All this grew to be extremely unreassuring, but the “Gamin’s” courage was not of a common order. As a matter of fact it might, without the least exaggeration, have been called Spartan, for her smile was never shadowy, her bearing never languid, and soon she was the very soul of the old castle by the sea, as she had always been that of Plenhöel.
So did the days at Salvières slip like bright beads from a many-colored necklace; one by one, diversified by excursions, rides, drives to the old abbeys and shrines with which that province of France is dotted, picnics in the forest or on the caverned shore, sails on the amusingly choppy water, and chases after elusive crawfish by lantern-light up the course of the cool little river that flows across the immense estate. Piotr seemed to have lost his regrettable propensity for sudden fits of fury, and was the happiest little creature on earth. Jean and Tatiana, cheered by Régis’s unfailing good-temper and rose-colored way of looking at things—especially as they felt certain that Basil had so far heard nothing of the latest developments—breathed more easily.
“The calm before the storm,” Garrassime, whom nothing escaped, said to himself. He had no confidence in the future, but he wisely kept his own counsel.
At the beginning of September a succession of squalls ended by a regular gale of the type which churns the Channel into amazing emotions. The North Sea and the Atlantic, hereditary enemies as they are, never miss an occasion to dash at each other’s throats on what they evidently consider a stretch of neutral water; and when this warring at close range begins, both coasts had best draw in their horns, for there is certain to occur what the Bretons and Normans call graphically “de la casse.”
Several wrecks had been reported, and the life-saving station at Salvières, lavishly endowed and equipped by Jean—for there are long stretches of bare shore on either side of the Castle where no government bâteau de sauvetage is housed—was, so to speak, day and night on the alert. On the fourth day of the gale (and according to the weather-wise there, if a gale lasts thrice over twenty-four hours, it is a bad business) the entire household was awakened about four in the morning by the appalling noise of a storm such as even in that region is something of a rarity. Mountainous waves escaladed the cliff, slavering with rage at their incapacity to scale them entirely; the wind raised so hoarse a voice that one could not hear oneself talk, even in a closed room with walls all of nine feet thick; and the air outside was so dense with spume and flying spindrift that the night had grown old without the faintest hint of dawn.
Assembled in the Salle des Chevaliers, the family and a number of servants awaited God only knew what! There was an impression of disaster in the all-embracing clangor which none could overlook or disregard, used as they all were to similar manifestations, and as the bell for matins faintly pierced the uproar, all filed laboriously along the cloisters into the chapel where the Abbé de Kerdren, the Duke’s cousin and chaplain, was kneeling on the altar steps.
He rose as they entered and faced round toward them, his hands still clasped and his finely modeled features looking white and drawn in the yellow light of the blessed candles—a tall and martial figure, whose vestments took upon him the look of knightly coat-armor, for he had begun life as a naval officer, and had only entered holy orders after the death of his bride of two months, killed in a hunting accident.
“Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae,” he began, raising his voice, for here too the roar of sea and wind was deafening.
Jean and Marguerite, kneeling side by side on the purple cushions of the last step—Tatiana and Régis with Piotr between them were close to the draped rail—could scarcely hear the prayer, and as she whispered it on her moonstone beads she suddenly thought of one line in a ballad that she loved and often sang: