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Title: The Man Who Laughs

Author: Victor Hugo

Release Date: June 11, 2004  [eBook #12587]

Language: English

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THE MAN WHO LAUGHS

A Romance of English History

By

VICTOR HUGO






CONTENTS



Preliminary Chapter.--Ursus
Another Preliminary Chapter.--The Comprachicos


PART I.

BOOK THE FIRST.--NIGHT NOT SO BLACK AS MAN.

I.     Portland Bill
II.    Left Alone
III.   Alone
IV.    Questions
V.     The Tree of Human Invention
VI.    Struggle between Death and Night
VII.   The North Point of Portland


BOOK THE SECOND.--THE HOOKER AT SEA.

I.     Superhuman Laws
II.    Our First Rough Sketches Filled in
III.   Troubled Men on the Troubled Sea
IV.    A Cloud Different from the Others enters on the Scene
V.     Hardquanonne
VI.    They Think that Help is at Hand
VII.   Superhuman Horrors
VIII.  Nix et Nox
IX.    The Charge Confided to a Raging Sea
X.     The Colossal Savage, the Storm
XI.    The Caskets
XII.   Face to Face with the Rock
XIII.  Face to Face with Night
XIV.   Ortach
XV.    Portentosum Mare
XVI.   The Problem Suddenly Works in Silence
XVII.  The Last Resource
XVIII. The Highest Resource


BOOK THE THIRD.--THE CHILD IN THE SHADOW.

I.     Chesil
II.    The Effect of Snow
III.   A Burden Makes a Rough Road Rougher
IV.    Another Form of Desert
V.     Misanthropy Plays Its Pranks
VI.    The Awaking


PART II.


BOOK THE FIRST.--THE EVERLASTING PRESENCE OF THE PAST. MAN REFLECTS MAN.

I.     Lord Clancharlie
II.    Lord David Dirry-Moir
III.   The Duchess Josiana
IV.    The Leader of Fashion
V.     Queen Anne
VI.    Barkilphedro
VII.   Barkilphedro Gnaws His Way
VIII.  Inferi
IX.    Hate is as Strong as Love
X.     The Flame which would be Seen if Man were Transparent
XI.    Barkilphedro in Ambuscade
XII.   Scotland, Ireland, and England


BOOK THE SECOND.--GWYNPLAINE AND DEA.

I.     Wherein we see the Face of Him of whom we have hitherto seen only
       the Acts
II.    Dea
III.   "Oculos non Habet, et Videt"
IV.    Well-matched Lovers
V.     The Blue Sky through the Black Cloud
VI.    Ursus as Tutor, and Ursus as Guardian
VII.   Blindness Gives Lessons in Clairvoyance
VIII.  Not only Happiness, but Prosperity
IX.    Absurdities which Folks without Taste call Poetry
X.     An Outsider's View of Men and Things
XI.    Gwynplaine Thinks Justice, and Ursus Talks Truth
XII.   Ursus the Poet Drags on Ursus the Philosopher


BOOK THE THIRD.--THE BEGINNING OF THE FISSURE.

I.     The Tadcaster Inn
II.    Open-Air Eloquence
III.   Where the Passer-by Reappears
IV.    Contraries Fraternize in Hate
V.     The Wapentake
VI.    The Mouse Examined by the Cats
VII.   Why Should a Gold Piece Lower Itself by Mixing with a Heap of
       Pennies?
VIII.  Symptoms of Poisoning
IX.    Abyssus Abyssum Vocat


BOOK THE FOURTH.--THE CELL OF TORTURE.

I.     The Temptation of St. Gwynplaine
II.    From Gay to Grave
III.   Lex, Rex, Fex
IV.    Ursus Spies the Police
V.     A Fearful Place
VI.    The Kind of Magistracy under the Wigs of Former Days
VII.   Shuddering
VIII.  Lamentation


BOOK THE FIFTH.--THE SEA AND FATE ARE MOVED BY THE SAME BREATH.

I.     The Durability of Fragile Things
II.    The Waif Knows Its Own Course
III.   An Awakening
IV.    Fascination
V.     We Think We Remember; We Forget


BOOK THE SIXTH.--URSUS UNDER DIFFERENT ASPECTS.

I.     What the Misanthrope said
II.    What He did
III.   Complications
IV.    Moenibus Surdis Campana Muta
V.     State Policy Deals with Little Matters as Well as with Great


BOOK THE SEVENTH.--THE TITANESS.

I.     The Awakening
II.    The Resemblance of a Palace to a Wood
III.   Eve
IV.    Satan
V.     They Recognize, but do not Know, Each Other


BOOK THE EIGHTH.--THE CAPITOL AND THINGS AROUND IT.

I.     Analysis of Majestic Matters
II.    Impartiality
III.   The Old Hall
IV.    The Old Chamber
V.     Aristocratic Gossip
VI.    The High and the Low
VII.   Storms of Men are Worse than Storms of Oceans
VIII.  He would be a Good Brother, were he not a Good Son


BOOK THE NINTH.--IN RUINS.

I.     It is through Excess of Greatness that Man reaches Excess of
       Misery
II.    The Dregs


CONCLUSION.--THE NIGHT AND THE SEA.

I.     A Watch-dog may be a Guardian Angel
II.    Barkilphedro, having aimed at the Eagle, brings down the Dove
III.   Paradise Regained Below
IV.    Nay; on High!






PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.


URSUS.

I.


Ursus and Homo were fast friends. Ursus was a man, Homo a wolf. Their
dispositions tallied. It was the man who had christened the wolf:
probably he had also chosen his own name. Having found _Ursus_ fit for
himself, he had found _Homo_ fit for the beast. Man and wolf turned
their partnership to account at fairs, at village fetes, at the corners
of streets where passers-by throng, and out of the need which people
seem to feel everywhere to listen to idle gossip and to buy quack
medicine. The wolf, gentle and courteously subordinate, diverted the
crowd. It is a pleasant thing to behold the tameness of animals. Our
greatest delight is to see all the varieties of domestication parade
before us. This it is which collects so many folks on the road of royal
processions.

Ursus and Homo went about from cross-road to cross-road, from the High
Street of Aberystwith to the High Street of Jedburgh, from country-side
to country-side, from shire to shire, from town to town. One market
exhausted, they went on to another. Ursus lived in a small van upon
wheels, which Homo was civilized enough to draw by day and guard by
night. On bad roads, up hills, and where there were too many ruts, or
there was too much mud, the man buckled the trace round his neck and
pulled fraternally, side by side with the wolf. They had thus grown old
together. They encamped at haphazard on a common, in the glade of a
wood, on the waste patch of grass where roads intersect, at the
outskirts of villages, at the gates of towns, in market-places, in
public walks, on the borders of parks, before the entrances of churches.
When the cart drew up on a fair green, when the gossips ran up
open-mouthed and the curious made a circle round the pair, Ursus
harangued and Homo approved. Homo, with a bowl in his mouth, politely
made a collection among the audience. They gained their livelihood. The
wolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by the
man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which
swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man,"
his friend would say to him.

Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then. At least, to bite was
the intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope, and to italicize his
misanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also; for the
stomach has to be consulted. Moreover, this juggler-misanthrope, whether
to add to the complexity of his being or to perfect it, was a doctor. To
be a doctor is little: Ursus was a ventriloquist. You heard him speak
without his moving his lips. He counterfeited, so as to deceive you, any
one's accent or pronunciation. He imitated voices so exactly that you
believed you heard the people themselves. All alone he simulated the
murmur of a crowd, and this gave him a right to the title of
Engastrimythos, which he took. He reproduced all sorts of cries of
birds, as of the thrush, the wren, the pipit lark, otherwise called the
gray cheeper, and the ring ousel, all travellers like himself: so that
at times when the fancy struck him, he made you aware either of a public
thoroughfare filled with the uproar of men, or of a meadow loud with the
voices of beasts--at one time stormy as a multitude, at another fresh
and serene as the dawn. Such gifts, although rare, exist. In the last
century a man called Touzel, who imitated the mingled utterances of men
and animals, and who counterfeited all the cries of beasts, was
attached to the person of Buffon--to serve as a menagerie.

Ursus was sagacious, contradictory, odd, and inclined to the singular
expositions which we term fables. He had the appearance of believing in
them, and this impudence was a part of his humour. He read people's
hands, opened books at random and drew conclusions, told fortunes,
taught that it is perilous to meet a black mare, still more perilous, as
you start for a journey, to hear yourself accosted by one who knows not
whither you are going; and he called himself a dealer in superstitions.
He used to say: "There is one difference between me and the Archbishop
of Canterbury: I avow what I am." Hence it was that the archbishop,
justly indignant, had him one day before him; but Ursus cleverly
disarmed his grace by reciting a sermon he had composed upon Christmas
Day, which the delighted archbishop learnt by heart, and delivered from
the pulpit as his own. In consideration thereof the archbishop pardoned
Ursus.

As a doctor, Ursus wrought cures by some means or other. He made use of
aromatics; he was versed in simples; he made the most of the immense
power which lies in a heap of neglected plants, such as the hazel, the
catkin, the white alder, the white bryony, the mealy-tree, the
traveller's joy, the buckthorn. He treated phthisis with the sundew; at
opportune moments he would use the leaves of the spurge, which plucked
at the bottom are a purgative and plucked at the top, an emetic. He
cured sore throat by means of the vegetable excrescence called Jew's
ear. He knew the rush which cures the ox and the mint which cures the
horse. He was well acquainted with the beauties and virtues of the herb
mandragora, which, as every one knows, is of both sexes. He had many
recipes. He cured burns with the salamander wool, of which, according to
Pliny, Nero had a napkin. Ursus possessed a retort and a flask; he
effected transmutations; he sold panaceas. It was said of him that he
had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour
to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he
was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit
to some such legend about us.

The fact is, Ursus was a bit of a savant, a man of taste, and an old
Latin poet. He was learned in two forms; he Hippocratized and he
Pindarized. He could have vied in bombast with Rapin and Vida. He could
have composed Jesuit tragedies in a style not less triumphant than that
of Father Bouhours. It followed from his familiarity with the venerable
rhythms and metres of the ancients, that he had peculiar figures of
speech, and a whole family of classical metaphors. He would say of a
mother followed by her two daughters, _There is a dactyl_; of a father
preceded by his two sons, _There is an anapaest_; and of a little child
walking between its grandmother and grandfather, _There is an
amphimacer_. So much knowledge could only end in starvation. The school
of Salerno says, "Eat little and often." Ursus ate little and seldom,
thus obeying one half the precept and disobeying the other; but this was
the fault of the public, who did not always flock to him, and who did
not often buy.

Ursus was wont to say: "The expectoration of a sentence is a relief. The
wolf is comforted by its howl, the sheep by its wool, the forest by its
finch, woman by her love, and the philosopher by his epiphonema." Ursus
at a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but acted; this
helped to sell the drugs. Among other works, he had composed an heroic
pastoral in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, who in 1608 brought a river to
London. The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty miles
from London: the knight came and took possession of it. He brought a
brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pickaxes; set to
breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it in
another--now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made wooden
aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundred
bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river entered
London, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgar
details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, in
which the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her his
bed, saying, "I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to pay
them"--an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh
Middleton had completed the work at his own expense.

Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once unsociable and
talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some
one, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who has
lived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one's
nature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue space is an
outlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue
with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of
Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus took after
those great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty of being his own
audience. He questioned himself, answered himself, praised himself,
blamed himself. You heard him in the street soliloquizing in his van.
The passers-by, who have their own way of appreciating clever people,
used to say: He is an idiot. As we have just observed, he abused himself
at times; but there were times also when he rendered himself justice.
One day, in one of these allocutions addressed to himself, he was heard
to cry out, "I have studied vegetation in all its mysteries--in the
stalk, in the bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the carpel, in the
ovule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the apothecium. I have
thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy--that is to say, the
formation of colours, of smell, and of taste." There was something
fatuous, doubtless, in this certificate which Ursus gave to Ursus; but
let those who have not thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy
cast the first stone at him.

Fortunately Ursus had never gone into the Low Countries; there they
would certainly have weighed him, to ascertain whether he was of the
normal weight, above or below which a man is a sorcerer. In Holland this
weight was sagely fixed by law. Nothing was simpler or more ingenious.
It was a clear test. They put you in a scale, and the evidence was
conclusive if you broke the equilibrium. Too heavy, you were hanged; too
light, you were burned. To this day the scales in which sorcerers were
weighed may be seen at Oudewater, but they are now used for weighing
cheeses; how religion has degenerated! Ursus would certainly have had a
crow to pluck with those scales. In his travels he kept away from
Holland, and he did well. Indeed, we believe that he used never to leave
the United Kingdom.

However this may have been, he was very poor and morose, and having made
the acquaintance of Homo in a wood, a taste for a wandering life had
come over him. He had taken the wolf into partnership, and with him had
gone forth on the highways, living in the open air the great life of
chance. He had a great deal of industry and of reserve, and great skill
in everything connected with healing operations, restoring the sick to
health, and in working wonders peculiar to himself. He was considered a
clever mountebank and a good doctor. As may be imagined, he passed for a
wizard as well--not much indeed; only a little, for it was unwholesome
in those days to be considered a friend of the devil. To tell the truth,
Ursus, by his passion for pharmacy and his love of plants, laid himself
open to suspicion, seeing that he often went to gather herbs in rough
thickets where grew Lucifer's salads, and where, as has been proved by
the Counsellor De l'Ancre, there is a risk of meeting in the evening
mist a man who comes out of the earth, "blind of the right eye,
barefooted, without a cloak, and a sword by his side." But for the
matter of that, Ursus, although eccentric in manner and disposition, was
too good a fellow to invoke or disperse hail, to make faces appear, to
kill a man with the torment of excessive dancing, to suggest dreams fair
or foul and full of terror, and to cause the birth of cocks with four
wings. He had no such mischievous tricks. He was incapable of certain
abominations, such as, for instance, speaking German, Hebrew, or Greek,
without having learned them, which is a sign of unpardonable wickedness,
or of a natural infirmity proceeding from a morbid humour. If Ursus
spoke Latin, it was because he knew it. He would never have allowed
himself to speak Syriac, which he did not know. Besides, it is asserted
that Syriac is the language spoken in the midnight meetings at which
uncanny people worship the devil. In medicine he justly preferred Galen
to Cardan; Cardan, although a learned man, being but an earthworm to
Galen.

To sum up, Ursus was not one of those persons who live in fear of the
police. His van was long enough and wide enough to allow of his lying
down in it on a box containing his not very sumptuous apparel. He owned
a lantern, several wigs, and some utensils suspended from nails, among
which were musical instruments. He possessed, besides, a bearskin with
which he covered himself on his days of grand performance. He called
this putting on full dress. He used to say, "I have two skins; this is
the real one," pointing to the bearskin.

The little house on wheels belonged to himself and to the wolf. Besides
his house, his retort, and his wolf, he had a flute and a violoncello on
which he played prettily. He concocted his own elixirs. His wits yielded
him enough to sup on sometimes. In the top of his van was a hole,
through which passed the pipe of a cast-iron stove; so close to his box
as to scorch the wood of it. The stove had two compartments; in one of
them Ursus cooked his chemicals, and in the other his potatoes. At night
the wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain. Homo's hair
was black, that of Ursus, gray; Ursus was fifty, unless, indeed, he was
sixty. He accepted his destiny, to such an extent that, as we have just
seen, he ate potatoes, the trash on which at that time they fed pigs and
convicts. He ate them indignant, but resigned. He was not tall--he was
long. He was bent and melancholy. The bowed frame of an old man is the
settlement in the architecture of life. Nature had formed him for
sadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been able to
weep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears as well as of
the palliative of joy. An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruin
was Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a
prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was Ursus. In his
youth he had been a philosopher in the house of a lord.

This was 180 years ago, when men were more like wolves than they are
now.

Not so very much though.




II.


Homo was no ordinary wolf. From his appetite for medlars and potatoes he
might have been taken for a prairie wolf; from his dark hide, for a
lycaon; and from his howl prolonged into a bark, for a dog of Chili. But
no one has as yet observed the eyeball of a dog of Chili sufficiently to
enable us to determine whether he be not a fox, and Homo was a real
wolf. He was five feet long, which is a fine length for a wolf, even in
Lithuania; he was very strong; he looked at you askance, which was not
his fault; he had a soft tongue, with which he occasionally licked
Ursus; he had a narrow brush of short bristles on his backbone, and he
was lean with the wholesome leanness of a forest life. Before he knew
Ursus and had a carriage to draw, he thought nothing of doing his fifty
miles a night. Ursus meeting him in a thicket near a stream of running
water, had conceived a high opinion of him from seeing the skill and
sagacity with which he fished out crayfish, and welcomed him as an
honest and genuine Koupara wolf of the kind called crab-eater.

As a beast of burden, Ursus preferred Homo to a donkey. He would have
felt repugnance to having his hut drawn by an ass; he thought too highly
of the ass for that. Moreover he had observed that the ass, a
four-legged thinker little understood by men, has a habit of cocking his
ears uneasily when philosophers talk nonsense. In life the ass is a
third person between our thoughts and ourselves, and acts as a
restraint. As a friend, Ursus preferred Homo to a dog, considering that
the love of a wolf is more rare.

Hence it was that Homo sufficed for Ursus. Homo was for Ursus more than
a companion, he was an analogue. Ursus used to pat the wolf's empty
ribs, saying: "I have found the second volume of myself!" Again he
said, "When I am dead, any one wishing to know me need only study Homo.
I shall leave a true copy behind me."

The English law, not very lenient to beasts of the forest, might have
picked a quarrel with the wolf, and have put him to trouble for his
assurance in going freely about the towns: but Homo took advantage of
the immunity granted by a statute of Edward IV. to servants: "Every
servant in attendance on his master is free to come and go." Besides, a
certain relaxation of the law had resulted with regard to wolves, in
consequence of its being the fashion of the ladies of the Court, under
the later Stuarts, to have, instead of dogs, little wolves, called
adives, about the size of cats, which were brought from Asia at great
cost.

Ursus had communicated to Homo a portion of his talents: such as to
stand upright, to restrain his rage into sulkiness, to growl instead of
howling, etc.; and on his part, the wolf had taught the man what _he_
knew--to do without a roof, without bread and fire, to prefer hunger in
the woods to slavery in a palace.

The van, hut, and vehicle in one, which traversed so many different
roads, without, however, leaving Great Britain, had four wheels, with
shafts for the wolf and a splinter-bar for the man. The splinter-bar
came into use when the roads were bad. The van was strong, although it
was built of light boards like a dove-cot. In front there was a glass
door with a little balcony used for orations, which had something of the
character of the platform tempered by an air of the pulpit. At the back
there was a door with a practicable panel. By lowering the three steps
which turned on a hinge below the door, access was gained to the hut,
which at night was securely fastened with bolt and lock. Rain and snow
had fallen plentifully on it; it had been painted, but of what colour it
was difficult to say, change of season being to vans what changes of
reign are to courtiers. In front, outside, was a board, a kind of
frontispiece, on which the following inscription might once have been
deciphered; it was in black letters on a white ground, but by degrees
the characters had become confused and blurred:--

"By friction gold loses every year a fourteen hundredth part of its
bulk. This is what is called the Wear. Hence it follows that on fourteen
hundred millions of gold in circulation throughout the world, one
million is lost annually. This million dissolves into dust, flies away,
floats about, is reduced to atoms, charges, drugs, weighs down
consciences, amalgamates with the souls of the rich whom it renders
proud, and with those of the poor whom it renders brutish."

The inscription, rubbed and blotted by the rain and by the kindness of
nature, was fortunately illegible, for it is possible that its
philosophy concerning the inhalation of gold, at the same time both
enigmatical and lucid, might not have been to the taste of the sheriffs,
the provost-marshals, and other big-wigs of the law. English legislation
did not trifle in those days. It did not take much to make a man a
felon. The magistrates were ferocious by tradition, and cruelty was a
matter of routine. The judges of assize increased and multiplied.
Jeffreys had become a breed.




III.

In the interior of the van there were two other inscriptions. Above the
box, on a whitewashed plank, a hand had written in ink as follows:--

    "THE ONLY THINGS NECESSARY TO KNOW.

"The Baron, peer of England, wears a cap with six pearls. The coronet
begins with the rank of Viscount. The Viscount wears a coronet of which
the pearls are without number. The Earl a coronet with the pearls upon
points, mingled with strawberry leaves placed low between. The Marquis,
one with pearls and leaves on the same level. The Duke, one with
strawberry leaves alone--no pearls. The Royal Duke, a circlet of crosses
and fleurs de lys. The Prince of Wales, crown like that of the King, but
unclosed.

"The Duke is a most high and most puissant prince, the Marquis and Earl
most noble and puissant lord, the Viscount noble and puissant lord, the
Baron a trusty lord. The Duke is his Grace; the other Peers their
Lordships. _Most honourable_ is higher than _right honourable_.

"Lords who are peers are lords in their own right. Lords who are not
peers are lords by courtesy:--there are no real lords, excepting such as
are peers.

"The House of Lords is a chamber and a court, _Concilium et Curia_,
legislature and court of justice. The Commons, who are the people, when
ordered to the bar of the Lords, humbly present themselves bareheaded
before the peers, who remain covered. The Commons send up their bills by
forty members, who present the bill with three low bows. The Lords send
their bills to the Commons by a mere clerk. In case of disagreement, the
two Houses confer in the Painted Chamber, the Peers seated and covered,
the Commons standing and bareheaded.

"Peers go to parliament in their coaches in file; the Commons do not.
Some peers go to Westminster in open four-wheeled chariots. The use of
these and of coaches emblazoned with coats of arms and coronets is
allowed only to peers, and forms a portion of their dignity.

"Barons have the same rank as bishops. To be a baron peer of England, it
is necessary to be in possession of a tenure from the king _per Baroniam
integram_, by full barony. The full barony consists of thirteen knights'
fees and one third part, each knight's fee being of the value of L20
sterling, which makes in all 400 marks. The head of a barony (_Caput
baroniae_) is a castle disposed by inheritance, as England herself, that
is to say, descending to daughters if there be no sons, and in that case
going to the eldest daughter, _caeteris filiabus aliunde satisfactis_.[1]

"Barons have the degree of lord: in Saxon, _laford_; _dominus_ in high
Latin; _Lordus_ in low Latin. The eldest and younger sons of viscounts
and barons are the first esquires in the kingdom. The eldest sons of
peers take precedence of knights of the garter. The younger sons do
not. The eldest son of a viscount comes after all barons, and precedes
all baronets. Every daughter of a peer is a _Lady_. Other English girls
are plain _Mistress_.

"All judges rank below peers. The serjeant wears a lambskin tippet; the
judge one of patchwork, _de minuto vario_, made up of a variety of
little white furs, always excepting ermine. Ermine is reserved for peers
and the king.

"A lord never takes an oath, either to the crown or the law. His word
suffices; he says, Upon my honour.

"By a law of Edward the Sixth, peers have the privilege of committing
manslaughter. A peer who kills a man without premeditation is not
prosecuted.

"The persons of peers are inviolable.

"A peer cannot be held in durance, save in the Tower of London.

"A writ of supplicavit cannot be granted against a peer.

"A peer sent for by the king has the right to kill one or two deer in
the royal park.

"A peer holds in his castle a baron's court of justice.

"It is unworthy of a peer to walk the street in a cloak, followed by two
footmen. He should only show himself attended by a great train of
gentlemen of his household.

"A peer can be amerced only by his peers, and never to any greater
amount than five pounds, excepting in the case of a duke, who can be
amerced ten.

"A peer may retain six aliens born, any other Englishman but four.

"A peer can have wine custom-free; an earl eight tuns.

"A peer is alone exempt from presenting himself before the sheriff of
the circuit.

"A peer cannot be assessed towards the militia.

"When it pleases a peer he raises a regiment and gives it to the king;
thus have done their graces the Dukes of Athol, Hamilton, and
Northumberland.

"A peer can hold only of a peer.

"In a civil cause he can demand the adjournment of the case, if there be
not at least one knight on the jury.

"A peer nominates his own chaplains. A baron appoints three chaplains;
a viscount four; an earl and a marquis five; a duke six.

"A peer cannot be put to the rack, even for high treason. A peer cannot
be branded on the hand. A peer is a clerk, though he knows not how to
read. In law he knows.

"A duke has a right to a canopy, or cloth of state, in all places where
the king is not present; a viscount may have one in his house; a baron
has a cover of assay, which may be held under his cup while he drinks. A
baroness has the right to have her train borne by a man in the presence
of a viscountess.

"Eighty-six tables, with five hundred dishes, are served every day in
the royal palace at each meal.

"If a plebeian strike a lord, his hand is cut off.

"A lord is very nearly a king.

"The king is very nearly a god.

"The earth is a lordship.

"The English address God as my lord!"

Opposite this writing was written a second one, in the same fashion,
which ran thus:--

"SATISFACTION WHICH MUST SUFFICE THOSE WHO HAVE NOTHING.

"Henry Auverquerque, Earl of Grantham, who sits in the House of Lords
between the Earl of Jersey and the Earl of Greenwich, has a hundred
thousand a year. To his lordship belongs the palace of Grantham Terrace,
built all of marble and famous for what is called the labyrinth of
passages--a curiosity which contains the scarlet corridor in marble of
Sarancolin, the brown corridor in lumachel of Astracan, the white
corridor in marble of Lani, the black corridor in marble of Alabanda,
the gray corridor in marble of Staremma, the yellow corridor in marble
of Hesse, the green corridor in marble of the Tyrol, the red corridor,
half cherry-spotted marble of Bohemia, half lumachel of Cordova, the
blue corridor in turquin of Genoa, the violet in granite of Catalonia,
the mourning-hued corridor veined black and white in slate of Murviedro,
the pink corridor in cipolin of the Alps, the pearl corridor in lumachel
of Nonetta, and the corridor of all colours, called the courtiers'
corridor, in motley.

"Richard Lowther, Viscount Lonsdale, owns Lowther in Westmorland, which
has a magnificent approach, and a flight of entrance steps which seem to
invite the ingress of kings.

"Richard, Earl of Scarborough, Viscount and Baron Lumley of Lumley
Castle, Viscount Lumley of Waterford in Ireland, and Lord Lieutenant and
Vice-Admiral of the county of Northumberland and of Durham, both city
and county, owns the double castleward of old and new Sandbeck, where
you admire a superb railing, in the form of a semicircle, surrounding
the basin of a matchless fountain. He has, besides, his castle of
Lumley.

"Robert Darcy, Earl of Holderness, has his domain of Holderness, with
baronial towers, and large gardens laid out in French fashion, where he
drives in his coach-and-six, preceded by two outriders, as becomes a
peer of England.

"Charles Beauclerc, Duke of St. Albans, Earl of Burford, Baron
Hedington, Grand Falconer of England, has an abode at Windsor, regal
even by the side of the king's.

"Charles Bodville Robartes, Baron Robartes of Truro, Viscount Bodmin and
Earl of Radnor, owns Wimpole in Cambridgeshire, which is as three
palaces in one, having three facades, one bowed and two triangular. The
approach is by an avenue of trees four deep.

"The most noble and most puissant Lord Philip, Baron Herbert of Cardiff,
Earl of Montgomery and of Pembroke, Ross of Kendall, Parr, Fitzhugh,
Marmion, St. Quentin, and Herbert of Shurland, Warden of the Stannaries
in the counties of Cornwall and Devon, hereditary visitor of Jesus
College, possesses the wonderful gardens at Wilton, where there are two
sheaf-like fountains, finer than those of his most Christian Majesty
King Louis XIV. at Versailles.

"Charles Somerset, Duke of Somerset, owns Somerset House on the Thames,
which is equal to the Villa Pamphili at Rome. On the chimney-piece are
seen two porcelain vases of the dynasty of the Yuens, which are worth
half a million in French money.

"In Yorkshire, Arthur, Lord Ingram, Viscount Irwin, has Temple Newsain,
which is entered under a triumphal arch and which has large wide roofs
resembling Moorish terraces.

"Robert, Lord Ferrers of Chartly, Bourchier, and Lonvaine, has Staunton
Harold in Leicestershire, of which the park is geometrically planned in
the shape of a temple with a facade, and in front of the piece of water
is the great church with the square belfry, which belongs to his
lordship.

"In the county of Northampton, Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland,
member of his Majesty's Privy Council, possesses Althorp, at the
entrance of which is a railing with four columns surmounted by groups in
marble.

"Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, has, in Surrey, New Park, rendered
magnificent by its sculptured pinnacles, its circular lawn belted by
trees, and its woodland, at the extremity of which is a little mountain,
artistically rounded, and surmounted by a large oak, which can be seen
from afar.

"Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, possesses Bretby Hall in
Derbyshire, with a splendid clock tower, falconries, warrens, and very
fine sheets of water, long, square, and oval, one of which is shaped
like a mirror, and has two jets, which throw the water to a great
height.

"Charles Cornwallis, Baron Cornwallis of Eye, owns Broome Hall, a palace
of the fourteenth century.

"The most noble Algernon Capel, Viscount Maiden, Earl of Essex, has
Cashiobury in Hertfordshire, a seat which has the shape of a capital H,
and which rejoices sportsmen with its abundance of game.

"Charles, Lord Ossulston, owns Darnley in Middlesex, approached by
Italian gardens.

"James Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, has, seven leagues from London,
Hatfield House, with its four lordly pavilions, its belfry in the
centre, and its grand courtyard of black and white slabs, like that of
St. Germain. This palace, which has a frontage 272 feet in length, was
built in the reign of James I. by the Lord High Treasurer of England,
the great-grandfather of the present earl. To be seen there is the bed
of one of the Countesses of Salisbury: it is of inestimable value and
made entirely of Brazilian wood, which is a panacea against the bites of
serpents, and which is called _milhombres_--that is to say, a thousand
men. On this bed is inscribed, _Honi soit qui mal y pense_.

"Edward Rich, Earl of Warwick and Holland, is owner of Warwick Castle,
where whole oaks are burnt in the fireplaces.

"In the parish of Sevenoaks, Charles Sackville, Baron Buckhurst, Baron
Cranfield, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, is owner of Knowle, which is as
large as a town and is composed of three palaces standing parallel one
behind the other, like ranks of infantry. There are six covered flights
of steps on the principal frontage, and a gate under a keep with four
towers.

"Thomas Thynne, Baron Thynne of Warminster, and Viscount Weymouth,
possesses Longleat, in which there are as many chimneys, cupolas,
pinnacles, pepper-boxes pavilions, and turrets as at Chambord, in
France, which belongs to the king.

"Henry Howard, Earl of Suffolk, owns, twelve leagues from London, the
palace of Audley End in Essex, which in grandeur and dignity scarcely
yields the palm to the Escorial of the King of Spain.

"In Bedfordshire, Wrest House and Park, which is a whole district,
enclosed by ditches, walls, woodlands, rivers, and hills, belongs to
Henry, Marquis of Kent.

"Hampton Court, in Herefordshire, with its strong embattled keep, and
its gardens bounded by a piece of water which divides them from the
forest, belongs to Thomas, Lord Coningsby.

"Grimsthorp, in Lincolnshire, with its long facade intersected by
turrets in pale, its park, its fish-ponds, its pheasantries, its
sheepfolds, its lawns, its grounds planted with rows of trees, its
groves, its walks, its shrubberies, its flower-beds and borders, formed
in square and lozenge-shape, and resembling great carpets; its
racecourses, and the majestic sweep for carriages to turn in at the
entrance of the house--belongs to Robert, Earl Lindsey, hereditary lord
of the forest of Waltham.

"Up Park, in Sussex, a square house, with two symmetrical belfried
pavilions on each side of the great courtyard, belongs to the Right
Honourable Forde, Baron Grey of Werke, Viscount Glendale and Earl of
Tankerville.

"Newnham Paddox, in Warwickshire, which has two quadrangular fish-ponds
and a gabled archway with a large window of four panes, belongs to the
Earl of Denbigh, who is also Count von Rheinfelden, in Germany.

"Wytham Abbey, in Berkshire, with its French garden in which there are
four curiously trimmed arbours, and its great embattled towers,
supported by two bastions, belongs to Montague, Earl of Abingdon, who
also owns Rycote, of which he is Baron, and the principal door of which
bears the device _Virtus ariete fortior_.

"William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, has six dwelling-places, of
which Chatsworth (two storied, and of the finest order of Grecian
architecture) is one.

"The Viscount of Kinalmeaky, who is Earl of Cork, in Ireland, is owner
of Burlington House, Piccadilly, with its extensive gardens, reaching to
the fields outside London; he is also owner of Chiswick, where there are
nine magnificent lodges; he also owns Londesborough, which is a new
house by the side of an old palace.

"The Duke of Beaufort owns Chelsea, which contains two Gothic buildings,
and a Florentine one; he has also Badminton, in Gloucestershire, a
residence from which a number of avenues branch out like rays from a
star. The most noble and puissant Prince Henry, Duke of Beaufort, is
also Marquis and Earl of Worcester, Earl of Glamorgan, Viscount
Grosmont, and Baron Herbert of Chepstow, Ragland, and Gower, Baron
Beaufort of Caldecott Castle, and Baron de Bottetourt.

"John Holies, Duke of Newcastle, and Marquis of Clare, owns Bolsover,
with its majestic square keeps; his also is Haughton, in
Nottinghamshire, where a round pyramid, made to imitate the Tower of
Babel, stands in the centre of a basin of water.

"William, Earl of Craven, Viscount Uffington, and Baron Craven of
Hamstead Marshall, owns Combe Abbey in Warwickshire, where is to be seen
the finest water-jet in England; and in Berkshire two baronies, Hamstead
Marshall, on the facade of which are five Gothic lanterns sunk in the
wall, and Ashdown Park, which is a country seat situate at the point of
intersection of cross-roads in a forest.

"Linnaeus, Lord Clancharlie, Baron Clancharlie and Hunkerville, Marquis
of Corleone in Sicily, derives his title from the castle of Clancharlie,
built in 912 by Edward the Elder, as a defence against the Danes.
Besides Hunkerville House, in London, which is a palace, he has Corleone
Lodge at Windsor, which is another, and eight castlewards, one at
Burton-on-Trent, with a royalty on the carriage of plaster of Paris;
then Grumdaith Humble, Moricambe, Trewardraith, Hell-Kerters (where
there is a miraculous well), Phillinmore, with its turf bogs, Reculver,
near the ancient city Vagniac, Vinecaunton, on the Moel-eulle Mountain;
besides nineteen boroughs and villages with reeves, and the whole of
Penneth chase, all of which bring his lordship L40,000 a year.

"The 172 peers enjoying their dignities under James II. possess among
them altogether a revenue of L1,272,000 sterling a year, which is the
eleventh part of the revenue of England."

In the margin, opposite the last name (that of Linnaeus, Lord
Clancharlie), there was a note in the handwriting of Ursus: _Rebel; in
exile; houses, lands, and chattels sequestrated. It is well_.




IV.


Ursus admired Homo. One admires one's like. It is a law. To be always
raging inwardly and grumbling outwardly was the normal condition of
Ursus. He was the malcontent of creation. By nature he was a man ever in
opposition. He took the world unkindly; he gave his satisfecit to no one
and to nothing. The bee did not atone, by its honey-making, for its
sting; a full-blown rose did not absolve the sun for yellow fever and
black vomit. It is probable that in secret Ursus criticized Providence a
good deal. "Evidently," he would say, "the devil works by a spring, and
the wrong that God does is having let go the trigger." He approved of
none but princes, and he had his own peculiar way of expressing his
approbation. One day, when James II. made a gift to the Virgin in a
Catholic chapel in Ireland of a massive gold lamp, Ursus, passing that
way with Homo, who was more indifferent to such things, broke out in
admiration before the crowd, and exclaimed, "It is certain that the
blessed Virgin wants a lamp much more than these barefooted children
there require shoes."

Such proofs of his loyalty, and such evidences of his respect for
established powers, probably contributed in no small degree to make the
magistrates tolerate his vagabond life and his low alliance with a wolf.
Sometimes of an evening, through the weakness of friendship, he allowed
Homo to stretch his limbs and wander at liberty about the caravan. The
wolf was incapable of an abuse of confidence, and behaved in society,
that is to say among men, with the discretion of a poodle. All the same,
if bad-tempered officials had to be dealt with, difficulties might have
arisen; so Ursus kept the honest wolf chained up as much as possible.

From a political point of view, his writing about gold, not very
intelligible in itself, and now become undecipherable, was but a smear,
and gave no handle to the enemy. Even after the time of James II., and
under the "respectable" reign of William and Mary, his caravan might
have been seen peacefully going its rounds of the little English country
towns. He travelled freely from one end of Great Britain to the other,
selling his philtres and phials, and sustaining, with the assistance of
his wolf, his quack mummeries; and he passed with ease through the
meshes of the nets which the police at that period had spread all over
England in order to sift wandering gangs, and especially to stop the
progress of the Comprachicos.

This was right enough. Ursus belonged to no gang. Ursus lived with
Ursus, a _tete-a-tete_, into which the wolf gently thrust his nose. If
Ursus could have had his way, he would have been a Caribbee; that being
impossible, he preferred to be alone. The solitary man is a modified
savage, accepted by civilization. He who wanders most is most alone;
hence his continual change of place. To remain anywhere long suffocated
him with the sense of being tamed. He passed his life in passing on his
way. The sight of towns increased his taste for brambles, thickets,
thorns, and holes in the rock. His home was the forest. He did not feel
himself much out of his element in the murmur of crowded streets, which
is like enough to the bluster of trees. The crowd to some extent
satisfies our taste for the desert. What he disliked in his van was its
having a door and windows, and thus resembling a house. He would have
realized his ideal, had he been able to put a cave on four wheels and
travel in a den.

He did not smile, as we have already said, but he used to laugh;
sometimes, indeed frequently, a bitter laugh. There is consent in a
smile, while a laugh is often a refusal.

His great business was to hate the human race. He was implacable in that
hate. Having made it clear that human life is a dreadful thing; having
observed the superposition of evils, kings on the people, war on kings,
the plague on war, famine on the plague, folly on everything; having
proved a certain measure of chastisement in the mere fact of existence;
having recognized that, death is a deliverance--when they brought him a
sick man he cured him; he had cordials and beverages to prolong the
lives of the old. He put lame cripples on their legs again, and hurled
this sarcasm at them, "There, you are on your paws once more; may you
walk long in this valley of tears!" When he saw a poor man dying of
hunger, he gave him all the pence he had about him, growling out, "Live
on, you wretch! eat! last a long time! It is not I who would shorten
your penal servitude." After which, he would rub his hands and say, "I
do men all the harm I can."

Through the little window at the back, passers-by could read on the
ceiling of the van these words, written within, but visible from
without, inscribed with charcoal, in big letters,--

                     URSUS, PHILOSOPHER.




ANOTHER PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.


THE COMPRACHICOS.

I.


Who now knows the word Comprachicos, and who knows its meaning?

The Comprachicos, or Comprapequenos, were a hideous and nondescript
association of wanderers, famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the
18th, unheard of in the 19th. The Comprachicos are like the "succession
powder," an ancient social characteristic detail. They are part of old
human ugliness. To the great eye of history, which sees everything
collectively, the Comprachicos belong to the colossal fact of slavery.
Joseph sold by his brethren is a chapter in their story. The
Comprachicos have left their traces in the penal laws of Spain and
England. You find here and there in the dark confusion of English laws
the impress of this horrible truth, like the foot-print of a savage in a
forest.

Comprachicos, the same as Comprapequenos, is a compound Spanish word
signifying Child-buyers.

The Comprachicos traded in children. They bought and sold them. They did
not steal them. The kidnapping of children is another branch of
industry. And what did they make of these children?

Monsters.

Why monsters?

To laugh at.

The populace must needs laugh, and kings too. The mountebank is wanted
in the streets, the jester at the Louvre. The one is called a Clown, the
other a Fool.

The efforts of man to procure himself pleasure are at times worthy of
the attention of the philosopher.

What are we sketching in these few preliminary pages? A chapter in the
most terrible of books; a book which might be entitled--_The farming of
the unhappy by the happy_.




II.


A child destined to be a plaything for men--such a thing has existed;
such a thing exists even now. In simple and savage times such a thing
constituted an especial trade. The 17th century, called the great
century, was of those times. It was a century very Byzantine in tone. It
combined corrupt simplicity with delicate ferocity--a curious variety of
civilization. A tiger with a simper. Madame de Sevigne minces on the
subject of the fagot and the wheel. That century traded a good deal in
children. Flattering historians have concealed the sore, but have
divulged the remedy, Vincent de Paul.

In order that a human toy should succeed, he must be taken early. The
dwarf must be fashioned when young. We play with childhood. But a
well-formed child is not very amusing; a hunchback is better fun.

Hence grew an art. There were trainers who took a man and made him an
abortion; they took a face and made a muzzle; they stunted growth; they
kneaded the features. The artificial production of teratological cases
had its rules. It was quite a science--what one can imagine as the
antithesis of orthopedy. Where God had put a look, their art put a
squint; where God had made harmony, they made discord; where God had
made the perfect picture, they re-established the sketch; and, in the
eyes of connoisseurs, it was the sketch which was perfect. They debased
animals as well; they invented piebald horses. Turenne rode a piebald
horse. In our own days do they not dye dogs blue and green? Nature is
our canvas. Man has always wished to add something to God's work. Man
retouches creation, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The Court
buffoon was nothing but an attempt to lead back man to the monkey. It
was a progress the wrong way. A masterpiece in retrogression. At the
same time they tried to make a man of the monkey. Barbara, Duchess of
Cleveland and Countess of Southampton, had a marmoset for a page.
Frances Sutton, Baroness Dudley, eighth peeress in the bench of barons,
had tea served by a baboon clad in cold brocade, which her ladyship
called My Black. Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, used to go
and take her seat in Parliament in a coach with armorial bearings,
behind which stood, their muzzles stuck up in the air, three Cape
monkeys in grand livery. A Duchess of Medina-Celi, whose toilet Cardinal
Pole witnessed, had her stockings put on by an orang-outang. These
monkeys raised in the scale were a counterpoise to men brutalized and
bestialized. This promiscuousness of man and beast, desired by the
great, was especially prominent in the case of the dwarf and the dog.
The dwarf never quitted the dog, which was always bigger than himself.
The dog was the pair of the dwarf; it was as if they were coupled with a
collar. This juxtaposition is authenticated by a mass of domestic
records--notably by the portrait of Jeffrey Hudson, dwarf of Henrietta
of France, daughter of Henri IV., and wife of Charles I.

To degrade man tends to deform him. The suppression of his state was
completed by disfigurement. Certain vivisectors of that period succeeded
marvellously well in effacing from the human face the divine effigy.
Doctor Conquest, member of the Amen Street College, and judicial visitor
of the chemists' shops of London, wrote a book in Latin on this
pseudo-surgery, the processes of which he describes. If we are to
believe Justus of Carrickfergus, the inventor of this branch of surgery
was a monk named Avonmore--an Irish word signifying Great River.

The dwarf of the Elector Palatine, Perkeo, whose effigy--or
ghost--springs from a magical box in the cave of Heidelberg, was a
remarkable specimen of this science, very varied in its applications. It
fashioned beings the law of whose existence was hideously simple: it
permitted them to suffer, and commanded them to amuse.




III.


The manufacture of monsters was practised on a large scale, and
comprised various branches.

The Sultan required them, so did the Pope; the one to guard his women,
the other to say his prayers. These were of a peculiar kind, incapable
of reproduction. Scarcely human beings, they were useful to
voluptuousness and to religion. The seraglio and the Sistine Chapel
utilized the same species of monsters; fierce in the former case, mild
in the latter.

They knew how to produce things in those days which are not produced
now; they had talents which we lack, and it is not without reason that
some good folk cry out that the decline has come. We no longer know how
to sculpture living human flesh; this is consequent on the loss of the
art of torture. Men were once virtuosi in that respect, but are so no
longer; the art has become so simplified that it will soon disappear
altogether. In cutting the limbs of living men, in opening their bellies
and in dragging out their entrails, phenomena were grasped on the moment
and discoveries made. We are obliged to renounce these experiments now,
and are thus deprived of the progress which surgery made by aid of the
executioner.

The vivisection of former days was not limited to the manufacture of
phenomena for the market-place, of buffoons for the palace (a species of
augmentative of the courtier), and eunuchs for sultans and popes. It
abounded in varieties. One of its triumphs was the manufacture of cocks
for the king of England.

It was the custom, in the palace of the kings of England, to have a sort
of watchman, who crowed like a cock. This watcher, awake while all
others slept, ranged the palace, and raised from hour to hour the cry of
the farmyard, repeating it as often as was necessary, and thus supplying
a clock. This man, promoted to be cock, had in childhood undergone the
operation of the pharynx, which was part of the art described by Dr.
Conquest. Under Charles II. the salivation inseparable to the operation
having disgusted the Duchess of Portsmouth, the appointment was indeed
preserved, so that the splendour of the crown should not be tarnished,
but they got an unmutilated man to represent the cock. A retired officer
was generally selected for this honourable employment. Under James II.
the functionary was named William Sampson, Cock, and received for his
crow L9, 2s. 6d. annually.

The memoirs of Catherine II. inform us that at St. Petersburg, scarcely
a hundred years since, whenever the czar or czarina was displeased with
a Russian prince, he was forced to squat down in the great antechamber
of the palace, and to remain in that posture a certain number of days,
mewing like a cat, or clucking like a sitting hen, and pecking his food
from the floor.

These fashions have passed away; but not so much, perhaps, as one might
imagine. Nowadays, courtiers slightly modify their intonation in
clucking to please their masters. More than one picks up from the
ground--we will not say from the mud--what he eats.

It is very fortunate that kings cannot err. Hence their contradictions
never perplex us. In approving always, one is sure to be always
right--which is pleasant. Louis XIV. would not have liked to see at
Versailles either an officer acting the cock, or a prince acting the
turkey. That which raised the royal and imperial dignity in England and
Russia would have seemed to Louis the Great incompatible with the crown
of St. Louis. We know what his displeasure was when Madame Henriette
forgot herself so far as to see a hen in a dream--which was, indeed, a
grave breach of good manners in a lady of the court. When one is of the
court, one should not dream of the courtyard. Bossuet, it may be
remembered, was nearly as scandalized as Louis XIV.




IV.


The commerce in children in the 17th century, as we have explained, was
connected with a trade. The Comprachicos engaged in the commerce, and
carried on the trade. They bought children, worked a little on the raw
material, and resold them afterwards.

The venders were of all kinds: from the wretched father, getting rid of
his family, to the master, utilizing his stud of slaves. The sale of men
was a simple matter. In our own time we have had fighting to maintain
this right. Remember that it is less than a century ago since the
Elector of Hesse sold his subjects to the King of England, who required
men to be killed in America. Kings went to the Elector of Hesse as we go
to the butcher to buy meat. The Elector had food for powder in stock,
and hung up his subjects in his shop. Come buy; it is for sale. In
England, under Jeffreys, after the tragical episode of Monmouth, there
were many lords and gentlemen beheaded and quartered. Those who were
executed left wives and daughters, widows and orphans, whom James II.
gave to the queen, his wife. The queen sold these ladies to William
Penn. Very likely the king had so much per cent. on the transaction. The
extraordinary thing is, not that James II. should have sold the women,
but that William Penn should have bought them. Penn's purchase is
excused, or explained, by the fact that having a desert to sow with men,
he needed women as farming implements.

Her Gracious Majesty made a good business out of these ladies. The young
sold dear. We may imagine, with the uneasy feeling which a complicated
scandal arouses, that probably some old duchesses were thrown in cheap.

The Comprachicos were also called the Cheylas, a Hindu word, which
conveys the image of harrying a nest.

For a long time the Comprachicos only partially concealed themselves.
There is sometimes in the social order a favouring shadow thrown over
iniquitous trades, in which they thrive. In our own day we have seen an
association of the kind in Spain, under the direction of the ruffian
Ramon Selles, last from 1834 to 1866, and hold three provinces under
terror for thirty years--Valencia, Alicante, and Murcia.

Under the Stuarts, the Comprachicos were by no means in bad odour at
court. On occasions they were used for reasons of state. For James II.
they were almost an _instrumentum regni_. It was a time when families,
which were refractory or in the way, were dismembered; when a descent
was cut short; when heirs were suddenly suppressed. At times one branch
was defrauded to the profit of another. The Comprachicos had a genius
for disfiguration which recommended them to state policy. To disfigure
is better than to kill. There was, indeed, the Iron Mask, but that was a
mighty measure. Europe could not be peopled with iron masks, while
deformed tumblers ran about the streets without creating any surprise.
Besides, the iron mask is removable; not so the mask of flesh. You are
masked for ever by your own flesh--what can be more ingenious? The
Comprachicos worked on man as the Chinese work on trees. They had their
secrets, as we have said; they had tricks which are now lost arts. A
sort of fantastic stunted thing left their hands; it was ridiculous and
wonderful. They would touch up a little being with such skill that its
father could not have known it. _Et que meconnaitrait l'oeil meme de son
pere_, as Racine says in bad French. Sometimes they left the spine
straight and remade the face. They unmarked a child as one might unmark
a pocket-handkerchief. Products, destined for tumblers, had their joints
dislocated in a masterly manner--you would have said they had been
boned. Thus gymnasts were made.

Not only did the Comprachicos take away his face from the child, they
also took away his memory. At least they took away all they could of it;
the child had no consciousness of the mutilation to which he had been
subjected. This frightful surgery left its traces on his countenance,
but not on his mind. The most he could recall was that one day he had
been seized by men, that next he had fallen asleep, and then that he had
been cured. Cured of what? He did not know. Of burnings by sulphur and
incisions by the iron he remembered nothing. The Comprachicos deadened
the little patient by means of a stupefying powder which was thought to
be magical, and suppressed all pain. This powder has been known from
time immemorial in China, and is still employed there in the present
day. The Chinese have been beforehand with us in all our
inventions--printing, artillery, aerostation, chloroform. Only the
discovery which in Europe at once takes life and birth, and becomes a
prodigy and a wonder, remains a chrysalis in China, and is preserved in
a deathlike state. China is a museum of embryos.

Since we are in China, let us remain there a moment to note a
peculiarity. In China, from time immemorial, they have possessed a
certain refinement of industry and art. It is the art of moulding a
living man. They take a child, two or three years old, put him in a
porcelain vase, more or less grotesque, which is made without top or
bottom, to allow egress for the head and feet. During the day the vase
is set upright, and at night is laid down to allow the child to sleep.
Thus the child thickens without growing taller, filling up with his
compressed flesh and distorted bones the reliefs in the vase. This
development in a bottle continues many years. After a certain time it
becomes irreparable. When they consider that this is accomplished, and
the monster made, they break the vase. The child comes out--and, behold,
there is a man in the shape of a mug!

This is convenient: by ordering your dwarf betimes you are able to have
it of any shape you wish.




V.


James II. tolerated the Comprachicos for the good reason that he made
use of them; at least it happened that he did so more than once. We do
not always disdain to use what we despise. This low trade, an excellent
expedient sometimes for the higher one which is called state policy, was
willingly left in a miserable state, but was not persecuted. There was
no surveillance, but a certain amount of attention. Thus much might be
useful--the law closed one eye, the king opened the other.

Sometimes the king went so far as to avow his complicity. These are
audacities of monarchical terrorism. The disfigured one was marked with
the fleur-de-lis; they took from him the mark of God; they put on him
the mark of the king. Jacob Astley, knight and baronet, lord of Melton
Constable, in the county of Norfolk, had in his family a child who had
been sold, and upon whose forehead the dealer had imprinted a
fleur-de-lis with a hot iron. In certain cases in which it was held
desirable to register for some reason the royal origin of the new
position made for the child, they used such means. England has always
done us the honour to utilize, for her personal service, the
fleur-de-lis.

The Comprachicos, allowing for the shade which divides a trade from a
fanaticism, were analogous to the Stranglers of India. They lived among
themselves in gangs, and to facilitate their progress, affected somewhat
of the merry-andrew. They encamped here and there, but they were grave
and religious, bearing no affinity to other nomads, and incapable of
theft. The people for a long time wrongly confounded them with the Moors
of Spain and the Moors of China. The Moors of Spain were coiners, the
Moors of China were thieves. There was nothing of the sort about the
Comprachicos; they were honest folk. Whatever you may think of them,
they were sometimes sincerely scrupulous. They pushed open a door,
entered, bargained for a child, paid, and departed. All was done with
propriety.

They were of all countries. Under the name of Comprachicos fraternized
English, French, Castilians, Germans, Italians. A unity of idea, a unity
of superstition, the pursuit of the same calling, make such fusions. In
this fraternity of vagabonds, those of the Mediterranean seaboard
represented the East, those of the Atlantic seaboard the West. Many
Basques conversed with many Irishmen. The Basque and the Irishman
understand each other--they speak the old Punic jargon; add to this the
intimate relations of Catholic Ireland with Catholic Spain--relations
such that they terminated by bringing to the gallows in London one
almost King of Ireland, the Celtic Lord de Brany; from which resulted
the conquest of the county of Leitrim.

The Comprachicos were rather a fellowship than a tribe; rather a
residuum than a fellowship. It was all the riffraff of the universe,
having for their trade a crime. It was a sort of harlequin people, all
composed of rags. To recruit a man was to sew on a tatter.

To wander was the Comprachicos' law of existence--to appear and
disappear. What is barely tolerated cannot take root. Even in the
kingdoms where their business supplied the courts, and, on occasions,
served as an auxiliary to the royal power, they were now and then
suddenly ill-treated. Kings made use of their art, and sent the artists
to the galleys. These inconsistencies belong to the ebb and flow of
royal caprice. "For such is our pleasure."

A rolling stone and a roving trade gather no moss. The Comprachicos were
poor. They might have said what the lean and ragged witch observed, when
she saw them setting fire to the stake, "Le jeu n'en vaut pas la
chandelle." It is possible, nay probable (their chiefs remaining
unknown), that the wholesale contractors in the trade were rich. After
the lapse of two centuries, it would be difficult to throw any light on
this point.

It was, as we have said, a fellowship. It had its laws, its oaths, its
formulae--it had almost its cabala. Any one nowadays wishing to know all
about the Comprachicos need only go into Biscaya or Galicia; there were
many Basques among them, and it is in those mountains that one hears
their history. To this day the Comprachicos are spoken of at Oyarzun, at
Urbistondo, at Leso, at Astigarraga. _Aguardate nino, que voy a llamar
al Comprachicos_--Take care, child, or I'll call the Comprachicos--is
the cry with which mothers frighten their children in that country.

The Comprachicos, like the Zigeuner and the Gipsies, had appointed
places for periodical meetings. From time to time their leaders
conferred together. In the seventeenth century they had four principal
points of rendezvous: one in Spain--the pass of Pancorbo; one in
Germany--the glade called the Wicked Woman, near Diekirsch, where there
are two enigmatic bas-reliefs, representing a woman with a head and a
man without one; one in France--the hill where was the colossal statue
of Massue-la-Promesse in the old sacred wood of Borvo Tomona, near
Bourbonne les Bains; one in England--behind the garden wall of William
Challoner, Squire of Gisborough in Cleveland, Yorkshire, behind the
square tower and the great wing which is entered by an arched door.




VI.


The laws against vagabonds have always been very rigorous in England.
England, in her Gothic legislation, seemed to be inspired with this
principle, _Homo errans fera errante pejor_. One of the special statutes
classifies the man without a home as "more dangerous than the asp,
dragon, lynx, or basilisk" (_atrocior aspide, dracone, lynce, et
basilico_). For a long time England troubled herself as much concerning
the gipsies, of whom she wished to be rid as about the wolves of which
she had been cleared. In that the Englishman differed from the Irishman,
who prayed to the saints for the health of the wolf, and called him "my
godfather."

English law, nevertheless, in the same way as (we have just seen) it
tolerated the wolf, tamed, domesticated, and become in some sort a dog,
tolerated the regular vagabond, become in some sort a subject. It did
not trouble itself about either the mountebank or the travelling barber,
or the quack doctor, or the peddler, or the open-air scholar, as long as
they had a trade to live by. Further than this, and with these
exceptions, the description of freedom which exists in the wanderer
terrified the law. A tramp was a possible public enemy. That modern
thing, the lounger, was then unknown; that ancient thing, the vagrant,
was alone understood. A suspicious appearance, that indescribable
something which all understand and none can define, was sufficient
reason that society should take a man by the collar. "Where do you live?
How do you get your living?" And if he could not answer, harsh penalties
awaited him. Iron and fire were in the code: the law practised the
cauterization of vagrancy.

Hence, throughout English territory, a veritable "loi des suspects" was
applicable to vagrants (who, it must be owned, readily became
malefactors), and particularly to gipsies, whose expulsion has
erroneously been compared to the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors
from Spain, and the Protestants from France. As for us, we do not
confound a battue with a persecution.

The Comprachicos, we insist, had nothing in common with the gipsies. The
gipsies were a nation; the Comprachicos were a compound of all
nations--the lees of a horrible vessel full of filthy waters. The
Comprachicos had not, like the gipsies, an idiom of their own; their
jargon was a promiscuous collection of idioms: all languages were mixed
together in their language; they spoke a medley. Like the gipsies, they
had come to be a people winding through the peoples; but their common
tie was association, not race. At all epochs in history one finds in the
vast liquid mass which constitutes humanity some of these streams of
venomous men exuding poison around them. The gipsies were a tribe; the
Comprachicos a freemasonry--a masonry having not a noble aim, but a
hideous handicraft. Finally, their religions differ--the gipsies were
Pagans, the Comprachicos were Christians, and more than that, good
Christians, as became an association which, although a mixture of all
nations, owed its birth to Spain, a devout land.

They were more than Christians, they were Catholics; they were more than
Catholics, they were Romans, and so touchy in their faith, and so pure,
that they refused to associate with the Hungarian nomads of the comitate
of Pesth, commanded and led by an old man, having for sceptre a wand
with a silver ball, surmounted by the double-headed Austrian eagle. It
is true that these Hungarians were schismatics, to the extent of
celebrating the Assumption on the 29th August, which is an abomination.

In England, so long as the Stuarts reigned, the confederation of the
Comprachicos was (for motives of which we have already given you a
glimpse) to a certain extent protected. James II., a devout man, who
persecuted the Jews and trampled out the gipsies, was a good prince to
the Comprachicos. We have seen why. The Comprachicos were buyers of the
human wares in which he was dealer. They excelled in disappearances.
Disappearances are occasionally necessary for the good of the state. An
inconvenient heir of tender age whom they took and handled lost his
shape. This facilitated confiscation; the tranfer of titles to
favourites was simplified. The Comprachicos were, moreover, very
discreet and very taciturn. They bound themselves to silence, and kept
their word, which is necessary in affairs of state. There was scarcely
an example of their having betrayed the secrets of the king. This was,
it is true, for their interest; and if the king had lost confidence in
them, they would have been in great danger. They were thus of use in a
political point of view. Moreover these artists furnished singers for
the Holy Father. The Comprachicos were useful for the _Miserere_ of
Allegri. They were particularly devoted to Mary. All this pleased the
papistry of the Stuarts. James II. could not be hostile to holy men who
pushed their devotion to the Virgin to the extent of manufacturing
eunuchs. In 1688 there was a change of dynasty in England: Orange
supplanted Stuart. William III. replaced James II.

James II. went away to die in exile, miracles were performed on his
tomb, and his relics cured the Bishop of Autun of fistula--a worthy
recompense of the Christian virtues of the prince.

William, having neither the same ideas nor the same practices as James,
was severe to the Comprachicos. He did his best to crush out the vermin.

A statute of the early part of William and Mary's reign hit the
association of child-buyers hard. It was as the blow of a club to the
Comprachicos, who were from that time pulverized. By the terms of this
statute those of the fellowship taken and duly convicted were to be
branded with a red-hot iron, imprinting R. on the shoulder, signifying
rogue; on the left hand T, signifying thief; and on the right hand M,
signifying man-slayer. The chiefs, "supposed to be rich, although
beggars in appearance," were to be punished in the _collistrigium_--that
is, the pillory--and branded on the forehead with a P, besides having
their goods confiscated, and the trees in their woods rooted up. Those
who did not inform against the Comprachicos were to be punished by
confiscation and imprisonment for life, as for the crime of misprision.
As for the women found among these men, they were to suffer the
cucking-stool--this is a tumbrel, the name of which is composed of the
French word _coquine_, and the German _stuhl_. English law being endowed
with a strange longevity, this punishment still exists in English
legislation for quarrelsome women. The cucking-stool is suspended over a
river or a pond, the woman seated on it. The chair is allowed to drop
into the water, and then pulled out. This dipping of the woman is
repeated three times, "to cool her anger," says the commentator,
Chamberlayne.




PART I.




BOOK THE FIRST.

_NIGHT NOT SO BLACK AS MAN_.




CHAPTER I.

PORTLAND BILL.


An obstinate north wind blew without ceasing over the mainland of
Europe, and yet more roughly over England, during all the month of
December, 1689, and all the month of January, 1690. Hence the disastrous
cold weather, which caused that winter to be noted as "memorable to the
poor," on the margin of the old Bible in the Presbyterian chapel of the
Nonjurors in London. Thanks to the lasting qualities of the old
monarchical parchment employed in official registers, long lists of poor
persons, found dead of famine and cold, are still legible in many local
repositories, particularly in the archives of the Liberty of the Clink,
in the borough of Southwark, of Pie Powder Court (which signifies Dusty
Feet Court), and in those of Whitechapel Court, held in the village of
Stepney by the bailiff of the Lord of the Manor. The Thames was frozen
over--a thing which does not happen once in a century, as the ice forms
on it with difficulty owing to the action of the sea. Coaches rolled
over the frozen river, and a fair was held with booths, bear-baiting,
and bull-baiting. An ox was roasted whole on the ice. This thick ice
lasted two months. The hard year 1690 surpassed in severity even the
famous winters at the beginning of the seventeenth century, so minutely
observed by Dr. Gideon Delane--the same who was, in his quality of
apothecary to King James, honoured by the city of London with a bust and
a pedestal.

One evening, towards the close of one of the most bitter days of the
month of January, 1690, something unusual was going on in one of the
numerous inhospitable bights of the bay of Portland, which caused the
sea-gulls and wild geese to scream and circle round its mouth, not
daring to re-enter.

In this creek, the most dangerous of all which line the bay during the
continuance of certain winds, and consequently the most
lonely--convenient, by reason of its very danger, for ships in hiding--a
little vessel, almost touching the cliff, so deep was the water, was
moored to a point of rock. We are wrong in saying, The night falls; we
should say the night rises, for it is from the earth that obscurity
comes. It was already night at the bottom of the cliff; it was still day
at top. Any one approaching the vessel's moorings would have recognized
a Biscayan hooker.

The sun, concealed all day by the mist, had just set. There was
beginning to be felt that deep and sombrous melancholy which might be
called anxiety for the absent sun. With no wind from the sea, the water
of the creek was calm.

This was, especially in winter, a lucky exception. Almost all the
Portland creeks have sand-bars; and in heavy weather the sea becomes
very rough, and, to pass in safety, much skill and practice are
necessary. These little ports (ports more in appearance than fact) are
of small advantage. They are hazardous to enter, fearful to leave. On
this evening, for a wonder, there was no danger.

The Biscay hooker is of an ancient model, now fallen into disuse. This
kind of hooker, which has done service even in the navy, was stoutly
built in its hull--a boat in size, a ship in strength. It figured in the
Armada. Sometimes the war-hooker attained to a high tonnage; thus the
Great Griffin, bearing a captain's flag, and commanded by Lopez de
Medina, measured six hundred and fifty good tons, and carried forty
guns. But the merchant and contraband hookers were very feeble
specimens. Sea-folk held them at their true value, and esteemed the
model a very sorry one, The rigging of the hooker was made of hemp,
sometimes with wire inside, which was probably intended as a means,
however unscientific, of obtaining indications, in the case of magnetic
tension. The lightness of this rigging did not exclude the use of heavy
tackle, the cabrias of the Spanish galleon, and the cameli of the Roman
triremes. The helm was very long, which gives the advantage of a long
arm of leverage, but the disadvantage of a small arc of effort. Two
wheels in two pulleys at the end of the rudder corrected this defect,
and compensated, to some extent, for the loss of strength. The compass
was well housed in a case perfectly square, and well balanced by its two
copper frames placed horizontally, one in the other, on little bolts, as
in Cardan's lamps. There was science and cunning in the construction of
the hooker, but it was ignorant science and barbarous cunning. The
hooker was primitive, just like the praam and the canoe; was kindred to
the praam in stability, and to the canoe in swiftness; and, like all
vessels born of the instinct of the pirate and fisherman, it had
remarkable sea qualities: it was equally well suited to landlocked and
to open waters. Its system of sails, complicated in stays, and very
peculiar, allowed of its navigating trimly in the close bays of Asturias
(which are little more than enclosed basins, as Pasages, for instance),
and also freely out at sea. It could sail round a lake, and sail round
the world--a strange craft with two objects, good for a pond and good
for a storm. The hooker is among vessels what the wagtail is among
birds--one of the smallest and one of the boldest. The wagtail perching
on a reed scarcely bends it, and, flying away, crosses the ocean.

These Biscay hookers, even to the poorest, were gilt and painted.
Tattooing is part of the genius of those charming people, savages to
some degree. The sublime colouring of their mountains, variegated by
snows and meadows, reveals to them the rugged spell which ornament
possesses in itself. They are poverty-stricken and magnificent; they put
coats-of-arms on their cottages; they have huge asses, which they
bedizen with bells, and huge oxen, on which they put head-dresses of
feathers. Their coaches, which you can hear grinding the wheels two
leagues off, are illuminated, carved, and hung with ribbons. A cobbler
has a bas-relief on his door: it is only St. Crispin and an old shoe,
but it is in stone. They trim their leathern jackets with lace. They do
not mend their rags, but they embroider them. Vivacity profound and
superb! The Basques are, like the Greeks, children of the sun; while the
Valencian drapes himself, bare and sad, in his russet woollen rug, with
a hole to pass his head through, the natives of Galicia and Biscay have
the delight of fine linen shirts, bleached in the dew. Their thresholds
and their windows teem with faces fair and fresh, laughing under
garlands of maize; a joyous and proud serenity shines out in their
ingenious arts, in their trades, in their customs, in the dress of their
maidens, in their songs. The mountain, that colossal ruin, is all aglow
in Biscay: the sun's rays go in and out of every break. The wild
Jaizquivel is full of idylls. Biscay is Pyrenean grace as Savoy is
Alpine grace. The dangerous bays--the neighbours of St. Sebastian, Leso,
and Fontarabia--with storms, with clouds, with spray flying over the
capes, with the rages of the waves and the winds, with terror, with
uproar, mingle boat-women crowned with roses. He who has seen the Basque
country wishes to see it again. It is the blessed land. Two harvests a
year; villages resonant and gay; a stately poverty; all Sunday the sound
of guitars, dancing, castanets, love-making; houses clean and bright;
storks in the belfries.

Let us return to Portland--that rugged mountain in the sea.

The peninsula of Portland, looked at geometrically, presents the
appearance of a bird's head, of which the bill is turned towards the
ocean, the back of the head towards Weymouth; the isthmus is its neck.

Portland, greatly to the sacrifice of its wildness, exists now but for
trade. The coasts of Portland were discovered by quarrymen and
plasterers towards the middle of the seventeenth century. Since that
period what is called Roman cement has been made of the Portland
stone--a useful industry, enriching the district, and disfiguring the
bay. Two hundred years ago these coasts were eaten away as a cliff;
to-day, as a quarry. The pick bites meanly, the wave grandly; hence a
diminution of beauty. To the magnificent ravages of the ocean have
succeeded the measured strokes of men. These measured strokes have
worked away the creek where the Biscay hooker was moored. To find any
vestige of the little anchorage, now destroyed, the eastern side of the
peninsula should be searched, towards the point beyond Folly Pier and
Dirdle Pier, beyond Wakeham even, between the place called Church Hope
and the place called Southwell.

The creek, walled in on all sides by precipices higher than its width,
was minute by minute becoming more overshadowed by evening. The misty
gloom, usual at twilight, became thicker; it was like a growth of
darkness at the bottom of a well. The opening of the creek seaward, a
narrow passage, traced on the almost night-black interior a pallid rift
where the waves were moving. You must have been quite close to perceive
the hooker moored to the rocks, and, as it were, hidden by the great
cloaks of shadow. A plank thrown from on board on to a low and level
projection of the cliff, the only point on which a landing could be
made, placed the vessel in communication with the land. Dark figures
were crossing and recrossing each other on this tottering gangway, and
in the shadow some people were embarking.

It was less cold in the creek than out at sea, thanks to the screen of
rock rising over the north of the basin, which did not, however, prevent
the people from shivering. They were hurrying. The effect of the
twilight defined the forms as though they had been punched out with a
tool. Certain indentations in their clothes were visible, and showed
that they belonged to the class called in England the ragged.

The twisting of the pathway could be distinguished vaguely in the relief
of the cliff. A girl who lets her stay-lace hang down trailing over the
back of an armchair, describes, without being conscious of it, most of
the paths of cliffs and mountains. The pathway of this creek, full of
knots and angles, almost perpendicular, and better adapted for goats
than men, terminated on the platform where the plank was placed. The
pathways of cliffs ordinarily imply a not very inviting declivity; they
offer themselves less as a road than as a fall; they sink rather than
incline. This one--probably some ramification of a road on the plain
above--was disagreeable to look at, so vertical was it. From underneath
you saw it gain by zigzag the higher layer of the cliff where it passed
out through deep passages on to the high plateau by a cutting in the
rock; and the passengers for whom the vessel was waiting in the creek
must have come by this path.

Excepting the movement of embarkation which was being made in the creek,
a movement visibly scared and uneasy, all around was solitude; no step,
no noise, no breath was heard. At the other side of the roads, at the
entrance of Ringstead Bay, you could just perceive a flotilla of
shark-fishing boats, which were evidently out of their reckoning. These
polar boats had been driven from Danish into English waters by the whims
of the sea. Northerly winds play these tricks on fishermen. They had
just taken refuge in the anchorage of Portland--a sign of bad weather
expected and danger out at sea. They were engaged in casting anchor: the
chief boat, placed in front after the old manner of Norwegian flotillas,
all her rigging standing out in black, above the white level of the sea;
and in front might be perceived the hook-iron, loaded with all kinds of
hooks and harpoons, destined for the Greenland shark, the dogfish, and
the spinous shark, as well as the nets to pick up the sunfish.

Except a few other craft, all swept into the same corner, the eye met
nothing living on the vast horizon of Portland--not a house, not a ship.
The coast in those days was not inhabited, and the roads, at that
season, were not safe.

Whatever may have been the appearance of the weather, the beings who
were going to sail away in the Biscayan urca pressed on the hour of
departure all the same. They formed a busy and confused group, in rapid
movement on the shore. To distinguish one from another was difficult;
impossible to tell whether they were old or young. The indistinctness of
evening intermixed and blurred them; the mask of shadow was over their
faces. They were sketches in the night. There were eight of them, and
there were seemingly among them one or two women, hard to recognize
under the rags and tatters in which the group was attired--clothes which
were no longer man's or woman's. Rags have no sex.

A smaller shadow, flitting to and fro among the larger ones, indicated
either a dwarf or a child.

It was a child.




CHAPTER II.

LEFT ALONE.


This is what an observer close at hand might have noted.

All wore long cloaks, torn and patched, but covering them, and at need
concealing them up to the eyes; useful alike against the north wind and
curiosity. They moved with ease under these cloaks. The greater number
wore a handkerchief rolled round the head--a sort of rudiment which
marks the commencement of the turban in Spain. This headdress was
nothing unusual in England. At that time the South was in fashion in the
North; perhaps this was connected with the fact that the North was
beating the South. It conquered and admired. After the defeat of the
Armada, Castilian was considered in the halls of Elizabeth to be elegant
court talk. To speak English in the palace of the Queen of England was
held almost an impropriety. Partially to adopt the manners of those upon
whom we impose our laws is the habit of the conquering barbarian towards
conquered civilization. The Tartar contemplates and imitates the
Chinese. It was thus Castilian fashions penetrated into England; in
return, English interests crept into Spain.

One of the men in the group embarking appeared to be a chief. He had
sandals on his feet, and was bedizened with gold lace tatters and a
tinsel waistcoat, shining under his cloak like the belly of a fish.
Another pulled down over his face a huge piece of felt, cut like a
sombrero; this felt had no hole for a pipe, thus indicating the wearer
to be a man of letters.

On the principle that a man's vest is a child's cloak, the child was
wrapped over his rags in a sailor's jacket, which descended to his
knees.

By his height you would have guessed him to be a boy of ten or eleven;
his feet were bare.

The crew of the hooker was composed of a captain and two sailors.

The hooker had apparently come from Spain, and was about to return
thither. She was beyond a doubt engaged in a stealthy service from one
coast to the other.

The persons embarking in her whispered among themselves.

The whispering interchanged by these creatures was of composite
sound--now a word of Spanish, then of German, then of French, then of
Gaelic, at times of Basque. It was either a patois or a slang. They
appeared to be of all nations, and yet of the same band.

The motley group appeared to be a company of comrades, perhaps a gang of
accomplices.

The crew was probably of their brotherhood. Community of object was
visible in the embarkation.

Had there been a little more light, and if you could have looked at them
attentively, you might have perceived on these people rosaries and
scapulars half hidden under their rags; one of the semi-women mingling
in the group had a rosary almost equal for the size of its beads to that
of a dervish, and easy to recognize for an Irish one made at
Llanymthefry, which is also called Llanandriffy.

You might also have observed, had it not been so dark, a figure of Our
Lady and Child carved and gilt on the bow of the hooker. It was probably
that of the Basque Notre Dame, a sort of Panagia of the old Cantabri.
Under this image, which occupied the position of a figurehead, was a
lantern, which at this moment was not lighted--an excess of caution
which implied an extreme desire of concealment. This lantern was
evidently for two purposes. When alight it burned before the Virgin, and
at the same time illumined the sea--a beacon doing duty as a taper.

Under the bowsprit the cutwater, long, curved, and sharp, came out in
front like the horn of a crescent. At the top of the cutwater, and at
the feet of the Virgin, a kneeling angel, with folded wings, leaned her
back against the stem, and looked through a spyglass at the horizon. The
angel was gilded like Our Lady. In the cutwater were holes and openings
to let the waves pass through, which afforded an opportunity for gilding
and arabesques.

Under the figure of the Virgin was written, in gilt capitals, the word
_Matutina_--the name of the vessel, not to be read just now on account
of the darkness.

Amid the confusion of departure there were thrown down in disorder, at
the foot of the cliff, the goods which the voyagers were to take with
them, and which, by means of a plank serving as a bridge across, were
being passed rapidly from the shore to the boat. Bags of biscuit, a cask
of stock fish, a case of portable soup, three barrels--one of fresh
water, one of malt, one of tar--four or five bottles of ale, an old
portmanteau buckled up by straps, trunks, boxes, a ball of tow for
torches and signals--such was the lading. These ragged people had
valises, which seemed to indicate a roving life. Wandering rascals are
obliged to own something; at times they would prefer to fly away like
birds, but they cannot do so without abandoning the means of earning a
livelihood. They of necessity possess boxes of tools and instruments of
labour, whatever their errant trade may be. Those of whom we speak were
dragging their baggage with them, often an encumbrance.

It could not have been easy to bring these movables to the bottom of the
cliff. This, however, revealed the intention of a definite departure.

No time was lost; there was one continued passing to and fro from the
shore to the vessel, and from the vessel to the shore; each one took his
share of the work--one carried a bag, another a chest. Those amidst the
promiscuous company who were possibly or probably women worked like the
rest. They overloaded the child.

It was doubtful if the child's father or mother were in the group; no
sign of life was vouchsafed him. They made him work, nothing more. He
appeared not a child in a family, but a slave in a tribe. He waited on
every one, and no one spoke to him.

However, he made haste, and, like the others of this mysterious troop,
he seemed to have but one thought--to embark as quickly as possible. Did
he know why? probably not: he hurried mechanically because he saw the
others hurry.

The hooker was decked. The stowing of the lading in the hold was quickly
finished, and the moment to put off arrived. The last case had been
carried over the gangway, and nothing was left to embark but the men.
The two objects among the group who seemed women were already on board;
six, the child among them, were still on the low platform of the cliff.
A movement of departure was made in the vessel: the captain seized the
helm, a sailor took up an axe to cut the hawser--to cut is an evidence
of haste; when there is time it is unknotted.

"Andamos," said, in a low voice, he who appeared chief of the six, and
who had the spangles on his tatters. The child rushed towards the plank
in order to be the first to pass. As he placed his foot on it, two of
the men hurried by, at the risk of throwing him into the water, got in
before him, and passed on; the fourth drove him back with his fist and
followed the third; the fifth, who was the chief, bounded into rather
than entered the vessel, and, as he jumped in, kicked back the plank,
which fell into the sea, a stroke of the hatchet cut the moorings, the
helm was put up, the vessel left the shore, and the child remained on
land.




CHAPTER III.

ALONE.


The child remained motionless on the rock, with his eyes fixed--no
calling out, no appeal. Though this was unexpected by him, he spoke not
a word. The same silence reigned in the vessel. No cry from the child to
the men--no farewell from the men to the child. There was on both sides
a mute acceptance of the widening distance between them. It was like a
separation of ghosts on the banks of the Styx. The child, as if nailed
to the rock, which the high tide was beginning to bathe, watched the
departing bark. It seemed as if he realized his position. What did he
realize? Darkness.

A moment later the hooker gained the neck of the crook and entered it.
Against the clear sky the masthead was visible, rising above the split
blocks between which the strait wound as between two walls. The truck
wandered to the summit of the rocks, and appeared to run into them. Then
it was seen no more--all was over--the bark had gained the sea.

The child watched its disappearance--he was astounded but dreamy. His
stupefaction was complicated by a sense of the dark reality of
existence. It seemed as if there were experience in this dawning being.
Did he, perchance, already exercise judgment? Experience coming too
early constructs, sometimes, in the obscure depths of a child's mind,
some dangerous balance--we know not what--in which the poor little soul
weighs God.

Feeling himself innocent, he yielded. There was no complaint--the
irreproachable does not reproach.

His rough expulsion drew from him no sign; he suffered a sort of
internal stiffening. The child did not bow under this sudden blow of
fate, which seemed to put an end to his existence ere it had well begun;
he received the thunderstroke standing.

It would have been evident to any one who could have seen his
astonishment unmixed with dejection, that in the group which abandoned
him there was nothing which loved him, nothing which he loved.

Brooding, he forgot the cold. Suddenly the wave wetted his feet--the
tide was flowing; a gust passed through his hair--the north wind was
rising. He shivered. There came over him, from head to foot, the shudder
of awakening.

He cast his eyes about him.

He was alone.

Up to this day there had never existed for him any other men than those
who were now in the hooker. Those men had just stolen away.

Let us add what seems a strange thing to state. Those men, the only
ones he knew, were unknown to him.

He could not have said who they were. His childhood had been passed
among them, without his having the consciousness of being of them. He
was in juxtaposition to them, nothing more.

He had just been--forgotten--by them.

He had no money about him, no shoes to his feet, scarcely a garment to
his body, not even a piece of bread in his pocket.

It was winter--it was night. It would be necessary to walk several
leagues before a human habitation could be reached.

He did not know where he was.

He knew nothing, unless it was that those who had come with him to the
brink of the sea had gone away without him.

He felt himself put outside the pale of life.

He felt that man failed him.

He was ten years old.

The child was in a desert, between depths where he saw the night rising
and depths where he heard the waves murmur.

He stretched his little thin arms and yawned.

Then suddenly, as one who makes up his mind, bold, and throwing off his
numbness--with the agility of a squirrel, or perhaps of an acrobat--he
turned his back on the creek, and set himself to climb up the cliff. He
escaladed the path, left it, returned to it, quick and venturous. He was
hurrying landward, just as though he had a destination marked out;
nevertheless he was going nowhere.

He hastened without an object--a fugitive before Fate.

To climb is the function of a man; to clamber is that of an animal--he
did both. As the slopes of Portland face southward, there was scarcely
any snow on the path; the intensity of cold had, however, frozen that
snow into dust very troublesome to the walker. The child freed himself
of it. His man's jacket, which was too big for him, complicated matters,
and got in his way. Now and then on an overhanging crag or in a
declivity he came upon a little ice, which caused him to slip down.
Then, after hanging some moments over the precipice, he would catch
hold of a dry branch or projecting stone. Once he came on a vein of
slate, which suddenly gave way under him, letting him down with it.
Crumbling slate is treacherous. For some seconds the child slid like a
tile on a roof; he rolled to the extreme edge of the decline; a tuft of
grass which he clutched at the right moment saved him. He was as mute in
sight of the abyss as he had been in sight of the men; he gathered
himself up and re-ascended silently. The slope was steep; so he had to
tack in ascending. The precipice grew in the darkness; the vertical rock
had no ending. It receded before the child in the distance of its
height. As the child ascended, so seemed the summit to ascend. While he
clambered he looked up at the dark entablature placed like a barrier
between heaven and him. At last he reached the top.

He jumped on the level ground, or rather landed, for he rose from the
precipice.

Scarcely was he on the cliff when he began to shiver. He felt in his
face that bite of the night, the north wind. The bitter north-wester was
blowing; he tightened his rough sailor's jacket about his chest.

It was a good coat, called in ship language a sou-'wester, because that
sort of stuff allows little of the south-westerly rain to penetrate.

The child, having gained the tableland, stopped, placed his feet firmly
on the frozen ground, and looked about him.

Behind him was the sea; in front the land; above, the sky--but a sky
without stars; an opaque mist masked the zenith.

On reaching the summit of the rocky wall he found himself turned towards
the land, and looked at it attentively. It lay before him as far as the
sky-line, flat, frozen, and covered with snow. Some tufts of heather
shivered in the wind. No roads were visible--nothing, not even a
shepherd's cot. Here and there pale spiral vortices might be seen, which
were whirls of fine snow, snatched from the ground by the wind and blown
away. Successive undulations of ground, become suddenly misty, rolled
themselves into the horizon. The great dull plains were lost under the
white fog. Deep silence. It spread like infinity, and was hush as the
tomb.

The child turned again towards the sea.

The sea, like the land, was white--the one with snow, the other with
foam. There is nothing so melancholy as the light produced by this
double whiteness.

Certain lights of night are very clearly cut in their hardness; the sea
was like steel, the cliff like ebony. From the height where the child
was the bay of Portland appeared almost like a geographical map, pale,
in a semicircle of hills. There was something dreamlike in that
nocturnal landscape--a wan disc belted by a dark crescent. The moon
sometimes has a similar appearance. From cape to cape, along the whole
coast, not a single spark indicating a hearth with a fire, not a lighted
window, not an inhabited house, was to be seen. As in heaven, so on
earth--no light. Not a lamp below, not a star above. Here and there came
sudden risings in the great expanse of waters in the gulf, as the wind
disarranged and wrinkled the vast sheet. The hooker was still visible in
the bay as she fled.

It was a black triangle gliding over the livid waters.

Far away the waste of waters stirred confusedly in the ominous
clear-obscure of immensity. The _Matutina_ was making quick way. She
seemed to grow smaller every minute. Nothing appears so rapid as the
flight of a vessel melting into the distance of ocean.

Suddenly she lit the lantern at her prow. Probably the darkness falling
round her made those on board uneasy, and the pilot thought it necessary
to throw light on the waves. This luminous point, a spark seen from
afar, clung like a corpse light to the high and long black form. You
would have said it was a shroud raised up and moving in the middle of
the sea, under which some one wandered with a star in his hand.

A storm threatened in the air; the child took no account of it, but a
sailor would have trembled. It was that moment of preliminary anxiety
when it seems as though the elements are changing into persons, and one
is about to witness the mysterious transfiguration of the wind into the
wind-god. The sea becomes Ocean: its power reveals itself as Will: that
which one takes for a thing is a soul. It will become visible; hence the
terror. The soul of man fears to be thus confronted with the soul of
nature.

Chaos was about to appear. The wind rolling back the fog, and making a
stage of the clouds behind, set the scene for that fearful drama of wave
and winter which is called a Snowstorm. Vessels putting back hove in
sight. For some minutes past the roads had no longer been deserted.
Every instant troubled barks hastening towards an anchorage appeared
from behind the capes; some were doubling Portland Bill, the others St.
Alban's Head. From afar ships were running in. It was a race for refuge.
Southwards the darkness thickened, and clouds, full of night, bordered
on the sea. The weight of the tempest hanging overhead made a dreary
lull on the waves. It certainly was no time to sail. Yet the hooker had
sailed.

She had made the south of the cape. She was already out of the gulf, and
in the open sea. Suddenly there came a gust of wind. The _Matutina_,
which was still clearly in sight, made all sail, as if resolved to
profit by the hurricane. It was the nor'-wester, a wind sullen and
angry. Its weight was felt instantly. The hooker, caught broadside on,
staggered, but recovering held her course to sea. This indicated a
flight rather than a voyage, less fear of sea than of land, and greater
heed of pursuit from man than from wind.

The hooker, passing through every degree of diminution, sank into the
horizon. The little star which she carried into shadow paled. More and
more the hooker became amalgamated with the night, then disappeared.

This time for good and all.

At least the child seemed to understand it so: he ceased to look at the
sea. His eyes turned back upon the plains, the wastes, the hills,
towards the space where it might not be impossible to meet something
living.

Into this unknown he set out.




CHAPTER IV.

QUESTIONS.


What kind of band was it which had left the child behind in its flight?

Were those fugitives Comprachicos?

We have already seen the account of the measures taken by William III.
and passed by Parliament against the malefactors, male and female,
called Comprachicos, otherwise Comprapequenos, otherwise Cheylas.

There are laws which disperse. The law acting against the Comprachicos
determined, not only the Comprachicos, but vagabonds of all sorts, on a
general flight.

It was the devil take the hindmost. The greater number of the
Comprachicos returned to Spain--many of them, as we have said, being
Basques.

The law for the protection of children had at first this strange result:
it caused many children to be abandoned.

The immediate effect of the penal statute was to produce a crowd of
children, found or rather lost. Nothing is easier to understand. Every
wandering gang containing a child was liable to suspicion. The mere fact
of the child's presence was in itself a denunciation.

"They are very likely Comprachicos." Such was the first idea of the
sheriff, of the bailiff, of the constable. Hence arrest and inquiry.
People simply unfortunate, reduced to wander and to beg, were seized
with a terror of being taken for Comprachicos although they were nothing
of the kind. But the weak have grave misgivings of possible errors in
justice. Besides, these vagabond families are very easily scared. The
accusation against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other
people's children. But the promiscuousness caused by poverty and
indigence is such that at times it might have been difficult for a
father and mother to prove a child their own.

How came you by this child? how were they to prove that they held it
from God? The child became a peril--they got rid of it. To fly
unencumbered was easier; the parents resolved to lose it--now in a wood,
now on a strand, now down a well.

Children were found drowned in cisterns.

Let us add that, in imitation of England, all Europe henceforth hunted
down the Comprachicos. The impulse of pursuit was given. There is
nothing like belling the cat. From this time forward the desire to seize
them made rivalry and emulation among the police of all countries, and
the alguazil was not less keenly watchful than the constable.

One could still read, twenty-three years ago, on a stone of the gate of
Otero, an untranslatable inscription--the words of the code outraging
propriety. In it, however, the shade of difference which existed between
the buyers and the stealers of children is very strongly marked. Here is
part of the inscription in somewhat rough Castillan, _Aqui quedan las
orejas de los Comprachicos, y las bolsas de los robaninos, mientras que
se van ellos al trabajo de mar_. You see the confiscation of ears, etc.,
did not prevent the owners going to the galleys. Whence followed a
general rout among all vagabonds. They started frightened; they arrived
trembling. On every shore in Europe their furtive advent was watched.
Impossible for such a band to embark with a child, since to disembark
with one was dangerous.

To lose the child was much simpler of accomplishment.

And this child, of whom we have caught a glimpse in the shadow of the
solitudes of Portland, by whom had he been cast away?

To all appearance by Comprachicos.




CHAPTER V.

THE TREE OF HUMAN INVENTION.


It might be about seven o'clock in the evening. The wind was now
diminishing--a sign, however, of a violent recurrence impending. The
child was on the table-land at the extreme south point of Portland.

Portland is a peninsula; but the child did not know what a peninsula
is, and was ignorant even of the name of Portland. He knew but one
thing, which is, that one can walk until one drops down. An idea is a
guide; he had no idea. They had brought him there and left him there.
_They_ and _there_--these two enigmas represented his doom. _They_ were
humankind. _There_ was the universe. For him in all creation there was
absolutely no other basis to rest on but the little piece of ground
where he placed his heel, ground hard and cold to his naked feet. In the
great twilight world, open on all sides, what was there for the child?
Nothing.

He walked towards this Nothing. Around him was the vastness of human
desertion.

He crossed the first plateau diagonally, then a second, then a third. At
the extremity of each plateau the child came upon a break in the ground.
The slope was sometimes steep, but always short; the high, bare plains
of Portland resemble great flagstones overlapping each other. The south
side seems to enter under the protruding slab, the north side rises over
the next one; these made ascents, which the child stepped over nimbly.
From time to time he stopped, and seemed to hold counsel with himself.
The night was becoming very dark. His radius of sight was contracting.
He now only saw a few steps before him.

All of a sudden he stopped, listened for an instant, and with an almost
imperceptible nod of satisfaction turned quickly and directed his steps
towards an eminence of moderate height, which he dimly perceived on his
right, at the point of the plain nearest the cliff. There was on the
eminence a shape which in the mist looked like a tree. The child had
just heard a noise in this direction, which was the noise neither of the
wind nor of the sea, nor was it the cry of animals. He thought that some
one was there, and in a few strides he was at the foot of the hillock.

In truth, some one was there.

That which had been indistinct on the top of the eminence was now
visible. It was something like a great arm thrust straight out of the
ground; at the upper extremity of the arm a sort of forefinger,
supported from beneath, by the thumb, pointed out horizontally; the
arm, the thumb, and the forefinger drew a square against the sky. At the
point of juncture of this peculiar finger and this peculiar thumb there
was a line, from which hung something black and shapeless. The line
moving in the wind sounded like a chain. This was the noise the child
had heard. Seen closely the line was that which the noise indicated, a
chain--a single chain cable.

By that mysterious law of amalgamation which throughout nature causes
appearances to exaggerate realities, the place, the hour, the mist, the
mournful sea, the cloudy turmoils on the distant horizon, added to the
effect of this figure, and made it seem enormous.

The mass linked to the chain presented the appearance of a scabbard. It
was swaddled like a child and long like a man. There was a round thing
at its summit, about which the end of the chain was rolled. The scabbard
was riven asunder at the lower end, and shreds of flesh hung out between
the rents.

A feeble breeze stirred the chain, and that which hung to it swayed
gently. The passive mass obeyed the vague motions of space. It was an
object to inspire indescribable dread. Horror, which disproportions
everything, blurred its dimensions while retaining its shape. It was a
condensation of darkness, which had a defined form. Night was above and
within the spectre; it was a prey of ghastly exaggeration. Twilight and
moonrise, stars setting behind the cliff, floating things in space, the
clouds, winds from all quarters, had ended by penetrating into the
composition of this visible nothing. The species of log hanging in the
wind partook of the impersonality diffused far over sea and sky, and the
darkness completed this phase of the _thing_ which had once been a man.

It was that which is no longer.

To be naught but a remainder! Such a thing is beyond the power of
language to express. To exist no more, yet to persist; to be in the
abyss, yet out of it; to reappear above death as if indissoluble--there
is a certain amount of impossibility mixed with such reality. Thence
comes the inexpressible. This being--was it a being? This black witness
was a remainder, and an awful remainder--a remainder of what? Of nature
first, and then of society. Naught, and yet total.

The lawless inclemency of the weather held it at its will; the deep
oblivion of solitude environed it; it was given up to unknown chances;
it was without defence against the darkness, which did with it what it
willed. It was for ever the patient; it submitted; the hurricane (that
ghastly conflict of winds) was upon it.

The spectre was given over to pillage. It underwent the horrible outrage
of rotting in the open air; it was an outlaw of the tomb. There was no
peace for it even in annihilation: in the summer it fell away into dust,
in the winter into mud. Death should be veiled, the grave should have
its reserve. Here was neither veil nor reserve, but cynically avowed
putrefaction. It is effrontery in death to display its work; it offends
all the calmness of shadow when it does its task outside its laboratory,
the grave.

This dead thing had been stripped. To strip one already
stripped--relentless act! His marrow was no longer in his bones; his
entrails were no longer in his body; his voice no longer in his throat.
A corpse is a pocket which death turns inside out and empties. If he
ever had a Me, where was the Me? There still, perchance, and this was
fearful to think of. Something wandering about something in chains--can
one imagine a more mournful lineament in the darkness?

Realities exist here below which serve as issues to the unknown, which
seem to facilitate the egress of speculation, and at which hypothesis
snatches. Conjecture has its _compelle intrare_. In passing by certain
places and before certain objects one cannot help stopping--a prey to
dreams into the realms of which the mind enters. In the invisible there
are dark portals ajar. No one could have met this dead man without
meditating.

In the vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently away. He had had
blood which had been drunk, skin which had been eaten, flesh which had
been stolen. Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat from
him. December had borrowed cold of him; midnight, horror; the iron,
rust; the plague, miasma; the flowers, perfume. His slow disintegration
was a toll paid to all--a toll of the corpse to the storm, to the rain,
to the dew, to the reptiles, to the birds. All the dark hands of night
had rifled the dead.

He was, indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant, a tenant of the
darkness. He was on a plain and on a hill, and _he was not_. He was
palpable, yet vanished. He was a shadow accruing to the night. After the
disappearance of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became in
lugubrious accord with all around him. By his mere presence he increased
the gloom of the tempest and the calm of stars. The unutterable which is
in the desert was condensed in him. Waif of an unknown fate, he
commingled with all the wild secrets of the night. There was in his
mystery a vague reverberation of all enigmas.

About him life seemed sinking to its lowest depths. Certainty and
confidence appeared to diminish in his environs. The shiver of the
brushwood and the grass, a desolate melancholy, an anxiety in which a
conscience seemed to lurk, appropriated with tragic force the whole
landscape to that black figure suspended by the chain. The presence of a
spectre in the horizon is an aggravation of solitude.

He was a Sign. Having unappeasable winds around him, he was implacable.
Perpetual shuddering made him terrible. Fearful to say, he seemed to be
a centre in space, with something immense leaning on him. Who can tell?
Perhaps that equity, half seen and set at defiance, which transcends
human justice. There was in his unburied continuance the vengeance of
men and his own vengeance. He was a testimony in the twilight and the
waste. He was in himself a disquieting substance, since we tremble
before the substance which is the ruined habitation of the soul. For
dead matter to trouble us, it must once have been tenanted by spirit. He
denounced the law of earth to the law of Heaven. Placed there by man, he
there awaited God. Above him floated, blended with all the vague
distortions of the cloud and the wave, boundless dreams of shadow.

Who could tell what sinister mysteries lurked behind this phantom? The
illimitable, circumscribed by naught, nor tree, nor roof, nor passer-by,
was around the dead man. When the unchangeable broods over us--when
Heaven, the abyss, the life, grave, and eternity appear patent--then it
is we feel that all is inaccessible, all is forbidden, all is sealed.
When infinity opens to us, terrible indeed is the closing of the gate
behind.




CHAPTER VI.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN DEATH AND LIFE.


The child was before this thing, dumb, wondering, and with eyes fixed.

To a man it would have been a gibbet; to the child it was an apparition.

Where a man would have seen a corpse the child saw a spectre.

Besides, he did not understand.

The attractions of the obscure are manifold. There was one on the summit
of that hill. The child took a step, then another; he ascended, wishing
all the while to descend; and approached, wishing all the while to
retreat.

Bold, yet trembling, he went close up to survey the spectre.

When he got close under the gibbet, he looked up and examined it.

The spectre was tarred; here and there it shone. The child distinguished
the face. It was coated over with pitch; and this mask, which appeared
viscous and sticky, varied its aspect with the night shadows. The child
saw the mouth, which was a hole; the nose, which was a hole; the eyes,
which were holes. The body was wrapped, and apparently corded up, in
coarse canvas, soaked in naphtha. The canvas was mouldy and torn. A knee
protruded through it. A rent disclosed the ribs--partly corpse, partly
skeleton. The face was the colour of earth; slugs, wandering over it,
had traced across it vague ribbons of silver. The canvas, glued to the
bones, showed in reliefs like the robe of a statue. The skull, cracked
and fractured, gaped like a rotten fruit. The teeth were still human,
for they retained a laugh. The remains of a cry seemed to murmur in the
open mouth. There were a few hairs of beard on the cheek. The inclined
head had an air of attention.

Some repairs had recently been done; the face had been tarred afresh, as
well as the ribs and the knee which protruded from the canvas. The feet
hung out below.

Just underneath, in the grass, were two shoes, which snow and rain had
rendered shapeless. These shoes had fallen from the dead man.

The barefooted child looked at the shoes.

The wind, which had become more and more restless, was now and then
interrupted by those pauses which foretell the approach of a storm. For
the last few minutes it had altogether ceased to blow. The corpse no
longer stirred; the chain was as motionless as a plumb line.

Like all newcomers into life, and taking into account the peculiar
influences of his fate, the child no doubt felt within him that
awakening of ideas characteristic of early years, which endeavours to
open the brain, and which resembles the pecking of the young bird in the
egg. But all that there was in his little consciousness just then was
resolved into stupor. Excess of sensation has the effect of too much
oil, and ends by putting out thought. A man would have put himself
questions; the child put himself none--he only looked.

The tar gave the face a wet appearance; drops of pitch, congealed in
what had once been the eyes, produced the effect of tears. However,
thanks to the pitch, the ravage of death, if not annulled, was visibly
slackened and reduced to the least possible decay. That which was before
the child was a thing of which care was taken: the man was evidently
precious. They had not cared to keep him alive, but they cared to keep
him dead.

The gibbet was old, worm-eaten, although strong, and had been in use
many years.

It was an immemorial custom in England to tar smugglers. They were
hanged on the seaboard, coated over with pitch and left swinging.
Examples must be made in public, and tarred examples last longest. The
tar was mercy: by renewing it they were spared making too many fresh
examples. They placed gibbets from point to point along the coast, as
nowadays they do beacons. The hanged man did duty as a lantern. After
his fashion, he guided his comrades, the smugglers. The smugglers from
far out at sea perceived the gibbets. There is one, first warning;
another, second warning. It did not stop smuggling; but public order is
made up of such things. The fashion lasted in England up to the
beginning of this century. In 1822 three men were still to be seen
hanging in front of Dover Castle. But, for that matter, the preserving
process was employed not only with smugglers. England turned robbers,
incendiaries, and murderers to the same account. Jack Painter, who set
fire to the government storehouses at Portsmouth, was hanged and tarred
in 1776. L'Abbe Coyer, who describes him as Jean le Peintre, saw him
again in 1777. Jack Painter was hanging above the ruin he had made, and
was re-tarred from time to time. His corpse lasted--I had almost said
lived--nearly fourteen years. It was still doing good service in 1788;
in 1790, however, they were obliged to replace it by another. The
Egyptians used to value the mummy of the king; a plebeian mummy can
also, it appears, be of service.

The wind, having great power on the hill, had swept it of all its snow.
Herbage reappeared on it, interspersed here and there with a few
thistles; the hill was covered by that close short grass which grows by
the sea, and causes the tops of cliffs to resemble green cloth. Under
the gibbet, on the very spot over which hung the feet of the executed
criminal, was a long and thick tuft, uncommon on such poor soil.
Corpses, crumbling there for centuries past, accounted for the beauty of
the grass. Earth feeds on man.

A dreary fascination held the child; he remained there open-mouthed. He
only dropped his head a moment when a nettle, which felt like an insect,
stung his leg; then he looked up again--he looked above him at the face
which looked down on him. It appeared to regard him the more steadfastly
because it had no eyes. It was a comprehensive glance, having an
indescribable fixedness in which there were both light and darkness, and
which emanated from the skull and teeth, as well as the empty arches of
the brow. The whole head of a dead man seems to have vision, and this is
awful. No eyeball, yet we feel that we are looked at. A horror of worms.

Little by little the child himself was becoming an object of terror. He
no longer moved. Torpor was coming over him. He did not perceive that he
was losing consciousness--he was becoming benumbed and lifeless. Winter
was silently delivering him over to night. There is something of the
traitor in winter. The child was all but a statue. The coldness of stone
was penetrating his bones; darkness, that reptile, was crawling over
him. The drowsiness resulting from snow creeps over a man like a dim
tide. The child was being slowly invaded by a stagnation resembling that
of the corpse. He was falling asleep.

On the hand of sleep is the finger of death. The child felt himself
seized by that hand. He was on the point of falling under the gibbet. He
no longer knew whether he was standing upright.

The end always impending, no transition between to be and not to be, the
return into the crucible, the slip possible every minute--such is the
precipice which is Creation.

Another instant, the child and the dead, life in sketch and life in
ruin, would be confounded in the same obliteration.

The spectre appeared to understand, and not to wish it. Of a sudden it
stirred. One would have said it was warning the child. It was the wind
beginning to blow again. Nothing stranger than this dead man in
movement.

The corpse at the end of the chain, pushed by the invisible gust, took
an oblique attitude; rose to the left, then fell back, reascended to the
right, and fell and rose with slow and mournful precision. A weird game
of see-saw. It seemed as though one saw in the darkness the pendulum of
the clock of Eternity.

This continued for some time. The child felt himself waking up at the
sight of the dead; through his increasing numbness he experienced a
distinct sense of fear.

The chain at every oscillation made a grinding sound, with hideous
regularity. It appeared to take breath, and then to resume. This
grinding was like the cry of a grasshopper.

An approaching squall is heralded by sudden gusts of wind. All at once
the breeze increased into a gale. The corpse emphasized its dismal
oscillations. It no longer swung, it tossed; the chain, which had been
grinding, now shrieked. It appeared that its shriek was heard. If it was
an appeal, it was obeyed. From the depths of the horizon came the sound
of a rushing noise.

It was the noise of wings.

An incident occurred, a stormy incident, peculiar to graveyards and
solitudes. It was the arrival of a flight of ravens. Black flying specks
pricked the clouds, pierced through the mist, increased in size, came
near, amalgamated, thickened, hastening towards the hill, uttering
cries. It was like the approach of a Legion. The winged vermin of the
darkness alighted on the gibbet; the child, scared, drew back.

Swarms obey words of command: the birds crowded on the gibbet; not one
was on the corpse. They were talking among themselves. The croaking was
frightful. The howl, the whistle and the roar, are signs of life; the
croak is a satisfied acceptance of putrefaction. In it you can fancy you
hear the tomb breaking silence. The croak is night-like in itself.

The child was frozen even more by terror than by cold.

Then the ravens held silence. One of them perched on the skeleton. This
was a signal: they all precipitated themselves upon it. There was a
cloud of wings, then all their feathers closed up, and the hanged man
disappeared under a swarm of black blisters struggling in the obscurity.
Just then the corpse moved. Was it the corpse? Was it the wind? It made
a frightful bound. The hurricane, which was increasing, came to its
aid. The phantom fell into convulsions.

The squall, already blowing with full lungs, laid hold of it, and moved
it about in all directions.

It became horrible; it began to struggle. An awful puppet, with a gibbet
chain for a string. Some humorist of night must have seized the string
and been playing with the mummy. It turned and leapt as if it would fain
dislocate itself; the birds, frightened, flew off. It was like an
explosion of all those unclean creatures. Then they returned, and a
struggle began.

The dead man seemed possessed with hideous vitality. The winds raised
him as though they meant to carry him away. He seemed struggling and
making efforts to escape, but his iron collar held him back. The birds
adapted themselves to all his movements, retreating, then striking
again, scared but desperate. On one side a strange flight was attempted,
on the other the pursuit of a chained man. The corpse, impelled by every
spasm of the wind, had shocks, starts, fits of rage: it went, it came,
it rose, it fell, driving back the scattered swarm. The dead man was a
club, the swarms were dust. The fierce, assailing flock would not leave
their hold, and grew stubborn; the man, as if maddened by the cluster of
beaks, redoubled his blind chastisement of space. It was like the blows
of a stone held in a sling. At times the corpse was covered by talons
and wings; then it was free. There were disappearances of the horde,
then sudden furious returns--a frightful torment continuing after life
was past. The birds seemed frenzied. The air-holes of hell must surely
give passage to such swarms. Thrusting of claws, thrusting of beaks,
croakings, rendings of shreds no longer flesh, creakings of the gibbet,
shudderings of the skeleton, jingling of the chain, the voices of the
storm and tumult--what conflict more fearful? A hobgoblin warring with
devils! A combat with a spectre!

At times the storm redoubling its violence, the hanged man revolved on
his own pivot, turning every way at once towards the swarm, as if he
wished to run after the birds; his teeth seemed to try and bite them.
The wind was for him, the chain against him. It was as if black deities
were mixing themselves up in the fray. The hurricane was in the battle.
As the dead man turned himself about, the flock of birds wound round him
spirally. It was a whirl in a whirlwind. A great roar was heard from
below. It was the sea.

The child saw this nightmare. Suddenly he trembled in all his limbs; a
shiver thrilled his frame; he staggered, tottered, nearly fell,
recovered himself, pressed both hands to his forehead, as if he felt his
forehead a support; then, haggard, his hair streaming in the wind,
descending the hill with long strides, his eyes closed, himself almost a
phantom, he took flight, leaving behind that torment in the night.




CHAPTER VII.

THE NORTH POINT OF PORTLAND.


He ran until he was breathless, at random, desperate, over the plain
into the snow, into space. His flight warmed him. He needed it. Without
the run and the fright he had died.

When his breath failed him he stopped, but he dared not look back. He
fancied that the birds would pursue him, that the dead man had undone
his chain and was perhaps hurrying behind him, and no doubt the gibbet
itself was descending the hill, running after the dead man; he feared to
see these things if he turned his head.

When he had somewhat recovered his breath he resumed his flight.

To account for facts does not belong to childhood. He received
impressions which were magnified by terror, but he did not link them
together in his mind, nor form any conclusion on them. He was going on,
no matter how or where; he ran in agony and difficulty as one in a
dream. During the three hours or so since he had been deserted, his
onward progress, still vague, had changed its purpose. At first it was a
search; now it was a flight. He no longer felt hunger nor cold--he felt
fear. One instinct had given place to another. To escape was now his
whole thought--to escape from what? From everything. On all sides life
seemed to enclose him like a horrible wall. If he could have fled from
all things, he would have done so. But children know nothing of that
breaking from prison which is called suicide. He was running. He ran on
for an indefinite time; but fear dies with lack of breath.

All at once, as if seized by a sudden accession of energy and
intelligence, he stopped. One would have said he was ashamed of running
away. He drew himself up, stamped his foot, and, with head erect, looked
round. There was no longer hill, nor gibbet, nor flights of crows. The
fog had resumed possession of the horizon. The child pursued his way: he
now no longer ran but walked. To say that meeting with a corpse had made
a man of him would be to limit the manifold and confused impression
which possessed him. There was in his impression much more and much
less. The gibbet, a mighty trouble in the rudiment of comprehension,
nascent in his mind, still seemed to him an apparition; but a trouble
overcome is strength gained, and he felt himself stronger. Had he been
of an age to probe self, he would have detected within him a thousand
other germs of meditation; but the reflection of children is shapeless,
and the utmost they feel is the bitter aftertaste of that which, obscure
to them, the man later on calls indignation. Let us add that a child has
the faculty of quickly accepting the conclusion of a sensation; the
distant fading boundaries which amplify painful subjects escape him. A
child is protected by the limit of feebleness against emotions which are
too complex. He sees the fact, and little else beside. The difficulty of
being satisfied by half-ideas does not exist for him. It is not until
later that experience comes, with its brief, to conduct the lawsuit of
life. _Then_ he confronts groups of facts which have crossed his path;
the understanding, cultivated and enlarged, draws comparisons; the
memories of youth reappear under the passions, like the traces of a
palimpsest under the erasure; these memories form the bases of logic,
and that which was a vision in the child's brain becomes a syllogism in
the man's. Experience is, however, various, and turns to good or evil
according to natural disposition. With the good it ripens, with the bad
it rots.

The child had run quite a quarter of a league, and walked another
quarter, when suddenly he felt the craving of hunger. A thought which
altogether eclipsed the hideous apparition on the hill occurred to him
forcibly--that he must eat. Happily there is in man a brute which serves
to lead him back to reality.

But what to eat, where to eat, how to eat?

He felt his pockets mechanically, well knowing that they were empty.
Then he quickened his steps, without knowing whither he was going. He
hastened towards a possible shelter. This faith in an inn is one of the
convictions enrooted by God in man. To believe in a shelter is to
believe in God.

However, in that plain of snow there was nothing like a roof. The child
went on, and the waste continued bare as far as eye could see. There had
never been a human habitation on the tableland. It was at the foot of
the cliff, in holes in the rocks, that, lacking wood to build themselves
huts, had dwelt long ago the aboriginal inhabitants, who had slings for
arms, dried cow-dung for firing, for a god the idol Heil standing in a
glade at Dorchester, and for trade the fishing of that false gray coral
which the Gauls called _plin_, and the Greeks _isidis plocamos_.

The child found his way as best he could. Destiny is made up of
cross-roads. An option of path is dangerous. This little being had an
early choice of doubtful chances.

He continued to advance, but although the muscles of his thighs seemed
to be of steel, he began to tire. There were no tracks in the plain; or
if there were any, the snow had obliterated them. Instinctively he
inclined eastwards. Sharp stones had wounded his heels. Had it been
daylight pink stains made by his blood might have been seen in the
footprints he left in the snow.

He recognized nothing. He was crossing the plain of Portland from south
to north, and it is probable that the band with which he had come, to
avoid meeting any one, had crossed it from east to west; they had most
likely sailed in some fisherman's or smuggler's boat, from a point on
the coast of Uggescombe, such as St. Catherine's Cape or Swancry, to
Portland to find the hooker which awaited them; and they must have
landed in one of the creeks of Weston, and re-embarked in one of those
of Easton. That direction was intersected by the one the child was now
following. It was impossible for him to recognize the road.

On the plain of Portland there are, here and there, raised strips of
land, abruptly ended by the shore and cut perpendicular to the sea. The
wandering child reached one of these culminating points and stopped on
it, hoping that a larger space might reveal further indications. He
tried to see around him. Before him, in place of a horizon, was a vast
livid opacity. He looked at this attentively, and under the fixedness of
his glance it became less indistinct. At the base of a distant fold of
land towards the east, in the depths of that opaque lividity (a moving
and wan sort of precipice, which resembled a cliff of the night), crept
and floated some vague black rents, some dim shreds of vapour. The pale
opacity was fog, the black shreds were smoke. Where there is smoke there
are men. The child turned his steps in that direction.

He saw some distance off a descent, and at the foot of the descent,
among shapeless conformations of rock, blurred by the mist, what seemed
to be either a sandbank or a tongue of land, joining probably to the
plains of the horizon the tableland he had just crossed. It was evident
he must pass that way.

He had, in fact, arrived at the Isthmus of Portland, a diluvian alluvium
which is called Chess Hill.

He began to descend the side of the plateau.

The descent was difficult and rough. It was (with less of ruggedness,
however) the reverse of the ascent he had made on leaving the creek.
Every ascent is balanced by a decline. After having clambered up he
crawled down.

He leapt from one rock to another at the risk of a sprain, at the risk
of falling into the vague depths below. To save himself when he slipped
on the rock or on the ice, he caught hold of handfuls of weeds and
furze, thick with thorns, and their points ran into his fingers. At
times he came on an easier declivity, taking breath as he descended;
then came on the precipice again, and each step necessitated an
expedient. In descending precipices, every movement solves a problem.
One must be skilful under pain of death. These problems the child solved
with an instinct which would have made him the admiration of apes and
mountebanks. The descent was steep and long. Nevertheless he was coming
to the end of it.

Little by little it was drawing nearer the moment when he should land on
the Isthmus, of which from time to time he caught a glimpse. At
intervals, while he bounded or dropped from rock to rock, he pricked up
his ears, his head erect, like a listening deer. He was hearkening to a
diffused and faint uproar, far away to the left, like the deep note of a
clarion. It was a commotion of winds, preceding that fearful north blast
which is heard rushing from the pole, like an inroad of trumpets. At the
same time the child felt now and then on his brow, on his eyes, on his
cheeks, something which was like the palms of cold hands being placed on
his face. These were large frozen flakes, sown at first softly in space,
then eddying, and heralding a snowstorm. The child was covered with
them. The snowstorm, which for the last hour had been on the sea, was
beginning to gain the land. It was slowly invading the plains. It was
entering obliquely, by the north-west, the tableland of Portland.




BOOK THE SECOND.

_THE HOOKER AT SEA_.




CHAPTER I.

SUPERHUMAN LAWS.


The snowstorm is one of the mysteries of the ocean. It is the most
obscure of things meteorological--obscure in every sense of the word. It
is a mixture of fog and storm; and even in our days we cannot well
account for the phenomenon. Hence many disasters.

We try to explain all things by the action of wind and wave; yet in the
air there is a force which is not the wind, and in the waters a force
which is not the wave. That force, both in the air and in the water, is
effluvium. Air and water are two nearly identical liquid masses,
entering into the composition of each other by condensation and
dilatation, so that to breathe is to drink. Effluvium alone is fluid.
The wind and the wave are only impulses; effluvium is a current. The
wind is visible in clouds, the wave is visible in foam; effluvium is
invisible. From time to time, however, it says, "I am here." Its "I am
here" is a clap of thunder.

The snowstorm offers a problem analogous to the dry fog. If the solution
of the _callina_ of the Spaniards and the _quobar_ of the Ethiopians be
possible, assuredly that solution will be achieved by attentive
observation of magnetic effluvium.

Without effluvium a crowd of circumstances would remain enigmatic.
Strictly speaking, the changes in the velocity of the wind, varying
from 3 feet per second to 220 feet, would supply a reason for the
variations of the waves rising from 3 inches in a calm sea to 36 feet in
a raging one. Strictly speaking, the horizontal direction of the winds,
even in a squall, enables us to understand how it is that a wave 30 feet
high can be 1,500 feet long. But why are the waves of the Pacific four
times higher near America than near Asia; that is to say, higher in the
East than in the West? Why is the contrary true of the Atlantic? Why,
under the Equator, are they highest in the middle of the sea? Wherefore
these deviations in the swell of the ocean? This is what magnetic
effluvium, combined with terrestrial rotation and sidereal attraction,
can alone explain.

Is not this mysterious complication needed to explain an oscillation of
the wind veering, for instance, by the west from south-east to
north-east, then suddenly returning in the same great curve from
north-east to south-east, so as to make in thirty-six hours a prodigious
circuit of 560 degrees? Such was the preface to the snowstorm of March
17, 1867.

The storm-waves of Australia reach a height of 80 feet; this fact is
connected with the vicinity of the Pole. Storms in those latitudes
result less from disorder of the winds than from submarine electrical
discharges. In the year 1866 the transatlantic cable was disturbed at
regular intervals in its working for two hours in the twenty-four--from
noon to two o'clock--by a sort of intermittent fever. Certain
compositions and decompositions of forces produce phenomena, and impose
themselves on the calculations of the seaman under pain of shipwreck.
The day that navigation, now a routine, shall become a mathematic; the
day we shall, for instance, seek to know why it is that in our regions
hot winds come sometimes from the north, and cold winds from the south;
the day we shall understand that diminutions of temperature are
proportionate to oceanic depths; the day we realize that the globe is a
vast loadstone polarized in immensity, with two axes--an axis of
rotation and an axis of effluvium--intersecting each other at the centre
of the earth, and that the magnetic poles turn round the geographical
poles; when those who risk life will choose to risk it scientifically;
when men shall navigate assured from studied uncertainty; when the
captain shall be a meteorologist; when the pilot shall be a chemist;
then will many catastrophes be avoided. The sea is magnetic as much as
aquatic: an ocean of unknown forces floats in the ocean of the waves,
or, one might say, on the surface. Only to behold in the sea a mass of
water is not to see it at all: the sea is an ebb and flow of fluid, as
much as a flux and reflux of liquid. It is, perhaps, complicated by
attractions even more than by hurricanes; molecular adhesion, manifested
among other phenomena by capillary attraction, although microscopic,
takes in ocean its place in the grandeur of immensity; and the wave of
effluvium sometimes aids, sometimes counteracts, the wave of the air and
the wave of the waters. He who is ignorant of electric law is ignorant
of hydraulic law; for the one intermixes with the other. It is true
there is no study more difficult nor more obscure; it verges on
empiricism, just as astronomy verges on astrology; and yet without this
study there is no navigation. Having said this much we will pass on.

One of the most dangerous components of the sea is the snowstorm. The
snowstorm is above all things magnetic. The pole produces it as it
produces the aurora borealis. It is in the fog of the one as in the
light of the other; and in the flake of snow as in the streak of flame
effluvium is visible.

Storms are the nervous attacks and delirious frenzies of the sea. The
sea has its ailments. Tempests may be compared to maladies. Some are
mortal, others not; some may be escaped, others not. The snowstorm is
supposed to be generally mortal. Jarabija, one of the pilots of
Magellan, termed it "a cloud issuing from the devil's sore side."[2]

The old Spanish navigators called this kind of squall _la nevada_, when
it came with snow; _la helada_, when it came with hail. According to
them, bats fell from the sky, with the snow.

Snowstorms are characteristic of polar latitudes; nevertheless, at times
they glide--one might almost say tumble--into our climates; so much
ruin is mingled with the chances of the air.

The _Matutina_, as we have seen, plunged resolutely into the great
hazard of the night, a hazard increased by the impending storm. She had
encountered its menace with a sort of tragic audacity; nevertheless, it
must be remembered that she had received due warning.




CHAPTER II.

OUR FIRST ROUGH SKETCHES FILLED IN.


While the hooker was in the gulf of Portland, there was but little sea
on; the ocean, if gloomy, was almost still, and the sky was yet clear.
The wind took little effect on the vessel; the hooker hugged the cliff
as closely as possible; it served as a screen to her.

There were ten on board the little Biscayan felucca--three men in crew,
and seven passengers, of whom two were women. In the light of the open
sea (which broadens twilight into day) all the figures on board were
clearly visible. Besides they were not hiding now--they were all at
ease; each one reassumed his freedom of manner, spoke in his own note,
showed his face; departure was to them a deliverance.

The motley nature of the group shone out. The women were of no age. A
wandering life produces premature old age, and indigence is made up of
wrinkles. One of them was a Basque of the Dry-ports. The other, with the
large rosary, was an Irishwoman. They wore that air of indifference
common to the wretched. They had squatted down close to each other when
they got on board, on chests at the foot of the mast. They talked to
each other. Irish and Basque are, as we have said, kindred languages.
The Basque woman's hair was scented with onions and basil. The skipper
of the hooker was a Basque of Guipuzcoa. One sailor was a Basque of the
northern slope of the Pyrenees, the other was of the southern
slope--that is to say, they were of the same nation, although the first
was French and the latter Spanish. The Basques recognize no official
country. _Mi madre se llama Montana_, my mother is called the mountain,
as Zalareus, the muleteer, used to say. Of the five men who were with
the two women, one was a Frenchman of Languedoc, one a Frenchman of
Provence, one a Genoese; one, an old man, he who wore the sombrero
without a hole for a pipe, appeared to be a German. The fifth, the
chief, was a Basque of the Landes from Biscarrosse. It was he who, just
as the child was going on board the hooker, had, with a kick of his
heel, cast the plank into the sea. This man, robust, agile, sudden in
movement, covered, as may be remembered, with trimmings, slashings, and
glistening tinsel, could not keep in his place; he stooped down, rose
up, and continually passed to and fro from one end of the vessel to the
other, as if debating uneasily on what had been done and what was going
to happen.

This chief of the band, the captain and the two men of the crew, all
four Basques, spoke sometimes Basque, sometimes Spanish, sometimes
French--these three languages being common on both slopes of the
Pyrenees. But generally speaking, excepting the women, all talked
something like French, which was the foundation of their slang. The
French language about this period began to be chosen by the peoples as
something intermediate between the excess of consonants in the north and
the excess of vowels in the south. In Europe, French was the language of
commerce, and also of felony. It will be remembered that Gibby, a London
thief, understood Cartouche.

The hooker, a fine sailer, was making quick way; still, ten persons,
besides their baggage, were a heavy cargo for one of such light draught.

The fact of the vessel's aiding the escape of a band did not necessarily
imply that the crew were accomplices. It was sufficient that the captain
of the vessel was a Vascongado, and that the chief of the band was
another. Among that race mutual assistance is a duty which admits of no
exception. A Basque, as we have said, is neither Spanish nor French; he
is Basque, and always and everywhere he must succour a Basque. Such is
Pyrenean fraternity.

All the time the hooker was in the gulf, the sky, although threatening,
did not frown enough to cause the fugitives any uneasiness. They were
flying, they were escaping, they were brutally gay. One laughed, another
sang; the laugh was dry but free, the song was low but careless.

The Languedocian cried, "_Caoucagno!_" "_Cocagne_" expresses the highest
pitch of satisfaction in Narbonne. He was a longshore sailor, a native
of the waterside village of Gruissan, on the southern side of the
Clappe, a bargeman rather than a mariner, but accustomed to work the
reaches of the inlet of Bages, and to draw the drag-net full of fish
over the salt sands of St. Lucie. He was of the race who wear a red cap,
make complicated signs of the cross after the Spanish fashion, drink
wine out of goat-skins, eat scraped ham, kneel down to blaspheme, and
implore their patron saint with threats--"Great saint, grant me what I
ask, or I'll throw a stone at thy head, _ou te feg un pic_." He might
be, at need, a useful addition to the crew.

The Provencal in the caboose was blowing up a turf fire under an
iron pot, and making broth. The broth was a kind of puchero, in which
fish took the place of meat, and into which the Provencal threw
chick peas, little bits of bacon cut in squares, and pods of red
pimento--concessions made by the eaters of _bouillabaisse_ to the
eaters of _olla podrida_. One of the bags of provisions was beside him
unpacked. He had lighted over his head an iron lantern, glazed with
talc, which swung on a hook from the ceiling. By its side, on another
hook, swung the weather-cock halcyon. There was a popular belief in
those days that a dead halcyon, hung by the beak, always turned its
breast to the quarter whence the wind was blowing. While he made the
broth, the Provencal put the neck of a gourd into his mouth, and now and
then swallowed a draught of aguardiente. It was one of those gourds
covered with wicker, broad and flat, with handles, which used to be hung
to the side by a strap, and which were then called hip-gourds. Between
each gulp he mumbled one of those country songs of which the subject is
nothing at all: a hollow road, a hedge; you see in the meadow, through a
gap in the bushes, the shadow of a horse and cart, elongated in the
sunset, and from time to time, above the hedge, the end of a fork loaded
with hay appears and disappears--you want no more to make a song.

A departure, according to the bent of one's mind, is a relief or a
depression. All seemed lighter in spirits excepting the old man of the
band, the man with the hat that had no pipe.

This old man, who looked more German than anything else, although he had
one of those unfathomable faces in which nationality is lost, was bald,
and so grave that his baldness might have been a tonsure. Every time he
passed before the Virgin on the prow, he raised his felt hat, so that
you could see the swollen and senile veins of his skull. A sort of full
gown, torn and threadbare, of brown Dorchester serge, but half hid his
closely fitting coat, tight, compact, and hooked up to the neck like a
cassock. His hands inclined to cross each other, and had the mechanical
junction of habitual prayer. He had what might be called a wan
countenance; for the countenance is above all things a reflection, and
it is an error to believe that idea is colourless. That countenance was
evidently the surface of a strange inner state, the result of a
composition of contradictions, some tending to drift away in good,
others in evil, and to an observer it was the revelation of one who was
less and more than human--capable of falling below the scale of the
tiger, or of rising above that of man. Such chaotic souls exist. There
was something inscrutable in that face. Its secret reached the abstract.
You felt that the man had known the foretaste of evil which is the
calculation, and the after-taste which is the zero. In his
impassibility, which was perhaps only on the surface, were imprinted two
petrifactions--the petrifaction of the heart proper to the hangman, and
the petrifaction of the mind proper to the mandarin. One might have said
(for the monstrous has its mode of being complete) that all things were
possible to him, even emotion. In every savant there is something of the
corpse, and this man was a savant. Only to see him you caught science
imprinted in the gestures of his body and in the folds of his dress. His
was a fossil face, the serious cast of which was counteracted by that
wrinkled mobility of the polyglot which verges on grimace. But a severe
man withal; nothing of the hypocrite, nothing of the cynic. A tragic
dreamer. He was one of those whom crime leaves pensive; he had the brow
of an incendiary tempered by the eyes of an archbishop. His sparse gray
locks turned to white over his temples. The Christian was evident in
him, complicated with the fatalism of the Turk. Chalkstones deformed his
fingers, dissected by leanness. The stiffness of his tall frame was
grotesque. He had his sea-legs, he walked slowly about the deck, not
looking at any one, with an air decided and sinister. His eyeballs were
vaguely filled with the fixed light of a soul studious of the darkness
and afflicted by reapparitions of conscience.

From time to time the chief of the band, abrupt and alert, and making
sudden turns about the vessel, came to him and whispered in his ear. The
old man answered by a nod. It might have been the lightning consulting
the night.




CHAPTER III.

TROUBLED MEN ON THE TROUBLED SEA.


Two men on board the craft were absorbed in thought--the old man, and
the skipper of the hooker, who must not be mistaken for the chief of the
band. The captain was occupied by the sea, the old man by the sky. The
former did not lift his eyes from the waters; the latter kept watch on
the firmament. The skipper's anxiety was the state of the sea; the old
man seemed to suspect the heavens. He scanned the stars through every
break in the clouds.

It was the time when day still lingers, but some few stars begin faintly
to pierce the twilight. The horizon was singular. The mist upon it
varied. Haze predominated on land, clouds at sea.

The skipper, noting the rising billows, hauled all taut before he got
outside Portland Bay. He would not delay so doing until he should pass
the headland. He examined the rigging closely, and satisfied himself
that the lower shrouds were well set up, and supported firmly the
futtock-shrouds--precautions of a man who means to carry on with a press
of sail, at all risks.

The hooker was not trimmed, being two feet by the head. This was her
weak point.

The captain passed every minute from the binnacle to the standard
compass, taking the bearings of objects on shore. The _Matutina_ had at
first a soldier's wind which was not unfavourable, though she could not
lie within five points of her course. The captain took the helm as often
as possible, trusting no one but himself to prevent her from dropping to
leeward, the effect of the rudder being influenced by the steerage-way.

The difference between the true and apparent course being relative to
the way on the vessel, the hooker seemed to lie closer to the wind than
she did in reality. The breeze was not a-beam, nor was the hooker
close-hauled; but one cannot ascertain the true course made, except when
the wind is abaft. When you perceive long streaks of clouds meeting in a
point on the horizon, you may be sure that the wind is in that quarter;
but this evening the wind was variable; the needle fluctuated; the
captain distrusted the erratic movements of the vessel. He steered
carefully but resolutely, luffed her up, watched her coming to,
prevented her from yawing, and from running into the wind's eye: noted
the leeway, the little jerks of the helm: was observant of every roll
and pitch of the vessel, of the difference in her speed, and of the
variable gusts of wind. For fear of accidents, he was constantly on the
lookout for squalls from off the land he was hugging, and above all he
was cautious to keep her full; the direction of the breeze indicated by
the compass being uncertain from the small size of the instrument. The
captain's eyes, frequently lowered, remarked every change in the waves.

Once nevertheless he raised them towards the sky, and tried to make out
the three stars of Orion's belt. These stars are called the three magi,
and an old proverb of the ancient Spanish pilots declares that, "He who
sees the three magi is not far from the Saviour."

This glance of the captain's tallied with an aside growled out, at the
other end of the vessel, by the old man, "We don't even see the
pointers, nor the star Antares, red as he is. Not one is distinct."

No care troubled the other fugitives.

Still, when the first hilarity they felt in their escape had passed
away, they could not help remembering that they were at sea in the month
of January, and that the wind was frozen. It was impossible to establish
themselves in the cabin. It was much too narrow and too much encumbered
by bales and baggage. The baggage belonged to the passengers, the bales
to the crew, for the hooker was no pleasure boat, and was engaged in
smuggling. The passengers were obliged to settle themselves on deck, a
condition to which these wanderers easily resigned themselves. Open-air
habits make it simple for vagabonds to arrange themselves for the night.
The open air (_la belle etoile_) is their friend, and the cold helps
them to sleep--sometimes to die.

This night, as we have seen, there was no _belle etoile_.

The Languedocian and the Genoese, while waiting for supper, rolled
themselves up near the women, at the foot of the mast, in some tarpaulin
which the sailors had thrown them.

The old man remained at the bow motionless, and apparently insensible to
the cold.

The captain of the hooker, from the helm where he was standing, uttered
a sort of guttural call somewhat like the cry of the American bird
called the exclaimer; at his call the chief of the brand drew near, and
the captain addressed him thus,--

"Etcheco Jauena." These two words, which mean "tiller of the mountain,"
form with the old Cantabri a solemn preface to any subject which should
command attention.

Then the captain pointed the old man out to the chief, and the dialogue
continued in Spanish; it was not, indeed, a very correct dialect, being
that of the mountains. Here are the questions and answers.

"Etcheco jauena, que es este hombre?"

"Un hombre."

"Que lenguas habla?"

"Todas."

"Que cosas sabe?"

"Todas."

"Quai pais?"

"Ningun, y todos."

"Qual dios?"

"Dios."

"Como le llamas?"

"El tonto."

"Como dices que le llamas?"

"El sabio."

"En vuestre tropa que esta?"

"Esta lo que esta."

"El gefe?"

"No."

"Pues que esta?"

"La alma."[3]

The chief and the captain parted, each reverting to his own meditation,
and a little while afterwards the _Matutina_ left the gulf.

Now came the great rolling of the open sea. The ocean in the spaces
between the foam was slimy in appearance. The waves, seen through the
twilight in indistinct outline, somewhat resembled plashes of gall. Here
and there a wave floating flat showed cracks and stars, like a pane of
glass broken by stones; in the centre of these stars, in a revolving
orifice, trembled a phosphorescence, like that feline reflection, of
vanished light which shines in the eyeballs of owls.

Proudly, like a bold swimmer, the _Matutina_ crossed the dangerous
Shambles shoal. This bank, a hidden obstruction at the entrance of
Portland roads, is not a barrier; it is an amphitheatre--a circus of
sand under the sea, its benches cut out by the circling of the waves--an
arena, round and symmetrical, as high as a Jungfrau, only drowned--a
coliseum of the ocean, seen by the diver in the vision-like transparency
which engulfs him,--such is the Shambles shoal. There hydras fight,
leviathans meet. There, says the legend, at the bottom of the gigantic
shaft, are the wrecks of ships, seized and sunk by the huge spider
Kraken, also called the fish-mountain. Such things lie in the fearful
shadow of the sea.

These spectral realities, unknown to man, are manifested at the surface
by a slight shiver.

In this nineteenth century, the Shambles bank is in ruins; the
breakwater recently constructed has overthrown and mutilated, by the
force of its surf, that high submarine architecture, just as the jetty,
built at the Croisic in 1760, changed, by a quarter of an hour, the
course of the tides. And yet the tide is eternal. But eternity obeys man
more than man imagines.




CHAPTER IV.

A CLOUD DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS ENTERS ON THE SCENE.


The old man whom the chief of the band had named first the Madman, then
the Sage, now never left the forecastle. Since they crossed the Shambles
shoal, his attention had been divided between the heavens and the
waters. He looked down, he looked upwards, and above all watched the
north-east.

The skipper gave the helm to a sailor, stepped over the after hatchway,
crossed the gangway, and went on to the forecastle. He approached the
old man, but not in front. He stood a little behind, with elbows resting
on his hips, with outstretched hands, the head on one side, with open
eyes and arched eyebrows, and a smile in the corners of his mouth--an
attitude of curiosity hesitating between mockery and respect.

The old man, either that it was his habit to talk to himself, or that
hearing some one behind incited him to speech, began to soliloquize
while he looked into space.

"The meridian, from which the right ascension is calculated, is marked
in this century by four stars--the Polar, Cassiopeia's Chair,
Andromeda's Head, and the star Algenib, which is in Pegasus. But there
is not one visible."

These words followed each other mechanically, confused, and scarcely
articulated, as if he did not care to pronounce them. They floated out
of his mouth and dispersed. Soliloquy is the smoke exhaled by the inmost
fires of the soul.

The skipper broke in, "My lord!"

The old man, perhaps rather deaf as well as very thoughtful, went on,--

"Too few stars, and too much wind. The breeze continually changes its
direction and blows inshore; thence it rises perpendicularly. This
results from the land being warmer than the water. Its atmosphere is
lighter. The cold and dense wind of the sea rushes in to replace it.
From this cause, in the upper regions the wind blows towards the land
from every quarter. It would be advisable to make long tacks between the
true and apparent parallel. When the latitude by observation differs
from the latitude by dead reckoning by not more than three minutes in
thirty miles, or by four minutes in sixty miles, you are in the true
course."

The skipper bowed, but the old man saw him not. The latter, who wore
what resembled an Oxford or Gottingen university gown, did not relax his
haughty and rigid attitude. He observed the waters as a critic of waves
and of men. He studied the billows, but almost as if he was about to
demand his turn to speak amidst their turmoil, and teach them something.
There was in him both pedagogue and soothsayer. He seemed an oracle of
the deep.

He continued his soliloquy, which was perhaps intended to be heard.

"We might strive if we had a wheel instead of a helm. With a speed of
twelve miles an hour, a force of twenty pounds exerted on the wheel
produces three hundred thousand pounds' effect on the course. And more
too. For in some cases, with a double block and runner, they can get two
more revolutions."

The skipper bowed a second time, and said, "My lord!"

The old man's eye rested on him; he had turned his head without moving
his body.

"Call me Doctor."

"Master Doctor, I am the skipper."

"Just so," said the doctor.

The doctor, as henceforward we shall call him, appeared willing to
converse.

"Skipper, have you an English sextant?"

"No."

"Without an English sextant you cannot take an altitude at all."

"The Basques," replied the captain, "took altitudes before there were
any English."

"Be careful you are not taken aback."

"I keep her away when necessary."

"Have you tried how many knots she is running?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"Just now."

"How?"

"By the log."

"Did you take the trouble to look at the triangle?"

"Yes."

"Did the sand run through the glass in exactly thirty seconds?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure that the sand has not worn the hole between the globes?"

"Yes."

"Have you proved the sand-glass by the oscillations of a bullet?"

"Suspended by a rope yarn drawn out from the top of a coil of soaked
hemp? Undoubtedly."

"Have you waxed the yarn lest it should stretch?"

"Yes."

"Have you tested the log?"

"I tested the sand-glass by the bullet, and checked the log by a round
shot."

"Of what size was the shot?"

"One foot in diameter."

"Heavy enough?"

"It is an old round shot of our war hooker, La Casse de Par-Grand."

"Which was in the Armada?"

"Yes."

"And which carried six hundred soldiers, fifty sailors, and twenty-five
guns?"

"Shipwreck knows it."

"How did you compute the resistance of the water to the shot?"

"By means of a German scale."

"Have you taken into account the resistance of the rope supporting the
shot to the waves?"

"Yes."

"What was the result?"

"The resistance of the water was 170 pounds."

"That's to say she is running four French leagues an hour."

"And three Dutch leagues."

"But that is the difference merely of the vessel's way and the rate at
which the sea is running?"

"Undoubtedly."

"Whither are you steering?"

"For a creek I know, between Loyola and St. Sebastian."

"Make the latitude of the harbour's mouth as soon as possible."

"Yes, as near as I can."

"Beware of gusts and currents. The first cause the second."

"Traidores."[4]

"No abuse. The sea understands. Insult nothing. Rest satisfied with
watching."

"I have watched, and I do watch. Just now the tide is running against
the wind; by-and-by, when it turns, we shall be all right."

"Have you a chart?"

"No; not for this channel."

"Then you sail by rule of thumb?"

"Not at all. I have a compass."

"The compass is one eye, the chart the other."

"A man with one eye can see."

"How do you compute the difference between the true and apparent
course?"

"I've got my standard compass, and I make a guess."

"To guess is all very well. To know for certain is better."

"Christopher guessed."

"When there is a fog and the needle revolves treacherously, you can
never tell on which side you should look out for squalls, and the end of
it is that you know neither the true nor apparent day's work. An ass
with his chart is better off than a wizard with his oracle."

"There is no fog in the breeze yet, and I see no cause for alarm."

"Ships are like flies in the spider's web of the sea."

"Just now both winds and waves are tolerably favourable."

"Black specks quivering on the billows--such are men on the ocean."

"I dare say there will be nothing wrong to-night."

"You may get into such a mess that you will find it hard to get out of
it."

"All goes well at present."

The doctor's eyes were fixed on the north-east. The skipper continued,--

"Let us once reach the Gulf of Gascony, and I answer for our safety. Ah!
I should say I am at home there. I know it well, my Gulf of Gascony. It
is a little basin, often very boisterous; but there, I know every
sounding in it and the nature of the bottom--mud opposite San Cipriano,
shells opposite Cizarque, sand off Cape Penas, little pebbles off
Boncaut de Mimizan, and I know the colour of every pebble."

The skipper broke off; the doctor was no longer listening.

The doctor gazed at the north-east. Over that icy face passed an
extraordinary expression. All the agony of terror possible to a mask of
stone was depicted there. From his mouth escaped this word, "Good!"

His eyeballs, which had all at once become quite round like an owl's,
were dilated with stupor on discovering a speck on the horizon. He
added,--

"It is well. As for me, I am resigned."

The skipper looked at him. The doctor went on talking to himself, or to
some one in the deep,--

"I say, Yes."

Then he was silent, opened his eyes wider and wider with renewed
attention on that which he was watching, and said,--

"It is coming from afar, but not the less surely will it come."

The arc of the horizon which occupied the visual rays and thoughts of
the doctor, being opposite to the west, was illuminated by the
transcendent reflection of twilight, as if it were day. This arc,
limited in extent, and surrounded by streaks of grayish vapour, was
uniformly blue, but of a leaden rather than cerulean blue. The doctor,
having completely returned to the contemplation of the sea, pointed to
this atmospheric arc, and said,--

"Skipper, do you see?"

"What?"

"That."

"What?"

"Out there."

"A blue spot? Yes."

"What is it?"

"A niche in heaven."

"For those who go to heaven; for those who go elsewhere it is another
affair." And he emphasized these enigmatical words with an appalling
expression which was unseen in the darkness.

A silence ensued. The skipper, remembering the two names given by the
chief to this man, asked himself the question,--

"Is he a madman, or is he a sage?"

The stiff and bony finger of the doctor remained immovably pointing,
like a sign-post, to the misty blue spot in the sky.

The skipper looked at this spot.

"In truth," he growled out, "it is not sky but clouds."

"A blue cloud is worse than a black cloud," said the doctor; "and," he
added, "it's a snow-cloud."

"La nube de la nieve," said the skipper, as if trying to understand the
word better by translating it.

"Do you know what a snow-cloud is?" asked the doctor.

"No."

"You'll know by-and-by."

The skipper again turned his attention to the horizon.

Continuing to observe the cloud, he muttered between his teeth,--

"One month of squalls, another of wet; January with its gales, February
with its rains--that's all the winter we Asturians get. Our rain even is
warm. We've no snow but on the mountains. Ay, ay; look out for the
avalanche. The avalanche is no respecter of persons. The avalanche is a
brute."

"And the waterspout is a monster," said the doctor, adding, after a
pause, "Here it comes." He continued, "Several winds are getting up
together--a strong wind from the west, and a gentle wind from the east."

"That last is a deceitful one," said the skipper.

       *       *       *       *       *

The blue cloud was growing larger.

"If the snow," said the doctor, "is appalling when it slips down the
mountain, think what it is when it falls from the Pole!"

His eye was glassy. The cloud seemed to spread over his face and
simultaneously over the horizon. He continued, in musing tones,--

"Every minute the fatal hour draws nearer. The will of Heaven is about
to be manifested."

The skipper asked himself again this question,--"Is he a madman?"

"Skipper," began the doctor, without taking his eyes off the cloud,
"have you often crossed the Channel?"

"This is the first time."

The doctor, who was absorbed by the blue cloud, and who, as a sponge can
take up but a definite quantity of water, had but a definite measure of
anxiety, displayed no more emotion at this answer of the skipper than
was expressed by a slight shrug of his shoulders.

"How is that?"

"Master Doctor, my usual cruise is to Ireland. I sail from Fontarabia to
Black Harbour or to the Achill Islands. I go sometimes to Braich-y-Pwll,
a point on the Welsh coast. But I always steer outside the Scilly
Islands. I do not know this sea at all."

"That's serious. Woe to him who is inexperienced on the ocean! One ought
to be familiar with the Channel--the Channel is the Sphinx. Look out for
shoals."

"We are in twenty-five fathoms here."

"We ought to get into fifty-five fathoms to the west, and avoid even
twenty fathoms to the east."

"We'll sound as we get on."

"The Channel is not an ordinary sea. The water rises fifty feet with the
spring tides, and twenty-five with neap tides. Here we are in slack
water. I thought you looked scared."

"We'll sound to-night."

"To sound you must heave to, and that you cannot do."

"Why not?"

"On account of the wind."

"We'll try."

"The squall is close on us."

"We'll sound, Master Doctor."

"You could not even bring to."

"Trust in God."

"Take care what you say. Pronounce not lightly the awful name."

"I will sound, I tell you."

"Be sensible; you will have a gale of wind presently."

"I say that I will try for soundings."

"The resistance of the water will prevent the lead from sinking, and the
line will break. Ah! so this is your first time in these waters?"

"The first time."

"Very well; in that case listen, skipper."

The tone of the word "listen" was so commanding that the skipper made an
obeisance.

"Master Doctor, I am all attention."

"Port your helm, and haul up on the starboard tack."

"What do you mean?"

"Steer your course to the west."

"Caramba!"

"Steer your course to the west."

"Impossible."

"As you will. What I tell you is for the others' sake. As for myself, I
am indifferent."

"But, Master Doctor, steer west?"

"Yes, skipper."

"The wind will be dead ahead."

"Yes, skipper."

"She'll pitch like the devil."

"Moderate your language. Yes, skipper."

"The vessel would be in irons."

"Yes, skipper."

"That means very likely the mast will go."

"Possibly."

"Do you wish me to steer west?"

"Yes."

"I cannot."

"In that case settle your reckoning with the sea."

"The wind ought to change."

"It will not change all night."

"Why not?"

"Because it is a wind twelve hundred leagues in length."

"Make headway against such a wind! Impossible."

"To the west, I tell you."

"I'll try, but in spite of everything she will fall off."

"That's the danger."

"The wind sets us to the east."

"Don't go to the east."

"Why not?"

"Skipper, do you know what is for us the word of death?"

"No."

"Death is the east."

"I'll steer west."

This time the doctor, having turned right round, looked the skipper full
in the face, and with his eyes resting on him, as though to implant the
idea in his head, pronounced slowly, syllable by syllable, these
words,--

"If to-night out at sea we hear the sound of a bell, the ship is lost."

The skipper pondered in amaze.

"What do you mean?"

The doctor did not answer. His countenance, expressive for a moment, was
now reserved. His eyes became vacuous. He did not appear to hear the
skipper's wondering question. He was now attending to his own monologue.
His lips let fall, as if mechanically, in a low murmuring tone, these
words,--

"The time has come for sullied souls to purify themselves."

The skipper made that expressive grimace which raises the chin towards
the nose.

"He is more madman than sage," he growled, and moved off.

Nevertheless he steered west.

But the wind and the sea were rising.




CHAPTER V.

HARDQUANONNE.


The mist was deformed by all sorts of inequalities, bulging out at once
on every point of the horizon, as if invisible mouths were busy puffing
out the bags of wind. The formation of the clouds was becoming ominous.
In the west, as in the east, the sky's depths were now invaded by the
blue cloud: it advanced in the teeth of the wind. These contradictions
are part of the wind's vagaries.

The sea, which a moment before wore scales, now wore a skin--such is the
nature of that dragon. It was no longer a crocodile: it was a boa. The
skin, lead-coloured and dirty, looked thick, and was crossed by heavy
wrinkles. Here and there, on its surface, bubbles of surge, like
pustules, gathered and then burst. The foam was like a leprosy. It was
at this moment that the hooker, still seen from afar by the child,
lighted her signal.

A quarter of an hour elapsed.

The skipper looked for the doctor: he was no longer on deck. Directly
the skipper had left him, the doctor had stooped his somewhat ungainly
form under the hood, and had entered the cabin; there he had sat down
near the stove, on a block. He had taken a shagreen ink-bottle and a
cordwain pocket-book from his pocket; he had extracted from his
pocket-book a parchment folded four times, old, stained, and yellow; he
had opened the sheet, taken a pen out of his ink-case, placed the
pocket-book flat on his knee, and the parchment on the pocket-book; and
by the rays of the lantern, which was lighting the cook, he set to
writing on the back of the parchment. The roll of the waves
inconvenienced him. He wrote thus for some time.

As he wrote, the doctor remarked the gourd of aguardiente, which the
Provencal tasted every time he added a grain of pimento to the puchero,
as if he were consulting it in reference to the seasoning. The doctor
noticed the gourd, not because it was a bottle of brandy, but because of
a name which was plaited in the wickerwork with red rushes on a
background of white. There was light enough in the cabin to permit of
his reading the name.

The doctor paused, and spelled it in a low voice,--

"Hardquanonne."

Then he addressed the cook.

"I had not observed that gourd before; did it belong to Hardquanonne?"

"Yes," the cook answered; "to our poor comrade, Hardquanonne."

The doctor went on,--

"To Hardquanonne, the Fleming of Flanders?"

"Yes."

"Who is in prison?"

"Yes."

"In the dungeon at Chatham?"

"It is his gourd," replied the cook; "and he was my friend. I keep it in
remembrance of him. When shall we see him again? It is the bottle he
used to wear slung over his hip."

The doctor took up his pen again, and continued laboriously tracing
somewhat straggling lines on the parchment. He was evidently anxious
that his handwriting should be very legible; and at length,
notwithstanding the tremulousness of the vessel and the tremulousness of
age, he finished what he wanted to write.

It was time, for suddenly a sea struck the craft, a mighty rush of
waters besieged the hooker, and they felt her break into that fearful
dance in which ships lead off with the tempest.

The doctor arose and approached the stove, meeting the ship's motion
with his knees dexterously bent, dried as best he could, at the stove
where the pot was boiling, the lines he had written, refolded the
parchment in the pocket-book, and replaced the pocket-book and the
inkhorn in his pocket.

The stove was not the least ingenious piece of interior economy in the
hooker. It was judiciously isolated. Meanwhile the pot heaved--the
Provencal was watching it.

"Fish broth," said he.

"For the fishes," replied the doctor. Then he went on deck again.




CHAPTER VI.

THEY THINK THAT HELP IS AT HAND.


Through his growing preoccupation the doctor in some sort reviewed the
situation; and any one near to him might have heard these words drop
from his lips,--

"Too much rolling, and not enough pitching."

Then recalled to himself by the dark workings of his mind, he sank again
into thought, as a miner into his shaft. His meditation in nowise
interfered with his watch on the sea. The contemplation of the sea is in
itself a reverie.

The dark punishment of the waters, eternally tortured, was commencing. A
lamentation arose from the whole main. Preparations, confused and
melancholy, were forming in space. The doctor observed all before him,
and lost no detail. There was, however, no sign of scrutiny in his face.
One does not scrutinize hell.

A vast commotion, yet half latent, but visible through the turmoils in
space, increased and irritated, more and more, the winds, the vapours,
the waves. Nothing is so logical and nothing appears so absurd as the
ocean. Self-dispersion is the essence of its sovereignty, and is one of
the elements of its redundance. The sea is ever for and against. It
knots that it may unravel itself; one of its slopes attacks, the other
relieves. No apparition is so wonderful as the waves. Who can paint the
alternating hollows and promontories, the valleys, the melting bosoms,
the sketches? How render the thickets of foam, blendings of mountains
and dreams? The indescribable is everywhere there--in the rending, in
the frowning, in the anxiety, in the perpetual contradiction, in the
chiaroscuro, in the pendants of the cloud, in the keys of the ever-open
vault, in the disaggregation without rupture, in the funereal tumult
caused by all that madness!

The wind had just set due north. Its violence was so favourable and so
useful in driving them away from England that the captain of the
_Matutina_ had made up his mind to set all sail. The hooker slipped
through the foam as at a gallop, the wind right aft, bounding from wave
to wave in a gay frenzy. The fugitives were delighted, and laughed; they
clapped their hands, applauded the surf, the sea, the wind, the sails,
the swift progress, the flight, all unmindful of the future. The doctor
appeared not to see them, and dreamt on.

Every vestige of day had faded away. This was the moment when the child,
watching from the distant cliff, lost sight of the hooker. Up to then
his glance had remained fixed, and, as it were, leaning on the vessel.
What part had that look in fate? When the hooker was lost to sight in
the distance, and when the child could no longer see aught, the child
went north and the ship went south.

All were plunged in darkness.




CHAPTER VII.

SUPERHUMAN HORRORS.


On their part it was with wild jubilee and delight that those on board
the hooker saw the hostile land recede and lessen behind them. By
degrees the dark ring of ocean rose higher, dwarfing in twilight
Portland, Purbeck, Tineham, Kimmeridge, the Matravers, the long streaks
of dim cliffs, and the coast dotted with lighthouses.

England disappeared. The fugitives had now nothing round them but the
sea.

All at once night grew awful.

There was no longer extent nor space; the sky became blackness, and
closed in round the vessel. The snow began to fall slowly; a few flakes
appeared. They might have been ghosts. Nothing else was visible in the
course of the wind. They felt as if yielded up. A snare lurked in every
possibility.

It is in this cavernous darkness that in our climate the Polar
waterspout makes its appearance.

A great muddy cloud, like to the belly of a hydra, hung over ocean, and
in places its lividity adhered to the waves. Some of these adherences
resembled pouches with holes, pumping the sea, disgorging vapour, and
refilling themselves with water. Here and there these suctions drew up
cones of foam on the sea.

The boreal storm hurled itself on the hooker. The hooker rushed to meet
it. The squall and the vessel met as though to insult each other.

In the first mad shock not a sail was clewed up, not a jib lowered, not
a reef taken in, so much is flight a delirium. The mast creaked and bent
back as if in fear.

Cyclones, in our northern hemisphere, circle from left to right, in the
same direction as the hands of a watch, with a velocity which is
sometimes as much as sixty miles an hour. Although she was entirely at
the mercy of that whirling power, the hooker behaved as if she were out
in moderate weather, without any further precaution than keeping her
head on to the rollers, with the wind broad on the bow so as to avoid
being pooped or caught broadside on. This semi-prudence would have
availed her nothing in case of the wind's shifting and taking her aback.

A deep rumbling was brewing up in the distance. The roar of the abyss,
nothing can be compared to it. It is the great brutish howl of the
universe. What we call matter, that unsearchable organism, that
amalgamation of incommensurable energies, in which can occasionally be
detected an almost imperceptible degree of intention which makes us
shudder, that blind, benighted cosmos, that enigmatical Pan, has a cry,
a strange cry, prolonged, obstinate, and continuous, which is less than
speech and more than thunder. That cry is the hurricane. Other voices,
songs, melodies, clamours, tones, proceed from nests, from broods, from
pairings, from nuptials, from homes. This one, a trumpet, comes out of
the Naught, which is All. Other voices express the soul of the universe;
this one expresses the monster. It is the howl of the formless. It is
the inarticulate finding utterance in the indefinite. A thing it is full
of pathos and terror. Those clamours converse above and beyond man. They
rise, fall, undulate, determine waves of sound, form all sorts of wild
surprises for the mind, now burst close to the ear with the importunity
of a peal of trumpets, now assail us with the rumbling hoarseness of
distance. Giddy uproar which resembles a language, and which, in fact,
is a language. It is the effort which the world makes to speak. It is
the lisping of the wonderful. In this wail is manifested vaguely all
that the vast dark palpitation endures, suffers, accepts, rejects. For
the most part it talks nonsense; it is like an access of chronic
sickness, and rather an epilepsy diffused than a force employed; we
fancy that we are witnessing the descent of supreme evil into the
infinite. At moments we seem to discern a reclamation of the elements,
some vain effort of chaos to reassert itself over creation. At times it
is a complaint. The void bewails and justifies itself. It is as the
pleading of the world's cause. We can fancy that the universe is engaged
in a lawsuit; we listen--we try to grasp the reasons given, the
redoubtable for and against. Such a moaning of the shadows has the
tenacity of a syllogism. Here is a vast trouble for thought. Here is the
_raison d'etre_ of mythologies and polytheisms. To the terror of those
great murmurs are added superhuman outlines melting away as they
appear--Eumenides which are almost distinct, throats of Furies shaped in
the clouds, Plutonian chimeras almost defined. No horrors equal those
sobs, those laughs, those tricks of tumult, those inscrutable questions
and answers, those appeals to unknown aid. Man knows not what to become
in the presence of that awful incantation. He bows under the enigma of
those Draconian intonations. What latent meaning have they? What do they
signify? What do they threaten? What do they implore? It would seem as
though all bonds were loosened. Vociferations from precipice to
precipice, from air to water, from the wind to the wave, from the rain
to the rock, from the zenith to the nadir, from the stars to the
foam--the abyss unmuzzled--such is that tumult, complicated by some
mysterious strife with evil consciences.

The loquacity of night is not less lugubrious than its silence. One
feels in it the anger of the unknown.

Night is a presence. Presence of what?

For that matter we must distinguish between night and the shadows. In
the night there is the absolute; in the darkness the multiple. Grammar,
logic as it is, admits of no singular for the shadows. The night is one,
the shadows are many.[5]

This mist of nocturnal mystery is the scattered, the fugitive, the
crumbling, the fatal; one feels earth no longer, one feels the other
reality.

In the shadow, infinite and indefinite, lives something or some one; but
that which lives there forms part of our death. After our earthly
passage, when that shadow shall be light for us, the life which is
beyond our life shall seize us. Meanwhile it appears to touch and try
us. Obscurity is a pressure. Night is, as it were, a hand placed on our
soul. At certain hideous and solemn hours we feel that which is beyond
the wall of the tomb encroaching on us.

Never does this proximity of the unknown seem more imminent than in
storms at sea. The horrible combines with the fantastic. The possible
interrupter of human actions, the old Cloud compeller, has it in his
power to mould, in whatsoever shape he chooses, the inconsistent
element, the limitless incoherence, the force diffused and undecided of
aim. That mystery the tempest every instant accepts and executes some
unknown changes of will, apparent or real.

Poets have, in all ages, called this the caprice of the waves. But there
is no such thing as caprice. The disconcerting enigmas which in nature
we call caprice, and in human life chance, are splinters of a law
revealed to us in glimpses.




CHAPTER VIII.

NIX ET NOX.


The characteristic of the snowstorm is its blackness. Nature's habitual
aspect during a storm, the earth or sea black and the sky pale, is
reversed; the sky is black, the ocean white, foam below, darkness
above; a horizon walled in with smoke; a zenith roofed with crape. The
tempest resembles a cathedral hung with mourning, but no light in that
cathedral: no phantom lights on the crests of the waves, no spark, no
phosphorescence, naught but a huge shadow. The polar cyclone differs
from the tropical cyclone, inasmuch as the one sets fire to every light,
and the other extinguishes them all. The world is suddenly converted
into the arched vault of a cave. Out of the night falls a dust of pale
spots, which hesitate between sky and sea. These spots, which are flakes
of snow, slip, wander, and flow. It is like the tears of a winding-sheet
putting themselves into lifelike motion. A mad wind mingles with this
dissemination. Blackness crumbling into whiteness, the furious into the
obscure, all the tumult of which the sepulchre is capable, a whirlwind
under a catafalque--such is the snowstorm. Underneath trembles the
ocean, forming and re-forming over portentous unknown depths.

In the polar wind, which is electrical, the flakes turn suddenly into
hailstones, and the air becomes filled with projectiles; the water
crackles, shot with grape.

No thunderstrokes: the lightning of boreal storms is silent. What is
sometimes said of the cat, "it swears," may be applied to this
lightning. It is a menace proceeding from a mouth half open and
strangely inexorable. The snowstorm is a storm blind and dumb; when it
has passed, the ships also are often blind and the sailors dumb.

To escape from such an abyss is difficult.

It would be wrong, however, to believe shipwreck to be absolutely
inevitable. The Danish fishermen of Disco and the Balesin; the seekers
of black whales; Hearn steering towards Behring Strait, to discover the
mouth of Coppermine River; Hudson, Mackenzie, Vancouver, Ross, Dumont
D'Urville, all underwent at the Pole itself the wildest hurricanes, and
escaped out of them.

It was into this description of tempest that the hooker had entered,
triumphant and in full sail--frenzy against frenzy. When Montgomery,
escaping from Rouen, threw his galley, with all the force of its oars,
against the chain barring the Seine at La Bouille, he showed similar
effrontery.

The _Matutina_ sailed on fast; she bent so much under her sails that at
moments she made a fearful angle with the sea of fifteen degrees; but
her good bellied keel adhered to the water as if glued to it. The keel
resisted the grasp of the hurricane. The lantern at the prow cast its
light ahead.

The cloud, full of winds, dragging its tumour over the deep, cramped and
eat more and more into the sea round the hooker. Not a gull, not a
sea-mew, nothing but snow. The expanse of the field of waves was
becoming contracted and terrible; only three or four gigantic ones were
visible.

Now and then a tremendous flash of lightning of a red copper colour
broke out behind the obscure superposition of the horizon and the
zenith; that sudden release of vermilion flame revealed the horror of
the clouds; that abrupt conflagration of the depths, to which for an
instant the first tiers of clouds and the distant boundaries of the
celestial chaos seemed to adhere, placed the abyss in perspective. On
this ground of fire the snow-flakes showed black--they might have been
compared to dark butterflies flying about in a furnace--then all was
extinguished.

The first explosion over, the squall, still pursuing the hooker, began
to roar in thorough bass. This phase of grumbling is a perilous
diminution of uproar. Nothing is so terrifying as this monologue of the
storm. This gloomy recitative appears to serve as a moment of rest to
the mysterious combating forces, and indicates a species of patrol kept
in the unknown.

The hooker held wildly on her course. Her two mainsails especially were
doing fearful work. The sky and sea were as of ink with jets of foam
running higher than the mast. Every instant masses of water swept the
deck like a deluge, and at each roll of the vessel the hawse-holes, now
to starboard, now to larboard, became as so many open mouths vomiting
back the foam into the sea. The women had taken refuge in the cabin, but
the men remained on deck; the blinding snow eddied round, the spitting
surge mingled with it. All was fury.

At that moment the chief of the band, standing abaft on the stern
frames, holding on with one hand to the shrouds, and with the other
taking off the kerchief he wore round his head and waving it in the
light of the lantern, gay and arrogant, with pride in his face, and his
hair in wild disorder, intoxicated by all the darkness, cried out,--

"We are free!"

"Free, free, free," echoed the fugitives, and the band, seizing hold of
the rigging, rose up on deck.

"Hurrah!" shouted the chief.

And the band shouted in the storm,--

"Hurrah!"

Just as this clamour was dying away in the tempest, a loud solemn voice
rose from the other end of the vessel, saying,--

"Silence!"

All turned their heads. The darkness was thick, and the doctor was
leaning against the mast so that he seemed part of it, and they could
not see him.

The voice spoke again,--

"Listen!"

All were silent.

Then did they distinctly hear through the darkness the toll of a bell.




CHAPTER IX.

THE CHARGE CONFIDED TO A RAGING SEA.


The skipper, at the helm, burst out laughing,--

"A bell! that's good. We are on the larboard tack. What does the bell
prove? Why, that we have land to starboard."

The firm and measured voice of the doctor replied,--

"You have not land to starboard."

"But we have," shouted the skipper.

"No!"

"But that bell tolls from the land."

"That bell," said the doctor, "tolls from the sea."

A shudder passed over these daring men. The haggard faces of the two
women appeared above the companion like two hobgoblins conjured up. The
doctor took a step forward, separating his tall form from the mast. From
the depth of the night's darkness came the toll of the bell.

The doctor resumed,--

"There is in the midst of the sea, halfway between Portland and the
Channel Islands, a buoy, placed there as a caution; that buoy is moored
by chains to the shoal, and floats on the top of the water. On the buoy
is fixed an iron trestle, and across the trestle a bell is hung. In bad
weather heavy seas toss the buoy, and the bell rings. That is the bell
you hear."

The doctor paused to allow an extra violent gust of wind to pass over,
waited until the sound of the bell reasserted itself, and then went
on,--

"To hear that bell in a storm, when the nor'-wester is blowing, is to be
lost. Wherefore? For this reason: if you hear the bell, it is because
the wind brings it to you. But the wind is nor'-westerly, and the
breakers of Aurigny lie east. You hear the bell only because you are
between the buoy and the breakers. It is on those breakers the wind is
driving you. You are on the wrong side of the buoy. If you were on the
right side, you would be out at sea on a safe course, and you would not
hear the bell. The wind would not convey the sound to you. You would
pass close to the buoy without knowing it. We are out of our course.
That bell is shipwreck sounding the tocsin. Now, look out!"

As the doctor spoke, the bell, soothed by a lull of the storm, rang
slowly stroke by stroke, and its intermitting toll seemed to testify to
the truth of the old man's words. It was as the knell of the abyss.

All listened breathless, now to the voice, now to the bell.




CHAPTER X.

THE COLOSSAL SAVAGE, THE STORM.


In the meantime the skipper had caught up his speaking-trumpet.

"Strike every sail, my lads; let go the sheets, man the down-hauls,
lower ties and brails. Let us steer to the west, let us regain the high
sea; head for the buoy, steer for the bell--there's an offing down
there. We've yet a chance."

"Try," said the doctor.

Let us remark here, by the way, that this ringing buoy, a kind of bell
tower on the deep, was removed in 1802. There are yet alive very old
mariners who remember hearing it. It forewarned, but rather too late.

The orders of the skipper were obeyed. The Languedocian made a third
sailor. All bore a hand. Not satisfied with brailing up, they furled the
sails, lashed the earrings, secured the clew-lines, bunt-lines, and
leech-lines, and clapped preventer-shrouds on the block straps, which
thus might serve as back-stays. They fished the mast. They battened down
the ports and bulls'-eyes, which is a method of walling up a ship. These
evolutions, though executed in a lubberly fashion, were, nevertheless,
thoroughly effective. The hooker was stripped to bare poles. But in
proportion as the vessel, stowing every stitch of canvas, became more
helpless, the havoc of both winds and waves increased. The seas ran
mountains high. The hurricane, like an executioner hastening to his
victim, began to dismember the craft. There came, in the twinkling of an
eye, a dreadful crash: the top-sails were blown from the bolt-ropes, the
chess-trees were hewn asunder, the deck was swept clear, the shrouds
were carried away, the mast went by the board, all the lumber of the
wreck was flying in shivers. The main shrouds gave out although they
were turned in, and stoppered to four fathoms.

The magnetic currents common to snowstorms hastened the destruction of
the rigging. It broke as much from the effect of effluvium as the
violence of the wind. Most of the chain gear, fouled in the blocks,
ceased to work. Forward the bows, aft the quarters, quivered under the
terrific shocks. One wave washed overboard the compass and its binnacle.
A second carried away the boat, which, like a box slung under a
carriage, had been, in accordance with the quaint Asturian custom,
lashed to the bowsprit. A third breaker wrenched off the spritsail yard.
A fourth swept away the figurehead and signal light. The rudder only was
left.

To replace the ship's bow lantern they set fire to, and suspended at the
stem, a large block of wood covered with oakum and tar.

The mast, broken in two, all bristling with quivering splinters, ropes,
blocks, and yards, cumbered the deck. In falling it had stove in a plank
of the starboard gunwale. The skipper, still firm at the helm,
shouted,--

"While we can steer we have yet a chance. The lower planks hold good.
Axes, axes! Overboard with the mast! Clear the decks!"

Both crew and passengers worked with the excitement of despair. A few
strokes of the hatchets, and it was done. They pushed the mast over the
side. The deck was cleared.

"Now," continued the skipper, "take a rope's end and lash me to the
helm." To the tiller they bound him.

While they were fastening him he laughed, and shouted,--

"Blow, old hurdy-gurdy, bellow. I've seen your equal off Cape
Machichaco."

And when secured he clutched the helm with that strange hilarity which
danger awakens.

"All goes well, my lads. Long live our Lady of Buglose! Let us steer
west."

An enormous wave came down abeam, and fell on the vessel's quarter.
There is always in storms a tiger-like wave, a billow fierce and
decisive, which, attaining a certain height, creeps horizontally over
the surface of the waters for a time, then rises, roars, rages, and
falling on the distressed vessel tears it limb from limb.

A cloud of foam covered the entire poop of the _Matutina_.

There was heard above the confusion of darkness and waters a crash.

When the spray cleared off, when the stern again rose in view, the
skipper and the helm had disappeared. Both had been swept away.

The helm and the man they had but just secured to it had passed with the
wave into the hissing turmoil of the hurricane.

The chief of the band, gazing intently into the darkness, shouted,--

"_Te burlas de nosotros?_"

To this defiant exclamation there followed another cry,--

"Let go the anchor. Save the skipper."

They rushed to the capstan and let go the anchor.

Hookers carry but one. In this case the anchor reached the bottom, but
only to be lost. The bottom was of the hardest rock. The billows were
raging with resistless force. The cable snapped like a thread.

The anchor lay at the bottom of the sea. At the cutwater there remained
but the cable end protruding from the hawse-hole.

From this moment the hooker became a wreck. The _Matutina_ was
irrevocably disabled. The vessel, just before in full sail, and almost
formidable in her speed, was now helpless. All her evolutions were
uncertain and executed at random. She yielded passively and like a log
to the capricious fury of the waves. That in a few minutes there should
be in place of an eagle a useless cripple, such a transformation is to
be witnessed only at sea.

The howling of the wind became more and more frightful. A hurricane has
terrible lungs; it makes unceasingly mournful additions to darkness,
which cannot be intensified. The bell on the sea rang despairingly, as
if tolled by a weird hand.

The _Matutina_ drifted like a cork at the mercy of the waves. She sailed
no longer--she merely floated. Every moment she seemed about to turn
over on her back, like a dead fish. The good condition and perfectly
water-tight state of the hull alone saved her from this disaster. Below
the water-line not a plank had started. There was not a cranny, chink,
nor crack; and she had not made a single drop of water in the hold. This
was lucky, as the pump, being out of order, was useless.

The hooker pitched and roared frightfully in the seething billows. The
vessel had throes as of sickness, and seemed to be trying to belch forth
the unhappy crew.

Helpless they clung to the standing rigging, to the transoms, to the
shank painters, to the gaskets, to the broken planks, the protruding
nails of which tore their hands, to the warped riders, and to all the
rugged projections of the stumps of the masts. From time to time they
listened. The toll of the bell came over the waters fainter and fainter;
one would have thought that it also was in distress. Its ringing was no
more than an intermittent rattle. Then this rattle died away. Where were
they? At what distance from the buoy? The sound of the bell had
frightened them; its silence terrified them. The north-wester drove them
forward in perhaps a fatal course. They felt themselves wafted on by
maddened and ever-recurring gusts of wind. The wreck sped forward in the
darkness. There is nothing more fearful than being hurried forward
blindfold. They felt the abyss before them, over them, under them. It
was no longer a run, it was a rush.

Suddenly, through the appalling density of the snowstorm, there loomed a
red light.

"A lighthouse!" cried the crew.




CHAPTER XI.

THE CASKETS.


It was indeed the Caskets light.

A lighthouse of the nineteenth century is a high cylinder of masonry,
surmounted by scientifically constructed machinery for throwing light.
The Caskets lighthouse in particular is a triple white tower, bearing
three light-rooms. These three chambers revolve on clockwork wheels,
with such precision that the man on watch who sees them from sea can
invariably take ten steps during their irradiation, and twenty-five
during their eclipse. Everything is based on the focal plan, and on the
rotation of the octagon drum, formed of eight wide simple lenses in
range, having above and below it two series of dioptric rings; an
algebraic gear, secured from the effects of the beating of winds and
waves by glass a millimetre thick[6], yet sometimes broken by the
sea-eagles, which dash themselves like great moths against these
gigantic lanterns. The building which encloses and sustains this
mechanism, and in which it is set, is also mathematically constructed.
Everything about it is plain, exact, bare, precise, correct. A
lighthouse is a mathematical figure.

In the seventeenth century a lighthouse was a sort of plume of the land
on the seashore. The architecture of a lighthouse tower was magnificent
and extravagant. It was covered with balconies, balusters, lodges,
alcoves, weathercocks. Nothing but masks, statues, foliage, volutes,
reliefs, figures large and small, medallions with inscriptions. _Pax in
bello_, said the Eddystone lighthouse. We may as well observe, by the
way, that this declaration of peace did not always disarm the ocean.
Winstanley repeated it on a lighthouse which he constructed at his own
expense, on a wild spot near Plymouth. The tower being finished, he shut
himself up in it to have it tried by the tempest. The storm came, and
carried off the lighthouse and Winstanley in it. Such excessive
adornment gave too great a hold to the hurricane, as generals too
brilliantly equipped in battle draw the enemy's fire. Besides whimsical
designs in stone, they were loaded with whimsical designs in iron,
copper, and wood. The ironwork was in relief, the woodwork stood out. On
the sides of the lighthouse there jutted out, clinging to the walls
among the arabesques, engines of every description, useful and useless,
windlasses, tackles, pulleys, counterpoises, ladders, cranes, grapnels.
On the pinnacle around the light delicately-wrought ironwork held great
iron chandeliers, in which were placed pieces of rope steeped in resin;
wicks which burned doggedly, and which no wind extinguished; and from
top to bottom the tower was covered by a complication of sea-standards,
banderoles, banners, flags, pennons, colours which rose from stage to
stage, from story to story, a medley of all hues, all shapes, all
heraldic devices, all signals, all confusion, up to the light chamber,
making, in the storm, a gay riot of tatters about the blaze. That
insolent light on the brink of the abyss showed like a defiance, and
inspired shipwrecked men with a spirit of daring. But the Caskets light
was not after this fashion.

It was, at that period, merely an old barbarous lighthouse, such as
Henry I. had built it after the loss of the _White Ship_--a flaming pile
of wood under an iron trellis, a brazier behind a railing, a head of
hair flaming in the wind.

The only improvement made in this lighthouse since the twelfth century
was a pair of forge-bellows worked by an indented pendulum and a stone
weight, which had been added to the light chamber in 1610.

The fate of the sea-birds who chanced to fly against these old
lighthouses was more tragic than those of our days. The birds dashed
against them, attracted by the light, and fell into the brazier, where
they could be seen struggling like black spirits in a hell, and at times
they would fall back again between the railings upon the rock, red hot,
smoking, lame, blind, like half-burnt flies out of a lamp.

To a full-rigged ship in good trim, answering readily to the pilot's
handling, the Caskets light is useful; it cries, "Look out;" it warns
her of the shoal. To a disabled ship it is simply terrible. The hull,
paralyzed and inert, without resistance, without defence against the
impulse of the storm or the mad heaving of the waves, a fish without
fins, a bird without wings, can but go where the wind wills. The
lighthouse shows the end--points out the spot where it is doomed to
disappear--throws light upon the burial. It is the torch of the
sepulchre.

To light up the inexorable chasm, to warn against the inevitable, what
more tragic mockery!




CHAPTER XII.

FACE TO FACE WITH THE ROCK.


The wretched people in distress on board the _Matutina_ understood at
once the mysterious derision which mocked their shipwreck. The
appearance of the lighthouse raised their spirits at first, then
overwhelmed them. Nothing could be done, nothing attempted. What has
been said of kings, we may say of the waves--we are their people, we are
their prey. All that they rave must be borne. The nor'-wester was
driving the hooker on the Caskets. They were nearing them; no evasion
was possible. They drifted rapidly towards the reef; they felt that they
were getting into shallow waters; the lead, if they could have thrown it
to any purpose, would not have shown more than three or four fathoms.
The shipwrecked people heard the dull sound of the waves being sucked
within the submarine caves of the steep rock. They made out, under the
lighthouse, like a dark cutting between two plates of granite, the
narrow passage of the ugly wild-looking little harbour, supposed to be
full of the skeletons of men and carcasses of ships. It looked like the
mouth of a cavern, rather than the entrance of a port. They could hear
the crackling of the pile on high within the iron grating. A ghastly
purple illuminated the storm; the collision of the rain and hail
disturbed the mist. The black cloud and the red flame fought, serpent
against serpent; live ashes, reft by the wind, flew from the fire, and
the sudden assaults of the sparks seemed to drive the snowflakes before
them. The breakers, blurred at first in outline, now stood out in bold
relief, a medley of rocks with peaks, crests, and vertebrae. The angles
were formed by strongly marked red lines, and the inclined planes in
blood-like streams of light. As they neared it, the outline of the reefs
increased and rose--sinister.

One of the women, the Irishwoman, told her beads wildly.

In place of the skipper, who was the pilot, remained the chief, who was
the captain. The Basques all know the mountain and the sea. They are
bold on the precipice, and inventive in catastrophes.

They neared the cliff. They were about to strike. Suddenly they were so
close to the great north rock of the Caskets that it shut out the
lighthouse from them. They saw nothing but the rock and the red light
behind it. The huge rock looming in the mist was like a gigantic black
woman with a hood of fire.

That ill-famed rock is called the Biblet. It faces the north
side the reef, which on the south is faced by another ridge,
L'Etacq-aux-giulmets. The chief looked at the Biblet, and shouted,--

"A man with a will to take a rope to the rock! Who can swim?"

No answer.

No one on board knew how to swim, not even the sailors--an ignorance not
uncommon among seafaring people.

A beam nearly free of its lashings was swinging loose. The chief clasped
it with both hands, crying, "Help me."

They unlashed the beam. They had now at their disposal the very thing
they wanted. From the defensive, they assumed the offensive.

It was a longish beam of heart of oak, sound and strong, useful either
as a support or as an engine of attack--a lever for a burden, a ram
against a tower.

"Ready!" shouted the chief.

All six, getting foothold on the stump of the mast, threw their weight
on the spar projecting over the side, straight as a lance towards a
projection of the cliff.

It was a dangerous manoeuvre. To strike at a mountain is audacity
indeed. The six men might well have been thrown into the water by the
shock.

There is variety in struggles with storms. After the hurricane, the
shoal; after the wind, the rock. First the intangible, then the
immovable, to be encountered.

Some minutes passed, such minutes as whiten men's hair.

The rock and the vessel were about to come in collision. The rock, like
a culprit, awaited the blow.

A resistless wave rushed in; it ended the respite. It caught the vessel
underneath, raised it, and swayed it for an instant as the sling swings
its projectile.

"Steady!" cried the chief; "it is only a rock, and we are men."

The beam was couched, the six men were one with it, its sharp bolts tore
their arm-pits, but they did not feel them.

The wave dashed the hooker against the rock.

Then came the shock.

It came under the shapeless cloud of foam which always hides such
catastrophes.

When this cloud fell back into the sea, when the waves rolled back from
the rock, the six men were tossing about the deck, but the _Matutina_
was floating alongside the rock--clear of it. The beam had stood and
turned the vessel; the sea was running so fast that in a few seconds she
had left the Caskets behind.

Such things sometimes occur. It was a straight stroke of the bowsprit
that saved Wood of Largo at the mouth of the Tay. In the wild
neighbourhood of Cape Winterton, and under the command of Captain
Hamilton, it was the appliance of such a lever against the dangerous
rock, Branodu-um, that saved the _Royal Mary_ from shipwreck, although
she was but a Scotch built frigate. The force of the waves can be so
abruptly discomposed that changes of direction can be easily managed, or
at least are possible even in the most violent collisions. There is a
brute in the tempest. The hurricane is a bull, and can be turned.

The whole secret of avoiding shipwreck is to try and pass from the
secant to the tangent.

Such was the service rendered by the beam to the vessel. It had done the
work of an oar, had taken the place of a rudder. But the manoeuvre once
performed could not be repeated. The beam was overboard; the shock of
the collision had wrenched it out of the men's hands, and it was lost in
the waves. To loosen another beam would have been to dislocate the hull.

The hurricane carried off the _Matutina_. Presently the Caskets showed
as a harmless encumbrance on the horizon. Nothing looks more out of
countenance than a reef of rocks under such circumstances. There are in
nature, in its obscure aspects, in which the visible blends with the
invisible, certain motionless, surly profiles, which seem to express
that a prey has escaped.

Thus glowered the Caskest while the _Matutina_ fled.

The lighthouse paled in distance, faded, and disappeared.

There was something mournful in its extinction. Layers of mist sank down
upon the now uncertain light. Its rays died in the waste of waters; the
flame floated, struggled, sank, and lost its form. It might have been a
drowning creature. The brasier dwindled to the snuff of a candle; then
nothing; more but a weak, uncertain flutter. Around it spread a circle
of extravasated glimmer; it was like the quenching of: light in the pit
of night.

The bell which had threatened was dumb. The lighthouse which had
threatened had melted away. And yet it was more awful now that they had
ceased to threaten. One was a voice, the other a torch. There was
something human about them.

They were gone, and nought remained but the abyss.




CHAPTER XIII.

FACE TO FACE WITH NIGHT.


Again was the hooker running with the shadow into immeasurable darkness.

The _Matutina_, escaped from the Caskets, sank and rose from billow to
billow. A respite, but in chaos.

Spun round by the wind, tossed by all the thousand motions of the wave,
she reflected every mad oscillation of the sea. She scarcely pitched at
all--a terrible symptom of a ship's distress. Wrecks merely roll.
Pitching is a convulsion of the strife. The helm alone can turn a vessel
to the wind.

In storms, and more especially in the meteors of snow, sea and night
end by melting into amalgamation, resolving into nothing but a smoke.
Mists, whirlwinds, gales, motion in all directions, no basis, no
shelter, no stop. Constant recommencement, one gulf succeeding another.
No horizon visible; intense blackness for background. Through all these
the hooker drifted.

To have got free of the Caskets, to have eluded the rock, was a victory
for the shipwrecked men; but it was a victory which left them in stupor.
They had raised no cheer: at sea such an imprudence is not repeated
twice. To throw down a challenge where they could not cast the lead,
would have been too serious a jest.

The repulse of the rock was an impossibility achieved. They were
petrified by it. By degrees, however, they began to hope again. Such are
the insubmergable mirages of the soul! There is no distress so complete
but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of
hope is seen in its depths. These poor wretches were ready to
acknowledge to themselves that they were saved. It was on their lips.

But suddenly something terrible appeared to them in the darkness.

On the port bow arose, standing stark, cut out on the background of
mist, a tall, opaque mass, vertical, right-angled, a tower of the abyss.
They watched it open-mouthed.

The storm was driving them towards it.

They knew not what it was. It was the Ortach rock.




CHAPTER XIV.

ORTACH.


The reef reappeared. After the Caskets comes Ortach. The storm is no
artist; brutal and all-powerful, it never varies its appliances. The
darkness is inexhaustible. Its snares and perfidies never come to an
end. As for man, he soon comes to the bottom of his resources. Man
expends his strength, the abyss never.

The shipwrecked men turned towards the chief, their hope. He could only
shrug his shoulders. Dismal contempt of helplessness.

A pavement in the midst of the ocean--such is the Ortach rock. The
Ortach, all of a piece, rises up in a straight line to eighty feet above
the angry beating of the waves. Waves and ships break against it. An
immovable cube, it plunges its rectilinear planes apeak into the
numberless serpentine curves of the sea.

At night it stands an enormous block resting on the folds of a huge
black sheet. In time of storm it awaits the stroke of the axe, which is
the thunder-clap.

But there is never a thunder-clap during the snowstorm. True, the ship
has the bandage round her eyes; darkness is knotted about her; she is
like one prepared to be led to the scaffold. As for the thunderbolt,
which makes quick ending, it is not to be hoped for.

The _Matutina_, nothing better than a log upon the waters, drifted
towards this rock as she had drifted towards the other. The poor
wretches on board, who had for a moment believed themselves saved,
relapsed into their agony. The destruction they had left behind faced
them again. The reef reappeared from the bottom of the sea. Nothing had
been gained.

The Caskets are a figuring iron[7] with a thousand compartments. The
Ortach is a wall. To be wrecked on the Caskets is to be cut into
ribbons; to strike on the Ortach is to be crushed into powder.

Nevertheless, there was one chance.

On a straight frontage such as that of the Ortach neither the wave nor
the cannon ball can ricochet. The operation is simple: first the flux,
then the reflux; a wave advances, a billow returns.

In such cases the question of life and death is balanced thus: if the
wave carries the vessel on the rock, she breaks on it and is lost; if
the billow retires before the ship has touched, she is carried back, she
is saved.

It was a moment of great anxiety; those on board saw through the gloom
the great decisive wave bearing down on them. How far was it going to
drag them? If the wave broke upon the ship, they were carried on the
rock and dashed to pieces. If it passed under the ship....

The wave _did_ pass under.

They breathed again.

But what of the recoil? What would the surf do with them? The surf
carried them back. A few minutes later the _Matutina_ was free of the
breakers. The Ortach faded from their view, as the Caskets had done. It
was their second victory. For the second time the hooker had verged on
destruction, and had drawn back in time.




CHAPTER XV.

PORTENTOSUM MARE.


Meanwhile a thickening mist had descended on the drifting wretches. They
were ignorant of their whereabouts, they could scarcely see a cable's
length around. Despite a furious storm of hail which forced them to bend
down their heads, the women had obstinately refused to go below again.
No one, however hopeless, but wishes, if shipwreck be inevitable, to
meet it in the open air. When so near death, a ceiling above one's head
seems like the first outline of a coffin.

They were now in a short and chopping sea. A turgid sea indicates its
constraint. Even in a fog the entrance into a strait may be known by the
boiling-like appearance of the waves. And thus it was, for they were
unconsciously coasting Aurigny. Between the west of Ortach and the
Caskets and the east of Aurigny the sea is hemmed in and cramped, and
the uneasy position determines locally the condition of storms. The sea
suffers like others, and when it suffers it is irritable. That channel
is a thing to fear.

The _Matutina_ was in it.

Imagine under the sea a tortoise shell as big as Hyde Park or the Champs
Elysees, of which every striature is a shallow, and every embossment a
reef. Such is the western approach of Aurigny. The sea covers and
conceals this ship-wrecking apparatus. On this conglomeration of
submarine breakers the cloven waves leap and foam--in calm weather, a
chopping sea; in storms, a chaos.

The shipwrecked men observed this new complication without endeavouring
to explain it to themselves. Suddenly they understood it. A pale vista
broadened in the zenith; a wan tinge overspread the sea; the livid light
revealed on the port side a long shoal stretching eastward, towards
which the power of the rushing wind was driving the vessel. The shoal
was Aurigny.

What was that shoal? They shuddered. They would have shuddered even more
had a voice answered them--Aurigny.

No isle so well defended against man's approach as Aurigny. Below and
above water it is protected by a savage guard, of which Ortach is the
outpost. To the west, Burhou, Sauteriaux, Anfroque, Niangle, Fond du
Croc, Les Jumelles, La Grosse, La Clanque, Les Eguillons, Le Vrac, La
Fosse-Maliere; to the east, Sauquet, Hommeau Floreau, La Brinebetais, La
Queslingue, Croquelihou, La Fourche, Le Saut, Noire Pute, Coupie, Orbue.
These are hydra-monsters of the species reef.

One of these reefs is called Le But, the goal, as if to imply that every
voyage ends there.

This obstruction of rocks, simplified by night and sea, appeared to the
shipwrecked men in the shape of a single dark band, a sort of black blot
on the horizon.

Shipwreck is the ideal of helplessness; to be near land, and unable to
reach it; to float, yet not to be able to do so in any desired
direction; to rest the foot on what seems firm and is fragile; to be
full of life, when o'ershadowed by death; to be the prisoner of space;
to be walled in between sky and ocean; to have the infinite overhead
like a dungeon; to be encompassed by the eluding elements of wind and
waves; and to be seized, bound, paralyzed--such a load of misfortune
stupefies and crushes us. We imagine that in it we catch a glimpse of
the sneer of the opponent who is beyond our reach. That which holds you
fast is that which releases the birds and sets the fishes free. It
appears nothing, and is everything. We are dependent on the air which is
ruffled by our mouths; we are dependent on the water which we catch in
the hollow of our hands. Draw a glassful from the storm, and it is but a
cup of bitterness--a mouthful is nausea, a waveful is extermination. The
grain of sand in the desert, the foam-flake on the sea, are fearful
symptoms. Omnipotence takes no care to hide its atom, it changes
weakness into strength, fills naught with all; and it is with the
infinitely little that the infinitely great crushes you. It is with its
drops the ocean dissolves you. You feel you are a plaything.

A plaything--ghastly epithet!

The _Matutina_ was a little above Aurigny, which was not an unfavourable
position; but she was drifting towards its northern point, which was
fatal. As a bent bow discharges its arrow, the nor'-wester was shooting
the vessel towards the northern cape. Off that point, a little beyond
the harbour of Corbelets, is that which the seamen of the Norman
archipelago call a "_singe_."

The "_singe_," or race, is a furious kind of current. A wreath of
funnels in the shallows produces in the waves a wreath of whirlpools.
You escape one to fall into another. A ship caught hold of by the race,
winds round and round until some sharp rock cleaves her hull; then the
shattered vessel stops, her stern rises from the waves, the stem
completes the revolution in the abyss, the stern sinks in, and all is
sucked down. A circle of foam broadens and floats, and nothing more is
seen on the surface of the waves but a few bubbles here and there rising
from the smothered breathings below.

The three most dangerous races in the whole Channel are one close to the
well-known Girdler Sands, one at Jersey between the Pignonnet and the
Point of Noirmont, and the race of Aurigny.

Had a local pilot been on board the _Matutina_, he could have warned
them of their fresh peril. In place of a pilot, they had their instinct.
In situations of extreme danger men are endowed with second sight. High
contortions of foam were flying along the coast in the frenzied raid of
the wind. It was the spitting of the race. Many a bark has been swamped
in that snare. Without knowing what awaited them, they approached the
spot with horror.

How to double that cape? There were no means of doing it.

Just as they had seen, first the Caskets, then Ortach, rise before them,
they now saw the point of Aurigny, all of steep rock. It was like a
number of giants, rising up one after another--a series of frightful
duels.

Charybdis and Scylla are but two; the Caskets, Ortach, and Aurigny are
three.

The phenomenon of the horizon being invaded by the rocks was thus
repeated with the grand monotony of the abyss. The battles of the ocean
have the same sublime tautology as the combats of Homer.

Each wave, as they neared it, added twenty cubits to the cape, awfully
magnified by the mist; the fast decreasing distance seemed more
inevitable--they were touching the skirts of the race! The first fold
which seized them would drag them in--another wave surmounted, and all
would be over.

Suddenly the hooker was driven back, as by the blow of a Titan's fist.
The wave reared up under the vessel and fell back, throwing the waif
back in its mane of foam. The _Matutina_, thus impelled, drifted away
from Aurigny.

She was again on the open sea.

Whence had come the succour? From the wind. The breath of the storm had
changed its direction.

The wave had played with them; now it was the wind's turn. They had
saved themselves from the Caskets. Off Ortach it was the wave which had
been their friend. Now it was the wind. The wind had suddenly veered
from north to south. The sou'-wester had succeeded the nor'-wester.

The current is the wind in the waters; the wind is the current in the
air. These two forces had just counteracted each other, and it had been
the wind's will to snatch its prey from the current.

The sudden fantasies of ocean are uncertain. They are, perhaps, an
embodiment of the perpetual, when at their mercy man must neither hope
nor despair. They do and they undo. The ocean amuses itself. Every shade
of wild, untamed ferocity is phased in the vastness of that cunning sea,
which Jean Bart used to call the "great brute." To its claws and their
gashings succeed soft intervals of velvet paws. Sometimes the storm
hurries on a wreck, at others it works out the problem with care; it
might almost be said that it caresses it. The sea can afford to take its
time, as men in their agonies find out.

We must own that occasionally these lulls of the torture announce
deliverance. Such cases are rare. However this may be, men in extreme
peril are quick to believe in rescue; the slightest pause in the storm's
threats is sufficient; they tell themselves that they are out of danger.
After believing themselves buried, they declare their resurrection; they
feverishly embrace what they do not yet possess; it is clear that the
bad luck has turned; they declare themselves satisfied; they are saved;
they cry quits with God. They should not be in so great a hurry to give
receipts to the Unknown.

The sou'-wester set in with a whirlwind. Shipwrecked men have never any
but rough helpers. The _Matutina_ was dragged rapidly out to sea by the
remnant of her rigging--like a dead woman trailed by the hair. It was
like the enfranchisement granted by Tiberius, at the price of violation.

The wind treated with brutality those whom it saved; it rendered service
with fury; it was help without pity.

The wreck was breaking up under the severity of its deliverers.

Hailstones, big and hard enough to charge a blunderbuss, smote the
vessel; at every rotation of the waves these hailstones rolled about the
deck like marbles. The hooker, whose deck was almost flush with the
water, was being beaten out of shape by the rolling masses of water and
its sheets of spray. On board it each man was for himself.

They clung on as best they could. As each sea swept over them, it was
with a sense of surprise they saw that all were still there. Several had
their faces torn by splinters.

Happily despair has stout hands. In terror a child's hand has the grasp
of a giant. Agony makes a vice of a woman's fingers. A girl in her
fright can almost bury her rose-coloured fingers in a piece of iron.
With hooked fingers they hung on somehow, as the waves dashed on and
passed off them; but every wave brought them the fear of being swept
away.

Suddenly they were relieved.




CHAPTER XVI.

THE PROBLEM SUDDENLY WORKS IN SILENCE.


The hurricane had just stopped short. There was no longer in the air
sou'-wester or nor'-wester. The fierce clarions of space were mute. The
whole of the waterspout had poured from the sky without any warning of
diminution, as if it had slided perpendicularly into a gulf beneath.
None knew what had become of it; flakes replaced the hailstones, the
snow began to fall slowly. No more swell: the sea flattened down.

Such sudden cessations are peculiar to snowstorms. The electric
effluvium exhausted, all becomes still, even the wave, which in ordinary
storms often remains agitated for a long time. In snowstorms it is not
so. No prolonged anger in the deep. Like a tired-out worker it becomes
drowsy directly, thus almost giving the lie to the laws of statics, but
not astonishing old seamen, who know that the sea is full of unforeseen
surprises.

The same phenomenon takes place, although very rarely, in ordinary
storms. Thus, in our time, on the occasion of the memorable hurricane of
July 27th, 1867, at Jersey the wind, after fourteen hours' fury,
suddenly relapsed into a dead calm.

In a few minutes the hooker was floating in sleeping waters.

At the same time (for the last phase of these storms resembles the
first) they could distinguish nothing; all that had been made visible in
the convulsions of the meteoric cloud was again dark. Pale outlines
were fused in vague mist, and the gloom of infinite space closed about
the vessel. The wall of night--that circular occlusion, that interior of
a cylinder the diameter of which was lessening minute by
minute--enveloped the _Matutina_, and, with the sinister deliberation of
an encroaching iceberg, was drawing in dangerously. In the zenith
nothing--a lid of fog closing down. It was as if the hooker were at the
bottom of the well of the abyss.

In that well the sea was a puddle of liquid lead. No stir in the
waters--ominous immobility! The ocean is never less tamed than when it
is still as a pool.

All was silence, stillness, blindness.

Perchance the silence of inanimate objects is taciturnity.

The last ripples glided along the hull. The deck was horizontal, with an
insensible slope to the sides. Some broken planks were shifting about
irresolutely. The block on which they had lighted the tow steeped in
tar, in place of the signal light which had been swept away, swung no
longer at the prow, and no longer let fall burning drops into the sea.
What little breeze remained in the clouds was noiseless. The snow fell
thickly, softly, with scarce a slant. No foam of breakers could be
heard. The peace of shadows was over all.

This repose succeeding all the past exasperations and paroxysms was, for
the poor creatures so long tossed about, an unspeakable comfort. It was
as though the punishment of the rack had ceased. They caught a glimpse
about them and above them of something which seemed like a consent, that
they should be saved. They regained confidence. All that had been fury
was now tranquillity. It appeared to them a pledge of peace. Their
wretched hearts dilated. They were able to let go the end of rope or
beam to which they had clung, to rise, hold themselves up, stand, walk,
move about. They felt inexpressibly calmed. There are in the depths of
darkness such phases of paradise, preparations for other things. It was
clear that they were delivered out of the storm, out of the foam, out of
the wind, out of the uproar. Henceforth all the chances were in their
favour. In three or four hours it would be sunrise. They would be seen
by some passing ship; they would be rescued. The worst was over; they
were re-entering life. The important feat was to have been able to keep
afloat until the cessation of the tempest. They said to themselves, "It
is all over this time."

Suddenly they found that all was indeed over.

One of the sailors, the northern Basque, Galdeazun by name, went down
into the hold to look for a rope, then came above again and said,--

"The hold is full."

"Of what?" asked the chief.

"Of water," answered the sailor.

The chief cried out,--

"What does that mean?"

"It means," replied Galdeazun, "that in half an hour we shall founder."




CHAPTER XVII.

THE LAST RESOURCE.


There was a hole in the keel. A leak had been sprung. When it happened
no one could have said. Was it when they touched the Caskets? Was it off
Ortach? Was it when they were whirled about the shallows west of
Aurigny? It was most probable that they had touched some rock there.
They had struck against some hidden buttress which they had not felt in
the midst of the convulsive fury of the wind which was tossing them. In
tetanus who would feel a prick?

The other sailor, the southern Basque, whose name was Ave Maria, went
down into the hold, too, came on deck again, and said,--

"There are two varas of water in the hold."

About six feet.

Ave Maria added, "In less than forty minutes we shall sink."

Where was the leak? They couldn't find it. It was hidden by the water
which was filling up the hold. The vessel had a hole in her hull
somewhere under the water-line, quite forward in the keel. Impossible to
find it--impossible to check it. They had a wound which they could not
stanch. The water, however, was not rising very fast.

The chief called out,

"We must work the pump."

Galdeazun replied, "We have no pump left."

"Then," said the chief, "we must make for land."

"Where is the land?"

"I don't know."

"Nor I."

"But it must be somewhere."

"True enough."

"Let some one steer for it."

"We have no pilot."

"Stand to the tiller yourself."

"We have lost the tiller."

"Let's rig one out of the first beam we can lay hands on. Nails--a
hammer--quick--some tools."

"The carpenter's box is overboard, we have no tools."

"We'll steer all the same, no matter where."

"The rudder is lost."

"Where is the boat? We'll get in and row."

"The boat is lost."

"We'll row the wreck."

"We have lost the oars."

"We'll sail."

"We have lost the sails and the mast."

"We'll rig one up with a pole and a tarpaulin for sail Let's get clear
of this and trust in the wind."

"There is no wind."

The wind, indeed, had left them, the storm had fled; and its departure,
which they had believed to mean safety, meant, in fact, destruction. Had
the sou'-wester continued it might have driven them wildly on some
shore--might have beaten the leak in speed--might, perhaps, have carried
them to some propitious sandbank, and cast them on it before the hooker
foundered. The swiftness of the storm, bearing them away, might have
enabled them to reach land; but no more wind, no more hope. They were
going to die because the hurricane was over.

The end was near!

Wind, hail, the hurricane, the whirlwind--these are wild combatants that
may be overcome; the storm can be taken in the weak point of its armour;
there are resources against the violence which continually lays itself
open, is off its guard, and often hits wide. But nothing is to be done
against a calm; it offers nothing to the grasp of which you can lay
hold.

The winds are a charge of Cossacks: stand your ground and they disperse.
Calms are the pincers of the executioner.

The water, deliberate and sure, irrepressible and heavy, rose in the
hold, and as it rose the vessel sank--it was happening slowly.

Those on board the wreck of the _Matutina_ felt that most hopeless of
catastrophes--an inert catastrophe undermining them. The still and
sinister certainty of their fate petrified them. No stir in the air, no
movement on the sea. The motionless is the inexorable. Absorption was
sucking them down silently. Through the depths of the dumb
waters--without anger, without passion, not willing, not knowing, not
caring--the fatal centre of the globe was attracting them downwards.
Horror in repose amalgamating them with itself. It was no longer the
wide open mouth of the sea, the double jaw of the wind and the wave,
vicious in its threat, the grin of the waterspout, the foaming appetite
of the breakers--it was as if the wretched beings had under them the
black yawn of the infinite.

They felt themselves sinking into Death's peaceful depths. The height
between the vessel and the water was lessening--that was all. They could
calculate her disappearance to the moment. It was the exact reverse of
submersion by the rising tide. The water was not rising towards them;
they were sinking towards it. They were digging their own grave. Their
own weight was their sexton.

They were being executed, not by the law of man, but by the law of
things.

The snow was falling, and as the wreck was now motionless, this white
lint made a cloth over the deck and covered the vessel as with a
winding-sheet.

The hold was becoming fuller and deeper--no means of getting at the
leak. They struck a light and fixed three or four torches in holes as
best they could. Galdeazun brought some old leathern buckets, and they
tried to bale the hold out, standing in a row to pass them from hand to
hand; but the buckets were past use, the leather of some was unstitched,
there were holes in the bottoms of the others, and the buckets emptied
themselves on the way. The difference in quantity between the water
which was making its way in and that which they returned to the sea was
ludicrous--for a ton that entered a glassful was baled out; they did not
improve their condition. It was like the expenditure of a miser, trying
to exhaust a million, halfpenny by halfpenny.

The chief said, "Let us lighten the wreck."

During the storm they had lashed together the few chests which were on
deck. These remained tied to the stump of the mast. They undid the
lashings and rolled the chests overboard through a breach in the
gunwale. One of these trunks belonged to the Basque woman, who could not
repress a sigh.

"Oh, my new cloak lined with scarlet! Oh, my poor stockings of
birchen-bark lace! Oh, my silver ear-rings to wear at mass on May Day!"

The deck cleared, there remained the cabin to be seen to. It was greatly
encumbered; in it were, as may be remembered, the luggage belonging to
the passengers, and the bales belonging to the sailors. They took the
luggage, and threw it over the gunwale. They carried up the bales and
cast them into the sea.

Thus they emptied the cabin. The lantern, the cap, the barrels, the
sacks, the bales, and the water-butts, the pot of soup, all went over
into the waves.

They unscrewed the nuts of the iron stove, long since extinguished:
they pulled it out, hoisted it on deck, dragged it to the side, and
threw it out of the vessel.

They cast overboard everything they could pull out of the deck--chains,
shrouds, and torn rigging.

From time to time the chief took a torch, and throwing its light on the
figures painted on the prow to show the draught of water, looked to see
how deep the wreck had settled down.




CHAPTER XVIII.

THE HIGHEST RESOURCE.


The wreck being lightened, was sinking more slowly, but none the less
surely.

The hopelessness of their situation was without resource--without
mitigation; they had exhausted their last expedient.

"Is there anything else we can throw overboard?"

The doctor, whom every one had forgotten, rose from the companion, and
said,

"Yes."

"What?" asked the chief.

The doctor answered, "Our Crime."

They shuddered, and all cried out,--

"Amen."

The doctor standing up, pale, raised his hand to heaven, saying,--

"Kneel down."

They wavered--to waver is the preface to kneeling down.

The doctor went on,--

"Let us throw our crimes into the sea, they weigh us down; it is they
that are sinking the ship. Let us think no more of safety--let us think
of salvation. Our last crime, above all, the crime which we committed,
or rather completed, just now--O wretched beings who are listening to
me--it is that which is overwhelming us. For those who leave intended
murder behind them, it is an impious insolence to tempt the abyss. He
who sins against a child, sins against God. True, we were obliged to put
to sea, but it was certain perdition. The storm, warned by the shadow of
our crime, came on. It is well. Regret nothing, however. There, not far
off in the darkness, are the sands of Vauville and Cape la Hogue. It is
France. There was but one possible shelter for us, which was Spain.
France is no less dangerous to us than England. Our deliverance from the
sea would have led but to the gibbet. Hanged or drowned--we had no
alternative. God has chosen for us; let us give Him thanks. He has
vouchsafed us the grave which cleanses. Brethren, the inevitable hand is
in it. Remember that it was we who just now did our best to send on high
that child, and that at this very moment, now as I speak, there is
perhaps, above our heads, a soul accusing us before a Judge whose eye is
on us. Let us make the best use of this last respite; let us make an
effort, if we still may, to repair, as far as we are able, the evil that
we have wrought. If the child survives us, let us come to his aid; if he
is dead, let us seek his forgiveness. Let us cast our crime from us. Let
us ease our consciences of its weight. Let us strive that our souls be
not swallowed up before God, for that is the awful shipwreck. Bodies go
to the fishes, souls to the devils. Have pity on yourselves. Kneel down,
I tell you. Repentance is the bark which never sinks. You have lost your
compass! You are wrong! You still have prayer."

The wolves became lambs--such transformations occur in last agonies;
tigers lick the crucifix; when the dark portal opens ajar, belief is
difficult, unbelief impossible. However imperfect may be the different
sketches of religion essayed by man, even when his belief is shapeless,
even when the outline of the dogma is not in harmony with the lineaments
of the eternity he foresees, there comes in his last hour a trembling of
the soul. There is something which will begin when life is over; this
thought impresses the last pang.

A man's dying agony is the expiration of a term. In that fatal second he
feels weighing on him a diffused responsibility. That which has been
complicates that which is to be. The past returns and enters into the
future. What is known becomes as much an abyss as the unknown. And the
two chasms, the one which is full by his faults, the other of his
anticipations, mingle their reverberations. It is this confusion of the
two gulfs which terrifies the dying man.

They had spent their last grain of hope on the direction of life; hence
they turned in the other. Their only remaining chance was in its dark
shadow. They understood it. It came on them as a lugubrious flash,
followed by the relapse of horror. That which is intelligible to the
dying man is as what is perceived in the lightning. Everything, then
nothing; you see, then all is blindness. After death the eye will
reopen, and that which was a flash will become a sun.

They cried out to the doctor,--

"Thou, thou, there is no one but thee. We will obey thee, what must we
do? Speak."

The doctor answered,--

"The question is how to pass over the unknown precipice and reach the
other bank of life, which is beyond the tomb. Being the one who knows
the most, my danger is greater than yours. You do well to leave the
choice of the bridge to him whose burden is the heaviest."

He added,--

"Knowledge is a weight added to conscience."

He continued,--

"How much time have we still?"

Galdeazun looked at the water-mark, and answered,--

"A little more than a quarter of an hour."

"Good," said the doctor.

The low hood of the companion on which he leant his elbows made a sort
of table; the doctor took from his pocket his inkhorn and pen, and his
pocket-book out of which he drew a parchment, the same one on the back
of which he had written, a few hours before, some twenty cramped and
crooked lines.

"A light," he said.

The snow, falling like the spray of a cataract, had extinguished the
torches one after another; there was but one left. Ave Maria took it out
of the place where it had been stuck, and holding it in his hand, came
and stood by the doctor's side.

The doctor replaced his pocket-book in his pocket, put down the pen and
inkhorn on the hood of the companion, unfolded the parchment, and
said,--

"Listen."

Then in the midst of the sea, on the failing bridge (a sort of
shuddering flooring of the tomb), the doctor began a solemn reading, to
which all the shadows seemed to listen. The doomed men bowed their heads
around him. The flaming of the torch intensified their pallor. What the
doctor read was written in English. Now and then, when one of those
woebegone looks seemed to ask an explanation, the doctor would stop, to
repeat--whether in French, or Spanish, Basque, or Italian--the passage
he had just read. Stifled sobs and hollow beatings of the breast were
heard. The wreck was sinking more and more.

The reading over, the doctor placed the parchment flat on the companion,
seized his pen, and on a clear margin which he had carefully left at the
bottom of what he had written, he signed himself, GERNARDUS GEESTEMUNDE:
Doctor.

Then, turning towards the others, he said,--

"Come, and sign."

The Basque woman approached, took the pen, and signed herself, ASUNCION.

She handed the pen to the Irish woman, who, not knowing how to write,
made a cross.

The doctor, by the side of this cross, wrote, BARBARA FERMOY, _of Tyrrif
Island, in the Hebrides_.

Then he handed the pen to the chief of the band.

The chief signed, GAIZDORRA: _Captal_.

The Genoese signed himself under the chief's name. GIANGIRATE.

The Languedocian signed, JACQUES QUARTOURZE: _alias, the Narbonnais_.

The Provencal signed, LUC-PIERRE CAPGAROUPE, _of the Galleys of Mahon_.

Under these signatures the doctor added a note:--

"Of the crew of three men, the skipper having been washed overboard by a
sea, but two remain, and they have signed."

The two sailors affixed their names underneath the note. The northern
Basque signed himself, GALDEAZUN.

The southern Basque signed, AVE MARIA: _Robber_.

Then the doctor said,--

"Capgaroupe."

"Here," said the Provencal.

"Have you Hardquanonne's flask?"

"Yes."

"Give it me."

Capgaroupe drank off the last mouthful of brandy, and handed the flask
to the doctor.

The water was rising in the hold; the wreck was sinking deeper and
deeper into the sea. The sloping edges of the ship were covered by a
thin gnawing wave, which was rising. All were crowded on the centre of
the deck.

The doctor dried the ink on the signatures by the heat of the torch, and
folding the parchment into a narrower compass than the diameter of the
neck, put it into the flask. He called for the cork.

"I don't know where it is," said Capgaroupe.

"Here is a piece of rope," said Jacques Quartourze.

The doctor corked the flask with a bit of rope, and asked for some tar.
Galdeazun went forward, extinguished the signal light with a piece of
tow, took the vessel in which it was contained from the stern, and
brought it, half full of burning tar, to the doctor.

The flask holding the parchment which they had all signed was corked and
tarred over.

"It is done," said the doctor.

And from out all their mouths, vaguely stammered in every language, came
the dismal utterances of the catacombs.

"Ainsi soit-il!"

"Mea culpa!"

"Asi sea!"

"Aro rai!"

"Amen!"

It was as though the sombre voices of Babel were scattered through the
shadows as Heaven uttered its awful refusal to hear them.

The doctor turned away from his companions in crime and distress, and
took a few steps towards the gunwale. Reaching the side, he looked into
space, and said, in a deep voice,--

"Bist du bei mir?"[8]

Perchance he was addressing some phantom.

The wreck was sinking.

Behind the doctor all the others were in a dream. Prayer mastered them
by main force. They did not bow, they were bent. There was something
involuntary in their condition; they wavered as a sail flaps when the
breeze fails. And the haggard group took by degrees, with clasping of
hands and prostration of foreheads, attitudes various, yet of
humiliation. Some strange reflection of the deep seemed to soften their
villainous features.

The doctor returned towards them. Whatever had been his past, the old
man was great in the presence of the catastrophe.

The deep reserve of nature which enveloped him preoccupied without
disconcerting him. He was not one to be taken unawares. Over him was the
calm of a silent horror: on his countenance the majesty of God's will
comprehended.

This old and thoughtful outlaw unconsciously assumed the air of a
pontiff.

He said,--

"Attend to me."

He contemplated for a moment the waste of water, and added,--

"Now we are going to die."

Then he took the torch from the hands of Ave Maria, and waved it.

A spark broke from it and flew into the night.

Then the doctor cast the torch into the sea.

The torch was extinguished: all light disappeared. Nothing left but the
huge, unfathomable shadow. It was like the filling up of the grave.

In the darkness the doctor was heard saying,--

"Let us pray."

All knelt down.

It was no longer on the snow, but in the water, that they knelt.

They had but a few minutes more.

The doctor alone remained standing.

The flakes of snow falling on him had sprinkled him with white tears,
and made him visible on the background of darkness. He might have been
the speaking statue of the shadow.

The doctor made the sign of the cross and raised his voice, while
beneath his feet he felt that almost imperceptible oscillation which
prefaces the moment in which a wreck is about to founder. He said,--

"Pater noster qui es in coelis."

The Provencal repeated in French,--

"Notre Pere qui etes aux cieux."

The Irishwoman repeated in Gaelic, understood by the Basque woman,--

"Ar nathair ata ar neamh."

The doctor continued,--

"Sanctificetur nomen tuum."

"Que votre nom soit sanctifie," said the Provencal.

"Naomhthar hainm," said the Irishwoman.

"Adveniat regnum tuum," continued the doctor.

"Que votre regne arrive," said the Provencal.

"Tigeadh do rioghachd," said the Irishwoman.

As they knelt, the waters had risen to their shoulders. The doctor went
on,--

"Fiat voluntas tua."

"Que votre volonte soit faite," stammered the Provencal.

And the Irishwoman and Basque woman cried,--

"Deuntar do thoil ar an Hhalamb."

"Sicut in coelo, sicut in terra," said the doctor.

No voice answered him.

He looked down. All their heads were under water. They had let
themselves be drowned on their knees.

The doctor took in his right hand the flask which he had placed on the
companion, and raised it above his head.

The wreck was going down. As he sank, the doctor murmured the rest of
the prayer.

For an instant his shoulders were above water, then his head, then
nothing remained but his arm holding up the flask, as if he were showing
it to the Infinite.

His arm disappeared; there was no greater fold on the deep sea than
there would have been on a tun of oil. The snow continued falling.

One thing floated, and was carried by the waves into the darkness. It
was the tarred flask, kept afloat by its osier cover.




BOOK THE THIRD.

_THE CHILD IN THE SHADOW_.




CHAPTER I.

CHESIL.


The storm was no less severe on land than on sea. The same wild
enfranchisement of the elements had taken place around the abandoned
child. The weak and innocent become their sport in the expenditure of
the unreasoning rage of their blind forces. Shadows discern not, and
things inanimate have not the clemency they are supposed to possess.

On the land there was but little wind. There was an inexplicable
dumbness in the cold. There was no hail. The thickness of the falling
snow was fearful.

Hailstones strike, harass, bruise, stun, crush. Snowflakes do worse:
soft and inexorable, the snowflake does its work in silence; touch it,
and it melts. It is pure, even as the hypocrite is candid. It is by
white particles slowly heaped upon each other that the flake becomes an
avalanche and the knave a criminal.

The child continued to advance into the mist. The fog presents but a
soft obstacle; hence its danger. It yields, and yet persists. Mist, like
snow, is full of treachery. The child, strange wrestler at war with all
these risks, had succeeded in reaching the bottom of the descent, and
had gained Chesil. Without knowing it he was on an isthmus, with the
ocean on each side; so that he could not lose his way in the fog, in the
snow, or in the darkness, without falling into the deep waters of the
gulf on the right hand, or into the raging billows of the high sea on
the left. He was travelling on, in ignorance, between these two abysses.

The Isthmus of Portland was at this period singularly sharp and rugged.
Nothing remains at this date of its past configuration. Since the idea
of manufacturing Portland stone into Roman cement was first seized, the
whole rock has been subjected to an alteration which has completely
changed its original appearance. Calcareous lias, slate, and trap are
still to be found there, rising from layers of conglomerate, like teeth
from a gum; but the pickaxe has broken up and levelled those bristling,
rugged peaks which were once the fearful perches of the ossifrage. The
summits exist no longer where the labbes and the skua gulls used to
flock together, soaring, like the envious, to sully high places. In vain
might you seek the tall monolith called Godolphin, an old British word,
signifying "white eagle." In summer you may still gather on those
surfaces, pierced and perforated like a sponge, rosemary, pennyroyal,
wild hyssop, and sea-fennel which when infused makes a good cordial, and
that herb full of knots, which grows in the sand and from which they
make matting; but you no longer find gray amber, or black tin, or that
triple species of slate--one sort green, one blue, and the third the
colour of sage-leaves. The foxes, the badgers, the otters, and the
martens have taken themselves off; on the cliffs of Portland, as well as
at the extremity of Cornwall, where there were at one time chamois, none
remain. They still fish in some inlets for plaice and pilchards; but the
scared salmon no longer ascend the Wey, between Michaelmas and
Christmas, to spawn. No more are seen there, as during the reign of
Elizabeth, those old unknown birds as large as hawks, who could cut an
apple in two, but ate only the pips. You never meet those crows with
yellow beaks, called Cornish choughs in English, _pyrrocorax_ in Latin,
who, in their mischief, would drop burning twigs on thatched roofs. Nor
that magic bird, the fulmar, a wanderer from the Scottish archipelago,
dropping from his bill an oil which the islanders used to burn in their
lamps. Nor do you ever find in the evening, in the plash of the ebbing
tide, that ancient, legendary neitse, with the feet of a hog and the
bleat of a calf. The tide no longer throws up the whiskered seal, with
its curled ears and sharp jaws, dragging itself along on its nailless
paws. On that Portland--nowadays so changed as scarcely to be
recognized--the absence of forests precluded nightingales; but now the
falcon, the swan, and the wild goose have fled. The sheep of Portland,
nowadays, are fat and have fine wool; the few scattered ewes, which
nibbled the salt grass there two centuries ago, were small and tough and
coarse in the fleece, as became Celtic flocks brought there by
garlic-eating shepherds, who lived to a hundred, and who, at the
distance of half a mile, could pierce a cuirass with their yard-long
arrows. Uncultivated land makes coarse wool. The Chesil of to-day
resembles in no particular the Chesil of the past, so much has it been
disturbed by man and by those furious winds which gnaw the very stones.

At present this tongue of land bears a railway, terminating in a pretty
square of houses, called Chesilton, and there is a Portland station.
Railway carriages roll where seals used to crawl.

The Isthmus of Portland two hundred years ago was a back of sand, with a
vertebral spine of rock.

The child's danger changed its form. What he had had to fear in the
descent was falling to the bottom of the precipice; in the isthmus, it
was falling into the holes. After dealing with the precipice, he must
deal with the pitfalls. Everything on the sea-shore is a trap--the rock
is slippery, the strand is quicksand. Resting-places are but snares. It
is walking on ice which may suddenly crack and yawn with a fissure,
through which you disappear. The ocean has false stages below, like a
well-arranged theatre.

The long backbone of granite, from which fall away both slopes of the
isthmus, is awkward of access. It is difficult to find there what, in
scene-shifters' language, are termed _practicables_. Man has no
hospitality to hope for from the ocean; from the rock no more than from
the wave. The sea is provident for the bird and the fish alone.
Isthmuses are especially naked and rugged; the wave, which wears and
mines them on either side, reduces them to the simplest form. Everywhere
there were sharp relief ridges, cuttings, frightful fragments of torn
stone, yawning with many points, like the jaws of a shark; breaknecks of
wet moss, rapid slopes of rock ending in the sea. Whosoever undertakes
to pass over an isthmus meets at every step misshapen blocks, as large
as houses, in the forms of shin-bones, shoulder-blades, and
thigh-bones, the hideous anatomy of dismembered rocks. It is not
without reason that these _striae_ of the sea-shore are called
_cotes_.[9]

The wayfarer must get out as he best can from the confusion of these
ruins. It is like journeying over the bones of an enormous skeleton.

Put a child to this labour of Hercules.

Broad daylight might have aided him. It was night. A guide was
necessary. He was alone. All the vigour of manhood would not have been
too much. He had but the feeble strength of a child. In default of a
guide, a footpath might have aided him; there was none.

By instinct he avoided the sharp ridge of the rocks, and kept to the
strand as much as possible. It was there that he met with the pitfalls.
They were multiplied before him under three forms: the pitfall of water,
the pitfall of snow, and the pitfall of sand. This last is the most
dangerous of all, because the most illusory. To know the peril we face
is alarming; to be ignorant of it is terrible. The child was fighting
against unknown dangers. He was groping his way through something which
might, perhaps, be the grave.

He did not hesitate. He went round the rocks, avoided the crevices,
guessed at the pitfalls, obeyed the twistings and turnings caused by
such obstacles, yet he went on. Though unable to advance in a straight
line, he walked with a firm step. When necessary, he drew back with
energy. He knew how to tear himself in time from the horrid bird-lime of
the quicksands. He shook the snow from about him. He entered the water
more than once up to the knees. Directly that he left it, his wet knees
were frozen by the intense cold of the night. He walked rapidly in his
stiffened garments; yet he took care to keep his sailor's coat dry and
warm on his chest. He was still tormented by hunger.

The chances of the abyss are illimitable. Everything is possible in it,
even salvation. The issue may be found, though it be invisible. How the
child, wrapped in a smothering winding-sheet of snow, lost on a narrow
elevation between two jaws of an abyss, managed to cross the isthmus is
what he could not himself have explained. He had slipped, climbed,
rolled, searched, walked, persevered, that is all. Such is the secret of
all triumphs. At the end of somewhat less than half an hour he felt
that the ground was rising. He had reached the other shore. Leaving
Chesil, he had gained terra firma.

The bridge which now unites Sandford Castle with Smallmouth Sands did
not then exist. It is probable that in his intelligent groping he had
reascended as far as Wyke Regis, where there was then a tongue of sand,
a natural road crossing East Fleet.

He was saved from the isthmus; but he found himself again face to face
with the tempest, with the cold, with the night.

Before him once more lay the plain, shapeless in the density of
impenetrable shadow. He examined the ground, seeking a footpath.
Suddenly he bent down. He had discovered, in the snow, something which
seemed to him a track.

It was indeed a track--the print of a foot. The print was cut out
clearly in the whiteness of the snow, which rendered it distinctly
visible. He examined it. It was a naked foot; too small for that of a
man, too large for that of a child.

It was probably the foot of a woman. Beyond that mark was another, then
another, then another. The footprints followed each other at the
distance of a step, and struck across the plain to the right. They were
still fresh, and slightly covered with little snow. A woman had just
passed that way.

This woman was walking in the direction in which the child had seen the
smoke. With his eyes fixed on the footprints, he set himself to follow
them.




CHAPTER II.

THE EFFECT OF SNOW.


He journeyed some time along this course. Unfortunately the footprints
were becoming less and less distinct. Dense and fearful was the falling
of the snow. It was the time when the hooker was so distressed by the
snow-storm at sea.

The child, in distress like the vessel, but after another fashion, had,
in the inextricable intersection of shadows which rose up before him, no
resource but the footsteps in the snow, and he held to it as the thread
of a labyrinth.

Suddenly, whether the snow had filled them up or for some other reason,
the footsteps ceased. All became even, level, smooth, without a stain,
without a detail. There was now nothing but a white cloth drawn over the
earth and a black one over the sky. It seemed as if the foot-passenger
had flown away. The child, in despair, bent down and searched; but in
vain.

As he arose he had a sensation of hearing some indistinct sound, but he
could not be sure of it. It resembled a voice, a breath, a shadow. It
was more human than animal; more sepulchral than living. It was a sound,
but the sound of a dream.

He looked, but saw nothing.

Solitude, wide, naked and livid, was before him. He listened. That which
he had thought he heard had faded away. Perhaps it had been but fancy.
He still listened. All was silent.

There was illusion in the mist.

He went on his way again. He walked forward at random, with nothing
henceforth to guide him.

As he moved away the noise began again. This time he could doubt it no
longer. It was a groan, almost a sob.

He turned. He searched the darkness of space with his eyes. He saw
nothing. The sound arose once more. If limbo could cry out, it would cry
in such a tone.

Nothing so penetrating, so piercing, so feeble as the voice--for it was
a voice. It arose from a soul. There was palpitation in the murmur.
Nevertheless, it seemed uttered almost unconsciously. It was an appeal
of suffering, not knowing that it suffered or that it appealed.

The cry--perhaps a first breath, perhaps a last sigh--was equally
distant from the rattle which closes life and the wail with which it
commences. It breathed, it was stifled, it wept, a gloomy supplication
from the depths of night. The child fixed his attention everywhere, far,
near, on high, below. There was no one. There was nothing. He listened.
The voice arose again. He perceived it distinctly. The sound somewhat
resembled the bleating of a lamb.

Then he was frightened, and thought of flight.

The groan again. This was the fourth time. It was strangely miserable
and plaintive. One felt that after that last effort, more mechanical
than voluntary, the cry would probably be extinguished. It was an
expiring exclamation, instinctively appealing to the amount of aid held
in suspense in space. It was some muttering of agony, addressed to a
possible Providence.

The child approached in the direction from whence the sound came.

Still he saw nothing.

He advanced again, watchfully.

The complaint continued. Inarticulate and confused as it was, it had
become clear--almost vibrating. The child was near the voice; but where
was it?