A Hero of Romance
Copyright© 2025 by Richard Marsh
Chapter 22: The End of the Journey
Throughout the day which followed, and throughout the night, and throughout the succeeding days and nights, Bertie wandered among the wilds of Finistère, and among its lanes and villages. How he lived he himself could have scarcely told. The misfortunes which had befallen him since he had set out on his journey to the Land of Golden Dreams had told upon him. He became ill in body and in mind. He needed rest and care, good food and careful nursing. What he got was no food, or scarcely any, strange skies to shelter him, a strange land to serve him as his bed.
It was fortunate that summer was at hand. Had it been winter he would have lain down at night, and in the morning they would have found him dead. But he was at least spared excessive cold. The winds were not invariably genial. The occasional rain was not at all times welcome--to him at least, whatever it might have been to the thirsty earth--but there was no frost. If frost had come he would certainly have died.
What he ate he scarcely knew. Throughout the whole of his wanderings he never received food from any human being. He found his breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper in the fields and on the hedges. A patch of turnips was a godsend. There was one field in particular in which grew both swedes and turnips. It was within a stone’s-throw of a village; to reach it from the road you had to scramble down a bank. To this he returned again and again. He began to look upon it almost as his own.
Once, towards evening, the farmer saw him getting his supper. The farmer saw the lad before the lad saw him. He stole upon him unawares, bent upon capturing the thief. He had almost achieved his purpose, and was within half a dozen yards of the miscreant, when, not looking where he was going in his anxiety to keep his eyes upon the pilferer, he caught his sabot in a hole, and came down upon his knees. As he came he gave vent to a deep Breton execration.
Startled, Bertie looked behind and saw the foe. He was off like the wind. When the farmer had regained, if not his temper, at least his perpendicular, he saw, fifty yards ahead, a wild-looking, ragged figure tearing for his life. The Breton was not built for speed. He perceived that he might as well attempt to rival the swallow in its flight as outrun the boy. So he contented himself with shaking his fists and shouting curses after the robber of his turnip field.
Never washing, never taking his clothes from his back nor his shoes from his feet, in appearance Bertie soon presented a figure which would have discredited a scarecrow. Scrambling through hedges, constant walking over stony ways, beds on dampish soil--these things told upon his garments; they soon began to drop away from him in shreds. His face went well with his clothing. Very white and drawn, very thin and dirty, his ravenous eyes looked out from under a tangled shock of hair. One night he had been startled in his sleep, as he often was, and he had sprung up, as a wild creature springs, and run for his life, not waiting to inquire what it was that had startled him, whether it was the snapping of a twig or the movement of a rabbit or a bird. In his haste he left his hat behind him, and as he never returned to get it, afterwards he went with his head uncovered.
It began to be rumoured about those parts that some strange thing had taken up its residence in the surrounding country. The Breton peasants and small farmers are ignorant, credulous, superstitious. The slightest incident of an unusual character they magnify into a mystery.
It was told in the hamlets that some wild creature had made its appearance in their neighbourhood. Some said it was a boy, some said it was a man, some said it was a woman; some said it was neither one thing nor the other, but a monster which had taken human shape.
Bertie lent an air of veracity to the different versions by his own proceedings. He was not in his own right mind. Had care been taken, and friends been near, all might have been well; as it was, fever was taking more and more possession of his brain. He shunned his fellow-creatures. At the sight of a little child he would take to his heels and run. He saw an enemy in every bush, in every tree; in a man or a woman he saw his worst enemy of all.
In consequence the tales gained ground and grew. A lout, returning from his labour in the fields, saw on a distant slope in the gathering twilight a wild-looking figure, who, at sight of him, turned and ran like the wind. The lout ran too. The tale did not lose by being told. Bertie was magnified into a giant, his speed into speed of the swiftest bird. The lout declared that he uttered mysterious sounds as he ran. He became a mysterious personage altogether--and a horrible one.
Others saw this thing of evil, for that it was a thing of evil all were agreed. The farmer who saw him in his turnip field had a wondrous tale to tell.
He had not tripped through his own stupidity and clumsiness. On the contrary, it was all owing to the influence of the evil eye. Bertie, being a thing of evil, had seen him--as things of evil have doubtless the power of doing--although his approach was made from the rear; and, seeing him, had glanced at him with his evil eye through the back of his head, as things possessing that fatal gift have, we may take it for granted, the power of doing. Nay, who shall decide that the evil eye is not itself located in the back of the head?
Anyhow, under its influence the farmer tripped. This became clearer to his mind the more he thought of it, and, it may be also added, the farther off the accident became. The next morning he remembered that he had been conscious of a mysterious something in his joints as he approached the turnip stealer--a something not to be described, but altogether mysterious and horrible. In the afternoon he declared that he had not followed the plunderer because he had been rooted to the ground, he knew not how nor why--rooted in the manner of his own turnips, which he had seen disappearing from underneath his eyes.
That night the tale grew still more horrible. He had a couple of glasses of brandy, at two sous a glass, with a select circle of his friends, and under the influence of conviviality the farmer made his neighbours’ hair stand on end. He went to bed with the belief impressed firmly on his mind that he had encountered Old Nick in person, engaged in the nefarious and characteristic action of stealing turnips from his turnip field.
Thus it came about that while Bertie avoided aboriginals, the aboriginals were equally careful in avoiding him. One day some one heard him speak. That was the climax. The tongue he spoke was neither Breton nor French. Delirium was overtaking the lad, and under its influence he was beginning to spout all sorts of nonsense in his feverish wanderings here and there.
The aboriginal in question had seen him running across the field and shouting as he ran. He declared, probably with truth, that never had he heard the like before. It was undoubtedly the language which was in common use among things of evil. This conclusion was not flattering to English-speaking people, but there are occasions on which ignorance is not bliss, and it is not folly to be wise. Being a Breton peasant of average education, this aboriginal decided that Bertie’s English was the language in common use among things of evil.
That settled the question. There are possibly Beings--Beings in this case should be written with a capital letter--of indifferent, and worse than indifferent character, who have at least some elementary acquaintance with the Breton tongue. Let so much be granted. But it cannot be doubted--at any rate no one did doubt it--that the fact of this stranger speaking in a strange tongue made it as plain as a pike-staff that he was the sort of character which is better left alone.
So, as a rule, they left him alone in the severest manner.
Of course this could not endure for ever. Bertie was approaching the Land of Golden Dreams in a sense of which he had not dreamed even in his wildest dreams. One cannot subsist on roots alone. Nor can a young gentleman, used to cosy beds and well-warmed rooms and regular meals, exist for long on such a diet, under ever-changing skies, in an inhospitable country, in the open air. Bertie was worn to a shadow. He was wasted not only physically, but mentally and morally. He was a ghost of what he once had been, enfeebled in mind and body.
If something did not happen soon to change his course of living, he would soon bring his journeying to an untimely end, and reach the Land of Dreams indeed.
Something did happen, but it was not by any means the sort of thing which was required.
One day a great hunt took place in that district. It was first-rate sport. They occasionally hunt wolves, and even wild boars in Finistère, but this time what was hunted was a boy. And the boy was Bertie.
The mayor of St. Thégonnec was a wise man. All mayors are of necessity, and from the nature of their office, wise, especially the mayors of rural France; and this mayor was the wisest of wise mayors. He was a miller by trade, honest as millers go, and as pig-headed a rustic as was ever found in Finistère. His name was Baudry--Jean Baudry.
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