‘A guard boat!’ cried one of the seamen.
‘Bill, boy, we’re done!’ said the
other, and began to stuff something into his sea boot.
But the boat swerved at the sight of us, like a shying
horse, and was off in another direction as fast as
eight frantic oars could drive her. The seamen
stared after her and wiped their brows. ’Her
conscience don’t seem much easier than our own,’
said one of them. ’I made sure it was
the preventives.’
’Looks to me as if you weren’t the only
queer cargo on the coast to-night, mister,’
remarked his comrade. ‘What could she be?’
’Cursed if I know what she was. I rammed
a cake of good Trinidad tobacco into my boot when
I saw her. I’ve seen the inside of a French
prison before now. Give way, Bill, and have it
over.’
A minute later, with a low grating sound, we ran aground
upon a gravelly leach. My bundle was thrown
ashore, I stepped after it, and a seaman pushed the
prow off again, springing in as his comrade backed
her into deep water. Already the glow in the
west had vanished, the storm-cloud was half up the
heavens, and a thick blackness had gathered over the
ocean. As I turned to watch the vanishing boat
a keen wet blast flapped in my face, and the air was
filled with the high piping of the wind and with the
deep thunder of the sea.
And thus it was that, on a wild evening in the early
spring of the year 1805, I, Louis de Laval, being
in the twenty-first year of my age, returned, after
an exile of thirteen years, to the country of which
my family had for many centuries been the ornament
and support. She had treated us badly, this
country; she had repaid our services by insult, exile,
and confiscation. But all that was forgotten
as I, the only de Laval of the new generation, dropped
upon my knees upon her sacred soil, and, with the
strong smell of the seaweed in my nostrils, pressed
my lips upon the wet and pringling gravel.
THE SALT-MARSH
When a man has reached his mature age he can rest
at that point of vantage, and cast his eyes back at
the long road along which he has travelled, lying
with its gleams of sunshine and its stretches of shadow
in the valley behind him. He knows then its whence
and its whither, and the twists and bends which were
so full of promise or of menace as he approached them
lie exposed and open to his gaze. So plain is
it all that he can scarce remember how dark it may
have seemed to him, or how long he once hesitated
at the cross roads. Thus when he tries to recall
each stage of the journey he does so with the knowledge
of its end, and can no longer make it clear, even
to himself, how it may have seemed to him at the time.
And yet, in spite of the strain of years, and the
many passages which have befallen me since, there
is no time of my life which comes back so very clearly
as that gusty evening, and to this day I cannot feel
the briny wholesome whiff of the seaweed without being
carried back, with that intimate feeling of reality
which only the sense of smell can confer, to the wet
shingle of the French beach.
