Читать книгу The Battle of the Strong (Historical Novel) - Gilbert Parker - Страница 14

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As Ranulph had surmised, the ship was the Narcissus, and its first lieutenant was Philip d’Avranche. The night before, orders had reached the vessel from the Admiralty that soundings were to be taken at the Ecrehos. The captain had at once made inquiries for a pilot, and Jean Touzel was commended to him. A messenger sent to Jean found that he had already gone to the Ecrehos. The captain had then set sail, and now, under Jean’s skilful pilotage, the Narcissus twisted and crept through the teeth of the rocks at the entrance, and slowly into the cove, reefs on either side gaping and girding at her, her keel all but scraping the serrated granite beneath. She anchored, and boats put off to take soundings and explore the shores. Philip was rowed in by Jean Touzel.

Stepping out upon the beach of Mattre ‘Ile, Philip slowly made his way over the shingle to the ruined chapel, in no good humour with himself or with the world, for exploring these barren rocks seemed a useless whim of the Admiralty, and he could not conceive of any incident rising from the monotony of duty to lighten the darkness of this very brilliant day. His was not the nature to enjoy the stony detail of his profession. Excitement and adventure were as the breath of life to him, and since he had played his little part at the Jersey battle in a bandbox eleven years before, he had touched hands with accidents of flood and field in many countries.

He had been wrecked on the island of Trinidad in a tornado, losing his captain and his ship; had seen active service in America and in India; won distinction off the coast of Arabia in an engagement with Spanish cruisers; and was now waiting for his papers as commander of a ship of his own, and fretted because the road of fame and promotion was so toilsome. Rumours of war with France had set his blood dancing a little, but for him most things were robbed of half their pleasure because they did not come at once.

This was a moody day with him, for he had looked to spend it differently. As he walked up the shingle his thoughts were hanging about a cottage in the Place du Vier Prison. He had hoped to loiter in a doorway there, and to empty his sailor’s heart in well-practised admiration before the altar of village beauty. The sight of Guida’s face the day before had given a poignant pulse to his emotions, unlike the broken rhythm of past comedies of sentiment and melodramas of passion. According to all logic of custom, the acuteness of yesterday’s impression should have been followed up by today’s attack; yet here he was, like another Robinson Crusoe, “kicking up the shingle of a cursed Patmos”—so he grumbled aloud. Patmos was not so wild a shot after all, for no sooner had he spoken the word than, looking up, he saw in the doorway of the ruined chapel the gracious figure of a girl: and a book of revelations was opened and begun.

At first he did not recognise Guida. There was only a picture before him which, by some fantastic transmission, merged into his reveries. What he saw was an ancient building—just such a humble pile of stone and rough mortar as one might see on some lone cliff of the AEgean or on abandoned isles of the equatorial sea. The gloom of a windowless vault was behind the girl, but the filtered sunshine of late September fell on her head. It brightened the white kerchief, and the bodice and skirt of a faint pink, throwing the face into a pleasing shadow where the hand curved over the forehead. She stood like some Diana of a ruined temple looking out into the staring day.

At once his pulses beat faster, for to him a woman was ever the fountain of adventure, and an unmanageable heart sent him headlong to the oasis where he might loiter at the spring of feminine vanity, or truth, or impenitent gaiety, as the case might be. In proportion as his spirits had sunk into sour reflection, they now shot up rocket-high at the sight of a girl’s joyous pose of body and the colour and form of the picture she made. In him the shrewdness of a strong intelligence was mingled with wild impulse. In most, rashness would be the outcome of such a marriage of characteristics; but clear-sightedness, decision, and a little unscrupulousness had carried into success many daring actions of his life. This very quality of resolute daring saved him from disaster.

Impulse quickened his footsteps now. It quickened them to a run when the hand was dropped from the girl’s forehead, and he saw again the face whose image and influence had banished sleep from his eyes the night before.

“Guida!” broke from his lips.

The man was transfigured. Brightness leaped into his look, and the greyness of his moody eye became as blue as the sea. The professional straightness of his figure relaxed into the elastic grace of an athlete. He was a pipe to be played on: an actor with the ambitious brain of a diplomatist; as weak as water, and as strong as steel; soft-hearted to foolishness or unyielding at will.

Now, if the devil had sent a wise imp to have watch and ward of this man and this maid, and report to him upon the meeting of their ways, the moment Philip took Guida’s hand, and her eyes met his, monsieur the reporter of Hades might have clapped-to his book and gone back to his dark master with the message and the record: “The hour of Destiny is struck.”

When the tide of life beats high in two mortals, and they meet in the moment of its apogee, when all the nature is sweeping on without command, guilelessly, yet thoughtlessly, the mere lilt of existence lulling to sleep wisdom and tried experience—speculation points all one way. Many indeed have been caught away by such a conjunction of tides, and they mostly pay the price.

But paying is part of the game of life: it is the joy of buying that we crave. Go down into the dark markets of the town. See the long, narrow, sordid streets lined with the cheap commodities of the poor. Mark how there is a sort of spangled gaiety, a reckless swing, a grinning exultation in the grimy, sordid caravanserai. The cheap colours of the shoddy open-air clothing-house, the blank faded green of the coster’s cart; the dark bluish-red of the butcher’s stall—they all take on a value not their own in the garish lights flaring down the markets of the dusk. Pause to the shrill music of the street musician, hear the tuneless voice of the grimy troubadour of the alley-ways; and then hark to the one note that commands them all—the call which lightens up faces sodden with base vices, eyes bleared with long looking into the dark caverns of crime:

“Buy—buy—buy—buy—buy!”

That is the tune the piper pipes. We would buy, and behold, we must pay. Then the lights go out, the voices stop, and only the dark tumultuous streets surround us, and the grime of life is ours again. Whereupon we go heavily to hard beds of despair, having eaten the cake we bought, and now must pay for unto Penalty, the dark inordinate creditor. And anon the morning comes, and then, at last, the evening when the triste bazaars open again, and the strong of heart and nerve move not from their doorways, but sit still in the dusk to watch the grim world go by. But mostly they hurry out to the bazaars once more, answering to the fevered call:

“Buy—buy—buy—buy—buy!”

And again they pay the price: and so on to the last foreclosure and the immitigable end.

One of the two standing in the door of the ruined chapel on the Ecrehos had the nature of those who buy but once and pay the price but once; the other was of those who keep open accounts in the markets of life. The one was the woman and the other was the man.

There was nothing conventional in their greeting. “You remembered me!” he said eagerly, in English, thinking of yesterday.

“I shouldn’t deserve to be here if I had forgotten,” she answered meaningly. “Perhaps you forget the sword of the Turk?” she added.

He laughed a little, his cheek flushed with pleasure. “I shouldn’t deserve to be here if I remembered—in the way you mean,” he answered.

Her face was full of pleasure. “The worst of it is,” she said, “I never can pay my debt. I have owed it for eleven years, and if I should live to be ninety I should still owe it.”

His heart was beating hard and he became daring. “So, thou shalt save my life,” he said, speaking in French. “We shall be quits then, thou and I.”

The familiar French thou startled her. To hide the instant’s confusion she turned her head away, using a hand to gather in her hair, which the wind was lifting lightly.

“That wouldn’t quite make us quits,” she rejoined; “your life is important, mine isn’t. You”—she nodded towards the Narcissus—“you command men.”

“So dost thou,” he answered, persisting in the endearing pronoun.

He meant it to be endearing. As he had sailed up and down the world, a hundred ports had offered him a hundred adventures, all light in the scales of purpose, but not all bad. He had gossiped and idled and coquetted with beauty before; but this was different, because the nature of the girl was different from all others he had met. It had mostly been lightly come and lightly go with himself, as with the women it had been easily won and easily loosed. Conscience had not smitten him hard, because beauty, as he had known it, though often fair and of good report, had bloomed for others before he came. But here was a nature fresh and unspoiled from the hand of the potter Life.

As her head slightly turned from him again, he involuntarily noticed the pulse beating in her neck, the rise and fall of her bosom. Life—here was life unpoisoned by one drop of ill thought or light experience.

“Thou dost command men too,” he repeated.

She stepped forward a little from the doorway and beyond him, answering back at him:

“Oh, no, I only knit, and keep a garden, and command a little home, that’s all.... Won’t you let me show you the island?” she added quickly, pointing to a hillock beyond, and moving towards it. He followed, speaking over her shoulder:

“That’s what you seem to do,” he answered, “not what you do.” Then he added rhetorically: “I’ve seen a man polishing the buckle of his shoe, and he was planning to take a city or manoeuvre a fleet.”

She noticed that he had dropped the thou, and, much as its use had embarrassed her, the gap left when the boldness was withdrawn became filled with regret, for, though no one had dared to say it to her before, somehow it seemed not rude on Philip’s lips. Philip? Yes, Philip she had called him in her childhood, and the name had been carried on into her girlhood—he had always been Philip to her.

“No, girls don’t think like that, and they don’t do big things,” she replied. “When I polish the pans”—she laughed—“and when I scour my buckles, I just think of pans and buckles.” She tossed up her fingers lightly, with a perfect charm of archness.

He was very close to her now. “But girls have dreams, they have memories.”

“If women hadn’t memory,” she answered, “they wouldn’t have much, would they? We can’t take cities and manoeuvre fleets.” She laughed a little ironically. “I wonder that we think at all or have anything to think about, except the kitchen and the garden, and baking and scouring and spinning”—she paused slightly, her voice lowered a little—“and the sea, and the work that men do round us.... Do you ever go into a market?” she added suddenly.

Somehow she could talk easily and naturally to him. There had been no leading up to confidence. She felt a sudden impulse to tell him all her thoughts. To know things, to understand, was a passion with her. It seemed to obliterate in her all that was conventional, it removed her far from sensitive egotism. Already she had begun “to take notice” in the world, and that is like being born again. As it grows, life ceases to be cliche; and when the taking notice is supreme we call it genius; and genius is simple and believing: it has no pride, it is naive, it is childlike.

Philip seemed to wear no mark of convention, and Guida spoke her thoughts freely to him. “To go into a market seems to me so wonderful,” she continued. “There are the cattle, the fruits, the vegetables, the flowers, the fish, the wood; the linen from the loom, the clothes that women’s fingers have knitted. But it isn’t just those things that you see, it’s all that’s behind them—the houses, the fields, and the boats at sea, and the men and women working and working, and sleeping and eating, and breaking their hearts with misery, and wondering what is to be the end of it all; yet praying a little, it may be, and dreaming a little—perhaps a very little.” She sighed, and continued: “That’s as far as I get with thinking. What else can one do in this little island? Why, on the globe Maitre Damian has at St. Aubin’s, Jersey is no bigger than the head of a pin. And what should one think of here?”

Her eyes were on the sea. Its mystery was in them, the distance, the ebb and flow, the light of wonder and of adventure too. “You—you’ve been everywhere,” she went on. “Do you remember you sent me once from Malta a tiny silver cross? That was years ago, soon after the Battle of Jersey, when I was a little bit of a girl. Well, after I got big enough I used to find Malta and other places on Maitre Damian’s globe. I’ve lived always there, on that spot”—she pointed towards Jersey—“on that spot one could walk round in a day. What do I know! You’ve been everywhere—everywhere. When you look back you’ve got a thousand pictures in your mind. You’ve seen great cities, temples, palaces, great armies, fleets; you’ve done things: you’ve fought and you’ve commanded, though you’re so young, and you’ve learned about men and about many countries. Look at what you know, and then, if you only think, you’ll laugh at what I know.”

For a moment he was puzzled what to answer. The revelation of the girl’s nature had come so quickly upon him. He had looked for freshness, sweetness, intelligence, and warmth of temperament, but it seemed to him that here were flashes of power. Yet she was only seventeen. She had been taught to see things with her own eyes and not another’s, and she spoke of them as she saw them; that was all. Yet never but to her mother had Guida said so much to any human being as within these past few moments to Philip d’Avranche.

The conditions were almost maliciously favourable, and d’Avranche was simple and easy as a boy, with his sailor’s bonhomie and his naturally facile spirit. A fateful adaptability was his greatest weapon in life, and his greatest danger. He saw that Guida herself was unconscious of the revelation she was making, and he showed no surprise, but he caught the note of her simplicity, and responded in kind. He flattered her deftly—not that she was pressed unduly, he was too wise for that. He took her seriously; and this was not all dissimulation, for her every word had glamour, and he now exalted her intellect unduly. He had never met girl or woman who talked just as she did; and straightway, with the wild eloquence of his nature, he thought he had discovered a new heaven and a new earth. A spell was upon him. He knew what he wanted when he saw it. He had always made up his mind suddenly, always acted on the intelligent impulse of the moment. He felt things, he did not study them—it was almost a woman’s instinct. He came by a leap to the goal of purpose, not by the toilsome steps of reason. On the instant his headlong spirit declared his purpose: this was the one being for him in all the world: at this altar he would light a lamp of devotion, and keep it burning forever.

“This is my day,” he said to himself. “I always knew that love would come down on me like a storm.” Then, aloud, he said to her: “I wish I knew what you know; but I can’t, because my mind is different, my life has been different. When you go into the world and see a great deal, and loosen a little the strings of your principles, and watch how sins and virtues contradict themselves, you see things after a while in a kind of mist. But you, Guida, you see them clearly because your heart is clear. You never make a mistake, you are always right because your mind is right.”

She interrupted him, a little troubled and a good deal amazed: “Oh, you mustn’t, mustn’t speak like that. It’s not so. How can one see and learn unless one sees and knows the world? Surely one can’t think wisely if one doesn’t see widely?”

He changed his tactics instantly. The world—that was the thing? Well, then, she should see the world, through him, with him.

“Yes, yes, you’re right,” he answered. “You can’t know things unless you see widely. You must see the world. This island, what is it? I was born here, don’t I know! It’s a foothold in the world, but it’s no more; it’s not afield to walk in, why, it’s not even a garden. No, it’s the little patch of green we play in in front of a house, behind the railings, before we go out into the world and learn how to live.”

They had now reached the highest point on the island, where a flagstaff stood. Guida was looking far beyond Jersey to the horizon line. There was little haze, the sky was inviolably blue. Far off against the horizon lay the low black rocks of the Minquiers. They seemed to her, on the instant, like stepping-stones. Beyond would be other stepping-stones, and others and others still again, and they would all mark the way and lead to what Philip called the world. The world! She felt a sudden little twist of regret at her heart. Here she was like a cow grazing within the circle of its tether—like a lax caterpillar on its blade of grass. Yet it had all seemed so good to her in the past; broken only by little bursts of wonder and wish concerning that outside world.

“Do we ever learn how to live?” she asked. “Don’t we just go on from one thing to another, picking our way, but never knowing quite what to do, because we don’t know what’s ahead? I believe we never do learn how to live,” she added, half-smiling, yet a little pensive too; “but I am so very ignorant, and—”

She stopped, for suddenly it flashed upon her: here she was baring her childish heart—he would think it childish, she was sure he would—everything she thought, to a man she had never known till to-day. No, no, she was wrong; she had known him, but it was only as Philip, the boy who had saved her life. And the Philip of her memory was only a picture, not a being; something to think about, not something to speak with, to whom she might show her heart. She flushed hotly and turned her shoulder on him. Her eyes followed a lizard creeping up the stones. As long as she lived she remembered that lizard, its colour changing in the sun. She remembered the hot stones, and how warm the flag-staff was when she stretched out her hand to it mechanically. But the swift, noiseless lizard running in and out of the stones, it was ever afterwards like a coat-of-arms upon the shield of her life.

Philip came close to her. At first he spoke over her shoulder, then he faced her. His words forced her eyes up to his, and he held them.

“Yes, yes, we learn how to live,” he said. “It’s only when we travel alone that we don’t see before us. I will teach you how to live—we will learn the way together! Guida! Guida!”—he reached out his hands to wards her—“don’t start so! Listen to me. I feel for you what I have felt for no other being in all my life. It came upon me yesterday when I saw you in the window at the Vier Prison. I didn’t understand it. All night I walked the deck thinking of you. To-day as soon as I saw your face, as soon as I touched your hand, I knew what it was, and—”

He attempted to take her hand now. “Oh, no, no!” she exclaimed, and drew back as if terrified.

“You need not fear me,” he burst out. “For now I know that I have but two things to live for: for my work”—he pointed to the Narcissus—“and for you. You are frightened of me? Why, I want to have the right to protect you, to drive away all fear from your life. You shall be the garden and I shall be the wall; you the nest and I the rock; you the breath of life and I the body that breathes it. Guida, my Guida, I love you!”

She drew back, leaning against the stones, her eyes riveted upon his, and she spoke scarcely above a whisper.

“It is not true—it is not true. You’ve known me only for one day—only for one hour. How can you say it!” There was a tumult in her breast; her eyes shone and glistened; wonder, embarrassed yet happy wonder, looked at him from her face, which was touched with an appealing, as of the heart that dares not believe and yet must believe or suffer.

“It is madness,” she added. “It is not true—how can it be true!”

Yet it all had the look of reality—the voice had the right ring, the face had truth, the bearing was gallant; the force and power of the man overwhelmed her.

She reached out her hand tremblingly as though to push him back. “It cannot be true,” she said. “To think—in one day!”

“It is true,” he answered, “true as that I stand here. One day—it is not one day. I knew you years ago. The seed was sown then, the flower springs up to-day, that is all. You think I can’t know that it is love I feel for you? It is admiration; it is faith; it is desire too; but it is love. When you see a flower in a garden, do you not know at once if you like it or no? Don’t you know the moment you look on a landscape, on a splendid building, whether it is beautiful to you? If, then, with these things one knows—these that haven’t any speech, no life like yours or mine—how much more when it is a girl with a face like yours, when it is a mind noble like yours, when it is a touch that thrills, and a voice that drowns the heart in music! Guida, believe that I speak the truth. I know, I swear, that you are the one passion, the one love of my life. All others would be as nothing, so long as you live, and I live to look upon you, to be beside you.”

“Beside me!” she broke in, with an incredulous irony fain to be contradicted, “a girl in a village, poor, knowing nothing, seeing no farther”—she looked out towards Jersey—“seeing no farther than the little cottage in the little country where I was born.”

“But you shall see more,” he said, “you shall see all, feel all, if you will but listen to me. Don’t deny me what is life and breathing and hope to me. I’ll show you the world; I’ll take you where you may see and know. We will learn it all together. I shall succeed in life. I shall go far. I’ve needed one thing to make me do my best for some one’s sake beside my own; you will make me do it for your sake. Your ancestors were great people in France; and you know that mine, centuries ago, were great also—that the d’Avranches were a noble family in France. You and I will win our place as high as the best of them. In this war that’s coming between England and France is my chance. Nelson said to me the other day—you have heard of him, of young Captain Nelson, the man they’re pointing to in the fleet as the one man of them all?—he said to me: ‘We shall have our chance now, d’Avranche.’ And we shall. I have wanted it till to-day for my own selfish ambition—now I want it for you. When I landed on this islet a half-hour ago, I hated it, I hated my ship, I hated my duty, I hated everything, because I wanted to go where you were, to be with you. It was Destiny that brought us both to this place at one moment. You can’t escape Destiny. It was to be that I should love you, Guida.”

He reached out to take her hands, but she put them behind her against the stones, and drew back. The lizard suddenly shot out from a hole and crossed over her fingers. She started, shivered at the cold touch, and caught the hand away. A sense of foreboding awaked in her, and her eyes followed the lizard’s swift travel with a strange fascination. But she lifted them to Philip’s, and the fear and premonition passed.

“Oh, my brain is in a whirl!” she said. “I do not understand. I know so little. No one has ever spoken to me as you have done. You would not dare”—she leaned forward a little, looking into his face with that unwavering gaze which was the best sign of her straight-forward mind—“you would not dare to deceive—you would not dare. I have—no mother,” she added with simple pathos.

The moisture came into his eyes. He must have been stone not to be touched by the appealing, by the tender inquisition, of that look.

“Guida,” he said impetuously, “if I deceive you, may every fruit of life turn to dust and ashes in my mouth! If ever I deceive you, may I die a black, dishonourable death, abandoned and alone! I should deserve that if I deceived you, Guida.”

For the first time since he had spoken she smiled, yet her eyes filled with tears too.

“You will let me tell you that I love you, Guida—it is all I ask now: that you will listen to me?”

She sighed, but did not answer. She kept looking at him, looking as though she would read his inmost soul. Her face was very young, though the eyes were so wise in their simplicity.

“You will give me my chance—you will listen to me, Guida, and try to understand—and be glad?” he asked, leaning closer to her and holding out his hands.

She drew herself up slightly as with an air of relief and resolve. She put a hand in his.

“I will try to understand—and be glad,” she answered.

“Won’t you call me Philip?” he said.

The same slight, mischievous smile crossed her lips now as eleven years ago in the Rue d’Egypte, and recalling that moment, she replied:

“Yes, sir—Philip!”

At that instant the figure of a man appeared on the shingle beneath, looking up towards them. They did not see him. Guida’s hand was still in Philip’s.

The man looked at them for a moment, then started and turned away. It was Ranulph Delagarde.

They heard his feet upon the shingle now. They turned and looked; and Guida withdrew her hand.