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That was what the fog meant; and it is all about them, in a hurricane now, stinging cold, thick to the touch, washing out every outline but sea sea! Never mind! They are nine days out. It is the twelfth of June. They are down to 46 degrees and no Gamaland! The blockheads have stopped spreading their maps in the captain's cabin. One can see a smile wreathing in the whiskers of the Dane.
Heavy sulphurous clouds hung low over the city, drifting very slowly and gloomily out across the river. Mount Royal crouched, black and sullen, in the background, its crest occluded by the darkness, appearing itself a cloud materialised, resting on earth. The harbour was filled with volumes of smoke, purple and black, wreathing and sidling eastwards, from steamers and chimneys.
Madelon went up-stairs, and brushed and braided her black hair before her glass; but the face therein did not look like her own to her, and she felt all the time as if she were braiding and wreathing the hair around another's head.
Without response, a grim smile wreathing his thin, hard lips, Stryker thrust one hand into his pocket, and withdrawing a coin, tossed it to the waiting waterman. Whereupon Kirkwood backed warily to the rail, abandoned the capstan-bar and dropped over the side. Nodding to the boatman, "The Steen landing quickly," he said in French.
From the perch of her lofty reconnaissance she had espied the painter working at his canvas, but her notion of visiting him she knew had been born not this morning, but last night when she had sat alone on the terrace and watched the pale moon wreathing fitfully among the clouds which hovered uncertainly off-shore.
He knew he had gone up The Mountain, at any rate; he knew he had come down The Mountain with the girl walking just before him; there was no forgetting her figure, as she walked on in silence, her braided locks falling a little, for want of the lost hairpin, perhaps, and looking like a wreathing coil of Shame on such fancies! to wrong that supreme crowning gift of abounding Nature, a rush of shining black hair, which, shaken loose, would cloud her all round, like Godiva, from brow to instep!
No one was in sight; but, about a quarter of a mile down the road, on the other side, was a large plantation-house, with its neat negro quarters clustering around it, and looking altogether like a little village. He knew that some of the cabins were inhabited, for he saw the smoke wreathing out of the chimneys; could he not go to one of them, and obtain food?
And her impatience grew and found vent in irritable movements and sighs of vexation. Suddenly her ears caught the sound of distant cries coming from the settlement. She turned in the direction. A lurid gleam was in the sky. Then, as she watched, the glare grew brighter, and sparks shot up in a great wreathing cloud of smoke. The direction was unmistakable.
The appealing glances of her beautiful wet eyes melt the stoniest male hearts, the soft tendril-like wreathing of her arms about the pillar of salt upon the Plain would have had power to change it back into a breathing human being once more, if Lot had looked back, instead of his helpmeet. Her sterner sisters may feel as keenly, love as tenderly, sorrow even more bitterly than she.
A quavering voice, near at hand, recalled him to himself, and turning, he beheld the marquis approaching with mincing manner, the paint and pigments cracked by the artificial smiles wreathing his wrinkled face. In that vast assemblage, amid all the energy, youth and surfeit of vitality, he seemed like a dried and crackling leaf, tossed helplessly, which any foot might crush to dust.
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