The Adventurers. Gustave Aimard
often, when I held horses, sold theatre checks, or acted clown to a mountebank – in fact, when I went through the thousand impossible shifts of the Bohemian, depression and discouragement nearly choked me; often and often have I felt my burning brow and throbbing temples clasped in the pinching vice of want; but I resisted, I girded myself up against adversity; never did I allow myself to be conquered, although I left upon the thorns of my rugged path many of the rags of my most fondly-cherished illusions; while my heart, writhing with despair, has bled from twenty wounds at once! Courage, Louis! henceforth there will be two of us to fight the battle! You shall be the head to conceive, I the arm to execute; you the intelligence, I the strength! Now the struggle will be equal, for we will sustain one another. Trust in me, my brother; a day will come when success will crown our efforts!"
"I can fully appreciate your devotion, and I accept it. Am I not, at present, your property? Entertain no fear of my resisting you. But I cannot help telling you that I fear all my attempts will be in vain, and that we shall be forced, sooner or later, to fall back upon that last means which you now prevent me having recourse to."
"Oh, thou man of little faith!" Valentine said, cheerfully; "on the road which we are about to take, fortune will be our slave!"
Louis could not repress a smile.
"We must, at all events, depend upon the aid of chance in what we are about to undertake," he said.
"Chance! chance is the hope of fools; the strong man commands it."
"Well, but what do you mean to do?"
"The lady you love is in America, is she not?"
"I have already told you so several times."
"Very well, then, we must go thither."
"But I do not know even in what part of America she resides."
"Of what consequence is that? The New World is the country of gold – the true region of adventurers! We shall retrieve our fortunes whilst searching for her; and is that so disagreeable a thing? Tell me – this lady was born somewhere?"
"She is a Chilian."
"Good! she has gone back to Chili, then; and it is there we shall find her."
Louis looked at his foster brother for a moment, with a species of respectful admiration.
"What! do you seriously mean that you will do this, brother?" he said, in an agitated voice.
"Without hesitation."
"Abandon the military career which offers you so many chances of success? I know that in three months you will be an officer."
"I have ceased to be a soldier since the morning; I have found a substitute."
"Oh, that is not possible!"
"Ay, but it is done."
"But your old mother, my nurse, whose only support you are!"
"Out of what you have left we will give her a few thousand francs, which, joined to my pension, will suffice for her to live on till we come back."
"Oh," said the young man, "I cannot accept of such a sacrifice – my honour forbids it!"
"Unfortunately, brother," Valentine said, in a tone which silenced the Count, "you have it not in your power to prevent it. In acting as I propose to do I am only discharging a sacred duty."
"I do not understand you."
"What is the use of explaining it to you?"
"I insist."
"Very good; and, perhaps, it will be better. Listen: – When, after having nursed you, my mother restored you to your family, my father fell sick, and died at the end of an illness of eight months, leaving my mother and myself in the greatest want; the little we possessed had been spent in medicines, and in paying the doctor for his visits. We ought to have had recourse to your family, who would, no doubt, have relieved us; but my mother would never consent to it. 'The Count de Prébois-Crancé has done as much as he ought,' she remarked, 'he shall not be troubled any more.'"
"She was wrong," said Louis.
"I know she was," Valentine replied. "In the meantime, hunger soon began to be felt. It was then I undertook all those impossible trades of which I just now spoke to you. One day, as I was carrying my cap round in the Place du Trône, after swallowing sabres and eating fire, to the great delight of the crowd, I found myself face to face with an officer of the Chasseurs d'Afrique, who looked at me with an air of pity and kindness that melted my heart within me. He led me away with him, made me relate my history, and insisted upon being conducted to the shed where I and my mother lived. At the sight of our misery the old soldier was much affected; a tear, which he could not restrain, flowed silently down his sunburnt cheek. Louis, that officer was your father."
"My noble and good father!" the Count exclaimed, pressing his foster brother's hand.
"Yes! yes, noble and good! he secured my mother a little annuity which enables her to live, and took me into his own regiment. Two years ago, during the last expedition against the Rey of Constantine, your father was struck by a bullet in his chest, and died at the end of two hours, calling upon his son."
"Yes," the young man said, with tears in his eyes, "I know he did."
"But what you do not know, Louis, is, that at the point of death your father turned towards me – for, from the moment he had received his wound I had never left him."
Louis again silently pressed the hand of Valentine, whilst the latter continued —
"'Valentine,' he said to me, in a faint voice, broken by the rattle of death, for the mortal agony had commenced, 'my son is left alone, and without experience; he has nobody but you, his foster brother. Watch over him – never abandon him! May I depend upon your promise? it will mitigate the pain of dying.' I knelt down beside him, and respectfully seizing the hand he held out to me, exclaimed – 'Die in peace! in the hour of adversity I will be always by the side of your Louis. Two tears of joy at that awful hour dropped from your father's eyes; he said, in a faltering voice – 'God has heard your oath and murmuring your name, and clasping my hand, he expired. Louis, I owe to your father the comfort my mother enjoys; I owe to your father the feelings that make me a man, and this cross which glitters on my breast. Can you not now comprehend, then, why I have spoken to you as I have done? While you held your course in your strength, I kept aloof; but now that the hour has arrived for accomplishing my vow, no human power can prevent me from doing so."
The two young men were silent for a moment, and then Louis, laying his face on the soldier's honest chest, said, with a burst of tears —
"When shall we set out, brother?"
The latter looked at him earnestly —
"You are fully resolved to commence a new life?"
"Entirely!" Louis replied, in a firm tone.
"Do you leave no regrets behind you?"
"None."
"You are ready to pass bravely through all the trials to which I may expose you?"
"I am."
"That is well, brother! it is thus I wish you to be. We will set out as soon as we have settled the balance of your past life. You must enter on the new existence I am about to open to you quite free from clogs or remembrances."
On the 2nd of February, 1835, a packet boat belonging to the Trans-Atlantic Company left Havre, directing its course towards Valparaiso. On board this vessel, as passengers, were the Count de Prébois-Crancé, Valentine Guillois his foster brother, and Cæsar their Newfoundland dog – Cæsar, the only friend who had remained faithful to them, and whom they could not think of leaving behind. Upon the quay a woman of about sixty years of age, her face bathed in tears, stood with her eyes intently fixed upon the vessel as long as it remained in sight. When it had disappeared below the horizon, she cast a desponding glance around her, and with a heavy heart bent her steps towards a house situated at a small distance from the beach, where she remained three days.
"Do what is right, happen what may!" she said, in a voice stifled by grief.
This woman was the