“At present it is a matter of saving the ship, and our lives. My own affairs can wait, but when this gale is over you may rest assured they shall have my attention.”
CHAPTER XX. WINGED
Beyond this one allusion to their respective positions, Christian was silent regarding his captivity. After the gale subsided the weather took a turn for the better, and clear skies by day and night rendered navigation an easy matter.
With characteristic daring the young Englishman had decided to offer no resistance and to seize no opportunities of escape until the termination of the voyage. The scheme half-formed within his mind was to see the voyage through, and effect his escape soon after landing in France. It was not without a certain adventurous fascination, and in the meantime there was much to interest him in his surroundings. If this young Abbé was a typical member of the Society of Jesus, he was worth studying. If this simplicity was an acquired cloak to deeper thought, it was worth penetrating, and if the man's entire individuality had been submerged in the mysterious system followed in the College of Jesuits, it was no waste of time to seek for the real man beneath the cultivated suavity that hid all feeling.
The more the two young men saw of each other the closer grew their intimacy, and with growing intimacy the domination of the stronger individuality was more marked in its influence.
To the frail and nervous priest this young Englishman was a new experience; his vitality and calm, straightforward manner of speech were such as the Abbé had never met with before. Such men and better men there were and are in the Society of Jesus, otherwise the power of the great Order would not be what it is; but René Drucquer had never come in contact with them. According to the wonderful code of laws laid down by its great founder (who, in other circumstances, might have prepared the world for the coming of such a man as Napoleon the First), the education of the young is entrusted to such brethren as are of slower parts; and from these honest, but by no means intelligent, men the young Abbé had learnt his views upon mankind in general. The creed they taught without understanding it themselves was that no man must give way to natural impulses; that he must restrain and quell and quench himself into a machine, without individuality or impulse, without likes or dislikes; that he must persistently perform such duties as are abhorrent to him, eat such food as nauseates him, and submit to the dictates of such men as hate him. And these, forsooth, are the teachings of one who, in his zealous shortsightedness, claims to have received his inspiration direct from the lips of the Great Teacher.
René Drucquer found himself in the intimate society of a man who said what he thought, acted as he conceived best, and held himself responsible, for word or deed, to none on earth. It was his first mission after a long and rigorous training. This was the first enemy of the Holy Church against whom he had been sent to fight, armed with the immeasurable power of the greatest brotherhood the world has ever known, protected by the shadow of its blessing; and there was creeping into the young priest's heart a vague and terrible suspicion that there might be two sides to the question. All the careful years of training, all the invisible meshes of the vast net that had been gathering its folds round him since he had first donned the dress of a Probationer of the College of Jesuits, were powerless to restrain the flight of a pure and guileless heart to the height of truth. Despite the countless one-sided and ingenious arguments instilled into his eager young mind in guise of mental armour against the dangers of the world, René Drucquer found himself, at the very first contact with the world, unconvinced that he was fighting upon the righteous side.
Brest had been left behind in a shimmering blue haze. Ahead lay the grim Pointe de Raz, with its short, thick-set lighthouse facing the vast Atlantic. Out to sea, in the fading glory of sunset, lay the long, low Ile-de-Sein, while here and there black rocks peeped above the water. The man holding the tiller was a sardine fisher, to whom every rock, every ripple, of these troubled waters was familiar. Fearlessly he guided the yawl close round by the high cliff—the westernmost point of Europe—but with the sunset the wind had dropped and the sails hung loosely, while the broad bows glided onwards with no sound of parted water.