第61章

"Oh, madame," cried Farrabesche, "before long, when the rains begin, you will hear the torrent roar even at the chateau; but even that is nothing to what happens in spring when the snows melt. The water then rushes down from all parts of the forest behind Montegnac, from those great slopes which are back of the hills on which you have your park.

All the water of these mountains pours into this valley and makes a deluge. Luckily for you, the trees hold the earth; otherwise the land would slide into the valley."

"Where are the springs?" asked Madame Graslin, giving her full attention to what he said.

Farrabesche pointed to a narrow gorge which seemed to end the valley just below his house. "They are mostly on a clay plateau lying between the Limousin and the Correze; they are mere green pools during the summer, and lose themselves in the soil. No one lives in that unhealthy region. The cattle will not eat the grass or reeds that grow near the brackish water. That vast tract, which has more than three thousand acres in it, is an open common for three districts; but, like the plains of Montegnac, no use can be made of it. This side on your property, as I showed you, there is a little earth among the stones, but over there is nothing but sandy rock."

"Send your boy for the horses; I will ride over and see it for myself."

Benjamin departed, after Madame Graslin had shown him the direction in which he would find Maurice and the horses.

"You who know, so they tell me, every peculiarity of the country thoroughly," continued Madame Graslin, "explain to me how it is that the streams of my forest which are on the side of the mountain toward Montegnac, and ought therefore to send their waters down there, do not do so, neither in regular water-courses nor in sudden torrents after rains and the melting of the snows."

"Ah, madame," said Farrabesche, "the rector, who thinks all the time about the welfare of Montegnac, has guessed the reason, but he can't find any proof of it. Since your arrival, he has made me trace the path of the water from point to point through each ravine and valley.

I was returning yesterday, when I had the honor of meeting you, from the base of the Roche-Vive, where I carefully examined the lay of the land. Hearing the horses' feet, I came up to see who was there.

Monsieur Bonnet is not only a saint, madame; he is a man of great knowledge. 'Farrabesche,' he said to me (I was then working on the road the village has just built to the chateau, and the rector came to me and pointed to that chain of hills from Montegnac to Roche-Vive),--'Farrabesche,' he said, 'there must be some reason why that water-shed does not send any of its water to the plain; Nature must have made some sluiceway which carries it elsewhere.' Well, madame, that idea is so simple you would suppose any child might have thought it; yet no one since Montegnac existed, neither the great lords, nor their bailiffs, nor their foresters, nor the poor, nor the rich, none of those who saw that plain barren for want of water, ever asked themselves why the streams which now feed the Gabou do not come there.

The three districts above, which have constantly been afflicted with fevers in consequence of stagnant water, never looked for the remedy;

I myself, who live in the wilds, never dreamed of it; it needed a man of God."

The tears filled his eyes as he said the word.

"All that men of genius discover," said Madame Graslin, "seems so simple that every one thinks they might have discovered it themselves.

But," she added, as if to herself, "genius has this fine thing about it,--it resembles all the world, but no one resembles it."

"I understood Monsieur Bonnet at once," continued Farrabesche; "it did not take him many words to tell me what I had to do. Madame, this fact I tell you of is all the more singular because there are, toward the plain, great rents and fissures in the mountain, gorges and ravines down which the water flows; but, strange to say, these clefts and ravines and gorges all send their streams into a little valley which is several feet below the level of your plain. To-day I have discovered the reason of this phenomenon: from the Roche-Vive to Montegnac, at the foot of the mountains, runs a shelf or barricade of rock, varying in height from twenty to thirty feet; there is not a break in it from end to end; and it is formed of a species of rock which Monsieur Bonnet calls schist. The soil above it, which is of course softer than rock, has been hollowed out by the action of the water, which is turned at right angles by the barricade of rock, and thus flows naturally into the Gabou. The trees and underbrush of the forest conceal this formation and the hollowing out of the soil. But after following the course of the water, as I have done by the traces left of its passage, it is easy to convince any one of the fact. The Gabou thus receives the water-shed of both mountains,--that which ought to go down the mountain face on which your park and garden are to the plain, and that which comes down the rocky slopes before us.

According to Monsieur Bonnet the present state of things will crease when the water-shed toward the plain gains a natural outlet, and is dammed toward the Gabou by the earth and rocks which the mountain torrents bring down with them. It will take a hundred years to do that, however; and besides, it isn't desirable. If your soil will not take up more water than the great common you are now going to see, Montegnac would be full of stagnant pools, breeding fever in the community."

"I suppose that the places Monsieur Bonnet showed me the other day where the foliage of the trees is still green mark the present conduits by which the water falls into the Gabou?"