His right arm
had been badly wounded in a recent encounter at the national game
of the _Soule_, a sport resembling our English foot-ball; but
played on both sides in such savage earnest by the people of
Brittany as to end always in bloodshed, often in mutilation,
sometimes even in loss of life. On the same bench with Gabriel
sat his betrothed wife--a girl of eighteen--clothed in the plain,
almost monastic black-and-white costume of her native district.
She was the daughter of a small farmer living at some little
distance from the coast. Between the groups formed on either side
of the fire-place, the vacant space was occupied by the foot of a
truckle-bed. In this bed lay a very old man, the father of
Francois Sarzeau. His haggard face was covered with deep
wrinkles; his long white hair flowed over the coarse lump of
sacking which served him for a pillow, and his light gray eyes
wandered incessantly, with a strange expression of terror and
suspicion, from person to person, and from object to object, in
all parts of the room. Whenever the wind and sea whistled and
roared at their loudest, he muttered to himself and tossed his
hands fretfully on his wretched coverlet. On these occasions his
eyes always fixed themselves intently on a little delf image of
the Virgin placed in a niche over the fire-place. Every time they
saw him look in this direction Gabriel and the young girls
shuddered and crossed themselves; and even the child, who still
kept awake, imitated their example.
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