a laughing girl from Sallertaine, Félicité Gauvrit, of La Seulière, whom he wished to take for wife. The dusk of evening was over the roads, it was hard to distinguish ruts from tufts of grass; but he, all absorbed in his sweetheart, confident that his horse knew the way, was not even holding the reins that had fallen and were dragging on the ground. And suddenly, as they were descending a hill close to La Fromentière, the horse, struck by a branch from a tree, started into a gallop. The waggon jerked from side to side, was in danger of being upset; the wheels were on the bank, the girl wanted to jump out.
"Don't be frightened, Félicité, I will manage him!" cried her lover. And standing up he leant forward to seize the horse by the bit and stop him. But whether the darkness, a jolt, or ill-luck deceived him, he overbalanced and fell along the harness. There were two simultaneous cries, one from the waggon, one from beneath it. The wheel had gone over his limbs. When Félicité Gauvrit could get to her lover's assistance, she found him trying in vain to struggle up from the ground. For eight months Mathurin was groaning in agony; then his groans ceased, his sufferings grew less acute; but first the feet became paralyzed, then the knees, and gradually the slow death mounted… At the present time he could only drag his lower limbs after him, crawling on his knees and wrists, grown to an enormous size. He could still guide a punt upon the canals of the Marais, but his strength was soon exhausted. In a hand-cart, such as farm children use for a plaything, the father or brother would draw him to the more distant fields whither the plough had preceded them; and thus, utterly useless, the young man would look on at the work to which he was born, and which he still loved so passionately. "Our poor eldest Lumineau, the handsomest of them all!"
His gay spirits had flown; his character had become as changed and warped as his body. He had grown hard, suspicious, cruel. His brothers and sisters hid all their little concerns from the man who looked upon the happiness of others as a personal wrong to himself; they feared his skill at ferreting out any love-making; the treachery which would prompt him to try and mar it. He, who never could hope now to inspire love, could not brook that others should possess it. Above all, could not brook that another should take the place which came to him by right of birth, that of future master, of the father's successor to the farm.
On that account he was jealous of François, and still more of André, the handsome young Chasseur d'Afrique, their father's favourite. He even was jealous of the farm-servant, who might become dangerous, did he marry Rousille.
Sometimes Mathurin Lumineau said to himself:
"If only I could get well again! I believe I do feel better!" At other times a kind of rage would take possession of him, and he would not speak for days, would hide away in corners or in the stables, until a flood of tears would melt his passion. At those times one man only could go near him: his father. One thing alone softened the cripple's churlishness, and that was to look on the home fields, to see the oxen at work, the seed sown which should yield abundantly in its season, and to gaze out on to the horizon where he had tasted of the fulness of life.
For the whole six years in which the girl he had loved had deserted him, he had never once been into the town of Sallertaine, even to Easter Communion, which he no longer attended. Nor had he ever met Félicité Gauvrit, of La Seulière, along the lanes.
He sometimes asked Eléonore:
"Do you ever hear any talk of her marrying? Is she still as handsome as when she loved me?"
When Marie-Rose went into the supper-room that night, it was Mathurin only whom she furtively glanced at, and his face seemed to her to wear a malicious smile, as though he had seen, or guessed Jean's absence.
Near Mathurin sat François, a very different looking man from the other, of middle height, stout, red faced, easy going. Of him, Rousille had no fear.
He was more pleasure-loving than the rest of the family. No great worker, extravagant, running off to all the fairs and markets, easy to get on with because he needed the indulgence of others. Physically and morally the counterpart of Eléonore, two years his senior, like her he had a broad face, dull blue eyes, and the same apathetic nature which so often called forth lectures from their father.
But while the girl in the protection of her home remained pure under the influence of her good mother, now dead, who, like so many of the simple peasant women of those parts, had lived a humble saint-like life, François had been ruined by barrack life.
He had submitted to military discipline, but without understanding the necessity for it; therefore without deriving the corresponding benefit. He had been subject to his superiors, had received punishment, had been sent hither and thither for three years; but he had never made a friend, never felt himself encouraged in the few halting intentions for good that he had taken with him from the home life, never been treated as a man, who has a soul, and whom sacrifice, however humble, can ennoble. On the other hand, he fell an easy prey to all the evils of a soldier's life; the loose talk at mess, the drinking habits of his companions, the constant endeavour to shirk duty, the prejudices, in a word the hundred and one corruptions into which young men can sink who are taken from their homes and sent out into the world, new to the temptations of great cities, without a guide at the very period when most they stand in need of one.
Neither better nor worse than the average of men home from military training, he had brought back with him to La Fromentière a remembrance of illicit pleasures that followed him everywhere; defiance of all authority, a disgust for the hard, uncertain, often unproductive work of farming, which he contrasted with vague notions about civil employment of which the leisure and privileges had been vaunted to him. How far off was he now from the simple son of the marshes, with fearless eyes, the inseparable companion,
