A Loose End | Page 8

face,
beaten by wind and weather into an odd sort of resemblance to the
rocks among which he passed his life--the hardy and primitive life to

which he had been born, and to which all his ideas were limited, a life
of continual struggle with the elements for the satisfaction of primary
needs, and which was directed by the movements of nature, by the tides,
the winds, and the rising and setting of the sun and the moon.
And thirdly there was Jean's nephew, Antoine.
The day before Antoine was born, his father had been drowned in a
storm which had wrecked many of the fishing-boats along the coast,
and his mother, from the shock of the news, gave premature birth to her
babe, and died a few hours after. His grandmother had brought up the
child, and his silent, rough-handed uncle had adopted him, and worked
for him, as if he were his own. So the little Antoine, with his blond
head, and his little bare feet, grew up in the rock-hewn cottage, like a
bright gorse-flower among the boulders, and spent an untaught
childhood, pattering about the granite floor, or clambering over the
rough rocks, and dabbling in the salt water, where he would watch the
beautiful green anemones, that had so many fingers but no hands, and
which he never touched, because, if he did, they spoilt themselves
directly, packing their fingers up very quickly, so that they went into
nowhere: or the prawns, that he always thought were the spirits of the
other fish, for they looked as if they were made of nothing, and they lay
so still under a stone, as if they were not there, and then darted so
quickly across the pool that you could not see them go.
Antoine knew a great deal about the spirits: how there were evil ones,
such as that which dwelt in the great mushroom stone out yonder to sea,
which was very powerful and wicked, so that the stone, being in fear,
always trembled, yet could not fall, because the evil spirit would not let
it: and then there were others which haunted the little valley beyond
Esquinel Point, where you must not go after dark, for the spirits took
the form of Little Men, who had the power to send astray the wits of
any that met them. Antoine feared those spirits more than any of the
others: they were so cunning and wanted to do you harm on purpose:
and when he went with his grandmother to pray in the little chapel on
the shore, he used to trot away from her side, as she knelt on her chair
with clasped hands and devoutly murmuring lips; and he would wander

over the rugged stone floor, till he found the niche in the wall where St.
Nicholas stood, wearing a blue cloak with a pink border, and having
such lovely pink cheeks: the kind St. Nicholas that took care of little
children, and that had three little boys without any clothes on always
with him, in the kind of little boat he stood in. And Antoine would pray
a childish prayer to St. Nicholas to protect him from the evil spirits of
the valley.
Antoine grew up very tall and strong. He accompanied Jean on his
fishing expeditions from the time he was twelve years old, and his
uncle used to say that he was of more use than many a grown man. He
knew every rock and even-current along that dangerous coast: he could
trim the boat to the wind through narrow channels in weather in which
Jean would hardly venture to do it himself: and the way in which the
fish took his bait made Jean sometimes cross himself, as he counted
over the shining boat-load of bream and cod, and mutter in his guttural
Breton speech, "'Tis the blessed St. Yvon aids him." Everybody liked
him in the village, and he took a kind of lead among the other lads, but,
whether it was the grave gaze of his blue eyes, or his earnest, outright
speech, or some other quality about him less easy to define, they all had
the same kind of feeling in regard to him that his uncle had. He was
different from themselves. There were indeed some among them in
whom this acknowledged superiority inspired envy and ill-will, and one
in particular, a lad that went lame with a club foot, but who had a
beautiful countenance, with dark, glowing eyes and finely-cut features,
never lost an opportunity of saying an ill word of, or doing an ill turn to
Antoine. Geoffroi Le Cocq seemed never far off, wherever Antoine
might be. He would lounge in the doorway of the café, watching for
him, and sing a mocking song