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that temperate Londoner; but MacIan came from the cold seas and
mists where a man can drink a tumbler of raw whisky in a boat
without it making him wink.
When the Highlander began to pull really hard upon the oars,
Turnbull craned his dripping red head out of the boat to see the
goal of his exertions. It was a sufficiently uninviting one;
nothing so far as could be seen but a steep and shelving bank of
shingle, made of loose little pebbles such as children like, but
slanting up higher than a house. On the top of the mound, against
the sky line, stood up the brown skeleton of some broken fence or
breakwater. With the grey and watery dawn crawling up behind it,
the fence really seemed to say to our philosophic adventurers
that they had come at last to the other end of nowhere.
Bent by necessity to his labour, MacIan managed the heavy boat
with real power and skill, and when at length he ran it up on a
smoother part of the slope it caught and held so that they could
clamber out, not sinking farther than their knees into the water
and the shingle. A foot or two farther up their feet found the
beach firmer, and a few moments afterwards they were leaning on
the ragged breakwater and looking back at the sea they had
escaped.
They had a dreary walk across wastes of grey shingle in the grey
dawn before they began to come within hail of human fields or
roads; nor had they any notion of what fields or roads they would
be. Their boots were beginning to break up and the confusion of
stones tried them severely, so that they were glad to lean on
their swords, as if they were the staves of pilgrims. MacIan
thought vaguely of a weird ballad of his own country which
describes the soul in Purgatory as walking on a plain full of
sharp stones, and only saved by its own charities upon earth.
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon
Every night and all,
Sit thee down and put them on,
And Christ receive thy soul.
Turnbull had no such lyrical meditations, but he was in an even
worse temper.
At length they came to a pale ribbon of road, edged by a shelf of
rough and almost colourless turf; and a few feet up the slope
there stood grey and weather-stained, one of those big wayside
crucifixes which are seldom seen except in Catholic countries.
MacIan put his hand to his head and found that his bonnet was not
there. Turnbull gave one glance at the crucifix--a glance at once
sympathetic and bitter, in which was concentrated the whole of
Swinburne's poem on the same occasion.
O hidden face of man, whereover
The years have woven a viewless veil,
If thou wert verily man's lover
What did thy love or blood avail?
Thy blood the priests mix poison of,
And in gold shekels coin thy love.
Then, leaving MacIan in his attitude of prayer, Turnbull began to
look right and left very sharply, like one looking for something.
Suddenly, with a little cry, he saw it and ran forward. A few
yards from them along the road a lean and starved sort of hedge
came pitifully to an end. Caught upon its prickly angle, however,
there was a very small and very dirty scrap of paper that might
have hung there for months, since it escaped from someone tearing
up a letter or making a spill out of a newspaper. Turnbull
snatched at it and found it was the corner of a printed page,
very coarsely printed, like a cheap novelette, and just large
enough to contain the words: "_et c'est elle qui_----"
"Hurrah!" cried Turnbull, waving his fragment; "we are safe at
last. We are free at last. We are somewhere better than England
or Eden or Paradise. MacIan, we are in the Land of the Duel!"
"Where do you say?" said the other, looking at him heavily and
with knitted brows, like one almost dazed with the grey doubts of
desolate twilight and drifting sea.
"We are in France!" cried Turnbull, with a voice like a trumpet,
"in the land where things really happen--_Tout arrive en France_.
We arrive in France. Look at this little message," and he held
out the scrap of paper. "There's an omen for you superstitious
hill folk. _C'est elle qui--Mais oui, mais oui, c'est elle qui
sauvera encore le monde_."
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