Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/540

498 a heap of seaweed and watched the un- loading of sacks of blé noir from a sailing-boat.

He polished a rusty sword while he watched, and as he rubbed he sang—a Breton song, but in the French tongue, which he was learning from a troubadour who had come, a month since, out of the Pays de Vannes to our island stronghold.

sang old Kabik,

I dropped a pebble at his feet, and as he looked up, waved a beckoning hand to him. Then, when I saw that he understood and was entering the castle to come to me, I moved across the ramparts and looked once more toward the mainland where the towering cliffs of the Pointe du Paz and the Pointe du Van rose precipitous over the breakers—eastward thence to the gaping reach of the great bay of Douarnénez, to the purple haze which at the bay's extremity cloaked the mountain Menezhom and—Landévennec!

"How long, my lady? How long?" said I, leaning upon the parapet of my island tower; and my eyes, after their wont, stared out far across the heaving sea, through the far purple mist, to Landévennec and what Landévennec sheltered.

Such a white slip of a girl to set a strong man mooning and dreaming through his days, tossing awake through his nights like any sick poet, any starved, whining ballad-singer—such a white slip of a girl with her yellow plaited hair and her red mouth and her burning eyes! Now I was ever a man for men—no hand-kisser, no babbler of soft verses, no cushion-lounger, no beggar for favors when my lord's away. I have ever loved man's work—adventure by land or sea, clean fighting (against odds, for choice), setting my strength and skill against the might of our fierce Northern seas. Yet—that white girl with her slim shape and her steady gray eyes burning to black—eyes unafraid in death's face! What has one maid which another maid lacks, that she should, all in a moment, set a man's hands a-shaking and his heart to unaccustomed throbs?

"How long, my lady? How long?" said I, and while my body leaned over the parapet of my island tower my eyes burned through the far purple haze to- ward Landévennec and what Landévennec sheltered.

I was thinking of how I had seen her for the first time a year gone by. "First," say I? Alas! the only time! I walked, I mind, upon the cliffs of the Pointe du Paz. It was a fair day, but the wind had shifted to southwest and a storm was coming. Already the surf boomed on the west cliff. I mind that I had reached a point just above that passage in the rocks which is called the Trou de l'Enfer—where the tide sucks and shrieks—when I heard from below at the water's edge a woman's voice calling for help. Even at that moment, before I had seen her, I wondered that the voice should be so calm—that there should be in it no frenzy of terror; for the woman must know, I said to myself, that aid could be near only by a miracle. It is seldom that any one walks upon the Pointe du Paz.

I shouted an answer to the voice below me. I made my way down the rocks of the cliff—it is a matter of two hundred feet—and at last I reached the sea's edge. It was but a maid who clung there, looking unafraid into death—a young maid. She had slipped among the rocks, and found herself at the base of a little precipice which offered no hand or foot hold—cut off by the rising tide.

There was no difficulty in saving her. I mourned that afterward. If only I might have risked my life—come near to losing it—won her pity by shedding my blood for her!

It was all too easy. I had but to clasp my arms about her knees and raise her so till she could find a safe hold on rocks above; then, with my greater strength, to buffet the waves, breast-high, to a point from which I could climb; and so, half carrying, half leading the girl, reach the. cliff's crest and the heathered moor. But, safe at last, we