The Battle of the Strong | Page 6

again, and then
answered:
"Yes, Philip--sir."
D'Avranche wanted to laugh, but the face of the child was sensitive and
serious, and he only smiled. "Say 'Yes, Philip', won't you?" he asked.
"Yes, Philip," came the reply obediently.
After a moment of speech with Madame Landresse, Philip stooped to
say good-bye to the child. "Good-bye, Guida."
A queer, mischievous little smile flitted over her face--a second, and it
was gone.
"Good-bye, sir--Philip," she said, and they parted. Her last words kept
ringing in his ears as he made his way homeward. "Good-bye,
sir--Philip" --the child's arrangement of words was odd and amusing,
and at the same time suggested something more. "Good-bye, Sir
Philip," had a different meaning, though the words were the same.
"Sir Philip--eh?" he said to himself, with a jerk of the head--"I'll be
more than that some day."

CHAPTER II
The night came down with leisurely gloom. A dim starlight pervaded
rather than shone in the sky; Nature seemed somnolent and gravely
meditative. It brooded as broods a man who is seeking his way through
a labyrinth of ideas to a conclusion still evading him. This sense of
cogitation enveloped land and sea, and was as tangible to feeling as
human presence.
At last the night seemed to wake from reverie. A movement, a thrill,

ran through the spangled vault of dusk and sleep, and seemed to pass
over the world, rousing the sea and the earth. There was no wind,
apparently no breath of air, yet the leaves of the trees moved, the
weather-vanes turned slightly, the animals in the byres roused
themselves, and slumbering folk opening their eyes, turned over in their
beds, and dropped into a troubled doze again.
Presently there came a long moaning sound from the tide, not loud but
rather mysterious and distant--a plaint, a threatening, a warning, a
prelude?
A dull labourer, returning from late toil, felt it, and raised his head in a
perturbed way, as though some one had brought him news of a far-off
disaster. A midwife, hurrying to a lowly birth-chamber, shivered and
gathered her mantle more closely about her. She looked up at the sky,
she looked out over the sea, then she bent her head and said to herself
that this would not be a good night, that ill-luck was in the air. "The
mother or the child will die," she said to herself. A 'longshoreman,
reeling home from deep potations, was conscious of it, and, turning
round to the sea, snarled at it and said yah! in swaggering defiance. A
young lad, wandering along the deserted street, heard it, began to
tremble, and sat down on a block of stone beside the doorway of a
baker's shop. He dropped his head on his arms and his chin on his
knees, shutting out the sound and sobbing quietly.
Yesterday his mother had been buried; to-night his father's door had
been closed in his face. He scarcely knew whether his being locked out
was an accident or whether it was intended. He thought of the time
when his father had ill-treated his mother and himself. That, however,
had stopped at last, for the woman had threatened the Royal Court, and
the man, having no wish to face its summary convictions, thereafter
conducted himself towards them both with a morose indifference.
The boy was called Ranulph, a name which had passed to him through
several generations of Jersey forebears--Ranulph Delagarde. He was
being taught the trade of ship-building in St. Aubin's Bay. He was not
beyond fourteen years of age, though he looked more, so tall and
straight and self-possessed was he.

His tears having ceased soon, he began to think of what he was to do in
the future. He would never go back to his father's house, or be
dependent on him for aught. Many plans came to his mind. He would
learn his trade of ship-building, he would become a master-builder,
then a shipowner, with fishing-vessels like the great company sending
fleets to Gaspe.
At the moment when these ambitious plans had reached the highest
point of imagination, the upper half of the door beside him opened
suddenly, and he heard men's voices. He was about to rise and
disappear, but the words of the men arrested him, and he cowered down
beside the stone. One of the men was leaning on the half-door,
speaking in French.
"I tell you it can't go wrong. The pilot knows every crack in the coast. I
left Granville at three; Rulle cour left Chaussey at nine. If he lands safe,
and the English troops ain't roused, he'll take the town and hold the
island easy enough."
"But the pilot, is he certain safe?" asked another voice. Ranulph
recognised it as that of the baker Carcaud, who owned the