“And very well too, Sir,” returned Berry, politely at his ease and unburdening himself of the heavier portions of the tool kit. “I can get along well enough in the Francy, but it takes time. . . and maybe you could tell me where I am, Sir, for it’s a matter of three hours since I knew!”
“This was St. Aubyn.” The priest spoke with long pauses and hesitations, as if not sure of what he would say. The little man, who had been standing aside with his meek look of inquiry bent on Berry, now said something friendly, helped him off with his coat, patted him into a chair near the brazier, and called gently, “Judic, Judic!” The old woman came back with something thin but hot in a bowl and a plate of bread. Berry shook his head at her, he had some rations left, he didn’t want to deprive them. . . But the curé said in his heavy voice, “You need not hesitate. There is plenty.” So he ate and drank, watched by three pairs of eyes that were singularly incurious; it was not so much that they were uninterested in him as that they were absorbed in something else. And Berry, trained by war to be never entirely trustful, wondered what it was. He resolved to know.
St. Aubyn. . . “You may well say. This _was_ St. Aubyn.” He addressed the company in general, and beamed on Mère Judic as she took away the empty bowl. “I’ve seen some places. . . None so bad as this, though. None so downright thorough. Which makes it all the queerer, if you’ll excuse me, to find this”—he circled a thumb slowly about the dim, quiet room—“to find anything so ’omelike as this at two-o’clock in the morning.” To himself he added, “You’ve a fine old face, Mossoo le cury, but it’s a listenin’ face. I wonder what you three are waitin’ here for?”
“You know where you are?” asked the priest, calmly. “You have perhaps heard of this—this town before?”
“I ’ave.” Berry was blunt. “Most of us ’ave. But I’d never ’ave thought to find a livin’ soul inside of it, though.”
“Ah!” The word was a slow sigh. “And yet there are three—living souls. Three.”
“What makes you stay?” asked Berry suddenly, and he had not meant to say it. “If it’d been me—if this’d been my town—”
“Yes?” The old man on the bench smiled faintly.
Berry leaned forward. “Well, look ’ere,” he went on rapidly, almost in a whisper, “wasn’t this where Von Eichensau turned the guns on a school—because ’e said a shot had come from a winder?”