SPRING comes early in Brittany, and by the end of May the apple-blossom is already almost over, while the hedgerows on each side of the smooth, broad roads are one tangled glory of golden broom, sweet-smelling honeysuckle, and delicate bramble-blossom.

But up in the mountains of Basse Bretagne, the Montagnes Noirs as they are called, it is different. The climate is colder there, and the seasons later, reminding one more of Scotland. Indeed, the scenery is not unlike certain parts of Scotland; for, as one winds up the lonely roads that lead to the heart of these hills, one leaves the vegetation of the south behind them, and reaches a region of bare, heather-covered moors, peat-bogs, and low, scrubby fir-trees.

The country is sparsely populated. The traveller only comes across a cottage at long intervals, and when he does pass one he looks at the low walls and thatched roof, wondering what sort of lives the people live who dwell inside.

At the door of one of these lonely cottages a woman was standing one bright May morning—in the May that followed the events which we have described in the last chapters—shading her eyes from the sun.

She was dressed in the ordinary Breton peasant’s dress—a black gown, with a great white cap and a white plaited collar, and her face was wrinkled and weather-beaten.

‘Pierre, Pierre, where art thou?’ she cried, scanning the bare moorland with her keen black eyes; ‘it is already seven o’clock, and the pigs are not fed, nor the chickens, and the cow waits in her stall to be led out to pasture.’

There was no answer, and she shrugged her shoulders impatiently.

‘Plague upon the boy,’ she muttered, ‘and upon those who brought him! Three francs a week doth not go far on his food, for he eats like an ox, and as for trouble—hein!’ And she shrugged her shoulders again in the expressive way only practised by a Frenchwoman or an Italian, then she proceeded to search the wretched little outhouses which adjoined her cottage for the delinquent.

She found him at last, a little white-faced, dark-haired lad, clad in a blue cotton suit, and wearing the wooden sabots of the country. He was lying asleep in the sun behind a diminutive haystack, which looked as if hay-crops in that part of the country were wont to be scanty.

He woke with a start as the woman shook him roughly, and shrank away from her with a look of fear in his brown eyes.

‘Thou lazy dreamer!’ she said, pulling him to his feet by the collar of his blue cotton blouse, and giving him a push in the direction of the pig-sty, ‘there is all thy work to do, and instead of doing it thou liest and sleepest as if thou wert the son of a lord. Make haste now, and feed the cow and the chickens, and take the cow to the pasture over by the bog-side yonder. See, if thou lingerest I shall take the stick, as I took it yesterday.’

Apparently the threat was no idle one, for the little boy went off hurriedly. He entered the cottage, and in a few minutes he returned dragging a pail which was evidently too heavy for him, and with much exertion managed at last to empty its contents into a great stone trough. Then he let down some low wooden bars, and from a rough enclosure two or three long-legged, bony pigs rushed out, jostling one another, and almost knocking the little fellow over in their haste to get at their food.

He stood watching them dully, leaning against the gate almost as if he had not energy to go on to his next task.

Perhaps the woman noticed this, and perhaps the thought rose in her mind that it would not pay to work the little foreigner—whom her son Jacques had brought from Paris one cold January day, bidding her at all costs to keep him safely, and guard against any possibility of his escape—too hard. For he had already been ill once, and he might fall ill again; and if anything happened to him then the three francs which Jacques sent her regularly for his board would cease to arrive, and the little hoard of silver which she was gathering in the old cracked coffee-pot which stood on the shelf above her bed would grow no bigger, and that would be a thousand pities, for she cared more for silver francs than for children.

‘See here, Pierre,’ she said, going into the cottage and returning with two thick slices of rye-bread, between which she had placed a morsel of meat and a sliced shalot, ‘it is fine and warm in the sun, so thou and Nanette shall have a little fÊte. Here is thy dinner; thou canst carry it with thee, and lie out in the sun all day on the hillside, while Nanette grazes to her heart’s content. See, thou canst go at once. I can attend to the poultry.’

The boy took the sandwich, which the old woman wrapped up in a piece of greasy paper, and put it carefully away in a little wallet which he wore slung over his shoulder.

‘Shall I tether Nanette, madame, or shall I let her go free?’ he asked. He spoke in the same patois in which the woman had spoken, but his accent was strangely foreign.

‘Thou canst lead her with the rope until thou reachest the other side, and then thou canst let her graze where she will,’ replied the woman; ‘only thou must keep in sight of the cottage, and be home ere the sun goes down.’

She turned away, and the boy took down a length of rope from the wall, and deftly slipped it over the horns of a gentle-looking little dun cow which had come forward, and was licking the sides of the trough where the pigs had fed, in the vain hope that she might find some of their food still sticking to the edges.

He led her away, and the docile animal followed him quietly, for Breton cows are accustomed to being led out to graze, and soon the two were picking their way gingerly over the quaking bog, which was still soft with the winter rain. Once arrived at the other side, where there was a strip of short, sweet grass, the boy slipped the rope from Nanette’s horns, and, climbing a short way up the side of the hill, he lay down in the sun and began to think.

Poor little fellow! his thoughts were always the same, and they were sometimes so confused that he could hardly tell whether the things he thought about were real or not. They floated through his brain, broken up and confused, like the colours in a kaleidoscope, and there were only two things that he was ever quite certain about. One was that he had not always lived in the low thatched cottage which he had just left; the other, that he was an English boy, and not a French one.

There were other things which he remembered vaguely, and which he was sure were real, although the old woman at the cottage, Madame GenviÈve, as she was called, always said that they were but feverish dreams that had fixed themselves in his brain during the illness which he had had after he had come to live with her.

This illness had taken away his memory, so she told him, and had filled his head with strange fancies, and had made him forget that he was her grandson, and had always lived in Paris until his mother died, and his father—her son Jacques—had brought him to the little cottage in the Montagnes Noirs to be the comfort of his old grandmother’s failing years.

But somehow Pierre did not believe all this, although he had learned to hold his tongue: for at first, when he used to talk of a strange memory which was always in his mind, and would speak the language which came easiest to his tongue, she would look round anxiously as if she feared that some one might hear him, and then she would fly into a passion, and scold him, and even beat him; and afterwards, when her anger had cooled, and the fear had gone out of her eyes, she would stroke his head, and tell him that those were but sick fancies, which he must be careful to hide, in case the inspector down at ChÂteauneuf should hear about him, and take him away and shut him up in an institution, as he did to all people who thought such thoughts.

So Pierre learned to hold his tongue and keep his thoughts to himself. This had been easy at first, when the least effort to think made his head ache as though it would split; but it was more difficult now that the fine weather, and the long days spent in the open air, were making his poor little body, and his mind too, stronger.

To-day as he lay on the hillside in the sun these thoughts were clearer than ever. He remembered a big station, all lit up, and he was there with some one else, a grown-up man it seemed to him, who did not call him Pierre, but some other name which had quite a different sound. Bah! he did not remember, but that did not matter. Perhaps the name would come into his mind later, as other things had come. The gentleman had gone away somewhere, and had told him to wait, and he had waited. Then some other men had passed, carrying bags, and talking to one another. They were gentlemen, he could remember that, wearing warm coats with fur collars. As he was looking at them, suddenly the face of one of them grew into a coarse, bad face, with a stubbly beard and a patch over one eye, and it seemed to him that he wanted to catch that man very much. So he ran after him, and cried, ‘I know you! I know you!’ The man had passed, but he turned round, and, lo and behold! he had a gentleman’s face once more. Then, somehow, Pierre was in a railway carriage with the gentleman and his friends, and the train was moving, and he wanted to get out; but one of the men laughed and said something about his knowing too much. And then it seemed that in this strange memory he struggled, and tried to scream, and some one put his hand over his mouth. And then he tried to bite the hand; he remembered his teeth going into the soft flesh, then he must have fallen, for he felt a dreadful pain at the back of his head, and everything stopped for a while; and when he woke up he was in the little box-bed in the thatched cottage on the moor, and the old woman was sitting cowering over the peat-fire talking to a stranger, who presently put some money in her hand and went away.

The story was very vague and confused. There was much about it which he could not understand, and when he tried to remember any more his head always ached; but somehow he knew that it was true, and he knew too that he was an English boy, though why an English boy should be living with an old woman in the heart of the Montagnes Noirs was more than he could make out.

But slowly a great determination was forming itself in his poor confused mind, and that was that one day he would run away. He knew that somewhere, to the north, over these hills, lay St Brieuc, and St Brieuc was near the sea. So much he had learned from the neighbouring peasants whom he saw occasionally, though very, very rarely, and they knew, because at Easter-time they drove their lean pigs and cows to sell at the market there. And over the sea was England.

‘Some day,’ thought Pierre, as he opened his satchel and broke off a corner of his sandwich, ‘when the days are longer, and my legs do not feel so tired—in a month perhaps—I will run away, and walk to St Brieuc, and there perhaps I may find a boat, and I will go to England. And when I am in England, then I will remember.’