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Updated: May 15, 2025
He was trying to recapture them and as he brought them back he laughed. It was the first time she had seen him laugh. Then as he stowed them away he shewed a disposition towards intimacy and talkativeness. "That's what the winds are in this place," said he, "no wonder ships steer clear of it." "I'm not thinking of the wind," said she, "I'm thinking of Bompard."
Dead, he was beginning to frighten her just as he had frightened her when living. Then she found that it was just the same with Bompard. He was frightening her too. Suppose one or the other were to peep in at her, and nod at her she pictured it and then crushed the picture in her mind and got up and came out again and stood in the sun.
"It's gone, whatever it may have been," said she, "can we reach the land?" "Why, yes, mademoiselle," said Bompard, "the wind is setting towards there and we have a sail, I am going to step the mast now when I've taken stock well, we won't starve. The tube is provisioned for a full crew for a fortnight, water too, we won't starve, that's a fact. La Touche, get a move on and help me with the sail."
Towards noon and with the coast now closer and well-defined, La Touche sighted something ahead. It was a rock, high and pointed like a black spire protruding from the sea and standing there like an outpost of the land. "Had we better give it a wide berth?" asked La Touche. "Maybe there's more near it." "The sea is running smooth enough by it," said Bompard.
La Touche was a fair-haired man, younger than Bompard, a melancholy looking individual who always seemed gazing at the worst of things. He spoke now as the girl drew his attention to something far away in the east, something sketched vaguely in the sky as though a picture lay there beyond the haze. "Ay, that's Kerguelen," said La Touche.
La Touche had taken the tinder box with him, so a fire was out of the question and she contented herself by laying out the beef that had served for dinner, and some biscuits. Then she saw that she had only laid two plates. Working half-unconsciously she had ruled Bompard out. She looked at the things lying there on the sand, then she turned away from them.
They had drawn nearer shore so that the boom of the swell in the caves and on the rocks came to them with the crying of the shore birds; passing a headland like a vast lizard they opened a beach curved like the new moon and seven miles from horn to horn. "There's our landing-place," cried Bompard, "big enough to pick and choose from." "Lord!" shouted La Touche. "Look over there moving rocks!"
She felt instinctively that he was the leader of Bompard and that Bompard alone would have been a much better individual, in many respects. "There is no use in saying 'Mon Dieu," said she, "the thing has to be done. The gulls and the rabbits will ruin everything if we leave things about. Come, Bompard."
Everything else is faded, weather-worn, and old, everything filled with sensuous beauty sky, earth, lagoon, garden wall, murmuring ripples the same wonderful Venice that thrills its lovers the world over. And the old painters are still here Walter Brown, Bunce, Bompard, Faulkner, and the rest successors of Ziem and Rico men who have loved her all their lives.
"It is now seven," rejoined the other; "we'll be gone long before nine." "Well," said Rondeau surlily, "I go out now for my supper. I'll return in half an hour, but at half-past eight you must clear out." Then he added with a sneer: "Citizens Legros and Desgas usually come back with deputy Heriot of nights, and citizens Jeanniot and Bompard come in from next door for a game of cards.
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