Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 18

All day long the fowls kept it alive with sound and movement; for of all mercurial and fussy things there is nothing on the face of the earth to equal c.o.c.ks and hens. They have such an utterly exaggerated sense, too, of their own importance; they make such a clacking and clucking over every egg, such a scratching and trumpeting over every morsel of treasure-trove, and such a striding and stamping over every bit of well-worn ground. On the whole, I think poultry have more humanity in them than any other race, footed or feathered; and c.o.c.ks certainly must have been the first creatures that ever hit on the great art of advertising. Myself I always fancy that the souls of this feathered tribe pa.s.s into the bodies of journalists; but this may be a mere baseless a.s.sociation of kindred ideas in my mind.

She kissed the dog on the forehead; then pointed to the kreel of sh.e.l.ls and seaweed on the red, smooth piece of rock.

"Take care of them, dear Bronze," she murmured; "and wait till I come back. Wait here."

She did not mean to command; she only meant to console him by the appointment of some service.

Bronze looked in her face with eyes of woe and longing; but he made no moan or sound, but only stretched himself beside the kreel on guard. I am always glad to think that as she went she turned, and kissed him once again.

The boat flew fast over the water. When boats leave you, and drag your heart with them, they always go like that; and when they come, and your heart darts out to meet them, then they are so slow!

The boat flew like a seagull, the sun bright upon her sail. Bronze, left upon the rock, lifted his head and gave one long, low wail. It echoed woefully and terribly over the wide, quiet waters. They gave back no answer--not even the poor answer that lies in echo.

It was very still there. Nothing was in sight except that single little sail s.h.i.+ning against the light, and flying--flying--flying.

Now and then you could hear a clock striking in the distant village, the faint crow of a c.o.c.k, the far-off voices of children calling to one another.

The little sea-mouse stole athwart a pool; the grey sea-crabs pa.s.sed like a little army; the tiny sea creatures that dwelt in rosy sh.e.l.ls thrust their delicate heads from their houses to peep and wonder at the sun. But all was noiseless. How dared they make a sound, when that great sea, that was at once their life and death, was present with its never-ceasing "Hus.h.!.+"

Bronze never moved, and his eyes never turned from the little boat that went and left him there--the little boat that fast became merely a flash and speck of white against the azure air, no bigger than the breadth of a seagull's wings.

An hour drifted by. The church-clock on the cliffs had struck four times; a deep-toned, weary bell, that tolled for every quarter, and must often have been heard, at dead of night, by dying men, drowning unshriven and unhouselled.

Suddenly the sand about us, so fawn-hued, smooth, and beautifully ribbed, grew moist, and glistened with a gleam of water, like eyes that fill with tears.

Bronze never saw: he only watched the boat. A little later the water gushed above the sand, and, gathering in a frail rippling edge of foam, rolled up and broke upon the rock.

And still he never saw; for still he watched the boat.

Awhile, and the water grew in volume, and filled the mouse's pool till it brimmed over, and bathed the dull gra.s.ses till they glowed like flowers; and drew the sea-crabs and the tiny dwellers of the sh.e.l.ls back once more into its wondrous living light.

And all around the fresh tide rose, silently thus about the rocks and stones; gliding and glancing in all the channels of the sh.o.r.e, until the sands were covered, and the gra.s.ses gathered in, and all the creeping, hueless things were lost within its s.p.a.ce; and in the stead of them, and of the bronzed palm-leaves of weed, and of the great brown boulders gleaming in the sun, there was but one vast lagoon of shadowless bright water everywhere.

And still he never saw; for still he watched the boat.

By this time the tide, rolling swiftly in before a strong sou'-wester, had risen midway against the rock on which we had been left, and was breaking froth and foam upon the rock's worn side. For this rock alone withstood the pa.s.sage of the sea: there was naught else but this to break the even width of water. All other things save this had been subdued and reapen.

It was all deep water around; and the water glowed a strange emerald green, like the green in a lizard or snake. The sh.o.r.e, that had looked so near, now seemed so far, far off; and the woods were hidden in mist, and the cottages were all blurred with the brown of the cliff, and there came no sound of any sort from the land--no distant bell, no farm-bird's call, no echo of children's voices. There was only one sound at all; and that was the low, soft, ceaseless murmuring of the tide as it glided inward.

The waters rose till they touched the crest of the rock; but still he never moved. Stretched out upon the stone, guarding the things of her trust, and with his eyes fastened on the sail which rose against the light, he waited thus--for death.

I was light, and a strong swimmer. I had been tossed on those waves from my birth. Buffeted, fatigued, blind with the salt sea-spray, drenched with the weight of the water, I struggled across that calm dread width of gla.s.sy coldness, and breathless reached the land.

By signs and cries I made them wot that something needed them at sea.

They began to get ready a little boat, bringing it down from its wooden rest on high dry ground beneath the cliff. Whilst they pushed and dragged through the deep-furrowed sand I gazed seaward. The sh.o.r.e was raised; I could see straight athwart the waters. They now were level with the rock; and yet he had never moved.

The little skiff had pa.s.sed round the bend of a bluff, and was out of his sight and ours.

The boat was pushed into the surf; they threw me in. They could see nothing, and trusted to my guidance.

I had skill enough to make them discover whither it was I wanted them to go. Then, looking in their eagerness whither my eyes went, they saw him on the rock, and with a sudden exercise of pa.s.sionate vigour, bent to their oars and sent the boat against the hard opposing force of the resisting tide. For they perceived that, from some cause, he was motionless there, and could not use his strength; and they knew that it would be shame to their manhood if, within sight of their land, the creature who had succoured their brethren in the snow, and saved the two-year child from the storm, should perish before their sight on a calm and unfretted sea and in a full noon sun.

It was but a furlong to that rock; it was but the breadth of the beach, that at low water stretched uncovered; and yet how slowly the boat sped, with the ruthless tide sweeping it back as fast as the oars bore it forward!

So near we seemed to him that one would have thought a stone flung from us through the air would have lit far beyond him; and yet the s.p.a.ce was enough, more than enough, to bar us from him, filled as it was with the strong adverse pressure of those low, swift, in-rus.h.i.+ng waves.

The waters leaped above the summit of the rock, and for a moment covered him. A great shout went up from the rowers beside me. They strained in every nerve to reach him; and the roll of a fresh swell of water lifted the boat farther than their uttermost effort could achieve, but lifted her backward, backward to the land.

When the waters touched him he arose slowly, and stood at bay like a stag upon a headland, when the hounds rage behind, and in front yawns the fathomless lake.

He stood so that he still guarded the things of his trust; and his eyes were still turned seaward, watching for the vanished sail.

Once again the men, with a loud cry to him of courage and help, strained at their oars, and drove themselves a yard's breadth farther out. And once again the tide, with a rush of surf and s.h.i.+ngle, swept the boat back, and seemed to bear her to the land as lightly as though she were a leaf with which a wind was playing.

The waters covered the surface of the rock. It sank from sight. The foam was white about his feet, and still he stood there--upon guard.

Everywhere there was the brilliancy of noontide sun; everywhere there was the beaming calmness of the sea, that spread out, far and wide, in one vast sheet of light; from the wooded line of the sh.o.r.e there echoed the distant gaiety of a woman's laugh. A breeze, softly stirring through the warm air, brought with it from the land the scent of myrtle thickets and wild flowers. How horrible they were--the light, the calm, the mirth, the summer fragrance!

For one moment he stood there erect; his dark form sculptured, lion-like, against the warm yellow light of noon; about his feet the foam.

Then, all noiselessly, a great, curled, compact wave surged over him, breaking upon him, sweeping him away. The water spread out quickly, smooth and gleaming like the rest. He rose, grasping in his teeth the kreel of weed and sh.e.l.ls.

He had waited until the last. Driven from the post he would not of himself forsake, the love of life awoke in him; he struggled against death.

Three times he sank, three times he rose. The sea was now strong, and deep, and swift of pace, rus.h.i.+ng madly in; and he was c.u.mbered with that weight of osier and of weed, which yet he never yielded, because it had been her trust. With each yard that the tide bore him forward, by so much it bore us backward. There was but the length of a spar between us, and yet it was enough!

He rose for the fourth time, his head above the surf, the kreel uplifted still, the sun-rays full upon his brown weary eyes, with all their silent agony and mute appeal. Then the tide, fuller, wilder, deeper with each wave that rolled, and was.h.i.+ng as it went all things of the sh.o.r.e from their places, flung against him, as it swept on, a great rough limb of driftwood. It struck him as he rose; struck him across the brow. The wave rushed on; the tide came in; the black wood floated to the sh.o.r.e; he never rose again.

And scarcely that span of the length of a spar had parted us from him when he sank!

All the day through they searched, and searched with all the skill of men sea-born and sea-bred. The fisher, whose little child he had saved in the winter night, would not leave him to the things of the deep. And at sunset they found him, floating westward, in the calm water where the rays of the sun made it golden and warm. He was quite dead; but in his teeth there still was clenched the osier kreel, washed empty of its freight.

They buried him there; on the sh.o.r.e underneath the cliff, where a great wild knot of myrtle grows, and the honeysuckle blooms all over the sand.

And when Lord Beltran in that autumn came, and heard how he had died in the fulfilling of a trust, he had a stone shapen and carved; and set it against the cliff, amongst the leaf.a.ge and flowers, high up where the highest winter tide will not come. And by his will the name of Bronze was cut on it in deep letters that will not wear out, and on which the sun will strike with every evening that it shall pa.s.s westward above the sea; and beneath the name he bade three lines be chiselled likewise, and they are these:

"HE CHOSE DEATH RATHER THAN UNFAITHFULNESS.

HE KNEW NO BETTER.

HE WAS A DOG."

"They are all words. Creatures that take out their grief in c.r.a.pe and mortuary tablets can't feel very much."

"There are many lamentations, from Lycidas to Lesbia, which prove that whether for a hero or a sparrow--" I began timidly to suggest.

"That's only a commonplace," snapped my lady. "They chatter and scribble; they don't feel. They write stanzas of 'gush' on Maternity; and tear the little bleating calf from its mother to bleed to death in a long, slow agony. They maunder twaddle about Infancy over some ugly red lump of human flesh, in whose creation their vanity happens to be involved; and then go out and send the springtide lamb to the slaughter, and shoot the parent birds as they fly to the nest where their fledglings are screaming in hunger! Pooh! Did you never find out the value of their words? Some one of them has said that speech was given them to conceal their thoughts. It is true that they use it for that end; but it was given them for this reason. At the time of the creation, when all except man had been made, the Angel of Life, who had been bidden to summon the world out of chaos, moving over the fresh and yet innocent earth, thought to himself, 'I have created so much that is doomed to suffer for ever, and for ever be mute; I will now create an animal that shall be compensated for all suffering by listening to the sound of its own voluble chatter.' Whereon the Angel called Man into being, and cut the _fraenum_ of his tongue, which has clacked incessantly ever since, all through the silence of the centuries."