King of Camargue Part 17

"Have you seen Rampal, friend?" said Renaud, stopping his horse short as soon as he saw the fisherman, who was just about changing his place.

"Ah! King, are you the man who is looking for him?" said the fisherman, an old man. "If he has kept to the road he took to get away from you,--for I saw he was watching some one behind him,--he ought to be on the sh.o.r.e of the Vaccares by this time, and from there, if he doesn't go back to Saintes-Maries, he will surely go up toward Notre-Dame-d'Amour. You have a good horse, and you can catch him between the Vaccares and the Grand' Mar."

Renaud darted away as if he had wings.

After an hour and a half of furious riding,--he was wise enough, however, to change his gait several times,-he drew rein, a little discouraged; then, after a brief halt and a draught of brandy from the flask that never left his holsters, he resumed his headlong race--but not until he had thoughtfully allowed his horse to drink a swallow of water from the ca.n.a.l.

When he was between the Grand' Mar swamp and the Vaccares, he found his own drove taking their midday rest there, under the guidance of Bernard, his young a.s.sistant.

Horses and bulls were lying motionless on the sh.o.r.e of the Vaccares, in the twofold glare from sky and water, for it was well-nigh noon, and the light was dazzling.

Bernard was resting likewise, lying on his back with his head on the saddle, not far from his horse, which was fettered near by, learning to amble.

In front of Renaud lay the pearl-gray Vaccares, gleaming like a huge table of polished steel, in the centre of which a veritable white islet of sea-mews were sleeping, motionless as statues.

Behind him stretched an ashen-gray plain, which could be seen only in spots--where the salt emerged in efflorescent crystals--glistening through a vast violet net-work of flowering _saladelles_; for the _saladelles_ spread out in broad, graceful tufts, with many ramifications, but without foliage, dotted with a mult.i.tude of lilac blossoms, between which the ground can be seen. And farther away the fields of gla.s.swort began, with their plump, juicy leaves; they are a beautiful rich green when they are young, but the salt air soon turns them blood-red, so that the oldest and those nearest the sea are the darkest.

Here and there the stunted tamarisk, with its gnarled trunk, dotted the plain, its spa.r.s.e foliage tinged with pink by the blossoms hanging in tiny cl.u.s.ters, which, tiny though they be, are a heavy burden for its flexible branches.

And in the dry, seamy bottoms were great patches of _siagnes_, _triangles_, _apauns_ of every kind, _caneous_ or dwarf reeds used in making roofs and matting, thorn-broom and all sorts of aquatic plants, bright green, and straight as fields of grain; their angular battalions, harvested in summer, go down before the scythe in broad half-circles. Above these patches of verdure, which bend and rustle with the faintest breath of air, hovered dragon-flies with enormous heads,--swallow-like insects, voracious devourers of gnats. They flew about with the swallows over the waters where the mosquito is born, making a metallic sound among the reeds when their wings of transparent, black-veined mica came in contact with them.

Renaud gazed at these familiar things and forgot himself in them. For a second he fancied that he was watching his drove there, and that he had nothing else to do but remain with his beasts, absorbed, as they were, in calm, unreasoning contemplation of the desert that surrounded him. He ceased to love, to hate, to desire, and to pursue.

The shadow of wings pa.s.sed him by. He raised his eyes and saw, above his head, two red flamingoes.

"They built their nest here this year," he thought.

But Prince, the good horse, had recognized his favorite mares, and, stretching out his neck, opening his nostrils wide to inhale the fresh breeze of the swamp and the plain, raising his lips and displaying his teeth, he gave a neigh that made all the mares spring to their feet at a single bound, the bulls raise their heads, and Bernard himself jump up from the ground, spear in hand.

Renaud, pressing his knees together and pulling his horse back, held him in hand, although he trembled under him and pranced up and down in the soft sand.

At the same time, a sudden gust of the _mistral_ swept across the plain and broke the mirror-like surface of the Vaccares into little waves.

"If it is Rampal you are looking for," said Bernard, "he isn't far away, you may be sure. When he saw me here, all of a sudden--just a moment ago--he rode off that way. And as he went out of my sight very soon, I believe he has gone into some cabin. You had better look around the Mejeane tower."

Renaud was off again.

Suddenly his eyes fell upon a low cabin with its rush-covered roof, shaped like a pyramid, or like a stack of straw, and surmounted, as they all are, by its wooden cross, bending back as if the _mistral_ were gradually blowing it over.

The thought came to him: "Rampal is there! His horse must be tired. He retraced his steps a short distance without Bernard's seeing him, and went into hiding there--hoping that I should be thrown off the scent and would ride by. Yes, he is surely there!"

Renaud turned about, and rode straight toward the cabin, keeping a sharp lookout; whereupon Rampal, who was really hidden there, watching his pursuer through the holes in the wall, rushed out, frightening an owl that flew away in dismay, and leaped upon his horse which was browsing in hobbles near by, but out of sight, at the bottom of a ditch.

The _mistral_, which comes like a cannon-ball when it makes up its mind to blow at that time of day, suddenly began to roar. Renaud had put his head down to meet the squall, so that he did not perceive this manoeuvre of the enemy.

So it was that Rampal seemed suddenly to come up out of the ground, not twenty feet from Renaud, who was not taken by surprise, however, but rushed at him, brandis.h.i.+ng his spear, for all the world like one of the knights of the time of Saint Louis, of whom our legends tell.

(Aigues-Mortes was then in its prime.)

But Camargue is, as every one knows, the mother of the _mistral_--the vast sunny plain, with Crau, which, after sending the air up by dint of overheating it, is compelled to summon other air in order to breathe at all. And thereupon, down the Rhone valley, at the summons of the desert, comes a torrent of fresh air, which is the companion of the river, and is called the _mistral_. It roared through Renaud's open vest as in the belly of a sail, and, taking Prince sidewise, kept him back a little. It was no easy matter to leap the ditch. That gave the advantage to Rampal, who was now trotting freely along, face to the wind.

The ditch was now between the two men, and Rampal's only purpose in trotting along the edge of it was to limber up his horse's legs.

Renaud, abandoning the idea of crossing the ditch for the moment, decided to follow along on his side. The two hors.e.m.e.n rode thus for a few moments. Rampal had prudently protected his face from the _mistral_ with a red silk handkerchief, the ends of which flapped about his neck.

Suddenly, taking advantage of a spot where the banks came somewhat nearer together, Renaud lifted his horse and landed on the other side of the ditch at the very instant that Rampal, having executed the same manoeuvre in the opposite direction, landed on the side Renaud had left.

Renaud did not find a favorable spot for crossing at once, and Rampal gained upon him.

Having at last crossed the obstacle once more, Renaud pursued Rampal at full speed, and so rapidly that, when Rampal turned to judge the distance between them, he saw Renaud hardly fifty paces behind him.

He had just time to turn about, and waited for his foe, with lance in rest, leaning forward in his saddle, his feet planted firmly in the broad stirrups.

Renaud, unluckily, was charging against the _mistral_. A sort of hail, consisting of sand and of the little snails that cling in myriads to the leaves of the _enganes_, beat into his face and angered him.

Five hundred feet away, Bernard was looking on--not saying a word, for fear of Rampal, but praying fervently for Renaud, and he fancied that he was watching two champions standing on the long ladders in the prows of the jousting boats, with their lances held firmly under their right arms. Rampal's spear, being suddenly lowered too far by a false step of his horse, p.r.i.c.ked the heel of Renaud's boot and grazed Prince's flank, whereupon he jumped violently aside, as if he were avoiding the horns of a heifer.

Renaud's spear tore the sleeve of his enemy's blue s.h.i.+rt and carried away the piece.

The hors.e.m.e.n met and pa.s.sed each other.

Rampal was the first to turn, and rode after Renaud, ready to strike him from behind, while he was struggling to stop Prince, who had acquired too much momentum; and Prince, hearing the other horse's hurried step, and feeling his hot breath behind him, furious at being held back, fearing that he would be overtaken, turned about so quickly and unexpectedly in his wrath, that Rampal took fright and turned again, but involuntarily.

Renaud, finding that his pursuer had once more become a fugitive, gave Prince a free rein.

The stallion was off like the wind.

The hors.e.m.e.n sped along, pushed on by the gusts, the wind being now behind them.

The mares and heifers, the whole drove, in fact, stood with their heads in the air, staring eyes, and nostrils distended, watching the two men come down toward them, bending over their horses' necks, reins flying, as if pursued by the tempest along the sh.o.r.es of the pond, whose waters were dancing and rippling in the wind.

Here and there the little tamarisks, bent almost double, seemed likewise to be fleeing from the storm. There were no more gnats or dragon-flies in the air. Above the Vaccares the spray was flying. The _mistral_ swept everything clean.

Two minutes later, powerless to control their enervated beasts, excited as they were by the struggle and the wind, the two adversaries rode at full speed through the drove.

Thereupon, inflamed by the sight of their two stallions racing madly by, alarmed at the sight of the waving spears, intoxicated by the wild wind that found a way into their bodies through their fiery nostrils, the mares neighed and reared and started off together on the gallop.

The heifers followed. Hundreds of hoofs and cloven feet beat the ground with a noise like the roaring of a tempest, and the whole drove, lashed by the _mistral_, which howled behind them, biting them and urging them forward, rolled across the plain like a second Rhone.

And while Bernard was saddling his horse in hot haste to overtake them, the two enemies galloped in the midst of the hurricane as if borne on by the stamping of eighty beasts, whose hoofs raised clouds of sand and showers of spray and mud in the wind that travelled faster than they!

At the head of this whirlwind, and still in the midst of it, Renaud succeeded in overtaking Rampal. When he was near enough to touch him, he selected the precise moment when his horse was raising his left hind foot, to strike him on the right hind-quarter. The right leg, just as it was about to strike the ground, bent double under the blow of a spear directed by a man riding at a gallop, and Rampal and his horse rolled over among the countless galloping hoofs that shook the earth.

Bulls and horses leaped over the two bodies lying there, man and beast, and when the drove, tired and subdued, came to a stop half a league farther on, Renaud, still riding Prince, was holding by the bridle his recaptured horse, bleeding only in the flank and at the nose.

Standing beside him, with rage in his heart, stained with mud and dust, his face bleeding and the skin torn from the palms of the hands, Rampal, red as fire, was occupied in rearranging his breeches and fastening his belt.

"Wait till next time, Renaud! After this you would expect a man to seek revenge, eh?"

But his shrill voice was drowned in the howling of the _mistral_.

"Give me back my saddle!" he shouted in a louder tone.