Read Ebook: Sur la vaste Terre by Mille Pierre

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Ebook has 821 lines and 52635 words, and 17 pages

"Quite bright, ma'am, you'd hardly know that he'd been sick. He's gaining strength rapidly; he sleeps a great deal; he's asleep now, ma'am. But, won't you step into the library? There's a fire in the grate, and I'll let Mr. French know you are here."

But Mr. French, who had overheard part of the colloquy, came forward from an adjoining room, in smoking jacket and slippers.

"How do you do?" he asked, extending his hand. "It was mighty good of you to come to see me."

"And I'm awfully glad to find you better," she returned, giving him her slender, gloved hand with impulsive warmth. "I might have telephoned, but I wanted to see for myself. I felt a part of the blame to be mine, for it is partly for me, you know, that you have been overworking."

"It was all in the game," he said, "and we have won. But sit down and stay awhile. I know you'll pardon my smoking jacket. We are partners, you know, and I claim an invalid's privilege as well."

The lady's fine eyes beamed, and her fair cheek flushed with pleasure. Had he only realised it, he might have claimed of her any privilege a woman can properly allow, even that of conducting her to the altar. But to him she was only, thus far, as she had been for a long time, a very good friend of his own and of Phil's; a former partner's widow, who had retained her husband's interest in the business; a wholesome, handsome woman, who was always excellent company and at whose table he had often eaten, both before and since her husband's death. Nor, despite Kirby's notions, was he entirely ignorant of the lady's partiality for himself.

"Doctor Moffatt has ordered Phil and me away, for three months," he said, after Mrs. Jerviss had inquired particularly concerning his health and Phil's.

"Three months!" she exclaimed with an accent of dismay. "But you'll be back," she added, recovering herself quickly, "before the vacation season opens?"

"Oh, certainly; we shall not leave the country."

"Where are you going?"

"The doctor has prescribed the pine woods. I shall visit my old home, where I was born. We shall leave in a day or two."

"You must dine with me to-morrow," she said warmly, "and tell me about your old home. I haven't had an opportunity to thank you for making me rich, and I want your advice about what to do with the money; and I'm tiring you now when you ought to be resting."

"Do not hurry," he said. "It is almost a pleasure to be weak and helpless, since it gives me the privilege of a visit from you."

She lingered a few moments and then went. She was the embodiment of good taste and knew when to come and when to go.

Mr. French was conscious that her visit, instead of tiring him, had had an opposite effect; she had come and gone like a pleasant breeze, bearing sweet odours and the echo of distant music. Her shapely hand, when it had touched his own, had been soft but firm; and he had almost wished, as he held it for a moment, that he might feel it resting on his still somewhat fevered brow. When he came back from the South, he would see a good deal of her, either at the seaside, or wherever she might spend the summer.

When Mr. French and Phil were ready, a day or two later, to start upon their journey, Kirby was at the Mercedes to see them off.

"You're taking Judson with you to look after the boy?" he asked.

"No," replied Mr. French, "Judson is in love, and does not wish to leave New York. He will take a vacation until we return. Phil and I can get along very well alone."

Kirby went with them across the ferry to the Jersey side, and through the station gates to the waiting train. There was a flurry of snow in the air, and overcoats were comfortable. When Mr. French had turned over his hand luggage to the porter of the Pullman, they walked up and down the station platform.

"I'm looking for something to interest us," said Kirby, rolling a cigarette. "There's a mining proposition in Utah, and a trolley railroad in Oklahoma. When things are settled up here, I'll take a run out, and look the ground over, and write to you."

"My dear fellow," said his friend, "don't hurry. Why should I make any more money? I have all I shall ever need, and as much as will be good for Phil. If you find a good thing, I can help you finance it; and Mrs. Jerviss will welcome a good investment. But I shall take a long rest, and then travel for a year or two, and after that settle down and take life comfortably."

"That's the way you feel now," replied Kirby, lighting another cigarette, "but wait until you are rested, and you'll yearn for the fray; the first million only whets the appetite for more."

"All aboard!"

The word was passed along the line of cars. Kirby took leave of Phil, into whose hand he had thrust a five-dollar bill, "To buy popcorn on the train," he said, kissed the boy, and wrung his ex-partner's hand warmly.

"Good-bye," he said, "and good luck. You'll hear from me soon. We're partners still, you and I and Mrs. Jerviss."

And though Mr. French smiled acquiescence, and returned Kirby's hand clasp with equal vigour and sincerity, he felt, as the train rolled away, as one might feel who, after a long sojourn in an alien land, at last takes ship for home. The mere act of leaving New York, after the severance of all compelling ties, seemed to set in motion old currents of feeling, which, moving slowly at the start, gathered momentum as the miles rolled by, until his heart leaped forward to the old Southern town which was his destination, and he soon felt himself chafing impatiently at any delay that threatened to throw the train behind schedule time.

"He'll be back in six weeks," declared Kirby, when Mrs. Jerviss and he next met. "I know him well; he can't live without his club and his counting room. It is hard to teach an old dog new tricks."

"And I'm sure he'll not stay away longer than three months," said the lady confidently, "for I have invited him to my house party."

"A privilege," said Kirby gallantly, "for which many a man would come from the other end of the world."

But they were both mistaken. For even as they spoke, he whose future each was planning, was entering upon a new life of his own, from which he was to look back upon his business career as a mere period of preparation for the real end and purpose of his earthly existence.

The hack which the colonel had taken at the station after a two-days' journey, broken by several long waits for connecting trains, jogged in somewhat leisurely fashion down the main street toward the hotel. The colonel, with his little boy, had left the main line of railroad leading north and south and had taken at a certain way station the one daily train for Clarendon, with which the express made connection. They had completed the forty-mile journey in two or three hours, arriving at Clarendon at noon.

It was an auspicious moment for visiting the town. It is true that the grass grew in the street here and there, but the sidewalks were separated from the roadway by rows of oaks and elms and china-trees in early leaf. The travellers had left New York in the midst of a snowstorm, but here the scent of lilac and of jonquil, the song of birds, the breath of spring, were all about them. The occasional stretches of brick sidewalk under their green canopy looked cool and inviting; for while the chill of winter had fled and the sultry heat of summer was not yet at hand, the railroad coach had been close and dusty, and the noonday sun gave some slight foretaste of his coming reign.

The colonel looked about him eagerly. It was all so like, and yet so different--shrunken somewhat, and faded, but yet, like a woman one loves, carried into old age something of the charm of youth. The old town, whose ripeness was almost decay, whose quietness was scarcely distinguishable from lethargy, had been the home of his youth, and he saw it, strange to say, less with the eyes of the lad of sixteen who had gone to the war, than with those of the little boy to whom it had been, in his tenderest years, the great wide world, the only world he knew in the years when, with his black boy Peter, whom his father had given to him as a personal attendant, he had gone forth to field and garden, stream and forest, in search of childish adventure. Yonder was the old academy, where he had attended school. The yellow brick of its walls had scaled away in places, leaving the surface mottled with pale splotches; the shingled roof was badly dilapidated, and overgrown here and there with dark green moss. The cedar trees in the yard were in need of pruning, and seemed, from their rusty trunks and scant leafage, to have shared in the general decay. As they drove down the street, cows were grazing in the vacant lot between the bank, which had been built by the colonel's grandfather, and the old red brick building, formerly a store, but now occupied, as could be seen by the row of boxes visible through the open door, by the post-office.

The little boy, an unusually handsome lad of five or six, with blue eyes and fair hair, dressed in knickerbockers and a sailor cap, was also keenly interested in the surroundings. It was Saturday, and the little two-wheeled carts, drawn by a steer or a mule; the pigs sleeping in the shadow of the old wooden market-house; the lean and sallow pinelanders and listless negroes dozing on the curbstone, were all objects of novel interest to the boy, as was manifest by the light in his eager eyes and an occasional exclamation, which in a clear childish treble, came from his perfectly chiselled lips. Only a glance was needed to see that the child, though still somewhat pale and delicate from his recent illness, had inherited the characteristics attributed to good blood. Features, expression, bearing, were marked by the signs of race; but a closer scrutiny was required to discover, in the blue-eyed, golden-haired lad, any close resemblance to the shrewd, dark man of affairs who sat beside him, and to whom this little boy was, for the time being, the sole object in life.

But for the child the colonel was alone in the world. Many years before, when himself only a boy, he had served in the Southern army, in a regiment which had fought with such desperate valour that the honour of the colonelcy had come to him at nineteen, as the sole survivor of the group of young men who had officered the regiment. His father died during the last year of the Civil War, having lived long enough to see the conflict work ruin to his fortunes. The son had been offered employment in New York by a relative who had sympathised with the South in her struggle; and he had gone away from Clarendon. The old family "mansion"--it was not a very imposing structure, except by comparison with even less pretentious houses--had been sold upon foreclosure, and bought by an ambitious mulatto, who only a few years before had himself been an object of barter and sale. Entering his uncle's office as a clerk, and following his advice, reinforced by a sense of the fitness of things, the youthful colonel had dropped his military title and become plain Mr. French. Putting the past behind him, except as a fading memory, he had thrown himself eagerly into the current of affairs. Fortune favoured one both capable and energetic. In time he won a partnership in the firm, and when death removed his relative, took his place at its head.

He had looked forward to the time, not very far in the future, when he might retire from business and devote his leisure to study and travel, tastes which for years he had subordinated to the pursuit of wealth; not entirely, for his life had been many sided; and not so much for the money, as because, being in a game where dollars were the counters, it was his instinct to play it well. He was winning already, and when the bagging trust paid him, for his share of the business, a sum double his investment, he found himself, at some years less than fifty, relieved of business cares and in command of an ample fortune.

This change in the colonel's affairs--and we shall henceforth call him the colonel, because the scene of this story is laid in the South, where titles are seldom ignored, and where the colonel could hardly have escaped his own, even had he desired to do so--this change in the colonel's affairs coincided with that climacteric of the mind, from which, without ceasing to look forward, it turns, at times, in wistful retrospect, toward the distant past, which it sees thenceforward through a mellowing glow of sentiment. Emancipated from the counting room, and ordered South by the doctor, the colonel's thoughts turned easily and naturally to the old town that had given him birth; and he felt a twinge of something like remorse at the reflection that never once since leaving it had he set foot within its borders. For years he had been too busy. His wife had never manifested any desire to visit the South, nor was her temperament one to evoke or sympathise with sentimental reminiscence. He had married, rather late in life, a New York woman, much younger than himself; and while he had admired her beauty and they had lived very pleasantly together, there had not existed between them the entire union of souls essential to perfect felicity, and the current of his life had not been greatly altered by her loss.

Toward little Phil, however, the child she had borne him, his feeling was very different. His young wife had been, after all, but a sweet and pleasant graft upon a sturdy tree. Little Phil was flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. Upon his only child the colonel lavished all of his affection. Already, to his father's eye, the boy gave promise of a noble manhood. His frame was graceful and active. His hair was even more brightly golden than his mother's had been; his eyes more deeply blue than hers; while his features were a duplicate of his father's at the same age, as was evidenced by a faded daguerreotype among the colonel's few souvenirs of his own childhood. Little Phil had a sweet temper, a loving disposition, and endeared himself to all with whom he came in contact.

The hack, after a brief passage down the main street, deposited the passengers at the front of the Clarendon Hotel. The colonel paid the black driver the quarter he demanded--two dollars would have been the New York price--ran the gauntlet of the dozen pairs of eyes in the heads of the men leaning back in the splint-bottomed armchairs under the shade trees on the sidewalk, registered in the book pushed forward by a clerk with curled mustaches and pomatumed hair, and accompanied by Phil, followed the smiling black bellboy along a passage and up one flight of stairs to a spon courage.

L'aube revint. Nous commencions ? rire et ? parler de marcher sur Ambatomasina. A huit heures du matin, un peloton de tirailleurs alg?riens arriva au pas de course, et nous nous trouvions assez ridicules et assez humili?s pour recevoir avec componction la vigoureuse semonce du capitaine des tirailleurs. Mais toute chose a deux c?t?s: je songeais en moi-m?me que notre ch?tive pr?sence avait sauv? le village de notre ami Rainitavy du sort de son voisin. Pourtant le p?re de Ramary et de K?taka demeurait sombre: le malheur ?vit? aujourd'hui devait ?choir le lendemain, ou dans quelques jours; il contemplait avec une r?signation morne le d?part de ces Fran?ais qui avaient ?t? ses h?tes, et qui l'abandonnaient sans armes ? un ennemi presque cr?? par eux. Peut-?tre aussi songeait-il ? ses cachettes d'argent, ? des compromissions secr?tes avec les insurg?s, ? des n?gociations anciennes, louches et n?cessaires, qui le rassuraient, tout en lui imposant de myst?rieux devoirs:

--Ramilina, Ragalliac, nous dit-il, je reste ici puisque je suis gouverneur. Le souffle de la vie est doux, mais nul ne peut fuir sa destin?e. Seulement, j'ai peur pour mes deux filles. Les collines d'Antsahadinta ne sont point pour elles une retraite s?re, et je vous prie de les conduire chez leur oncle Rainimaro, ? Tananarive, quartier d'Ambatovinaky.

Et, ma foi, je criai:

--K?taka, petite K?taka, si je t'emm?ne, je te garde!

K?taka surveillait en cet instant, les l?vres serr?es, une esclave occup?e ? ficeler une natte par-dessus un coffre en bois, son unique bagage. Elle r?pondit sans embarras:

--Oui, si tu n'as pas encore de femme chez toi.

Et c'est ainsi que je me fian?ai apr?s une chasse au marais, un conte de voc?ratrice, une veill?e d'armes, et des inqui?tudes qui maintenant se r?solvaient en une sorte de joie exalt?e. Le p?re s'inclina avec un simple sourire de courtoisie. Il n'avait aucune illusion sur ces mariages, toujours irr?guliers, rarement fid?les, des blancs avec les filles de Madagascar; pourtant il ?tait heureux de trouver un protecteur pour son enfant, qu'il aimait, et peut-?tre pour lui-m?me. D'ailleurs, l'id?e de continence et de vertu n'est point une id?e malgache. La chastet? n'y existe point, m?me comme pr?jug?, et la libert? de la femme en amour ?gale la libert? de l'homme: tradition antique l?gu?e ? cette race par les Malayo-Polyn?siens qui peupl?rent Madagascar. Et de m?me qu'aux terres oc?aniennes, d'o? qu'ils viennent, les enfants sont accueillis par la famille de la m?re, et toujours choy?s.

Comme le pays par lequel nous avions pass? pour venir n'?tait point s?r, nous suiv?mes les tirailleurs kabyles qui regagnaient la route d'?tapes habituelle, et, une fois sur celle-ci, notre petite troupe se joignit ? l'escorte qui accompagnait le convoi quotidien des marchandises.

Apr?s Alarobia, la caravane ne traversa plus que des villages br?l?s. On apercevait de loin, du haut des innombrables collines de terre rouge que nous gravissions tour ? tour, leur silhouette appauvrie, les maisons en briques crues o? le pignon demeurait seul, veuf du toit effondr?. Plus pr?s, c'?tait l'odeur de l'incendie r?cent, une ?cre senteur de paille grill?e et fumante encore, de terre recuite d'o? l'humidit? ressortait en vapeurs chaudes. Entre les quatre murs des habitations d?sert?es, le chaume consum? ?tait tomb? sur le sol m?me o? avaient v?cu des familles, et, par-dessous les d?combres, les cendres de l'ancien foyer se distinguaient encore, plus hautes, entass?es au coin sacr? du nord-est, au milieu des jarres ? eau, des plats ? cuire le riz, de toute une pauvre vaisselle de terre rouge que le feu, par place, avait flamb?e ou noircie. Les choses semblaient d'autant plus d?sol?es qu'elles avaient un air vaguement europ?en. Des fen?tres montraient encore des morceaux de vitres bris?es; des marches d'escalier grimpaient le long des murs; des poulets, des dindons, revenant aux lieux d'habitude, cherchaient leur vie sur les fumiers; et quelques demeures isol?es, d?truites aussi, avaient l'aspect familier d'une ferme de Beauce. Les champs de manioc indig?ne, de pommes de terre dont la semence ?tait venue d'Europe, ?talaient leurs quadrilat?res r?guliers, descendaient jusqu'aux vall?es inf?rieures qu'illuminait le vert brillant, moir?, caressant des rizi?res. Des canalisations adroites conduisaient les eaux jusqu'au flanc des collines, et l'on devinait partout l'?pre travail d'un paysan passionn? pour la propri?t?, amoureux des plantes qu'on peut vendre ou dont on se nourrit, qui croissent sous l'action du soleil, de l'eau, de la b?che et du f?mur de boeuf, transform? en massue, et qui sert ? briser les mottes de gl?be dure.

Mais combien tout cela ?tait boulevers?, pill?, ravag?! Parfois, sur une haute et lointaine colline, de confuses taches blanches s'agitaient, ray?es de l'?clair d'un coup de fusil: c'?taient les Fahavales qui surveillaient la roule, ?piant les caravanes. Alors les porteurs poussaient un cri, courant, se pressant contre les hommes d'escorte, des S?n?galais ? la peau noir-bleu, qui marchaient accompagn?s de leurs femmes aux longs seins, aux hanches larges et arrondies en lyre, couvertes de bijoux d'argent et de cuivre, d'amulettes et de colliers d'ambre jaune. Ces barbares, appel?s par des civilis?s pour r?duire un peuple moins barbare et qui, vaincu par eux, continuait ? les m?priser, nous pr?c?daient sans ordre, avec des bondissements et des sursauts de b?tes farouches. A peine s'ils portaient un uniforme, mais on estimait leur courage indomptable et presque effrayant, leur sant? robuste, leur passion de la lutte sanglante, de la mort re?ue et surtout donn?e de pr?s.

Les pauvres et craintifs portefaix malgaches, agr?g?s, serr?s par la frayeur les uns contre les autres, se racontaient leurs mis?res et leurs supplices, disaient l'histoire des camarades pass?s avant eux et pris par l'ennemi, qui leur avait coup? les jarrets. Puis, les insurg?s disparaissaient ? l'horizon, et la caravane, insouciante et bavarde, s'allongeait de nouveau, ?tal?e sur des centaines de m?tres, onduleuse, ?troite, form?e d'anneaux mal li?s, d'hommes unis ? deux ou ? quatre pour le transport des lourdes malles, des caisses de vin et de pain, des lits de camp, de tout le bagage et de toutes les provisions emport?es par les Europ?ens, dans cet exil pour une contr?e que leur imagination avait crue plus sauvage encore, et d?nu?e de tout.

--Nous arrivons, dit Galliac, voici l'observatoire des j?suites.

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