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"The lady sent none." "Why?" Under my questions Jacques turned red and pale, then he blundered out: "The Chevalier de la Mora said he would bring the answer to you himself at the shore." He kept his eyes fast riveted upon another hole he was digging in the sand. "The Chevalier?" I knew what that meant. Great God! and this was the end of it all. "Tell me, you bungling fool, what knows he of this?"
Duke William's ship, which was named the Mora, had been presented to him by his wife Mathilda, and most of the vessels had been built and manned by the Norman barons and prelates, the Bishop of Bayeux preparing no less than a hundred ships. The Conquest of England must have almost been regarded as a holy crusade!
Upon the long march to Biloxi, de la Mora was the life of the command, and drew to our camp fire every straggler who could make a fair excuse to come. He knew good songs, and he sang them well; he knew good cheer, and he kept us all in radiant spirits. All, save myself. I was bitterly dejected. "Cheer up, lad," he'd say, "What ails you?
Day after day, he simply indulged, in the company of his female cousins and the waiting-maids, in either reading his books, or writing characters, or in thrumming the lute, playing chess, drawing pictures and scanning verses, even in drawing patterns of argus pheasants, in embroidering phoenixes, contesting with them in searching for strange plants, and gathering flowers, in humming poetry with gentle tone, singing ballads with soft voice, dissecting characters, and in playing at mora, so that, being free to go everywhere and anywhere, he was of course completely happy.
Little he seems to reck of the damp of the soil or the heat of the sun, nor can a noisy game of mora played by a couple of his companions beside him disturb his deep slumber. Mora has ever been the classic game of the South, and indeed, there is abundant evidence to show that it was played by the ancestors of these dwellers in Magna Graecia hundreds of years before Pompeii was overthrown.
On the summit grew a fig-tree, fully as large as a common English apple-tree; and from its branches again hung pendant a number of vines, both fig-tree and vines bearing a quantity of fruit; but the parent mora, from the undue exhaustion of its sap, was already giving signs of decay, and in a short time both fig-tree and vine, I saw, would inevitably follow its fate.
There was an explosion of cries, of "Ah's!" and "Oh's!" some saying, "I suspected it!" others, "It is impossible!" "Pardon me," added Francis, formerly a trumpeter in the Ninth Lancers the regiment of Mora and of Monpavon "pardon me.
They consisted of two moras of Lacedæmonians: now Ephorus says that a mora consists of 500 men, but Kallisthenes says 700, and some other authorities, and amongst them Polybius, put it at 900.
It was she, it was she to the life, her regular profile, her kindly, laughing mouth, and the long curl caressing the slender neck. Ah! all the Ducs de Mora on earth might come now. Felicia no longer existed for him.
On the end of the bench was the monosyllabic Scot, who ceased the exquisite painting of mora buttresses and jungle shadows only for the equal fascination of searching bats for parasites.
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