Bridle the Wind (7 page)

And overhead –

‘I don't want to die,' whispered a choking voice. ‘Help me – please help me! I don't – want – to -die-'

High overhead hung a small, thin body, suspended from one of the arching boughs. It was still in motion – kicking, struggling -

I scrambled up through the slender whippy branches, climbing as if they had been a ladder, thrusting myself upward, cursing and praying in the same words, to the same Deity. ‘Listen! You must, you
must
save him till I come – don't let him die, only save him till I come – '

‘Have you a knife, child?' called Father Antoine in sudden agitation.

Novices were not allowed to carry knives, but I had brought one from the garden shed for cutting through the tough roots of seaweed. It was tucked
under the cord which formed my belt. With clumsy trembling speed I cut the rope, and Father Antoine below received the slight body into his capable arms. Meanwhile I pushed myself out of the tree, not caring how I fell, and landed crouching beside the pair of them.

‘Is – is he still alive?'

Father Antoine had already, with great care, loosed the choking cord that constricted the thin neck; then with his gnarled but gentle hands he pressed the sides of the frail chest: pressed, pressed, pressed, and released.

‘Blow into his mouth, boy,' he directed me. ‘Breathe for him! As I release my hands each time, you blow. Yes, yes, that is the way.'

Kneeling on a huge patch of crushed violets I blew – waited; blew again; while Father Antoine doggedly continued to press, release, and press, forcing the emptied lungs to take up their task again. If Father Vespasian could see us battling like this! I thought, and was infinitely glad that he could not, that there were only the two of us working desperately hard without the need for speech in the quiet glade. But, oh, supposing our work was in vain?

It seemed like half an hour that we had been kneeling there, though in reality perhaps it had been three minutes, four minutes, five minutes -

At last there came the slightest, weakest sound from the body between Father Antoine's hands -a faint, choking cough.

‘Ah!
Grace a Dieu!
I think we are going to win. Do not stop blowing for a single instant, my son!'

I blew – waited – blew; and then suddenly we were rewarded. The face below mine – which was blue-white, waxy – contorted and crumpled; the chest contracted, expanded, filled with air, and expelled it again in a violent sneeze.

‘We've done it!
We have saved him! He is alive!' In my joy and relief I grabbed Father Antoine's hands; I could hardly forbear from embracing him. Perhaps I did.

‘Gently, my son. We are not quite out of the wood yet.'

He continued with his massage, pressing the ribs, rubbing the dreadfully bruised and discoloured neck.

But his words went on echoing in my mind. Not out of the wood. No; and very likely neither were the people who had hung up this poor victim. They could not be very far away; the deed was too recent.

I sprang to the side of the glade from which we had come and began to hack at the whippy stems with my knife, to make a wider passage through. On the far side, I now noticed, there were signs that somebody had entered recently; branches were broken, grass was crushed. But that would be no way for us to take.

A few minutes, and I had cleared a path wide enough for our purposes.

‘Father Antoine,' I said in a low voice. ‘Do you not think we should carry him to the shore?'

While saying this, I opened my eyes very wide, laid my finger on my lips, and silently gestured toward the depths of the thicket – from which, indeed, I thought I had heard a slight crack, or crunch. He took my meaning instantly.

‘It is well thought, my boy. Yes, let us go.'

Gently and most carefully he raised the head and shoulders, I laid hold of the bare, scratched legs, and painfully, with great trouble, we proceeded back along the little passage I had cut, and so out into the fresh reviving air of the seashore. Only then did I realise that the person we had rescued was hardly taller than myself: a boy, no more; and pitifully thin. His jerkin and breeches were of old, threadbare material; his hair was long and so matted that it looked like tar; he had no hat, shoes, or stockings. He was dirty, bedraggled, and dreadfully bruised. He weighed – luckily for us who had to carry him – little more than the seaweed that we had been handling.

But why should they have hanged a boy? And who were
they?
Who in the world would do such a deed?

And why – at this thought, which came to me while carrying him over the soft, slippery sand, I almost stumbled in my astonishment – why should I have been given a foreknowledge of this event? For that, I now saw, was what had been sent to me. Three months ago, on that stormy evening in January, God had granted me a prevision of what was to come. Why?

Had it happened simply because, exhausted,
gasping with fear and fatigue after my own narrow escape from death, I had been flung up on this very spot, where his murder was later going to take place?

Or had my destiny planned the whole happening, the whole connection, from much further back? And was that why I had been sent here?

The asses still stood with drooping heads just where we had left them; we placed the rescued boy in the cart, on a mattress of seaweed.

‘Can you talk at all, my poor child?' Father Antoine asked quietly.

Two wild dark-brown eyes opened at him for a moment, enormously wide, and there came a faint, negative movement of the head.

‘No matter; just lie still; we are going to take you to a place of safety.'

The eyes closed again. Not, I thought, in relief at the monk's promise, but rather to keep their secrets hidden.

As we began to cross the causeway, and the cart shook violently, bumping over the uneven edges of rock, the eyes flew open again in alarm, then shut resolutely. I was leading Berri, and could not forbear, in quick glances over my shoulder, to study the boy whom I had been the means of saving from death. What a singular link now lay between us, I thought! We had been, as it were, bound together by three months of time, three months that had been removed from my life by the mysterious hand of God.

What had become of those three months? I would never know.

And suddenly I remembered Father Vespasian. ‘Where has your soul been hiding since that day? Under whose dominion?' Why should he ask that? What did he expect to hear?

Another thought struck me: that I, only, in the entire human race, had knowledge of the bond between me and the hanged boy. Father Antoine might well guess at some part of the whole, but unless I chose to tell him, he would never know the complete story.

Slowly, doubtfully, I pondered this. In a way I felt that Father Antoine had a right to hear about it. He had been kind, understanding; had not pressed me; had helped me, by arranging my visits to the shore, to be in the right spot when memory caught up and became linked with reality. Yes, he had a right to know the whole. But, apart from him, I did not wish anybody else to learn about this mystery. It was my secret – mine and this boy's, whoever he was – it belonged to no one else.
Especially,
I thought, I would not wish it to come to the ears of Father Vespasian. Why not? I could hardly frame the reasons to myself, but they were there, solid as mountains in my mind. Father Vespasian would wish to know
for the wrong purpose.
He was not sane; he was not quite human; there was something wild, ungovernable, dreadful about him. He did not belong to God. His motive for doing what he did came from some other quarter. No, the less he knew about this boy, the better, I
decided; and I felt a strong wish to protect the frail, bruised body curled up among the seaweed in the cart. He ought not to be exposed to the Abbot's baleful scrutiny.

Thinking this, I turned for another glance at the boy. He was little more than a skeleton covered with skin. The velveteen jerkin and canvas pantaloons he wore were so filthy and tattered that they hardly did more than decently cover him. His feet were bare; the colour of legs, arms, and face was a kind of bluish brown, like the mud of a tidal river. His cheeks were so gaunt from starvation that his chin stuck up sharp as the point of a spade. Here is somebody, Felix, I thought, whose sufferings make your own seem like a fiesta. What troubles have
you
ever endured? A scolding tutor and some peevish old aunts, a few days in prison, a couple of uncomfortable sea-passages? But this poor creature has probably known terrible hardship all his life.

And following this feeling came one of downright guilt for all the luck, friendship, and unfair spoiling that had come my way; upon which I resolved to befriend the boy, since we had been so significantly flung together, and do all that lay in my power to help him.

At the foot of the steep zigzag that led up to the Abbey gate, I brought Berri to a halt and faced Father Antoine.

‘My father – perhaps before we reach the entrance I ought to tell you that I have remembered fully what before I had forgotten.'

He gave me a beautiful smile, filled with understanding and sympathy.

‘My boy, I was sure that you had! The manner in which you hurled yourself from the beach -like an arrow from a crossbow into that thicket -showed me that some pattern had come clear in your mind, instructing you to act without wasting a moment.'

‘It happened in this way, father – '

But now, to my surprise, he laid a finger on my lips.

‘Hush yet awhile, child! I believe that you should wait and think carefully before imparting the story to me, or indeed to anybody. Take counsel in prayer before any action. There is without doubt some further mystery which still remains to be solved. Perhaps we shall learn it when we hear the history of this poor one. Or perhaps future happenings will reveal God's purpose. But – in the meantime – do you not think that our first care should be for our hurt lamb, who is in urgent need of Father Pierre and his salves and tisanes?'

At once I felt humbled and reproved for thoughtlessness. Here I stood, who not two minutes previously had resolved to help the victim in every possible way, proposing to waste precious time in recounting my own tale. Very self-important, Felix! Abashed, I tugged at the bridle to urge Berri on his way up the hill.

Only later did it occur to me that perhaps Father Antoine had another reason for discouraging my communication to him. I looked upward to a green shoulder
of the headland, and there was Father Vespasian, in his dark cloak and hood, arms folded, head bent, walking to and fro, to and fro, in his favourite spot, like a captain on the bridge of a ship. Did he see us? I could not tell. But I realised that as a member of the Community Father Antoine was in duty bound to report anything I told him to the Abbot.

But what he did not know, he could not tell.

We bore the hurt boy directly to the infirmary, where Father Pierre drew in a deep, shocked breath at our story and the sight of the bruised neck. He set pots of broth, wine, and milk to simmer on his little fire, while Father Antoine departed, as he must, to make a report to the Abbot.

Next Father Pierre directed me to help the sufferer upstairs.

The boy, who had been huddled in a chair, protested in a faint whisper that he could manage the stairs very well if someone took his arm.

‘Do not try to talk yet, my child,' said Father Pierre. ‘Your throat has been severely strained. Only tell us your name.'

‘It – it is Jua – Juan.'

‘Good, Juan. Now say no more. Felix here, who saved your life, will help you up to bed.'

The boy flashed me an odd look: surprise, inquiry, a kind of unwilling gratitude, as if he had far rather
not
have to be obliged to me. I felt sympathy at this, and gave a slight shrug, as if to say, Oh, it was nothing, what else could I do?

His feelings were plain enough to me. It is a
great burden to owe one's life to a stranger. Especially when one is still not far removed from the brink of death.

His eyes, I noticed, had remarkable coppery gleams in their dark-brown depths.

Slowly and with great reluctance he put out a wrist and hand not much thicker than a chicken's claw, which I threaded round my waist and so half lifted, half supported him up the wide shallow stone stair that led to the infirmary dorter. He smelled of tar and crushed herbage and felt light as a squirrel.

Up above there was a spacious dormitory and a few little cell-like single rooms. No patients occupied the half-dozen pallets in the dormitory at present, and I would have led Juan there, but he demanded, in a peremptory whisper, to be placed in a room by himself. This, Father Pierre, who had followed us up, permitted with a nod. We lifted the boy onto a cot, then returned downstairs for water and towels.

When I carried up a basin of warm water I discovered that Juan had barricaded himself in. There were no fastenings on the doors, but he had dragged (with strength obtained from heaven knows where) a bench across the room so as to bar the door.

‘No one shall come in! I do not wish anybody to come in!' he whispered urgently through a crack in the woodwork.

Father Pierre and I stood staring at one another in perplexity. He rubbed his tonsure. To break
down the door would be no great problem, but who would be so cruel as to use force against the poor terrified creature? Perhaps, still half crazed by his experience, he mistook us for his enemies.

‘Come, now, what foolishness is this?' called Father Pierre gently through the door. ‘We do not intend to hurt you, my child; we have brought hot water, to wash you and clean your wounds and untangle your hair.'

‘I will wash myself! I do not wish anybody -
anybody -
to come near.'

Father Pierre shrugged at that, with resignation. I could see from his expression that he did not expect his new patient to make a very good job of the ablutions, but he was too experienced in caring for the sick to bring the matter to a great issue. Accordingly he replied in a matter-of-fact tone: ‘Very well; if that is what you wish. Your main need at present is sleep and rest. Wash yourself a little, put on clean clothes, which I will bring up, then drink a little broth, then sleep.'