Angus B. Reach

“ A cry was heard without; the lights of the hamlet beneath disappeared; and then a shock from below made the chateau swing and rock, and white waves were all around them.
"The sea, my lord," said the seneschal, "has burst the sand-banks; the castle stands on low ground. We are all dead men—the sea—the sea!"
The Baron Armand turned to Klosso: "Does he speak truth?"
"The worthy gentleman," said the imp, "is perfectly in the right; you are all dead men; and, Monseigneur le Baron, when you gave me last a year of your life, you gave me the last you had to give." ”

“ Captain Jem at this moment returned on deck, carrying two large pistols.
‘If the schooner as much as scrapes a ridge of sand,’ says he, and he pressed the muzzle of one of the pistols so hard upon the dwarfs forehead, that when he took it away there was a round blue ring left above the eyebrow; ‘if the schooner as much as taps one oyster upon the coral, you cease to live!’
‘That is no news,’ answered the dwarf, with the old shrug of the shoulders; ‘if the schooner strikes we all of us cease to live. Pooh, pooh, man! bullying avails not now. ”

“ Then the wind began to blow, and vast rolling masses of mist to move before it. From a high ridge, with vast green slopes, all dotted with sheep, spreading away beneath until they blended with the corn-land on the plain, Bagnerre appeared, the great white hotels peeping from the trees, and the whole town lying as it were at the bottom of a bowl. It must be fearfully hot in summer, when the sun shines right down into the amphitheatre, and the high hills about, deaden every breeze. At present, however, the wind was rising to a gale, and blowing the heavy clouds right over the Pyrenees. ”

“ Behold us, then, seated in great conclave under an awning, which it was Stout Jem’s first precaution to have spread, as, the berths in the schooner being close and stifling, we desired to sleep in the open air. In such a case, the stretching of an awning preserves a crew from the fall of the unwholesome dews, and from the rays of the moon, which, mild and beautiful as they are, yet, by some hidden power, swell and distort the features of such as sleep with their faces unprotected from the baneful light. A sea-box put upon deck served as a table, and we sat on chests and coils of rope round it. ”

“ Then Baron Armand de Chatel-morant paced the room a long time in gloomy meditation. At length he sat down again, and said aloud: "There is no doubt of it—I am in love. That face haunts me; Toinette's face is ever floating opposite to me. 'Tis an odd feeling; I was never so before. But, since it is so, I must even have the maiden—she will cheer me—I love her face. I will send to-morrow to Bordeaux, as from her uncle; and when she comes here, by the star of Aldeboran, she stays here, Jacques Fort to the contrary notwithstanding!" ”

“ We were running five or six knots, with the cool land-breeze sighing in our sails. The heaven was one vault of stars, and, lying on deck wrapped up in folds of old canvas, while Nicky held the tiller beside me, I fixed my gaze upon the Southern Cross, that beautiful cluster of stars which shines only in the tropics, and which, appearing in the solemn and thoughtful night, always caused me to feel that I was in a strange part of the world, even more than the curious animals, and plants, and men, which one sees daily and ordinarily about one, when abroad. ”

“ Passing, for the present, Montpellier, where people with consumptions used to be sent to swallow dust, as likely to be soothing to the lungs, and to breathe the balmy zephyrs of the whispering mistral, I made straight for Lunel, in order to get from thence to one of the strangest old towns in France—Aigues-Mortes. All around us, as we hurried on, were vines and olives—a true land of wine and oil. The olive-tree did not improve on acquaintance—it got uglier and uglier—more formal, and more cast-iron looking, the more you saw of it. ”

“ At length, after great toil, I stood upon the top of the bank, and felt, to my joy, the cool blast of the strong sea-breeze, which rustled in the bushes, and soon blew away my insect enemies far to leeward. Then, mounting a moderate-sized eminence, I set myself to reconnoitre; and truly I might have deemed that I was in a desert and unpeopled land. Behind me rose great swelling ridges, extending above one another as far as my eye could reach, and all covered with bright green brushwood, with here and there one of the long feathery palm-trees standing up like a steeple over houses. ”

“ He, indeed, who enters the Landes, appears to have crossed a French frontier, and left the merry land behind. No more bright vineyards—no more rich fields of waving corn—no more clustered villages—no more chateau-turrets—no [Pg 66] more tapering spires. You look up to heaven to see whether the sky has not changed, as well as the land. No; all there is blue and serene as before, and the keen, hot sun glares intensely down upon undulating wastes of marsh, fir, and sand, among which you may travel for leagues without seeing a man, hearing a dog bark, or a bird sing. ”

“ The ocean is the most inscrutable of sepulchres. I know not, and no man knows, the place of their resting. The breeze was fair, and the sea smooth, which bore from Carthagena the ship in which they embarked to return to Spain. She was a stately merchantman, and as she left the port cannon thundered and church bells clashed from echoing steeples. Then spreading her fair white wings to the wind, and towering in her pride over the fleet of small craft which joyously, with shout and blessing, convoyed her out to sea—the good ship disappeared, holding her steady course for home. ”

“ A strange feature in the wine country is the wondrously capricious and fitful nature of the soil. A forenoon's walk will show you the earth altering in its surface qualities almost like the shifting hues of shot silk—gravel of a light colour fading into gravel of a [Pg 30] dark—sand blending with the mould, and bringing it now to a dusky yellow, now to an ashen grey—strata of chalky clay every now and then struggling into light only to melt away into beds of mere shingle—or bright semi-transparent pebbles, indebted to the action of water for shape and hue. ”

“ The bowman of the Spanish boat made a desperate leap, alighting with a surge on the stern of our shallop. Even while he was in the air, I started up to grapple with him. Our arms grasped each other’s doublets. I felt his hot breath on my cheek. We stood erect but for a moment, twining, as it were, around each other’s limbs, and then both of us, linked with brawny muscles together, fell splash into the sea, amid a great shout, which mingled in my ears with the rushing and gurgling of the water, into which we plunged. ”

“ So attired, then, with a gourd containing some wretched piquette hung across his shoulders, and provided with a store of rye-bread, baked, perhaps, three weeks before, a few dry sardines, and as many onions or cloves of garlic, the Landes shepherd sallies forth into the wilderness. He reckons himself a rich man, if his employer allows him, over and above his food, sixty francs a-year. From the rising to the setting of the sun, he never touches the ground, shuffling backwards and forwards on his stilts, or leaning against a pine, plying the never-pausing knitting-needle. ”

“ In a moment the flaming torches, shown from so many of the fleet, were blown out or quenched; but the great ship, burning a bright light in her main rigging, we saw her all lurid and blue in the glare, leaning heavily over to the blast, her slanting yards dotted with the seamen, who were taking in sail as fast as they had spread it forth. In a few minutes again all around was darkness, except where the glimmer of a lantern, tossing and tumbling as though a giant were flinging it from hand to hand, showed where one of the Pearl Fleet was jerking and straining at her anchor. ”

“ Presently, passing through a zone of stunted furze, and dry thin-bladed grass, we emerged into the most fearful desert I ever looked upon—a sea of heights and hollows, dells and ridges, long slopes and precipitous ravines—all of them composed of pure white, hot, drifting sand. The labour of walking was excessive. I longed for the stilts I had seen the day before. Every puff of breeze sent the sand, like dry pungent powder, into our faces, and sometimes we could see it reft from the peaks of the ridges, and blown like clouds of dust far out into the air. ”

“ As we looked, a canoe, with white men, came from the great ship, paddling fast towards us, and soon the white men leaped up among the corpses on the deck. They gave a great cry of horror when they saw all the planks covered with bodies, some sitting, some lying, some piled up upon each other in heaps—where fathers and sons, and brothers and sisters, and husbands and wives, had died together—and they were about to go back hastily into their canoe, but we all cried as with one voice for water. ”

“ Jasmin will not accept a stiver of money so earned. With a species of perhaps overstrained, but certainly exalted, chivalric feeling, he declines to appear before an audience to exhibit for money the gifts with which nature has endowed him. After, perhaps, a brilliant tour through the South of France, delighting vast audiences in every city, and flinging many thousands of francs into every poor-box which he passes, the poet contentedly returns to his humble occupation, and to the little shop where he earns his daily bread by his daily toil, as a barber and hairdresser. ”

“ Oh, heart of man, what strange wild tunes thou playest—what discords mingling with and marring thy harmonies—what harmonies mingling with and attuning thy discords! Courteous and rude, paltry and noble, magnanimous and base. A man can be all these in an hour, in a breath, the grandest and the foulest thing in nature!
Now, that I have told at length the strange chances which brought Don José and I face to face so often, and in such curious relations to each other at Carthagena, I would fain pass quickly over the story of my after stay in that city. ”

“ The true wind mingles with the flying dust a greyish or yellowish haze, through which the sun shines hot, yet cheerless. I had, however, a specimen of the wind, which quite satisfied me, and which certainly enables me to affirm, that the coldest, harshest, and most rheumatic easterly gale which ever whistled the fogs from Essex marshes over the dripping and shivering streets of London, is a genial, balmy, and ambrosial zephyr, compared with the mistral of the ridiculously bepuffed climate of the South of France. ”