"I was born at Chambéry," he said in his own idiom, "among the mountains, monsieur. Englishmen know Jules Marchand, the guide. So I am train. Better the broken neck than the skin off the body. Là bas, they are all devils when the Captain is away. Very well, I away also until he come. He shall give them the back on the rope. Very good man, the Captain, when he not have the thunderstorm. Mon Dieu, he burn like the lightnings then; but afterward it is the blue sky, and he laugh. I go to him and say, 'Pardon,' and he shall give me the handshake. For the others, not so; they take the ship out. Captain say that very bad. Oh, my dam, there shall be the skin off the back for that."
I laughed at the drollery of it, and then asked him if he had seen the cruiser. When he replied, "Certainly; she is the Vengeur, from Toulon," I remembered that he was a seaman, and likely to miss nothing the horizon could show him.
"Why should she be here?" I asked him. "Do you think they have discovered the caves? Has any one betrayed the Captain?"
He shook his head. "They hunt the bay," he said. "Why for not? If be they discover, all the worse for them. That's what I say when I see the Zero come up. Cruiser go to hell by and by. Much better if they were not my countrymen, monsieur; I have sorrow for that. But I am the servant of the Captain, and what can I do? Captain Black, he the greatest man that ever have live in the world. If my countrymen so big fool as to send the ship, they pay the price as well as any other. The Vengeur never go back to Toulon again, sure and certain. She, what you say, done and gone for."
"Then it's an accident that brought her here, Marchand?"
He shrugged his shoulders with a Frenchman's gesture.
"Probablement. But she will not remain, monsieur; she will pay the price. Ecco, you shall see."
He repeated this, using the Italian exclamation again and again; and, being now a little recovered, he turned flat upon his stomach, and gazed intently down upon the hither sea. Fascinated by his vague words, which I could not but understand, I also turned my eyes upon the ship; and so we lay, side by side, watching the approaching cruiser, and wondering, perchance, if a tenth part of what we feared for her was in the minds of those who manned her.
What a placid scene! How still the sea! How characteristic of a desolate ocean whose waves beat upon a land of solitudes! Search it to a remote horizon, and the eye could detect no ship upon the broad of the waters. Gulls wheeled above the black islands as though to scare men from their dangers. Mingling in a sensuous play of colours were blues such as Murillo would have loved, greens which were not greens until the sea played upon them, the jewels of the impregnable ramparts, the gold fleck of the burning sun. Not a sound arose but that of the screeching birds. The ship's propeller made thunder in the silence as she drew in toward the land. And she was doomed beyond hope; three hundred souls aboard her would never see the sun rise again! I trembled at the horror of the thought. It came upon me as a chill wind blowing out of the night. Death! It was there upon the sea, and a man might have heard the beating of its wings.
Upon the other side stood the palpable fact that the Vengeur knew the secrets of the caves, and had come to search them. I could not doubt it as I watched her. Viewed from that high place, every movement upon the bridge was plainly visible. I saw officers with gold epaulets spying out the shore; there were leadsmen in the forechains, a group of soldiers aft, a busying to and fro which could not be mistaken. Anon, I heard the bells ring out, and saw the ship bring to. The fearful dread which had been upon me began to pass away. Our men had fled from her, I said; it must be that. When I told Marchand as much, he laughed aloud. This was a fine spectacle to him; he had forgotten all about his countrymen, it appeared.
"Our people very wise," he said, half turning his head; "they know how to wait. Be glad you are not down there, mon ami. Death a very bad thing, but, mon Dieu, the death they will die! Wait a little while, just a little while, and then——"
I made no answer, for the drama held me spellbound. A loud cry of "Ecco!" from my companion found me gazing with hot eyes at a ripple upon the water, such a ripple as a great fish might have made when pursuing or pursued; and I followed it almost from our own inlet to the very hull of the Vengeur. There it ceased, and for an instant, during which a man might have cried aloud for pity, there was no sound upon all the sea.
Of that which followed after, my first memory is of a low murmur as of thunder at the pit of the sea. The air about me quivered, and was followed by a cool breeze which seemed drawn down from above to the vortex o! the deep. I looked at the Vengeur, and thought she was unchanged. The confusion upon her decks, the wild shouts, the leaping figures of men—all might have been the horse-play of clowns in a pantomime. The unreality of it, the belief that the cruiser had escaped the danger, impressed itself upon my mind, and could not be shaken. From this I passed to a kind of curiosity. The ship had listed to port, I saw, and so swiftly that all on her decks were tumbled pell-mell into a black heap by her bulwarks. Carried across the sea, their screams and cries hardly seemed louder than those of the gulls that circled above them. It was impossible to watch them without a certain contempt for their craven panic; and yet how unjust a censure! The truth lay hidden from our eyes. It was a truth of fire.
A loud cry from the Frenchman first called my attention to this. I looked at the Vengeur and saw a puff of black smoke drift up amidships and go floating over the still sea. Immediately a flame of fire followed upon the smoke, and sent the doomed wretches headlong to the fo'c'stle. Now, as though a judgment had fallen on the ship, the flame ran crimson from stem to stern of her. I saw men burned to cinders where they stood; others withered as leaves in a devouring furnace. The roar of the fire, the scream of voices, the confusion, the agony set me trembling as with an ague. I cried to God to have mercy upon them, and tried to shut the scene from my eyes. It was a vain hope. The very terror of it compelled me to bear witness.
How long the Vengeur burned before she sank I cannot tell you. It seemed to me that the horror endured a full hour, during which many a brave fellow leaped to the waves and was swallowed up by them. When the end came, it was quite suddenly, and in a strange way. Listed to port, as I have said, the cruiser heeled more and more in that direction, until at last she turned right over, and showed her keel plates to the sun. All her beautiful yacht-like lines were disclosed then, and even her propellers were to be seen as they raced violently at that moment of her dissolution. For a brief spell she seemed to rest thus upon the surface of the sea; then, with a roar that made the headland tremble, she went down in a whirl of foam, and left the rushing waters to the dying and the dead. Now, I knew that her boilers had burst when she sank, and I began to think of the Zero and of what might have happened to her. Had the shock of this explosion harmed the devils who wrought this mischief, or had it left them scathless?
The ship herself answered the question, rising to the surface immediately, and showing excited men leaping to her platform. I heard the hellish laughter with which they met the shrieks from the wretches who perished beneath the foaming breakers; I saw them thrust the drowning under, and mock them at the instant of death. A holocaust at the altar of their safety, it may be that even one living man cast up upon that shore would have betrayed them irrevocably. So fury fell upon them as a pestilence; they were as madmen who knew not the meaning of mercy.
The records have stated that three men and a woman escaped from the Vengeur; the men upon deck rafts, the woman, if a girl of fifteen can ever be called a woman, by swimming to the shore, and lying hid upon a spur of the rocks until a fishing-boat discovered her, and she was carried to Vigo. Of these things neither Jules nor I saw anything at all during the tragedy or afterward. There were so many poor souls struggling in the waters, so many burned by the fire or killed by the desperadoes on the Zero, that the passing of one or two might well have escaped us. The child herself—Irma de Loisel—whose daring exploit was the talk of all France, I myself have met and heard in Paris since that dread day. She tells me that she saw both Marchand and myself very clearly, and that we were standing on the very summit of the headland; but of this I have no memory, and it