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Updated: June 16, 2025
Ferrol was in a deep sleep when Christine and her brother entered the chamber. Her face turned still more pale when she saw him, flushed, and became pale again. There were leaden hollows round his eyes, and his hair was matted with perspiration. Yet he was handsome and helpless. Her eyes filled with tears.
"I saw you coming," Ferrol said, as Christine stopped the buggy. "You have been to see Magon and Sophie?" she asked. "Yes, for a minute," he answered. "Where are you going?" "Just for a drive," she replied. "Come, won't you?" He got in, and she drove on. "Where were you going?" she asked. "Why, to the old mill," was his reply. "I wanted a little walk, then a rest."
With an oath, Lavilette went out, banging the door after him. Ferrol shrugged his shoulder with a stoic ennui, and put away the pistols in the trunk. He was thinking how reckless he had been to take them out; and yet he was amused, too, at the risk he had run. A strange indifference possessed him this morning indifference to everything. He was suffering reaction from the previous day's excitement.
Handing over the key, he grasped Ferrol's hand with an effusive confidence, and hurried out. Nic Lavilette was now an important person in his own sight and in the sight of others in Bonaventure. In him the pomp of his family took an individual form. Earlier than the appointed time, Ferrol turned the key and stepped inside the big despoiled hallway of the old farmhouse.
There were three principal French detachments to be united, in Brest twenty ships, in Toulon ten, in Rochefort five. To these the outbreak of the war between Great Britain and Spain added the forces of the latter kingdom, in Ferrol and Cadiz, aggregating fifteen serviceable ships; but this was not until March, 1805.
In the midst of this furore, the bulletins announced that the Spanish ironclads "Zaragoza" and "Numancia" had sailed from Havana, with no destination announced; that their consorts, the "Arapiles" and "Vittoria," together with three transports, "San Quentin," "Patino," and "Ferrol," the latter well laden with coal and provisions, were preparing to follow; also, that the huge "El Cid" had been fitted for sea, and was about to sail from Vigo, Spain.
Twenty men had suddenly disappeared from Bonaventure on the day that Ferrol visited Sophie Farcinelle, and it was only the next morning that the cause of their disappearance was generally known. There had been many rumours abroad that a detachment of men from the parish were to join Papineau.
She said no more, for he had no desire to listen to an account of his misdeeds, which were not a few, and Christine had a galling tongue. When the door was shut she went to the bed, sat down on a chair beside it, and looked at Ferrol earnestly and sadly. "My dear! my dear, dear, dear!" she said in a whisper, "you look so handsome and so kind as you lie there like no man I ever saw in my life.
"Well, maybe some one did use this pistol last night. It wouldn't be hard to open my trunk. Let's see; whom shall we suspect?" Lavilette was entirely reassured, if indeed he needed reassurance. Ferrol coughed still more, and was obliged to sit down on the side of the bed and rest himself against the foot-board.
A slight skirmish took place on the first advance of the troops, and a sharper one next morning; but the enemy were effectually driven back, and the heights which command the harbour of Ferrol gained, with the loss in all of sixteen men killed, and five officers and sixty-three men wounded. Six sail of the line, two of them large first-rates, were in the harbour.
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