The Battle of the Strong. Gilbert Parker

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СКАЧАТЬ still be within smell and sound of the sea, and loves that place best which gives him widest prospect.

      This day a solitary figure was pacing backwards and forwards upon the cliff edge, stopping now to turn a telescope upon the water and now upon the town. It was a lad of not more than sixteen years, erect, well-poised, having an air of self-reliance, even of command. Yet it was a boyish figure too, and the face was very young, save for the eyes; these were frank but still sophisticated.

      The first time he looked towards the town he laughed outright, freely, spontaneously; threw his head back with merriment, and then glued his eye to the glass again. What he had seen was a girl of about five years of age with a man, in La Rue d’Egypte, near the old prison, even then called the Vier Prison. Stooping, the man had kissed the child, and she, indignant, snatching the cap from his head, had thrown it into the stream running through the street. Small wonder that the lad on the hill grinned, for the man who ran to rescue his hat from the stream was none other than the Bailly of the island, next in importance to the Lieutenant-Governor.

      The lad could almost see the face of the child, its humorous anger, its wilful triumph, and also the enraged look of the Bailly as he raked the stream with his long stick, tied with a sort of tassel of office. Presently he saw the child turn at the call of a woman in the Place du Vier Prison, who appeared to apologise to the Bailly, busy now drying his recovered hat by whipping it through the air. The lad on the hill recognised the woman as the child’s mother.

      This little episode over, he turned once more towards the sea, watching the sun of late afternoon fall upon the towers of Elizabeth Castle and the great rock out of which St. Helier the hermit once chiselled his lofty home. He breathed deep and strong, and the carriage of his body was light, for he had a healthy enjoyment of all physical sensations and all the obvious drolleries of life. A broad sort of humour was written upon every feature; in the full, quizzical eye, in the width of cheek-bone, in the broad mouth, and in the depth of the laugh, which, however, often ended in a sort of chuckle not entirely pleasant. It suggested a selfish enjoyment of the odd or the melodramatic side of other people’s difficulties.

      At last the youth encased his telescope, and turned to descend the hill to the town. As he did so, a bell began to ring. From where he was he could look down into the Vier Marchi, or market-place, where stood the Cohue Royale and house of legislature. In the belfry of this court-house, the bell was ringing to call the Jurats together for a meeting of the States. A monstrous tin pan would have yielded as much assonance. Walking down towards the Vier Marchi the lad gleefully recalled the humour of a wag who, some days before, had imitated the sound of the bell with the words:

      “Chicane—chicane! Chicane—chicane!”

      The native had, as he thought, suffered somewhat at the hands of the twelve Jurats of the Royal Court, whom his vote had helped to elect, and this was his revenge—so successful that, for generations, when the bell called the States or the Royal Court together, it said in the ears of the Jersey people—thus insistent is apt metaphor:

      “Chicane—chicane! Chicane—chicane!”

      As the lad came down to the town, trades-people whom he met touched their hats to him, and sailors and soldiers saluted respectfully. In this regard the Bailly himself could not have fared better. It was not due to the fact that the youth came of an old Jersey family, nor by reason that he was genial and handsome, but because he was a midshipman of the King’s navy home on leave; and these were the days when England’s sailors were more popular than her soldiers.

      He came out of the Vier Marchi into La Grande Rue, along the stream called the Fauxbie flowing through it, till he passed under the archway of the Vier Prison, making towards the place where the child had snatched the hat from the head of the Bailly.

      Presently the door of a cottage opened, and the child came out, followed by her mother.

      The young gentleman touched his cap politely, for though the woman was not fashionably dressed, she was distinguished in appearance, with an air of remoteness which gave her a kind of agreeable mystery.

      “Madame Landresse—” said the young gentleman with deference.

      “Monsieur d’Avranche—” responded the lady softly, pausing.

      “Did the Bailly make a stir? I saw the affair from the hill, through my telescope,” said young d’Avranche, smiling.

      “My little daughter must have better manners,” responded the lady, looking down at her child reprovingly yet lovingly.

      “Or the Bailly must—eh, Madame?” replied d’Avranche, and, stooping, he offered his hand to the child. Glancing up inquiringly at her mother, she took it. He held hers in a clasp of good nature. The child was so demure, one could scarcely think her capable of tossing the Bailly’s hat into the stream; yet looking closely, there might be seen in her eyes a slumberous sort of fire, a touch of mystery. They were neither blue nor grey, but a mingling of both, growing to the most tender, greyish sort of violet. Down through generations of Huguenot refugees had passed sorrow and fighting and piety and love and occasional joy, until in the eyes of this child they all met, delicately vague, and with the wistfulness of the early morning of life.

      “What is your name, little lady?” asked d’Avranche of the child.

      “Guida, sir,” she answered simply.

      “Mine is Philip. Won’t you call me Philip?”

      She flashed a look at her mother, regarded him again, and then answered:

      “Yes, Philip—sir.”

      D’Avranche wanted to laugh, but the face of the child was sensitive and serious, and he only smiled. “Say ‘Yes, Philip’, won’t you?” he asked.

      “Yes, Philip,” came the reply obediently.

      After a moment of speech with Madame Landresse, Philip stooped to say good-bye to the child. “Good-bye, Guida.”

      A queer, mischievous little smile flitted over her face—a second, and it was gone.

      “Good-bye, sir—Philip,” she said, and they parted. Her last words kept ringing in his ears as he made his way homeward. “Good-bye, sir—Philip”—the child’s arrangement of words was odd and amusing, and at the same time suggested something more. “Good-bye, Sir Philip,” had a different meaning, though the words were the same.

      “Sir Philip—eh?” he said to himself, with a jerk of the head—“I’ll be more than that some day.”

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      The night came down with leisurely gloom. A dim starlight pervaded rather than shone in the sky; Nature seemed somnolent and gravely meditative. It brooded as broods a man who is seeking his way through a labyrinth of ideas to a conclusion still evading him. This sense of cogitation enveloped land and sea, and was as tangible to feeling as human presence.

      At last the night seemed to wake from reverie. A movement, a thrill, ran through the spangled vault of dusk and sleep, and seemed to pass over the world, rousing the sea and the earth. There was no wind, apparently no breath of air, yet the leaves of the trees moved, the weather-vanes turned slightly, the animals СКАЧАТЬ