At this time also, on an April afternoon, in open daylight, a wolf attacked the peasant girl Ettarre while she was watching the cow and the four sheep. She defended herself boldly with the fallen branch of an oak tree. After that, the stout reddish-colored animal drew back and sat down like a dog upon his haunches, at a more comfortably remote distance, of about twelve paces, and I thence looked at her for a moment or two. A thrush chirped and twittered overhead. The wolf presently yawned; he trotted away; and Ettarre at supper mentioned, as a curious circumstance, that the beast’s tail was pronged.
It was just after this that young Odo le Noir began his courtship of Ettarre the peasant girl, whom some believed to be a witch-woman, and now the boy followed her everywhither.
“Most charming Ettarre! my own heart’s darling!” he would say, “there was never anybody who was more white and tender than is your body.”
“But you, Black Odo, are much too dark for my taste.”
“I did not speak of taste, Ettarre. Yet your bright eyes so dazzle me that I know not of what I am speaking.”
“Your eyes, Black Odo, are too strange and deep-set. When, as so rarely happens, you look straight into my face, then your wild eyes, Black Odo, are made horrible by that red and flaring light which shows behind them.”
“Do you not laugh at me, Ettarre, but let us two be friends after the manner of the friendly beasts!”
“I would not have you laugh, black beast; for your teeth are long and sharp, and I loathe the sight of them.”
“Yet is my hunger for you very great—”
“And what is that to me, whose dislike of you is so much greater?”
“Let us touch hands, then, in farewell!”
“Not even your hand will I touch willingly, Black Odo, for your finger-nails are unpleasantly long and like the claws of a wolf.”
With that, the beautiful young girl fled away from him, across a meadow where cowslips grew. It seemed to Odo that a strange and troubling music followed after her. In any case, this meeting was but a sample of many other meetings. And never at any time would Ettarre listen to his wooing; but the boy Odo continued to desire this peasant girl.
Yet his most deep desires were for the Lord of Forest, and for the delights which they shared in Druid wood, and for the even larger gustos that were to be the rewards of Odo’s fearlessness by-and-by.
“I design great things for you, my Prettyman,” the Master would assure him, “and I intend that you shall go far in the service to which we are both enlisted.”
Even after Odo had been seized, and in the whiles that he lay in the dark prison at Lisuarte, the Master would come to him at night, and would fondle him, and; would repeat this assurance.
3. OF HIS CONFESSION AND CONVERSION
Black Odo was brought before the criminal court at Yair. He confessed everything, and departed from the truth only in saying it was Ettarre the wicked witch-woman, who had seduced his innocence; who had first led him to the Lord of the Forest; and who upon three occasions had rubbed him all over with the ointment and helped him into the wolf skin. But Ettarre, after she also had been fetched to Yair, would confess nothing. Her stubbornness was a calamity to the patience of her judges: yet these earnest men did not despair, but they tortured her white flesh again and again, even until she died, in their long-suffering attempts to win the obstinate girl to candor and repentance.
The tweezers and hammers and hot irons were not needed in cross-examining Odo, because he confessed freely whatsoever any one of his black-robed judges suggested, and then went edifyingly far beyond any merely judicial imaginings. Odo, called Le Noir, was therefore found guilty upon all counts.
Messire Gui de Puysange, president of the court, pronounced the sentence. His long fingers played idly with the large silver inkstand before him in the while that he was speaking. He pointed out that, thanks to the progress of science, in the enlightened age whose benefits they were all sharing, lycanthropy, or that form of mania in which the patient imagined himself to be, and acted as, a wolf, was now known to be an hallucination, or, as some learned persons thought, a form of chronic insanity; and, in either case, was, to the eyes of the considerate, more properly an affliction than a crime. The said Odo, called Le Noir, in consequence, and in consideration of his youth and of the corrupting influence exerted by his deceased paramour, and in consideration of his lack of educational advantages, should be sent to the monastery at Aigremont, for better restraint and rearing, and for the re-establishment of his mental and spiritual health, said Messire de Puysange. Science, gentlemen, said Messire de Puysange, science was at last, in these progressive times, teaching us how to deal sanely with the insane.
