But in certain circumstances the extremity of fear is another name for the extremity of daring; and the master, at this last moment going to range the crew in two lines, and one of the sailors who had me in charge releasing me for an instant, that he might arm himself with a sand-bag, I saw my opportunity. With a desperate swing I wrenched myself from the grasp of the other men. That done, a single bound carried me to the plank which joined the deck to the shore. I flew across it, swift as the wind; and as the whole crew seeing what had happened broke from their stations and with yells and whoops of glee took up the chase, I sprang on shore. Bursting recklessly through the fringe of idlers whom the arrival of the ship had brought to the water's edge, I sped across the open wharf, threaded a labyrinth of bales and casks, and darted up the first lane to which I came.
Fear gave me wings, and I left the wharf a score of yards ahead of my pursuers. But the seamen, who had taken up the chase with the gusto of boys let loose from school, made up for the lack of speed by whooping like demons; and the English among them halloing "Stop Thief!" and the others some French words alike in import, the alarm went abreast of me. Fortunately the lane was almost deserted, and I easily evaded the halfhearted efforts to stop me, which one or two made. It seemed that I should for the present get away. But at the last moment, at the head of the lane fate waited for me: an old woman standing in a doorway--and who made, as I came up, as if she was afraid of me--flung a bucket after me. It fell in front of me, I trod on the edge and fell with a shriek of pain.
Before I could rise or speak, the foremost of the sailors came up and struck me on the head with a sand-bag; and the others as they arrived rained blows on me without mercy. I managed to utter a cry, then instinctively covered my head with my arms. They belaboured me until they were tired and I almost senseless; when, thinking me dead, they went off whistling, and I crawled into the nearest doorway and fainted away.
[CHAPTER XL]
When I recovered my senses I was on my back in one of eighteen beds, in a long white-walled room, having barred windows, and a vaulted ceiling. A woman, garbed strangely in black, and with a queer white cap drawn tight round her face, leaned over me, and with her finger laid to her lips, enjoined silence. Here and there along the wall were pictures of saints; and at the end two candles burned before a kind of altar. I had an idea that I had been partly conscious, and had lain tossing giddily with a burning head, and a dreadful thirst through days and nights of fever. Now, though I could scarcely raise my head, and my brain reeled if I stirred, I was clear-minded, and knew that the bone of my leg was broken, and that for that reason I had a bed to myself where most lay double. For the rest I was so weak I could only cry in pure gratitude when the nun came to me in my turn, and fed me, and plain, stout, and gentle-eyed, laid her fingers on her lip, or smiling, said in her odd English "Quee-at, quee-at, monsieur!"
In face of the blessings which the Protestant Succession, as settled in our present House of Hanover, has secured to these islands, it would little become me to find a virtue in papistry; and my late lord, who early saw and abjured the errors of that faith, would have been the last to support or encourage such a thesis. Notwithstanding which, I venture to say that the devotion of these women to their calling is a thing not to be decried, merely because we have no counterpart of it, nor the charity of that hospital, simply because the burning of candles and worshipping of saints alternate with the tendance of the wretched. On the contrary, it seems to me that were such a profession, the idolatrous vows excepted, grafted on our Church, it might redound alike to the credit of religion--which of late the writings of Lord Bolingbroke have somewhat belittled--and to the good of mankind.
So much with submission; nor will the most rigid of our divines blame me, when they learn that I lay ten weeks in the Maison de Dieu at Dunquerque, dependent for everything on the kind offices of those good women; and nursed during that long period with a solicitude and patience not to be exceeded by that of wife or mother. When I had so far recovered as to be able to leave my bed, and move a few yards on crutches, I was assisted to a shady courtyard, nestled snugly between the hospital and the old town wall. Here, under a gnarled mulberry tree which had sheltered the troops of Parma, I spent my time in a dream of peace, through which nuns, apple-faced and kind-eyed, flitted laden with tisanes, or bearing bottles that called for the immediate attention of M. le Medecin's long nose and silver-rimmed spectacles. Occasionally their Director would seat himself beside me, and silently run through his office: or instruct me in the French tongue, and the evils of Jansenism--mainly by means of the snuff-box which rarely left his fine white hands. More often the meagre apothecary, young, yellow, dry, ambitious, with a hungry light in his eyes, would take an English lesson, until the coming of his superior routed him, and sent him to his gallipots and compounding with a flea in his ear.
Such were the scenes and companions that attended my return to health; nor, my spirits being attuned to these, should I have come to seek or desire others, though enhanced by my native air--a species of inertia, more easily excused by those who have viewed French life near at hand, than by such as have never travelled--but for an encounter as important in its consequences as it was unexpected, which broke the even current of my days.
It was no uncommon thing for the nuns to bring one of my own countrymen to me, in the fond hope that I might find a friend. But as these persons, from the nature of the case, were invariably Jacobites, and either knowing something of my story, thought me well served, or coming to examine me, shied at the names of Mr. Brome and Lord Shrewsbury, such efforts had but one end. When I heard, therefore, for the fourth or fifth time that a compatriot of mine, amiable, and of a vivacity tout-â-fait marveilleuse was coming to see me, I was as far from supposing that I should find an acquaintance, as I was from anticipating the interview with pleasure. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when Sœur Marie called me into the garden at the appointed time; and, her simple face shining with delight, led me to the old mulberry tree, where, who should be sitting but Mary Ferguson!
She had as little expected to meet me as I to meet her, but coming on me thus suddenly, and seeing me lame, and in a sense a cripple, reduced, moreover, by the long illness through which I had passed, she let her feelings have way. Such tenderness as she had entertained for me before welled up now with irresistible force, and giving the lie to a certain hoydenish hardness, inherent in a disposition which was never one of the most common, in a moment she was in my arms. If she did not weep herself, she pardoned, and possibly viewed with pleasure, those tears on my part, which weakness and surprise drew from me, while a hundred broken words and exclamations bore witness to the gratitude she felt on the score of her escape.