The imp raised its hand, and they heard the whistling of a strong, gusty wind, and the creaking of the weather-cocks, as they all turned towards the sea.
"Stronger—stronger—stronger!" shouted the baron; and the whistle became a roar, and the roar a howl; and the castle shook and swayed in the blast.
"Good—good!" laughed the baron; "something more than a puff there—ha! ha!—as Jacques Fort has found by this time on the deck of his new ship in the Bay of Biscay."
The Familiar gently remarked that the weather was roughish, when the seneschal rushed into the room in a dreadful state of terror at the storm.
"My lord—my lord!" he said, "we shall all be blown away; the air is full of sand; you would be suffocated outside. The wind is tearing up the pines; and oh, poor Jacques Fort is at sea, and drowned—drowned, by this time, to a certainty!"
"Yes," said Armand, "I should rather think so. Toinette must take up with somebody else.—Stronger!"
The last injunction was addressed to the imp, and instantly complied with. The tempest roared like the up-bursting of a volcano, and screeched and screamed through the sugar-loaf turrets and the lattices, which it had burst in, and the loop-holes, like a hundred thousand devils' whistles. The seneschal fell on his knees.
"Stronger still!" said the baron.
And meantime what was Jaques Fort doing in his new ship? With every rag of canvass torn out of the bolt-ropes, the Sainte Vierge was flying on the very top, as it seemed, of the driving spray, on to the breakers. Jacques was the only man left on deck—every one of the rest had been washed overboard, and were already sleeping in the sea; and he knew that in a moment he would follow them. The staggering ship rose on the back of a mighty breaker; and the captain knew that with its fall upon the beach his vessel would be ground to powder.
"Oh, Toinette!" he murmured, as the ship was hove forward like a bolt from a bow, and then fell shooting into a creaming current of rushing water, while the sand-hills appeared right and left for a moment, and then were left astern. The last grand wave had burst the barrier, and the frail ship and the kneeling mariner were borne onward on the ridge of the advancing flood, which formed the lake of Arcachon. Jacques Fort saw a light, and steered towards it: it was the light in the baron's chamber at the chateau of Chatel-morant.