"I say! my old woman," said Kerjegou, "tells me she's had the little boy we were looking for; that makes half-score-two now!"Another had found himself the father of twins; and a third announced the marriage of pretty Jenny Caroff, a girl well known to all the Icelanders, with some rich and infirm old resident of the Commune of Plourivo. As they were eyeing each other as if through white gauze, this also appeared to alter the sound of the voices, which came as if muffled and from far away.
Meanwhile Yann could not take his eyes off one of those brother fishermen, a little grizzled fellow, whom he was quite sure he never had seen before, but who had, nevertheless, straightway said to him, "How d'o, long Yann?" with all the familiarity of bosom acquaintance.
He wore the provoking ugliness of a monkey, with an apish twinkling of mischief too in his piercing eyes.
"As for me," said Larvoer, of the /Reine-Berthe/, "I've been told of the death of the grandson of old Yvonne Moan, of Ploubazlanec--who was serving his time in the navy, you know, in the Chinese squadron--a very great pity."On hearing this, all the men of /La Marie/ turned towards Yann to learn if he already knew anything of the sad news.
"Ay," he answered in a low voice, but with an indifferent and haughty air, "it was told me in the last letter my father sent me." They still kept on looking at him, curious at finding out the secret of his grief, and it made him angry.
These questions and answers were rapidly exchanged through the pallid mists, so the moments of this peculiar colloquy skipped swiftly by.
"My wife wrote me at the same time," continued Larvoer, "that Monsieur Mevel's daughter has left the town to live at Ploubazlanec and take care of her old grand-aunt--Granny Moan. She goes out to needlework by the day now--to earn her living. Anyhow, I always thought, I did, that she was a good, brave girl, in spite of her fine-lady airs and her furbelows."Then again they all stared at Yann, which made him still more angry; a red flush mounted to his cheeks, under their tawny tan.
With Larvoer's expression of opinion about Gaud ended this parley with the crew of the /Reine-Berthe/, none of whom were ever again to be seen by human eyes. For a moment their faces became more dim, their vessel being already farther away; and then, all at once, the men of the /Marie/ found they had nothing to push against, nothing at the end of their poles--all spars, oars, odds and ends of deck-lumber, were groping and quivering in emptiness, till they fell heavily, one after the other, down into the sea, like their own arms, lopped off and inert.
They pulled all the useless defences on board. The /Reine-Berthe/, melting away into the thick fog, had disappeared as suddenly as a painted ship in a dissolving view. They tried to hail her, but the only response was a sort of mocking clamour--as of many voices--ending in a moan, that made them all stare at each other in surprise.
This /Reine-Berthe/ did not come back with the other Icelandic fishers; and as the men of the /Samuel-Azenide/ afterward picked up in some fjord an unmistakable waif (part of her taffrail with a bit of her keel), all ceased to hope; in the month of October the names of all her crew were inscribed upon black slabs in the church.
From the very time of that apparition--the date of which was well remembered by the men of the /Marie/--until the time of their return, there had been no really dangerous weather on the Icelandic seas, but a great storm from the west had, three weeks before, swept several sailors overboard, and swallowed up two vessels. The men remembered Larvoer's peculiar smile, and putting things together many strange conjectures were made. In the dead of night, Yann, more than once, dreamed that he again saw the sailor who blinked like an ape, and some of the men of the /Marie/ wondered if, on that remembered morning, they had not been talking with ghosts.
