D. K. Broster
Almond, Wild Almond
Historical Romance Novel
e-artnow, 2021
Contact: [email protected]
EAN: 4064066387402
Table of Contents
Almond, wild almond,
Give counsel to me,
And hush thy fierce lover
The wind in the tree!
Along the night pasture
I’ve come through the dew
To tell thee, wild almond,
The old songs are true!
I too have a lover. . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
O had he entreated
I could have said nay,
But he, he says nothing,
And then goes away!
Ah, loves he for ever?
And loves me alone?
These things that men say not
How can they be known?
He may, but he may not—
And I would be free:—
Now play not, now sway not,
Thou little black tree,
Almond, wild almond,
Give counsel to me!
Herbert Trench.
CHAPTER I
Seven o’clock of the dark, furious March evening, seven o’clock on the second day of the second storm. “Unless,” thought the young French officer standing with one hand upon the high, yellowing mantelpiece, “unless we should reckon this week’s tornado as but a prolongation of last week’s. God, what weather!”
A fiercer blast than before pounded at the windows of the Intendance de la Marine at Dunkirk, and a vicious puff of black smoke came volleying out between the impassive caryatids of the fireplace. “Forty thousand devils!” exclaimed Lieutenant the Vicomte Marie-Cyprien d’Ornières de Lancize, as he sprang back, amid some derisive laughter from the other end of the room, and, whipping forth his pocket-handkerchief, clapped it for a second or so to his nose. Out of range of the odious discharge from the chimney, he next made a movement as if to flick his boots, those long cavalry boots which came halfway up his thighs, but cut the action short, remembering that the boots in question, usually so immaculate, were already spattered with mud, and sticky with sea-water nearly to their tops. Sea-water had stained and discoloured the wide full skirts of his brilliant uniform coat as well. Dandy though he was, officer in Dauphin-Dragons, and acting aide-de-camp to the Comte de Saxe, M. de Lancize’s attire, like that of many another soldier and sailor in Dunkirk to-day, bore speaking traces of the two closely succeeding tempests, the second of which was raging there now.
They were peculiarly disastrous tempests—save from the point of view of Hanoverian England—because they had wrecked and driven on shore about one quarter of the large flotilla of transports assembled at Dunkirk in this year of 1744 for the purpose of landing ten thousand Frenchmen upon English soil, in support of the claims of the House of Stuart—in support also of King Louis XV’s desire to pay out George II for the defeat inflicted last June on old Maréchal de Noailles at Dettingen. It had seemed to His Most Christian Majesty and his advisers that even if they did not succeed in bringing about an actual revolution in England, they might at least stir up civil war, and in either case the English and Hanoverian troops would have to be withdrawn from the