Sir Isumbras at the Ford

by D. K. Broster

CHAPTER XXXV
Mr. Tollemache as a Linguist

(1)

The full-rigged ship, in oils, embedded in a solid sea of the same medium resembling a newly ploughed ultramarine field, which hung over the chest of drawers in the Bishop's bedroom (he having taken the little house furnished, and feeling, with his fine courtesy, that he had no right to change the place of anything therein), perplexed La Vireville not at all. Almost his last memory had been of the sea. There was, too, a stuffed trout in a glass case which might also, with a little difference, have been a denizen of the deep. . . . But his mind, still, after ten days' care, somewhat confused, was not at all cleared by lying and gazing, as he often did, at the little triptych of the Assumption which the Bishop had succeeded in bringing away from his private chapel in France, and which hung not far from the other painting. La Vireville could not have told why, but the triptych seemed to him, as it did to the Grand Vicar, incongruous with the stuffed trout. He used to speculate how it got there.

At first he had remembered very little about Quiberon, either about the surrender or his own abortive execution, but he had a vivid, detached memory of what came after the latter event. He could recall how, just as the little boat plunged into the breakers of Houat, he had suddenly regained his senses, brought back, no doubt, from the borders of unconsciousness by the never-dying instinct of the seaman. Too late though it was to save himself then, that instinct kept his nerveless hand on the tiller in an attempt to guide what he could no longer control. . . . He remembered the crash, the swirling, foaming water that sucked him down twice, struggling desperately, from the rock which, crippled as he was, he could neither gain nor cling to, the water that beat him against it like a cork, and that then, in a great wave, finally engulfed him, to bear him back and fling him senseless on the pebbles. He remembered, too, waking once more to a brief, semi-animate existence, to find himself lying face downwards on the wet shingle, his hair in a salt pool that seemed half blood—or was it merely tinged with the light of the red sunset that towered over Houat? Close by the surge still thundered, drenching his cold, half-naked body with spray. He was bleeding and battered from head to foot, yet, though he knew he saw death face to face at last, he contrived to drag himself up the shingle a few inches farther from the furious breakers. . . . After that, darker oblivion than before. . . .

Of his finding next morning by two of his compatriots, refugees like himself from Quiberon, in time to save his life but not his arm, he knew nothing, and most of the memories of his slow and painful struggle back to existence in that bleak, scarcely habitable islet, among the human débris of the great disaster, were confused, and—except one—in no way desirable as reminiscences.

Yet now, whether as the result of better care and conditions, or because the strain of the voyage to England had worn itself off, brain and body alike were recovering fast, and Monseigneur, very much pleased, intimated that he should shortly set up in practice as a physician. His best medicine, however, was still to come—from Jersey.

(2)

Fortuné was sound asleep when his mother at last bent over him, one frosty December afternoon, her heart brimming with mingled thankfulness and tears. For indeed the face on the pillow, always lean, had passed far beyond mere leanness now. . . . Yet here he was, her son, whom she had mourned as slain, sleeping just as he used to sleep twenty years ago, a boy at Kerdronan, with one hand under his head—no, not just as he had used to sleep, for this was not of those days, this evidence, very marked in repose, of the pitiable victory that weakness had won over vigour. He was alive, would live, but he looked broken. And achingly it went to her heart, how thin his wrist was—all she could see, at the moment, of that once strong, sunburnt hand of his. Involuntarily she looked about for the other hand. . . . And it was then, and then only, that the full realisation of what the Bishop had told her came down upon her. Under that avalanche her fortitude gave way, and sinking down on the chair by the bedside she hid her face in her hands.

The slight movement had wakened the sleeper, and he opened his eyes, and lay a few seconds looking at her, without stirring. He had known that she was coming.

"What are you crying for, petite mère?" he said at last, in his changed voice. "Are you so sorry, then, to see me again?"