Toilers of the Sea Part 13

He seemed, indeed, always on the watch--for what? For rogues probably.

Every Tuesday he commanded the Durande on her pa.s.sage from Guernsey to St. Malo. He arrived at St. Malo on the Tuesday evening, stayed two days there to discharge and take in a new cargo, and started again for Guernsey on Friday morning.

There was at that period, at St. Malo, a little tavern near the harbour, which was called the "Jean Auberge."

The construction of the modern quays swept away this house. At this period, the sea came up as far as the St. Vincent and Dinan gates. St.

Merlan and St. Servan communicated with each other by covered carts and other vehicles, which pa.s.sed to and fro among vessels lying high and dry, avoiding the buoys, the anchors, and cables, and running the risk now and then of smas.h.i.+ng their leathern hoods against the lowered yards, or the end of a jibboom. Between the tides, the coachmen drove their horses over those sands, where, six hours afterwards, the winds would be beating the rolling waves. The four-and-twenty carrying dogs of St.

Malo, who tore to pieces a naval officer in 1770, were accustomed to prowl about this beach. This excess of zeal on their part led to the destruction of the pack. Their nocturnal barkings are no longer heard between the little and the great Talard.

Sieur Clubin was accustomed to stay at the Jean Auberge. The French office of the Durande was held there.

The custom-house officers and coast-guardmen came to take their meals and to drink at the Jean Auberge. They had their separate tables. The custom-house officers of Binic found it convenient for the service to meet there with their brother officers of St. Malo.

Captains of vessels came there also; but they ate at another table.

Sieur Clubin sat sometimes at one, sometimes at the other table, but preferred the table of the custom-house men to that of the sea captains.

He was always welcome at either.

The tables were well served. There were strange drinks especially provided for foreign sailors. A dandy sailor from Bilboa could have been supplied there with a _helada_. People drank stout there, as at Greenwich; or brown _gueuse_, as at Antwerp.

Masters of vessels who came from long voyages and privateersmen sometimes appeared at the captains' table, where they exchanged news.

"How are sugars? That commission is only for small lots.--The brown kinds, however, are going off. Three thousand bags of East India, and five hundred hogsheads of Sagua.--Take my word, the opposition will end by defeating Villele.--What about indigo? Only seven serons of Guatemala changed hands.--The _Nanino-Julia_ is in the roads; a pretty three-master from Brittany.--The two cities of La Plata are at loggerheads again.--When Monte Video gets fat, Buenos Ayres grows lean.--It has been found necessary to transfer the cargo of the _Regina-Coeli_, which has been condemned at Callao.--Cocoas go off briskly.--Caraque bags are quoted at one hundred and thirty-four, and Trinidad's at seventy-three.--It appears that at the review in the Champ de Mars, the people cried, 'Down with the ministers!'--The raw salt Saladeros hides are selling--ox-hides at sixty francs, and cows' at forty-eight.--Have they pa.s.sed the Balkan?--What is Diebitsch about?--Aniseed is in demand at San Francisco. Plagniol olive oil is quiet.--Gruyere cheese, in bulk, is thirty-two francs the quintal.--Well, is Leon XII. dead?" etc., etc.

All these things were talked about and commented on aloud. At the table of the custom-house and coast-guard officers they spoke in a lower key.

Matters of police and revenue on the coast and in the ports require, in fact, a little more privacy, and a little less clearness in the conversation.

The sea-captains' table was presided over by an old captain of a large vessel, M. Gertrais-Gaboureau. M. Gertrais-Gaboureau could hardly be regarded as a man; he was rather a living barometer. His long life at sea had given him a surprising power of prognosticating the state of the weather. He seemed to issue a decree for the weather to-morrow. He sounded the winds, and felt the pulse, as it were, of the tides. He might be imagined requesting the clouds to show their tongue--that is to say, their forked lightnings. He was the physician of the wave, the breeze, and the squall. The ocean was his patient. He had travelled round the world like a doctor going his visits, examining every kind of climate in its good and bad condition. He was profoundly versed in the pathology of the seasons. Sometimes he would be heard delivering himself in this fas.h.i.+on--"The barometer descended in 1796 to three degrees below tempest point." He was a sailor from real love of the sea. He hated England as much as he liked the ocean. He had carefully studied English seamans.h.i.+p, and considered himself to have discovered its weak point. He would explain how the _Sovereign_ of 1637 differed from the _Royal William_ of 1670, and from the _Victory_ of 1775. He compared their build as to their forecastles and quarter-decks. He looked back with regret to the towers upon the deck, and the funnel-shaped tops of the _Great Harry_ of 1514--probably regarding them from the point of view of convenient lodging-places for French cannon-b.a.l.l.s. In his eyes, nations only existed for their naval inst.i.tutions. He indulged in some odd figures of speech on this subject. He considered the term "The Trinity House" as sufficiently indicating England. The "Northern Commissioners"

were in like manner synonymous in his mind with Scotland; the "Ballast Board," with Ireland. He was full of nautical information. He was, in himself, a marine alphabet and almanack, a tariff and low-water mark, all combined. He knew by heart all the lighthouse dues--particularly those of the English coast--one penny per ton for pa.s.sing before this; one farthing before that. He would tell you that the Small Rock Light which once used to burn two hundred gallons of oil, now consumes fifteen hundred. Once, aboard s.h.i.+p, he was attacked by a dangerous disease, and was believed to be dying. The crew a.s.sembled round his hammock, and in the midst of his groans and agony he addressed the chief carpenter with the words, "You had better make a mortise in each side of the main caps, and put in a bit of iron to help pa.s.s the top ropes through." His habit of command had given to his countenance an expression of authority.

It was rare that the subjects of conversation at the captains' table and at that of the custom-house men were the same. This, however, did happen to be the case in the first days of that month of February to which the course of this history has now brought us. The three-master _Tamaulipas_, Captain Zuela, arrived from Chili, and bound thither again, was the theme of discussion at both tables.

At the captains' table they were talking of her cargo; and at that of the custom-house people, of certain circ.u.mstances connected with her recent proceedings.

Captain Zuela, of Copiapo, was partly a Chilian and partly a Columbian.

He had taken a part in the War of Independence in a true independent fas.h.i.+on, adhering sometimes to Bolivar, sometimes to Morillo, according as he had found it to his interest. He had enriched himself by serving all causes. No man in the world could have been more Bourbonist, more Bonapartist, more absolutist, more liberal, more atheistical, or more devoutly catholic. He belonged to that great and renowned party which may be called the Lucrative party. From time to time he made his appearance in France on commercial voyages; and if report spoke truly, he willingly gave a pa.s.sage to fugitives of any kind--bankrupts or political refugees, it was all the same to him, provided they could pay.

His mode of taking them aboard was simple. The fugitive waited upon a lonely point of the coast, and at the moment of setting sail, Zuela would detach a small boat to fetch him. On his last voyage he had a.s.sisted in this way an outlaw and fugitive from justice, named Berton; and on this occasion he was suspected of being about to aid the flight of the men implicated in the affair of the Bida.s.soa. The police were informed, and had their eye upon him.

This period was an epoch of flights and escapes. The Restoration in France was a reactionary movement. Revolutions are fruitful of voluntary exile; and restorations of wholesale banishments. During the first seven or eight years which followed the return of the Bourbons, panic was universal--in finance, in industry, in commerce, men felt the ground tremble beneath them. Bankruptcies were numerous in the commercial world; in the political, there was a general rush to escape. Lavalette had taken flight, Lefebvre Desnouettes had taken flight, Delon had taken flight. Special tribunals were again in fas.h.i.+on--_plus_ Treetaillon.

People instinctively shunned the Pont de Saumur, the Esplanade de la Reole, the wall of the Observatoire in Paris, the tower of Taurias d'Avignon--dismal landmarks in history where the period of reaction has left its sign-spots, on which the marks of that blood-stained hand are still visible. In London the Thistlewood affair, with its ramifications in France: in Paris the Trogoff trial, with its ramifications in Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, had increased the motives for anxiety and flight, and given an impetus to that mysterious rout which left so many gaps in the social system of that day. To find a place of safety, this was the general care. To be implicated was to be ruined. The spirit of the military tribunals had survived their inst.i.tution. Sentences were matters of favour. People fled to Texas, to the Rocky Mountains, to Peru, to Mexico. The men of the Loire, traitors then, but now regarded as patriots, had founded the _Champ d'Asile_. Beranger in one of his songs says--

"Barbarians! we are Frenchmen born; Pity us, glorious, yet forlorn."

Self-banishment was the only resource left. Nothing, perhaps, seems simpler than flight, but that monosyllable has a terrible significance.

Every obstacle is in the way of the man who slips away. Taking to flight necessitates disguise. Persons of importance--even ill.u.s.trious characters--were reduced to these expedients, only fit for malefactors.

Their independent habits rendered it difficult for them to escape through the meshes of authority. A rogue who violates the conditions of his ticket-of-leave comports himself before the police as innocently as a saint; but imagine innocence constrained to act a part; virtue disguising its voice; a glorious reputation hiding under a mask. Yonder pa.s.ser-by is a man of well-earned celebrity; he is in quest of a false pa.s.sport. The equivocal proceedings of one absconding from the reach of the law is no proof that he is not a hero. Ephemeral but characteristic features of the time of which our so-called regular history takes no note, but which the true painter of the age will bring out into relief.

Under cover of these flights and concealments of honest men, genuine rogues, less watched and suspected, managed often to get clear off. A scoundrel, who found it convenient to disappear, would take advantage of the general pell-mell, tack himself on to the political refugees, and, thanks to his greater skill in the art, would contrive to appear in that dim twilight more honest even than his honest neighbours. Nothing looks more awkward and confused sometimes than honesty unjustly condemned. It is out of its element, and is almost sure to commit itself.

It is a curious fact, that this voluntary expatriation, particularly with honest folks, appeared to lead to every strange turn of fortune.

The modic.u.m of civilisation which a scamp brought with him from London or Paris became, perhaps, a valuable stock in trade in some primitive country, ingratiated him with the people, and enabled him to strike into new paths. There is nothing impossible in a man's escaping thus from the laws, to reappear elsewhere as a dignitary among the priesthood. There was something phantasmagorial in these sudden disappearances; and more than one such flight has led to events like the marvels of a dream. An escapade of this kind, indeed, seemed to end naturally in the wild and wonderful; as when some broken bankrupt suddenly decamps to turn up again twenty years later as Grand Vizier to the Mogul, or as a king in Tasmania.

Rendering a.s.sistance to these fugitives was an established trade, and, looking to the abundance of business of that kind, was a highly profitable one. It was generally carried on as a supplementary branch of certain recognised kinds of commerce. A person, for instance, desiring to escape to England, applied to the smugglers; one who desired to get to America, had recourse to sea-captains like Zuela.

II

CLUBIN OBSERVES SOMEONE

Zuela came sometimes to take refreshment at the Jean Auberge. Clubin knew him by sight.

For that matter Clubin was not proud. He did not disdain even to know scamps by sight. He went so far sometimes as to cultivate even a closer acquaintance with them; giving his hand in the open street, or saying good-day to them. He talked English with the smugglers, and jabbered Spanish with the _contrebandistas_. On this subject he had at command a number of apologetic phrases. "Good," he said, "can be extracted out of the knowledge of evil. The gamekeeper may find advantage in knowing the poacher. The good pilot may sound the depths of a pirate, who is only a sort of hidden rock. I test the quality of a scoundrel as a doctor will test a poison." There was no answering a battery of proverbs like this.

Everybody gave Clubin credit for his shrewdness. People praised him for not indulging in a ridiculous delicacy. Who, then, should dare to speak scandal of him on this point? Everything he did was evidently "for the good of the service." With him, all was straightforward. Nothing could stain his good fame. Crystal might more easily become sullied. This general confidence in him was the natural reward of a long life of integrity, the crowning advantage of a settled reputation. Whatever Clubin might do, or appear to do, was sure to be interpreted favourably.

He had attained almost to a state of impeccability. Over and above this, "he is very wary," people said: and from a situation which in others would have given rise to suspicion, his integrity would extricate itself, with a still greater halo of reputation for ability. This reputation for ability mingled harmoniously with his fame for perfect simplicity of character. Great simplicity and great talents in conjunction are not uncommon. The compound const.i.tutes one of the varieties of the virtuous man, and one of the most valuable. Sieur Clubin was one of those men who might be found in intimate conversation with a sharper or a thief, without suffering any diminution of respect in the minds of their neighbours.

The _Tamaulipas_ had completed her loading. She was ready for sea, and was preparing to sail very shortly.

One Tuesday evening the Durande arrived at St. Malo while it was still broad daylight. Sieur Clubin, standing upon the bridge of the vessel, and superintending the manoeuvres necessary for getting her into port, perceived upon the sandy beach near the Pet.i.t-Bey, two men, who were conversing between the rocks, in a solitary spot. He observed them with his sea-gla.s.s, and recognised one of the men. It was Captain Zuela. He seemed to recognise the other also.

This other was a person of high stature, a little grey. He wore the broad-brimmed hat and the sober clothing of the Society of Friends. He was probably a Quaker. He lowered his gaze with an air of extreme diffidence.

On arriving at the Jean Auberge, Sieur Clubin learnt that the _Tamaulipas_ was preparing to sail in about ten days.

It has since become known that he obtained information on some other points.

That night he entered the gunsmith's shop in the St. Vincent Street, and said to the master:

"Do you know what a revolver is?"

"Yes," replied the gunsmith. "It is an American weapon."

"It is a pistol with which a man can carry on a conversation."

"Exactly: an instrument which comprises in itself both the question and the answer."

"And the rejoinder too."

"Precisely, Monsieur Clubin. A rotatory clump of barrels."

"I shall want five or six b.a.l.l.s."

The gunmaker twisted the corner of his lip, and made that peculiar noise with which, when accompanied by a toss of the head, Frenchmen express admiration.

"The weapon is a good one, Monsieur Clubin."

"I want a revolver with six barrels."