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This is how I came to quarter myself on Madame Barbière and her idiot son, and how I ultimately learned from the lips of the latter the strange story of his own immediate fall from reason and the dear light of intellect. By day Camille Barbière proved to be a young man, some five and twenty years of age, of a handsome and impressive exterior.
Watkins stepped ashore, he demanded of Jonas why he had landed the expedition in those dark woods where there was not a sign of a house to be seen; and the negro hastened to explain that the road lay about a quarter of a mile straight ahead, and that the house in which Beardsley formerly lived stood on the other side of it.
"It's no easy thing to climb, and the person doesn't live that can climb it at night. We had to take the daylight to it, and didn't reach the top till after sunset. Why, I could take hours and hours telling you about that last climb, which I won't. The top was flat as a billiard table, about a quarter of an acre in size, and was almost clean of snow.
Enough of life remained, however, to support the frame for a while; and the will still exercised its power over the mere animal functions. Her son shut out the view of the body, and she motioned him aside with an impatience of manner he had never before witnessed from the same quarter.
Then, there alone in the darkness, trembling with cold and with something else, too, perchance, he meditated. He had meditated all night long; he had meditated all the day: he heard within him but one voice, which said, "Alas!" A quarter of an hour passed thus. At length he bowed his head, sighed with agony, dropped his arms, and retraced his steps. He walked slowly, and as though crushed.
Once fairly established within my new quarter we mutually exerted our utmost endeavours to gratify each other as well as ourselves, and the result of our efforts soon led, much to the satisfaction of both parties, in the temporary subjugation of both the contending forces.
"This proposition was greeted with acclamation; they led away both horse and child; some were occupied in mending the harness, then one supplied a cap, another a pair of stockings, another some shoes, and another a good jacket; in a quarter of an hour the child was warmly clad, the harness repaired, and a tall lad of eighteen, brandishing a whip, which he cracked close to the horse's ears, by way of warning, said to the little boy, who, gazing first at his new clothes, and then at the good woman, believed himself the hero of a fairy-tale.
I went into his stateroom; he was lying on his couch wrapped up in a rug, with a pillow under his head. "What was the matter with you up there just now?" he asked. "Wind flew round on the lee quarter, sir," I said. "Couldn't you see the shift coming?" "Yes, sir, I thought it wasn't very far off."
His own chief, the American Ambassador, would be informed of what had happened, but he was a wise old man, there was no fear of indiscretion in that quarter; but yes, he, Vanderlyn, must face that fact Tom Pargeter would know the truth. Vanderlyn's hidden abhorrence of the other man, of the man whose friend he had perforce compelled himself to be for so long, rose in a great flood. Tom Pargeter?
It reminded you of those open barricades used in boar hunting, and behind which the German Emperor awaits the onslaught of thoroughly terrified pigs. Like a bird's nest it clung to the side of the hill, and, across a valley, looked at a sister hill a quarter of a mile away. "On that hill," said the colonel, "on a level with us, are the Germans."
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