The Ink-Stain (Tache d'encre) — Volume 3 — John Shaqi
The Ink-Stain (Tache d'encre) — Volume 3Bazin, René
General
The Ink-Stain (Tache d'encre) — Volume 3
Bazin, René
Paris (France) -- Fiction
And so we settled that Madeleine was not to say a word to my uncle about
my being in Bourges, within a few feet of him. If she perceived any
break in the gloom which enveloped M. Mouillard, she was to let me know;
if I were obliged to put off my interview to the morrow, and to pass the
night on the sofa-bed in the library, she was to bring me something to
eat, a rug, and "the pillow you used in your holidays when you were a
boy."
I was installed then in the big library on the first-floor, adjoining the
drawing-room, its other door opening on the passage opposite M.
Mouillard's door, and its two large windows on the garden. What a look
of good antique middle-class comfort there was about it, from the floor
of bees'-waxed oak, with its inequalities of level, to the four bookcases
with glass doors, surmounted by four bronzed busts of Herodotus, Homer,
Socrates, and Marmontel! Nothing had been moved; the books were still in
the places where I had known them for twenty years; Voltaire beside
Rousseau, the Dictionary of Useful Knowledge, and Rollin's Ancient
History, the slim, well bound octavos of the Meditations of St.
Ignatius, side by side with an enormous quarto on veterinary surgery.
The savage arrows, said to be poisoned, which always used to frighten me
so much, were still arranged like a peacock's tail over the mantel-shelf,
each end of which was adorned by the same familiar lumps of white coral.
The musical-box, which I was not allowed to touch till I was eighteen,
still stood in the left-hand corner, and on the writing-table, near the
little blotting-book that held the note-paper, rose, still majestic,
still turning obedient to the touch within its graduated belts, the
terrestrial globe "on which are marked the three voyages of Captain Cook,
both outward and homeward." Ah, captain, how often have we sailed those
voyages together! What grand headway we made as we scoured the tropics
in the heel of the trade-wind, our ship threading archipelagoes whose
virgin forests stared at us in wonder, all their strange flowers opening
toward us, seeking to allure us and put us to sleep with their dangerous
perfumes. But we always guessed the snare, we saw the points of the
assegais gleaming amid the tall grasses; you gave the word in your full,
deep voice, and our way lay infinite before us; we followed it, always on
the track of new lands, new discoveries, until we reached the fatal isle
of Owhyhee, the spot where this terrestrial globe is spotted with a tear
--for I wept over you, my captain, at the age when tears unlock
themselves and flow easily from a heart filled with enchantment!
Seven o'clock sounded from the cathedral; the garden door slammed to;
my uncle was returning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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