0,49 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Hervey Allen's "Anthony Adverse" is a sweeping historical novel set against the backdrop of the late 18th century, intricately weaving together themes of adventure, romance, and the quest for identity. The narrative follows the life of Anthony, an orphaned boy who navigates a world filled with political upheaval, personal betrayals, and the search for love. Allen's rich, lyrical prose and detailed characterizations evoke a vivid tapestry of the period, drawing readers into the tumultuous environments of Europe and the Caribbean. As a work steeped in literary realism, it captures not only the grand historical moments but also the intimate struggles of its protagonist, making it feel both expansive and personal. Hervey Allen, an accomplished writer and poet, was deeply influenced by his own rich historical knowledge and a passion for storytelling. His experiences and travels—particularly his keen interest in the complexities of human relationships and the nuances of societal change—were significant factors in his creation of "Anthony Adverse." His ability to fuse historical events with compelling narratives ultimately stems from a profound understanding of the human condition and the historical forces that shape individual lives. I highly recommend "Anthony Adverse" to readers who appreciate intricate narratives that blend historical accuracy with personal drama. This novel not only entertains but also challenges readers to reflect on the legacies of the past and their implications for personal and collective identities. Allen's masterful storytelling will captivate anyone seeking an immersive literary experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Ähnliche
Anthony Adverse
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the heart of Anthony Adverse lies the struggle of a solitary life swept into the wide circuits of commerce and empire, where the hunger to make one’s fortune collides with the cost of keeping one’s conscience, and where love, chance, and ambition contend to decide whether character can steer a course through history’s tempests; circling ports, plantations, roads, and salons, the narrative tests the boundaries between fate and choice, asking what remains of integrity when survival demands bargaining with power, and how far a person may travel before identity turns into a mask fashioned by opportunity and loss.
Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse is a sprawling historical novel first published in 1933, set largely in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as revolutions, wars, and expanding trade redraw the Atlantic world. Rooted in the picaresque and the bildungsroman, it moves from European mercantile milieus to far-flung colonial arenas, tracing the human costs and temptations of a globalizing economy. Appearing during the Great Depression, the book quickly found a wide readership, its breadth and momentum offering immersion in a world both distant and uncomfortably familiar. Its scale, period detail, and moral preoccupations establish a durable place within twentieth-century American historical fiction.
The premise is simple in outline and capacious in consequence: an orphan of obscure parentage is placed in a prosperous trading household, schooled in the arithmetic and etiquette of commerce, and propelled into adulthood by decisions that send him across seas and borders. The narrative follows his apprenticeship to the world’s bargains—financial, political, and intimate—without fastening prematurely on outcomes. Allen writes with panoramic curiosity and a sensibility that alternates between romantic ardor and sober accounting, pairing sumptuous description with brisk incident. The reading experience is immersive and episodic, a long voyage composed of vividly staged ports of call and moral crosswinds.
At its center are questions of agency and inheritance: how a life shaped by secrecy, patronage, and accident can become an instrument of purpose. The book interrogates the moral arithmetic of profit, especially within systems that convert people and places into commodities, and it regards the violence of imperial expansion as a force that warps private loyalties. Faith, desire, and ambition intersect as competing claims on conduct, while the pull of memory contests the seductions of reinvention. Without prescribing easy verdicts, the novel stages ethical dilemmas in concrete settings—offices, ships, manor houses—inviting readers to weigh the price of advancement against obligations to others.
For contemporary readers, Anthony Adverse resonates as a study of globalization before the word existed, dramatizing how distant markets and political decisions reach into the intimacies of work, family, and love. It foregrounds the entanglement of personal success with extractive economies, including slavery, without reducing individuals to symbols; the friction between conscience and complicity remains urgently recognizable. The novel’s attention to migration, language, and social mobility speaks to a world negotiating borders and debts both literal and moral. Its insistence that luck, structure, and willpower are inseparable reminds us how narratives of self-making often obscure the scaffolds that make them possible.
Formally, the book favors an episodic architecture: self-contained adventures accumulate into a composite portrait, with pauses for reflection interleaved among reversals and chases. Allen’s prose is expansive, attentive to landscape, costume, and the unglamorous mechanics of trade, yet he keeps the plot in motion with sharp turns and memorable set pieces. Readers should expect a long journey whose rhythms shift between intimacy and spectacle, and a tone that balances sentiment with irony. The effect is that of a nineteenth-century canvas composed by a twentieth-century hand, accessible yet grand in scope, demanding patience and rewarding it with breadth, texture, and moral argument.
Approached as both adventure and inquiry, Anthony Adverse offers the pleasures of movement and discovery while pressing toward the harder reckoning of what fortunes cost. It invites readers to inhabit a past that is not merely picturesque but ethically fraught, insisting that the energies that build empires and careers also leave marks on bodies and minds. In an era still wrestling with inequality and displacement, the novel’s capacious gaze feels bracing rather than nostalgic. To read it now is to test the resilience of empathy amid ambition, and to measure whether a life’s compass can hold steady as the world tilts.
Synopsis
Hervey Allen’s 1933 historical novel opens in late eighteenth‑century Europe, with a birth shadowed by scandal and secrecy. The infant, delivered into a convent’s care and given the prophetic surname Adverse, is later placed under the protection of a worldly Italian merchant who prizes discipline, calculation, and nerve. In a countinghouse by the sea, the boy Anthony learns ledgers before he learns love, absorbing the mercantile codes that govern ships and fortunes. His guardian’s tutelage promises worldly success yet leaves Anthony haunted by unanswered questions about origin, honor, and destiny, setting the terms of a life that will be measured against risk and conscience.
Adolescence brings a formal apprenticeship and the first attachments that tug against arithmetic and duty. Anthony proves quick with numbers and quicker with decisive action, rising from clerk to trusted agent while harboring a fervent, tender love that promises a private harbor. Circumstance, however, imposes its tariffs. Business responsibilities expand, alliances among elders harden, and gossip threatens reputations. When a voyage is ordered to secure far‑flung interests and settle accounts, Anthony accepts, believing diligence will hasten his return. That departure, conceived as a brief absence, becomes the hinge of his youth, opening a door to worlds whose scales and customs confound his schooling.
The itinerary first sweeps him down the Atlantic routes to the West African coast, where warehouses and roadsteads reveal a commerce bound to human captivity. As an emissary charged with securing cargoes and credits, Anthony negotiates with factors and chiefs, witnesses the mechanics of barter, and encounters the brutal efficiencies of the slave trade. The revelations are not only external. He measures his livelihood against his unease, finding that prudence, once a virtue, can shade into complicity. Hardship, fever, and the peril of the sea force improvisation and courage, but the deeper trial lies in deciding what success can mean when profit exacts a human price.
From Africa, the current carries him into the Caribbean and the Americas, where colonial ports thrum with sugar, rum, and war rumors. There he manages estates and trading houses, builds a reputation for bold, sometimes ruthless efficiency, and learns how quickly a balance sheet can invert under hurricane, rebellion, or deceit. Friendships prove transactional, enemies industrious, and the law elastic. Yet amid exploitation’s machinery, he seeks leverage to do lesser harm, to honor promises made before departure, and to reserve a portion of himself from the market. Each compromise tightens and loosens different bonds, entangling his future with strangers’ fates.
Years later the tides return him to Europe, where empires are realigned and a new military genius redraws maps. In capitals and camps he moves among financiers, officers, impresarios, and priests, discovering that influence travels as swiftly in salons as it does in convoys. The woman he once loved has become renowned in the arts, a public figure whose private loyalties are guarded by necessity. Their paths cross uncertainly, threaded through obligations each cannot dismiss. Anthony’s ambition, sharpened by experience, competes with a hunger for belonging, and the novel weighs fame, patronage, and romantic hope against the cost of survival in turbulent times.
Setbacks, windfalls, and separations accumulate, and Anthony’s restlessness tilts toward self‑scrutiny. Counsel from men of faith and from hard‑won friends challenges the arithmetic by which he has justified choices, proposing a different ledger of debt and repair. The journey widens to include rural retreats and new settlements across the ocean, where anonymity can be a grace or a temptation. He weighs the claims of family, charity, and work that harms no one, pursuing a more durable measure of worth than daring or profit. What he owes, and to whom, becomes the question that steadies his impulses and reframes his adventures.
Without disclosing its final turns, the novel stands as a panoramic picaresque that ranges across continents and decades to test the persistent tug between fortune and character. Anthony Adverse maps the circuitry linking private desire to imperial commerce, revealing how love, money, and power organize lives far beyond any one person’s intent. Its scenes of countinghouses, ports, theaters, and campaigns place ethical inquiry inside vivid adventure, asking what it means to live decently when prosperity rests on other people’s wounds. First published in 1933, it endures for its sweep, momentum, and moral restlessness, inviting renewed reflection on choice amid history’s tempests.
Historical Context
Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse is set within the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Atlantic world tied Europe, Africa, and the Americas through commerce and empire. The narrative moves among Italian and French settings to West African coasts and Caribbean plantations, as well as American ports. Institutions central to the era—aristocratic households, Catholic convents, merchant houses, and imperial administrations—frame the characters’ fortunes. Those decades witnessed revolutionary upheavals, wars, and expanding global trade that created opportunity and peril. The novel’s panoramas depend on this interconnected geography, using it to expose how personal advancement was inseparable from political power and transoceanic markets.
In the decades before and after 1800, the Italian peninsula comprised small states—among them the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Kingdom of Sardinia (including Genoa), and the Papal States—where local law, noble privilege, and church authority were decisive. Catholic convents and foundling homes managed guardianship, dowries, and the seclusion of women, while aristocratic marriages cemented property and lineage. Free ports like Livorno facilitated international trade, drawing merchants from Britain, France, and the Levant. Such structures supplied the social constraints and advantages that shape characters’ origins and alliances, and they highlight how patronage, inheritance, and ecclesiastical discipline directed private lives in a mercantile age.
The French Revolution of 1789 dismantled feudal privileges, secularized church property, and unleashed political violence that sent nobles and clergy into exile. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) and later dechristianization campaigns challenged ecclesiastical authority, while new civil codes recast marriage, inheritance, and citizenship. When revolutionary and then Napoleonic armies crossed into Italy and beyond, they exported administrative reforms and conscription, reordering borders and loyalties. These convulsions altered the legal status of persons and property across Europe. The novel’s characters negotiate precisely such shifting regimes, where titles, contracts, and even names could be made precarious by revolutionary law and war.
Between 1792 and 1815, continuous European warfare reshaped oceans as battlefields. Britain’s naval supremacy and blockade policy met Napoleon’s Continental System, constricting trade and encouraging smuggling and neutral flags. Letters of marque, privateering, and admiralty prize courts affected every voyage from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. Merchants relied on bills of exchange, marine insurance underwritten in London, and complex partnerships to survive seizures and currency shocks. The book’s itinerary depends on such realities: routes are chosen, fortunes risked, and identities masked within legal gray zones created by wartime commerce, illustrating how global conflict translated into intimate calculations aboard ships and in countinghouses.
Late eighteenth-century prosperity across Atlantic empires depended heavily on the transatlantic slave trade and plantation labor. Enslaved Africans were transported primarily from West and West-Central Africa to Caribbean and American ports to produce sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cotton. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) destroyed France’s leading sugar colony and reshaped markets; Cuba’s sugar complex expanded thereafter. Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the United States in 1808, and international agreements after 1815 empowered naval suppression, though Spanish trafficking persisted illicitly into the 1820s. The novel’s crossings place characters near these circuits, underscoring how profit, violence, and law converged in Atlantic capitalism.
In the Americas, imperial boundaries and commercial regimes shifted rapidly. The Bourbon Reforms restructured Spain’s colonial trade before independence movements erupted on the mainland after 1808. The secret Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800) returned Louisiana to France; the United States purchased it in 1803, opening Gulf routes to American merchants and slaveholding planters. Caribbean ports under British, Spanish, and Danish flags competed as entrepôts. North American Atlantic cities and river gateways supplied credit, ships, and markets to West Indian and African ventures. Episodes set in the Americas unfold against this mosaic of jurisdictions, where changing sovereignty altered tariffs, legality, and opportunity.
Seafaring and commerce depended on disciplined labor and cosmopolitan hubs. Crews signed articles dictating pay and discipline; mortality from shipwreck, violence, and tropical disease remained high along West African and Caribbean coasts. Port cities hosted diasporic communities—Italian and Jewish merchants, African sailors, and refugees of revolution—who exchanged news, capital, and languages. Consular and admiralty courts adjudicated disputes for foreigners far from home, while notarial archives recorded credit and apprenticeship. The book’s movements through ships, countinghouses, and plantations mirror these working realities, showing how mobility promised advancement yet exposed individuals to coercion, legal vulnerability, and the inequalities structuring Atlantic labor.
Published in 1933, during the Great Depression, Anthony Adverse joined a wave of expansive historical novels that offered readers both escape and moral inventory. Hervey Allen, an American writer and veteran of the First World War, drew on extensive historical research to stage a picaresque across revolutionary Europe and the Atlantic economy. By juxtaposing aristocratic etiquette, church discipline, merchant finance, warfare, and slavery, the book reflects its depicted era’s interdependence of power and profit. It also critiques that world’s foundations—exposing the human costs of empire, capital, and faith—while inviting comparisons with the economic precarity and disillusionment of the interwar United States.
Anthony Adverse
VOLUME ONE
THE ROOTS OF THE TREE
BOOK I--IN WHICH THE SEED FALLS IN THE ENCHANTED FOREST
I. The Coach
II. The Little Madonna
III. At the "Golden Sheaf"
IV. The Enchanted Forest
V. A Pastoral Interlude
VI. The Muse of Tragedy
VII. The Fly Walks In
VIII. A Hole in the Wall
BOOK II--IN WHICH THE ROOTS OF THE TREE ARE EXPOSED
IX. The Convent of Jesus the Child
X. The Chick Emerges
XI. Between Two Worlds
XII. Casa da Bonnyfeather
XIII. The Evidence of Things Unseen
XIV. Reality Makes a Bid
XV. The Shadows of Faith
XVI. Pagan Mornings
XVII. Philosophical Afternoons
XVIII. Bodies in the Dark
XIX. The Numbers of the Virgin
BOOK III--IN WHICH THE ROOTS OF THE TREE ARE TORN LOOSE
XX. Apples and Ashes
XXI. Adventures of a Shepherdess
XXII. Icons and Iconoclasts
XXIII. Farewells and Epitaphs
VOLUME TWO
THE OTHER BRONZE BOY
BOOK IV--IN WHICH SEVERAL IMAGES TRAVEL TOGETHER
XXIV. The Table of the Sun
XXV. The Villa Brignole
XXVI. The Street of the Image Makers
XXVII. The Pillars of Hercules
XXVIII. The Seed of a Miracle
BOOK V--IN WHICH THE NECESSARY ALLOY IS ADDED
XXIX. The House of Silenus
XXX. The Miracle in the Chapel of St. Paul, Regla
XXXI. A Decent Mammalian Philosophy
XXXII. Honour Among Thieves
XXXIII. A Mantilla Intrudes
XXXIV. Through a Copy of Velasquez
XXXV. The Temporary Sequestration of the Ariostatica
BOOK VI--IN WHICH THE BRONZE GOES INTO THE FIRE
XXXVI. A Gradual Approach to Africa
XXXVII. The Crew Go Ashore
XXXVIII. A Whiff of Grapeshot
XXXIX. Viewed from Gallegos
XL. The Master of Gallegos
XLI. A Glimpse into the Furnace
XLII. The Vision of Light
XLIII. The Image Begins to Melt
XLIV. The Hard Metal Runs
XLV. The Bronze Is Sublimed
XLVI. The Unicorn Charges Home
VOLUME THREE
THE LONELY TWIN
BOOK VII--IN WHICH A WORLDLY BROTHER IS ACQUIRED
XLVII. Reverberations
XLVIII. Old Friends Grown Older
XLIX. What Banking Is About
L. Don Luis Reflects by Candlelight
LI. The Coach and the Berlin
LII. Over the Crest
LIII. The Force of Gravity
LIV. The Plains of France
LV. The Little Man at Great Headquarters
BOOK VIII--IN WHICH PROSPERITY ENFORCES LONELINESS
LVI. A Metallic Standard Is Resumed
LVII. Your Humble Obedient Servant
LVIII. Gloria Mundi
LIX. The Swan-song of Romance
LX. Panem et Circenses
LXI. Shoes and Stockings
LXII. The Prince of the Peace Beyond the Pyrenees
BOOK IX--IN WHICH THE TREE IS CUT DOWN
LXIII. By the River of Babylon
LXIV. The Snake Changes Its Skin
LXV. The People of the Bear
LXVI. The Pilgrimage of Grace
LXVII. The Prison of St. Lazarus
LXVIII. The Stone in the Heart of the Tree
VOLUME ONE
THE ROOTS OF THE TREE
BOOK ONE
In Which the Seed Falls in the Enchanted Forest
CHAPTER ONE
THE COACH
Between the villages of Aubière and Romagnat in the ancient Province of Auvergne there is an old road that comes suddenly over the top of a high hill. To stand south of this ridge looking up at the highway flowing over the skyline is to receive one of those irrefutable impressions from landscape which requires more than a philosopher to explain. In this case it is undoubtedly, for some reason, one of exalted expectation.
From the deep notch in the hillcrest where the road first appears, to the bottom of the valley below it, the fields seem to sweep down hastily for the express purpose of widening out and waiting by the way. From the low hills for a considerable distance about, the stone farm buildings all happen to face toward it, and although most of them have stood thus for centuries their expressions of curiosity remain unaltered.
Somewhat to the east the hill of Gergovia[1] thrusts its head into the sky, and continually stares toward the notch as if speculating whether Celtic pedlars, Roman legionaries, Franks, crusaders, or cavaliers will raise the dust there.
In fact in whatever direction a man may look in this particular vicinity his eyes are led inevitably by the seductive tracery of the skyline to the most interesting point in all that countryside, the place where the road surmounts the hill. Almost anything might appear there suddenly against the empty sky, fix itself upon the memory, and then move on to an unknown destination.
Perhaps the high hill of Gergovia where heroic events have taken place in the remote past now misses a certain epic grandeur in the rhythms of mankind. For ages past tribes have ceased to migrate and armies to march over the highway it looks down upon. Cavalcades, or companies of pilgrims have rarely been seen upon it for some centuries now. Individual wayfaring has long been the rule. Even by the last quarter of the eighteenth century it had long been apparent what the best way of travelling the roads of this world is when one has a definite, personal object in view. Such, indeed, was then the state of society that the approach of a single individual, if he happened to belong to a certain class, might cause as much consternation to a whole countryside as the advance of a hostile army.
It was this condition of affairs, no doubt, that accounted for the alarm upon the faces of several peasants as they stood waiting uneasily in the late afternoon sunshine one spring day in the year 1775. They were gazing apprehensively at the deep notch in the hill just above them where the road, which they had been mending, surmounted the ridge. Indeed, a grinding sound of wheels from the farther side of the crest had already reached the ears of the keenest some moments before.
Presently there was the loud crack of a whip, the shouts of a postilion, and the heads of two horses made their appearance prick-eared against the sky. The off-leader, for there were evidently more horses behind, was ridden by a squat-bodied little man with abnormally short legs. A broad-brimmed felt hat with the flap turned up in front served, even at considerable distance, to accentuate under its dingy green cockade an unusual breadth of countenance. The ridge at the apex is very steep. The first team had already begun to descend before immediately behind it appeared the second straining hard against the breast straps. Then the coach, a "V"-shaped body with the powdered heads of two footmen in cocked hats peering over its slightly curved roof, outlined itself sharply in the bright notch of the road and seemed for an instant to pause there.
As soon as it hove in full sight a babble of relieved exclamation arose from the group of watching peasants. It was not the coach of M. de Besance.
As to whose coach it might be, there was small time for speculation. The problem rapidly began to solve itself. The coach was heavy and the hill was steep. Suddenly, at a cry from the little postilion, who began to use his whip like a demon, the horses stretched themselves out. An immense cloud of dust arose and foamed about the wheels.
The black body of the coach was now seen coming down the road like a log over a waterfall. Oaths, cries, shouts from the white-faced footmen, the squall and moan of brakes, and a frantic drumming of hoofs accompanied its descent. Four horses and the carriage flashed as one object through the spray of a little stream at the foot of the hill. There was a nautical pitch as the vehicle mounted violently upon a brief length of causeway that led to the ford. But so great was the momentum which it had accumulated and the terror of the horses that the postilion was unable to check them even with the attempted assistance of the peasants.
A large hole full of water on one side of the little causeway now became horribly apparent to him. With a quick jerk on the bridle and a firm hand the clever little driver dragged his horses around it. The front wheels missed it by a fraction. But there had not been time to turn the trick entirely. For an instant the left hind wheel hung spinning. Then to the accompaniment of a shrill feminine scream from the interior of the coach it sank with a sickening jar and gravelly crunch into the very centre of the pit. Nevertheless, the rear of the carriage finally rose to the level of the causeway as the horses once more struggled forward. A high water mark showed itself upon the yellow stockings of the petrified footmen. The coach lurched again violently, rocked, and stopped.
Scarcely had the coach body ceased to oscillate in its slings when from the window projected a claret-coloured face surmounted by a travel-stained wig much awry. A hand like a lion's paw flourished a gold-headed cane furiously, and from the mouth of its entirely masculine owner, which vent can only be described as grim, proceeded in a series of staccato barks and lion-like roars a masterpiece of Spanish profanity. It began with God the Father and ranged through the remainder of the Trinity. It touched upon the apostles, not omitting Judas; skipped sulphurously through a score or two of saints, and ended with a few choked bellows caused by twinges of violent pain, on Santiago of Compostela. During the entire period of this soul-shaking address, and for several speechless seconds after, a small, intensely black, forked beard continued to flicker like an adder's tongue through the haze of words surrounding it. Somewhat exhausted, its owner now paused.
Those who thought his vocabulary exhausted, however, were sadly mistaken.
The gentleman looking out of the coach window owned estates both in Spain and in Italy. From both he drew copious revenues not only of rents but of idiom. He was of mixed Irish, Spanish, and Tuscan ancestry, and his fluency was even thrice enhanced. He now gripped his cane more firmly and lapsed into Italian.
"You mule's bastard," roared he, twisting his head around with an obvious grin of pain to address the little man sitting astride the lead horse, "Come here, I say. Come here till I break your back. I'll . . ." The rest was cut short by a second grimace of agony and a whistling sound from the cane.
The recipient of this alluring invitation climbed down from his saddle rather slowly, but with no further signs of hesitation walked imperturbably past his four quivering horses toward the door of the coach. His legs, which already appeared small when astride a horse, were now seen to be shorter than ever and crooked. Yet he moved with a certain feline motion that was somehow memorable. As he turned to face the door of the coach and removed his cocked hat, two tufts of mouse-coloured hair just over his ears, and a long, black whip thrust through his belt till it projected out of his coat tails behind, completed for the peasants, who were now crowding as close as they dared, the illusion that they were looking, not at a man, but at an animal vaguely familiar.
The door of the coach was now pushed open by the gold-headed cane revealing to those by the roadside a glimpse of the sumptuous interior of a nobleman's private carriage. Its owner had been riding with his back to the horses. As the door opened wider a long, white object projecting across the aisle toward the rear disclosed itself as a human leg disguised by a plethora of bandages and resting upon a "T"-shaped stand contrived out of a couple of varnished boards. On this couch the ill member with its swathed foot seemed to repose like a mummy. On the rear seat could be caught a glimpse of a brocaded skirt the folds of which remained motionless.
The claret-coloured face now appeared again and the cane was once more flourished as if about to descend upon the back of the unfortunate postilion waiting hat in hand just beyond its reach. But the gentleman had now reached the limit of his field of action. He was the owner of the mummified limb on the "T"-shaped stand, a fact of which he was just then agonizingly reminded, and a torrent of several languages that seemed to start at his waist literally leapt out of his mouth.
To the surprise of all but the footmen, who were thoroughly inured to such scenes, the little man in the road ventured to reply. He purred in a soft Spanish patois accompanied by gestures that provided a perfect pantomime. Due to his eloquent motions towards the peasants in the ditch and the hole in the road, it was not necessary to understand his dialect in order to follow his argument. With this the gentleman, who had meanwhile violently jerked his wig back into place, seemed inclined to agree.
Seeing how things were going, a tall fellow somewhat more intelligent than his companions now stepped forward.
"It is to be hoped that monsieur will overlook the existence of the terrible hole which has caused him such discomfort . . ."
"Overlook its existence, you scoundrel, when it nearly bumped me into purgatory!" roared the gentleman. "What do you mean?"
"Ah, if we had only known monsieur was coming this way so soon it should have been filled in before this. It is very difficult now to get these rascals to come to the corvée[2]. We were informed you would not arrive until day after tomorrow. I can tell you, sir," continued he, turning an eye on his miserable companions which they did not seem to appreciate, "I can tell you they were just now in a fine sweat when they heard monsieur's coach ascending the hill. If it had been that of M. le Comte de Besance . . . oh, if it had been M. le Comte himself!"
"M. de Besance? Ah, then we are already upon his estates!" interrupted the gentleman in the coach. "Do you hear that, my dear?" Seemingly placated, and as if the incident were drawing to a close, he began to close the door. Noticing the crest on the outside panel for the first time, the man by the road licked his lips and hastened to correct himself.
"But yes, monseigneur," he gasped, "the Château de Besance is scarcely half an hour's drive. One goes as far as the cross-roads at Romagnat and then turns to the left by the little wood. And the road from here on monseigneur will find in excellent shape. For a week now we have laboured upon it even in wheat sowing time."
Mollified at finding himself so near the end of a long and painful journey the gentleman's face relaxed somewhat from its unrelenting scowl. A few pale blotches began to appear through its hitherto uniform tint of scarlet. Encouraged by this the unfortunate bailiff essayed further.
"By special order we have smoothed the road from Romagnat for the illustrious guest expected at the château; but not until day after tomorrow." Here he bowed. "Yet an hour later and this accurséd hole would have been filled. A little more willingness on the part of these"--a grim smile of understanding on the face of the nobleman here transported the bailiff--"a little more skill on the part of monseigneur's coachman . . ."
Scarcely had these words left the man's mouth, however, before a hail of rocks and mud set him dodging and dancing. The small postilion who had all this time been waiting in the road hat in hand was galvanized into instant action. On all fours, he dashed about snatching up every clod and stone that came ready to his paws. The whip flickered tail-like over his back, his grey-green eyes blazed brilliantly, and he spat and squalled out a stream of curses that might have done credit to his master. One of the peasants began to mutter something about the evil eye, and all began to draw back from the coach.
"Are we all right?" shouted the master to his footmen.
"Yes, Your Excellency," they replied as if with one voice.
"Drive on then, Sancho, you devil's cat," roared the gentleman now grinning with enjoyment at the grotesque scene before him and with satisfaction at finding that neither his leg nor his coach was irreparably damaged.
But at the word "cat" the little postilion fairly bounded into the air. His hair seemed to stand on end. Those outside the coach appeared to be fascinated. They continued to stand and stare until with an impatient gesture the gentleman on the inside pulled a tasselled cord. A small bell hung in a yoke on the roof tinkled musically, and the horses long accustomed to the signal moved forward.
Finding himself about to be left alone on the highroad in a hopeless minority, the postilion with a final snarl turned, picked up his hat, clapped it on his head, and in a series of panther-like leaps, for his legs were far too short to run, gained the lead horse already some yards ahead and vaulted into the saddle.
"A cat! A cat!" shrieked the peasants. The four horses broke into a trot, and the coach and its passengers rocked and rolled along the road that had been so carefully "smoothed" to the Château de Besance.
But rumour preceded it in the person of a peasant runner who took a short cut across the fields. The servants at the château were warned of the unexpectedly sudden approach of visitors. Even before the coach reached the cross-roads at Romagnat that entire village was agog. For nothing except scandal spreads so fast as an apt nickname. The two indeed are frequently related, and in this case as long as he remained in that part of Auvergne Don Luis Guzman Sotoymer y O'Connell, conde de Azuaga in Estremadura, Marquis da Vincitata in Tuscany, and Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of France from that grand duchy, was invariably associated with his feline postilion, Sancho, and referred to over the entire countryside as Monsieur le Marquis de Carabas and his cat.
Compared with the surface of the royal highway the recently smoothed road upon the estates of M. de Besance was as a calm harbour to the Bay of Biscay. Both Don Luis and his leg thus began to experience considerable benefit from the comparative ease with which the coach now rolled along. The end of a ten days' journey from Versailles was almost in sight, and the marquis began to contemplate the bandages in the vicinity of his big toe--from which only a faint, blue light now seemed to emanate--if not with entire satisfaction at least with considerable relief. As he did so his eyes happened to stray past his carefully cherished foot into the deep recess formed by the rear seat, thus serving to remind him of what he was at times somewhat prone to forget.
The ample rear seat of the coach upholstered in a smooth velvet of a light rose colour was deep enough to form, with its painted side panels and the arched roof above it, what seemed from the front seat, where the marquis was now leaning back, to be a deep alcove. Sunk in the luxurious cushions of the seat, and reclining against the back of the coach with her head directly under an oval window was what appeared to be the body of a young girl scarcely eighteen years of age. Her form was completely relaxed. Her long sensitive hands, upon one finger of which was a wedding ring, lay with startling and web-like whiteness against the rose of the cushions. Two waxen arms disappeared at the elbows into the folds of a grey silk travelling scarf wrapped about her shoulders like a Vigée-Lebrun drapery. She sat with one leg crossed over the other so that her skirt, stiffly brocaded in a heavy heliotrope and gold pattern, fell in a sharp-edged fold that might have been moulded in porcelain to one white-slippered foot.
Used as he was to an almost selfless yielding in his girl-wife which constantly expressed itself in his presence in her relaxed physical attitudes, there was, as he now looked at her across the aisle of the coach, something in her posture which caused Don Luis to glance hastily and uneasily at her face. Her small, rather neat head lay drooped to one side. Since Bourges, which they had left hastily after the death of her maid by plague, she had been unable to accomplish an elaborate powdered coiffure. Consequently her own hair of a pure saffron colour seldom seen in the south of Europe, burst, rather than was combed back, into a high Grecian knot held precariously by one gold-knobbed pin. Across her wide, clear forehead, above carefully pencilled and minutely pointed arcs of eyebrows, and blowing out from the temples before and around two finely chiselled ears, sprang a delightful hedge of ringlets and tiny silken wires. These in the rays of the western sun, which darted now and again through the oval window behind, were touched along with a thousand dust motes that danced in the semi-darkness of the coach, into a sudden blaze and aura of golden glory. A straight nose, and a rather small, pursed mouth, whose corners were nevertheless drawn out enough to be turned down toward an obstinate little chin, completed a countenance with a bisque complexion like that of a miniature. It needed only that the eyes should be wide open and staring directly at you out of the shadows to give the impression that you were actually in the presence of some dream-like and helpless doll. But her eyes were now closed, or almost so. As her husband looked at them with their long, brown lashes disclosing only a blue polished glimmer of the pupils beneath, while the lids remained perfectly motionless, it calmly occurred to him that she might have fainted.
Yet this realization even when it became a certainty did not suggest to Don Luis any necessity for immediate action. Before everything else the marquis was a connoisseur, an appreciator of rare and accidental patterns of beauty in nature, and of their successful imitation or creation in art. The picture before him was a combination of both. The wide-flung frame of the upholstered seat, the delicate rose-leaf tint of the background, the perspective of the alcove, and the unusual arrangement of its lights and shadows were, so it happened, in exact harmony with the central and somewhat tragic figure of the portrait. There was even a high light in precisely the proper place, for a large emerald breast pin concentrated the stray beams of sunlight and deflected them in a living grey-green shaft across the folds of the girl's scarf.
Don Luis was delighted. For the time being he felt that his condescension and his trouble in marrying this young woman had been rewarded. And where had he seen that exact arrangement of headdress and features, accidental to be sure, but quite purely classic in effect? Ah, it was on a coin of Faustine; or was it Theodora? Perhaps a combination of both. One's mind played tricks like that. His artistic imagination no doubt! Yes, there was something a little Byzantine here, and yet quite Grecian behind with the knot, of course. Well, he would look again in that cabinet in the Pitti next time he was in Florence. He knew the exact spot where it stood. Just next to that vile medallion of Guido. . . . But a slight trembling of his wife's eyelids reminded him that some more direct attention to the subject of so admirable a reverie was now in order.
"Maria," said he, leaning forward and feeling along her arms as if she were a doll whose limbs might have been accidentally broken, "listen, I am speaking to you."
Recalled thus from somewhere else by a command not to be disregarded, she slowly opened her eyes, wide, and very blue, upon him. Scarcely had full consciousness returned to her look before she hastened to disengage her arms from his grasp and to whisper, "Better now. It was that last jolt. I was sure we should all be killed. I prayed to her all the way down the hill. I dreamed I was with her now." A haze suffused itself over her eyes as if she had been looking at the little hills of a child's paradise with the morning mist still gathered upon them.
For a moment he remained silent. There was one crack, however, in his otherwise turtle-like armour. Glancing toward a statuette of the Madonna, which at his wife's entreaty had been set in a niche in the side of the coach, he crossed himself fervently. The upholstery had been cut away to allow the insertion of this figure and its little shrine, and for some time he kept his eyes fixed in its direction with an expression at once conventionally pious and fearfully sincere. Only a boyhood in Spain could have achieved it. But while it lasted and his lips moved, the girl remained still. A look of mixed jealousy and chagrin as if she were loath to share some personal possession with him hardened her eyes and brought her chin a little further forward while his devotions went on. At last, seeing that his gaze had shifted to the window again, she ventured to ask, "What happened?"
"Nothing," said he. The coach rolled on a short distance.
Settling back he pulled up a square flap in the cushion and produced from a locker in the seat a bottle and a small, silver travelling mug. "Nothing, fortunately," he repeated, "but drink this and you will soon feel better. Shall I tell you now? It was a deep hole in the road. A few minutes later and it would have been filled. No doubt it did jar you badly sitting directly over the wheel, but the coach of monseigneur is undoubtedly a good one. We shall not be delayed."
Without spilling any of the wine which he offered her, she managed to sip it down and wipe the scarlet stain from her lips with a wisp of a handkerchief. Seeing how steady were her hands, Don Luis congratulated her and proceeded to follow up his panacea for all earthly ills, as he put the bottle back in the seat, with a little cheering chat.
"It is really too bad that both of the mishaps of the journey have fallen upon you, my dear," said he, wiping his own lips. "I could complain to M. de Besance about this last one and make it lively for those lazy peasants. He is said to prefer the high justice to the low, but it is not quite so easy in these disturbed times to take the high hand as it used to be. Hanging or driving away a tenant is not to be thought of nowadays, especially when one's luck at cards has been of the sorriest. They say some of these fellows in the country are getting impatient at sending all their rents to Versailles. The fields here look in condition though," he exclaimed, "fine, well-tilled acres!"
She nodded wearily.
"So they didn't expect us so soon," he chuckled, "otherwise that hole would not have 'existed.' Well, Sancho paid them back in their own loose dirt." He proceeded to relate the incident, at which she succeeded in smiling faintly.
"No, we are decidedly before-hand with them. If you had not insisted on delaying at Bourges to be sure that maid would die, we might have been here two days sooner. That delay was a sheer waste of time. Oh! it has been difficult with your hair, I am sure. But do you know I admire you as you are. There is a certain classic air about you. They told me you were quite the rage at the Petit Trianon[3] in a milkmaid's smock. It was really clever of you to manage that. To be commanded to the dairy by the queen herself, twice!"
A slight tinge of colour began to suffuse her cheeks.
"Still you should never have let them find out that you really did know how to milk," he went on. "That was a faux pas, a decidedly peculiar accomplishment for the wife of an envoy extraordinary. It is not real simplicity they want. You should have merely pretended to be learning rapidly. But to have finished milking before Madame! It was fatal! I can tell you our stock dropped after that. I felt like M. Law himself. If it had not been for my luck in the Œil-de-Bœuf and that night at de Guémené's soirée we should have been nowhere, nowhere at all. Even the mission might have failed. But when I won M. d'Orléans' new coach from him at écarté, and drove off in it with the lilies on the door! Ha! That was something, even if one's wife did know how to milk." He looked at her, stroking his beard with satisfaction.
The coach rolled on while the shadows deepened. In the depths of the seat he could not see the tears in the eyes of his young wife. The world outside glimmered before her.
A red ray of sunset dashed itself against the rose-coloured cushions and glanced into the shimmering pools of her eyes. Reflected there she saw the Palace of Love at the Petit Trianon; the torchlight on the pool before it. A dust mote became a boat gliding past in the red glow. Ghosts of music began to sound in her ears. The trees whispered outside like the park forest.
Suddenly the vision became intensely clear. Up the little steps of the temple sprang a young soldier in a white and gold uniform. He was putting roses on the altar before the god of love. She leaned forward now to see his face--and found herself gazing directly into the eyes of her husband.
His lips parted slowly in a completely self-possessed smile. She gasped slightly. The vision had been so clear! She was almost afraid he must have seen it, too. But Don Luis was not given to visions. The gouty leg had unaccountably stopped pulsing and its owner now felt inclined to talk.
"M. le Comte de Besance did not come off so well in his bets with me either." His smile widened. "Five hundred louis against my living on his estates till my leg is cured! All of these fellows are so sure of their provincial springs. No one can dispute with them. It is like arguing with a country priest about a local miracle. Por Dios, how he leered over that fine hand he held. I almost believe he wanted to lose just to have me try his spa. Else how could he have played so ill? So I shall take my time here. It is due my good luck. And I like the air already. None the less that there are no handsome Irish captains of the guard to breathe it. Mark that! O'Connell was my great-grandfather's name. That is all the Irish you will get. We shall say no more about that fellow, but"--and he leaned forward clutching her knee--"remember!"
Having delivered this ultimatum he sat back again for some time in silence. At last one of the footmen absent-mindedly began to drum upon the roof. "Leave off that," roared his master. Outside the man snatched his hand back as if he had suddenly found it resting on a hot stove. Don Luis continued.
"You can rest here and forget all about it. They say the Château de Besance is a pleasant enough place. The last M. de Besance but one spent some time in Italy and even journeyed to see the Grand Turk. The rugs are said to be remarkable, and there are some good Venetian pieces. Besides, the place is not too large to be comfortable. I shall get you another maid, somehow, and you can indulge your cursed English taste for driving about the country."
"Scotch, you mean," the girl said softly, "my father . . ."
"It is all the same," said he, a little impatient at the interruption. "Doubtless there is a small carriage in the count's stables. But no jaunting about in peasants' carts! That was bad enough at Livorno when you were a girl. Remember!"
He had an unpleasant way of trilling the phrase in Italian, an accent that might have accompanied a sneer. She always felt it and winced. Yet seldom was he so talkative or so amiable as now. Despite an occasional sardonic fall in his tones, without which he could scarcely have expressed himself, for the first time in her married life of about a year he was verging upon the affable. Sensing the state of his feelings as well as their ephemeral nature, she decided to pick flowers while the sun shone.
"At the château--could I have a dog?" she asked. Her quick reading of the human barometer and her instant grasp of opportunity tickled his shrewd fancy. In the mood he was in he consented with an ease that astonished himself.
"At the château, yes. But it must not come into the coach. I will not be having the cushions made for royalty itself ruined."
She laughed. The very thought of a companion who could give and receive affection revived her. Leaning forward she looked out of the window and let the breeze play on her forehead. They were just approaching a village.
Presently the coach and four wheeled sharply around a well-curb at the forks of the road. A weather-beaten cross stood above the town fountain, and the usual crowd of women drawing water at that time of day put their pitchers down or slipped the bucket yokes from their shoulders at the sound of horses. Almost everyone in the village who could find an excuse to be away, and there were few who could not, stood waiting to stare curiously but silently at the coach. The only sound was the clopping of hoofs and the occasional snarl of the more vicious village curs carefully held back from barking. Dogs which barked at guests on the estates of M. le Comte de Besance invariably failed to return to their owners.
"To the château?" cried Sancho, drawing up and nourishing his whip.
One of the horses began to crane its neck and sniff toward the fountain. The crowd gaped and began to murmur something among themselves about a cat. "But, yes, certainly, a cat!" There seemed a humorous difference of opinion. Sancho began to jabber. The bell on the top of the coach tapped twice with unusual emphasis, and he swung the horses to the left.
"That fool!" exclaimed the marquis, "he would stop at every village well to start a brawl. An end must be put to that! If he fights with everyone who howls 'cat' after him between here and the Alps, I shall be needing a new coachman long before we get to Italy. Besides, the man does look like a cat! You can see, my love, it would never do to have a dog in the coach with Puss-in-Boots on the box, never!" Don Luis actually leaned out of the window and laughed at his own joke. In town he would never have thought of doing so. It was the first time she had ever heard him laugh heartily and something in the tone of it startled her.
They were ascending a long rise now between a pleasant park-like wood on one side and a carefully pruned vineyard on the other. A few bunches of grapes smaller than berries as yet showed here and there. An all but imperceptible perfume was in the air. Maria breathed deeply and lay back with her eyes closed. The scent was delightfully familiar, suggestive even in its intangibility, and she allowed herself, as she relaxed into the cushions, the unexpected boon of indulging to the full an overpowering illusion that she was returning home.
After all, perhaps the Château de Besance might have its compensations. She would play that she was coming home anyway. It would make the arrival at another strange place more bearable. The faint tinge of colour brightened in her cheeks. Even the illusion made her heart beat faster.
Her husband was looking out over the vineyards, wide and peculiarly mellow in the last, long rays of full daylight. If only that countenance with its pointed beard, the cheeks forever a dark wine colour, the hard black eyes, and the mouth like a trap,--if only he were not here now to spoil her dream! A small breeze blowing across the aisle of the coach fanned her cheeks and brought a more pungent whiff as of the vineyards about Livorno. Shutting her eyes tight she breathed more deeply, then she turned away from him and opened them wide.
From the little niche in the side of the coach the madonna was looking at her. The girl began to pray to her silently. The face of the Virgin was very familiar. The little statuette was the one memento which she had been allowed to keep that still reminded her of home. Her lips moved imperceptibly, her nostrils widened to the breeze, her eyes remained fixed upon the face of the statue. For a few wretched and blessed moments she was back again in her own room in her father's house.
Don Luis had no idea of what was going on in his wife's mind. He saw that she was praying and that seemed natural enough. But he did not care how, when, where, or to what a woman prayed. Just now he was nowhere in particular himself. His leg had stopped hurting and left him pleasantly vacant of mind; in an easy, almost garrulous mood. He leaned out of the window still farther and noticed they were nearly at the top of the hill. Hadn't the bailiff in charge of the peasants said the château was just over the top of the rise? The memory of that unfortunate fleeing in a hail of mud again caused Don Luis to laugh aloud.
The little postilion turned about in his saddle and looked back at his master. An amused grin spread from his whiskers along his jaws. A knowing wink passed between the master and his man. Just then the horses began to descend.
"What can you see ahead?" shouted the marquis.
But the reply of the postilion was lost in the sudden grinding of brakes.
CHAPTER TWO
THE LITTLE MADONNA
The peasants working on the corvée of M. de Besance had just completed filling the hole in the causeway and were gathering up their tools to depart for a well-earned night's rest, when the sound of galloping hoofs once more fell upon their ears.
There was a short cessation of the sound. Then without any further warning a man mounted on a spirited bay horse darkened the notch at the top of the hill. Picking his way rapidly down the steep slope, he splashed at a sharp clip through the ford and cantered onto the causeway. A certain military precision lurked in the folds of a blue cloak that fell from his shoulders in trim, straight lines. As he came opposite the group of peasants he reined up his horse sharply, and at the first glance as if his judgment was seldom at a loss, picked out the bailiff in charge of the work although the man's clothes were still bespattered by the dirt with which his friend the postilion[4] had recently favoured him. The stranger beckoned to him, but somewhat suspicious from his recent experience the man hesitated to step forward as smartly as before. Nor did two large pistols in the holsters of a military saddle, and the brass clover of a rapier scabbard projecting below the newcomer's riding cloak add to the bailiff's sense of self-possession.
"Come here," said the horseman, seeing how matters stood, in a voice that was not to be denied. With some visible hesitation the bailiff advanced.
"Have you seen a gentleman on a black gelding pass this way recently?"
"No, sir, he has not come by this road," replied the man.
The stranger's horse refreshed from its recent plunge in the ford danced about uneasily and pawed the dust. "Ha, Solange, you witch you, ho, girl!" he cried, reining her about in a semi-circle with a sure hand and bringing her back again as he called over one shoulder, "How do you know that?"
"Because, monsieur," replied his informant, "we have been working here all day and no one has passed southward except the coach of monsieur . . . pardon, I mean monseigneur, the guest of M. le Comte."
"Monseigneur!" said the stranger raising his eyebrows. "Why do you say that?"
"The crest, sir, the lilies were on the door!"
"Are you sure of it?"
"Am I likely to forget it? Dieu! am I not covered from head to foot by the filth which that devil, his cat of a postilion, threw at me. Look!" and the bailiff turned to exhibit the state of his back.
He was immediately struck by another missile, but this time of a more welcome kind. As he stooped to pick up the coin, he saw the limbs of the mare suddenly gathered under her as she felt the spur. By the time he had picked up the money and bitten it, both horse and rider were fifty yards away.
"Monsieur is in a hurry," he muttered, as he pocketed the piece and prepared to go home.
It was easy enough to follow the coach. In the newly smoothed highway the broad wheel tracks of the great vehicle were as plainly to be seen as if it had just been driven over a field of virgin snow. Yet the coach itself was nowhere visible. Behind the top of a little rise above the village the stranger dismounted and made sure of this before urging his mount onto the level open ground below. He was about to gallop on when a low cloud of dust at the top of a hill across the valley caught his eye.
The coach was just emerging from a patch of woodland and going over the skyline. From where he stood he could even see someone lean from the window to speak to the postilion while the latter turned in his saddle to reply. Then the whole equipage disappeared over the ridge.
Clapping spurs to his horse the stranger galloped down the road, leaped over a low hedge, and taking an open short cut across some meadows, found himself in a trice back on the road again. The village, which he had thus avoided, lay between the highways at the "V" of the cross-roads, and he was now passing rapidly uphill with a wood on one hand and vineyards on the other. Just short of the hillcrest he again dismounted suddenly and threw the reins over the mare's neck. She stood patiently, precisely where she had been left. Muffling his cloak well about him, he strode rapidly forward a few yards, stooping low. He then left the road, and taking shelter behind a convenient shrub, looked down into the valley beyond.
Before him lay a low valley, a wide, cultivated landscape stretching away in the softly brilliant afterglow of a French sunset. In the foreground was the park of Besance. A statue gleamed here and there amid the wide-armed trees like an ivory high light. The road wound through the groves in a vague "S"-shaped curve up to the château itself, an old building with candle snuffer towers. But there was a new wing in front with high, arched renaissance windows and a row of conical trees in tubs. It was one of those minor Versailles which during the last two reigns had sprung up all over Europe. As he watched, a fountain began to play on the terrace and the downstairs windows gleamed with a saffron light as someone flitted from room to room lighting chandeliers. The coach now emerged from between a wall of hedges, made the half-circle before the entrance, and drew up before the door. In the lens-like air, as the footmen leaped to let down the steps, he could even see their brass buttons. After some little delay the coach moved out and trotted around to the rear.
A scene of considerable bustle was now revealed on the steps of the château. Four lackeys bearing a man with a white object that stuck out straight before him were swaying up the stairs, marshalled by a bustling major-domo. A woman stood waiting for them at the top while various bags and valises in charge of other servants disappeared through the door. Even at that distance he could still make out the peculiar heliotrope shade of her skirt, and that she was carrying something in her hand. "By God!" said he in English, and with an emotion so violent that it found vent in immediate action. With a determined and almost desperate gesture he plucked a handful of leaves off the bush which concealed him, and scattered them angrily.
The four men bearing their human burden now began to shuffle on the last ascent to the door. Evidently what they had in hand was no light matter. At the very top someone stumbled. The whole group began to sway perilously. Then, as the invalid's cane began to play over their heads and along their backs viciously, they fairly precipitated themselves into the gaping mouth of the door. Only the woman now remained, apparently looking out over the landscape where the shadows were beginning to gather. In the excitement attending the entrance of the baggage and the gentleman it seemed as if she stood there forgotten.
