In Search of Mademoiselle

by George Gibbs

With regard to the company of adventurers it made me feel no better to learn that there was another to share my opinion. It was no child’s play, this voyage, on which we were going. It was work for staunch-bodied men with big limbs and stiff hands, and not the slender, pink-fingered gentlemen I had seen thus far. When I thought that the safety of Mademoiselle lay with the disposition of these people I was more troubled than ever.

She came aboard late in the afternoon, and with Madame and the Sieur de la Notte went at once to the cabin. Soon Admiral Ribault came alongside in his pinnace and signaled the fleet to get under way. Amid the firing of cannon upon the shore we passed out of the river on the ebb of the tide and with a fair wind set the broad bows of the Trinity squarely into the red path of light that shimmered towards the sun, the color of blood. I shuddered a little; then laughed aloud at my womanish thought. Surely, my illness had made me weak indeed.

In a few days Mademoiselle came upon the deck with Madame. I had grown so strong that I was taking my day watches now. My pulses tingled anew and my lungs drank their fill of the salt air. The old love of the life was in me again. But I could not make out the manner of Mademoiselle de la Notte. Twice in the first week did I go up to her and address her, but I was so ill at ease and her manner so distant that I turned away and sought another part of the vessel. Then when she saw that she had hurt me and that perhaps the difference of our positions—she thinking me not to be of gentle birth—had gone more deeply than she had wished, she called me to her and bade me place a stool for her and one for Madame and wrap them in their cloaks, talking cheerfully the while. This I did silently, going then forward to my place of duty. I had no wish to force my presence upon her and so kept at a distance, speaking only when it was not to be avoided. And yet my heart was sore that she should treat me so.

Then there would come two or three of those bejeweled gentlemen; who, recovered from their sickness, stood by her side talking to her gaily after the manner of the sparks at a levee, flaunting their fine scented handkerchiefs. This she seemed to enjoy, and made my cup of bitterness full to overflowing.

But by and by there came a change. One day, the third week from Dieppe, while I was talking between my watches with the sister of Lieutenant Bachasse, Mademoiselle motioned that she would speak with me. She dismissed those fine hangers-on and asked me what she had done that I had treated her in so ill a fashion. I said nothing; for it did not become me to cavil. She knew well why I had not waited upon her, and why I would not speak. I seemed to see it in the way she spoke; and I learned from that time what discernment a woman has upon all matters which concern the heart of a man. Things after that were better between us. By and bye, no day passed that we did not talk together; sometimes in presence of Madame or Monsieur the Vicomte, and sometimes alone.

Oh, the wonder of those days and nights upon the ocean! When the afternoon sun shimmered fair upon the amber seas to the southward, and the sails about us were picked out in silver against the purple of the horizon, turning as the sun dropped down, to ruddy gold and bronze and then fading away into the gray softness of dusk! And then, when the gulls and dolphins ceased to play and the moon came out, we would sometimes lean upon the bulwarks, just she and I, looking down along the sides to the bow-wave where the fire of the southern waters turned the gray of the foam to soft glowing flames which warmly kissed the ship and then danced away like sprites into the darkness beyond.

“It is an ocean of velvet,—a fair ocean,” she would say softly.

“It is Heaven, Mademoiselle,” I would answer.

We talked much of the things which had been and of those to come, and I told her the stories of faraway lands that I had seen. She wondered greatly at some of the things I knew; and yet for all that I felt at times as though I were but a child beside her in every other thing save the mere buffets of life. She was haughty no more; for it seemed in that gray immensity of murmuring sea and starlit sky that all was equal between us, and that we two were alone, close to our Maker.