Читать книгу The Adventurers - Gustave Aimard - Страница 9

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It is a long voyage from Havre to Chili. The man accustomed to the thousand agitations and the intoxicating whirlwind of the atmosphere of Paris, necessarily finds the life on shipboard, the calm and regular life, insipid and monotonous. It is certainly tedious to remain months together in a vessel, confined to a cabin a few feet square, without air and without sun, almost without light, and to have no walk but the narrow deck of the ship, no horizon but the rolling or the tranquil sea—at all times and everywhere nothing but sea.

The transition is very trying. The Parisian, accustomed to the noise and perpetual motion of a great city, cannot at once enter into or comprehend the poetry of the sailor's life, of which he knows nothing, or the sublime pleasures and keen enjoyments which those granite-hearted men, exposed incessantly to a struggle with the elements, constantly experience; men who laugh at the tempest and brave the hurricane; who, twenty times a minute, stand face to face with death, and at last feel such a contempt for it that they end by not believing in it. The hours are of interminable length to the passenger who pines for the land; every day appears an age to him. With his eyes constantly turned toward a point which he begins to imagine he shall never gain, he sinks, in spite of himself, into a species of gloomy nostalgia, which the sight of the wished for port is alone powerful enough to dissipate.

The Count de Prébois-Crancé and Valentine Guillois had, then, undergone the dispersion of all the illusions and all the ennuis attendant upon a first sea voyage. During the first days they were employed in recalling the vivid remembrance of that other life from which they had parted for ever. They talked over the surprise which the sudden disappearance of the Count would cause in the fashionable society from which he had fled without warning, and without leaving any means of tracing him. Forgetting for awhile the distance which separated them from the America to which they were bound, they dwelt at great length upon the unknown pleasures which awaited them upon that golden soil, that land of promise for all sorts of adventurers, but which, alas! often offers those who go thither in the hope of gaining an easy fortune, nothing but disappointment and sorrow.

As every subject, however interesting it may be, must in the end grow exhausted, the two young men, to escape the fatiguing monotony of the voyage, had the good sense so to arrange their existence as to prevent tedium from gaining the influence over them which it had upon the other passengers. Twice a day, morning and evening, the Count, who was perfectly well acquainted with Spanish, gave his foster brother lessons in that language, lessons by which he profited so well, that after two months' study, he was able to carry on a conversation in Spanish. When he had made such progress, the young men employed no other language, either between themselves or with the persons on board who understood it. This habit produced the desired result; that is to say, Valentine, in a very short time, spoke Spanish, which is not difficult to acquire, as fluently as French; and then, in return, Valentine occasionally became the professor. He made Louis go through gymnastic exercises, in order to develop his natural strength, accustom his body to fatigue, and render him capable of supporting the rude exigencies of his new position.

We will here, for a moment, return to the character of Valentine Guillois, a character of which the reader, from the young man's manner of acting and speaking, might form a completely erroneous opinion, and this we think it our duty to rectify. Morally, Valentine Guillois was a young fellow quite unacquainted with himself; hot-headed, giddy in the extreme, the surface had been slightly vitiated by reading chosen without discernment; but the foundation was essentially good. He united in himself all the characteristics of a class whose knowledge of the world is obtained from romances and the dramas of the Faubourg du Temple. He had sprung up like a mushroom upon the pavé of Paris, performing for bread, as he himself said, the most eccentric and impossible things. As a soldier, he had lived from hand to mouth, happy in the present, and careless of a future whose existence was so uncertain for him. But in the heart of this thoughtless gamin a new sentiment had germinated, and, in a very short time, taken deep root,—a hearty devotion to the man who had held out his hand to him, had had pity on his mother, and who, by dragging him from the slough in which he was plunged, without hope of ever rising, had given him a consciousness of his own personal value. The death of this benefactor had struck him like a clap of thunder. He felt all the importance of the mission with which his dying colonel had charged him, the responsible burden he imposed upon him, and he swore, with the firm resolution of keeping his oath, cost what it might, to watch, like an attentive and devoted brother, over the son of him who had made a man of him equal to other men. The two most prominent points of Valentine's character were, an energy which obstacles only augmented instead of depressing, and an iron will.

With these two qualities, employed to the extent to which Valentine carried them, a man is sure to accomplish great things, and, if death does not surprise him on the road, to attain, at a given moment, the object, whatever it may be, which he has marked out for himself. In the present circumstances, these qualities were invaluable to the Count de Prébois-Crancé, a man of a dreamy, poetical nature, weak character, and timid mind, who, accustomed from his birth to the easy life of people of fortune, was entirely ignorant of the incessant difficulties of the new life into which he found himself suddenly cast. As always happens, when two men gifted with such opposite qualities meet, Valentine was not long in gaining over his foster brother a great moral influence, an influence which he employed with infinite tact, without ever rendering his companion aware of it; he appeared to do everything according to his will, whilst imposing his own upon him. In short, these two men, who loved each other thoroughly, and had but one head and one heart, perfected each other.

The mode of speaking employed by Valentine in the early chapters of this history, was not at all habitual to him, and had truly astonished himself. Rising to the level of the situation in which the resolution of the young man he wished to save placed him, he had comprehended, with that sound common sense which he unwittingly possessed, that instead of desponding over the misfortune which struck his foster brother so unexpectedly, it was his duty, on the contrary, to endeavour to impart to him the courage he was deficient in. Thus, as we have seen, he found in his heart arguments so peremptorily decisive, that the Count consented to live, and gave himself up to his counsels. Valentine did not hesitate. The departure of Doña Rosario furnished him with the excuse he needed for dragging his foster brother from the Parisian gulf which, after having swallowed up his fortune, threatened to swallow up himself. Perceiving, before all else, the necessity for expatriating him, he persuaded Louis to follow the object of his love to America; and both set out gaily for the New World, abandoning the country which, like other emigrants, they fancied had been so ungrateful to them.

Often during the passage the young Count had felt his courage flag, and his faith in the future abandon him, when thinking of the life of struggles and trials that awaited him in America. But Valentine, by his inexhaustible gaiety, his incredible store of anecdotes, and his incessant sallies, always succeeded in smoothing the wrinkles from the brow of his companion, who, with his habitual carelessness and want of energy, allowed himself to sink under that occult influence of Valentine which remoulded him, without his cognizance, and gradually made a new man of him.

Such was the state of mind in which our two personages found themselves when the packet boat cast anchor in the roads of Valparaiso. Valentine, with his imperturbable assurance, doubted of nothing: he was persuaded that the people he was about to have to do with were very much beneath him in intelligence, and that he could manage very well to attain the double object which he aimed at. The Count entirely depended upon his foster brother for finding for him the woman he loved, and whom he had come so far to seek. As to retrieving his fortune, he did not even dream of that.

Valparaiso—Valley of Paradise—so named probably by antiphrasis, for it is the filthiest and ugliest city of Spanish America—is nothing but a depot for foreigners, whom commercial interests do not call into Chili. Our young men only remained there long enough to equip themselves in the costume of the country; that is to say, to assume the Panama hat, the poncho, and polenas; then, each armed with two double-barrelled pistols, a rifle, and a long knife in his belt, they left the port, and, mounted on excellent horses, took their course towards Santiago, on the evening preceding the day on which the execution we have described in the preceding chapter was to take place. The weather was magnificent;— the rays of a burning sun rendered the very dust golden, and made the stones of the road shine like jewels.

"Ah!" said Valentine, as soon as they found themselves upon the superb road which leads to the capital of Chili; "it does one good to breathe the air of the land—caramba, as they say here. Well, now, here we are in this boasted America, and now we must set about collecting our harvest of gold."

"And Doña Rosario?" said his foster brother, in a melancholy tone.

"Oh! we shall have found her within a fortnight," replied Valentine, with astounding confidence.

With these consolatory words, he animated his horse with the spur, and the distance before them rapidly diminished.