Beyond a bare, weather-worn wall, about a hundred paces from the
spot where the two friends sat looking and listening as they drank
their wine, was the village of the Catalans. Long ago this
mysterious colony quitted Spain, and settled on the tongue of land
on which it is to this day. Whence it came no one knew, and it
spoke an unknown tongue. One of its chiefs, who understood
Provencal, begged the commune of Marseilles to give them this bare
and barren promontory, where, like the sailors of old, they had run
their boats ashore. The request was granted; and three months
afterwards, around the twelve or fifteen small vessels which had
brought these gypsies of the sea, a small village sprang up. This
village, constructed in a singular and picturesque manner, half
Moorish, half Spanish, still remains, and is inhabited by
descendants of the first comers, who speak the language of their
fathers. For three or four centuries they have remained upon this
small promontory, on which they had settled like a flight of
seabirds, without mixing with the Marseillaise population,
intermarrying, and preserving their original customs and the
costume of their mother-country as they have preserved its
language.
Our readers will follow us along the only street of this little
village, and enter with us one of the houses, which is sunburned to
the beautiful dead-leaf color peculiar to the buildings of the
country, and within coated with whitewash, like a Spanish posada. A
young and beautiful girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as
velvety as the gazelle's, was leaning with her back against the
wainscot, rubbing in her slender delicately moulded fingers a bunch
of heath blossoms, the flowers of which she was picking off and
strewing on the floor; her arms, bare to the elbow, brown, and
modelled after those of the Arlesian Venus, moved with a kind of
restless impatience, and she tapped the earth with her arched and
supple foot, so as to display the pure and full shape of her
well-turned leg, in its red cotton, gray and blue clocked,well-turned leg, in its red cotton, gray and blue clocked,
stocking. At three paces from her, seated in a chair which he
balanced on two legs, leaning his elbow on an old worm-eaten table,
was a tall young man of twenty, or two-and-twenty, who was looking
at her with an air in which vexation and uneasiness were mingled.
He questioned her with his eyes, but the firm and steady gaze of
the young girl controlled his look.
"You see, Mercedes," said the young man, "here is Easter come
round again; tell me, is this the moment for a wedding?"
"I have answered you a hundred times, Fernand, and really you
must be very stupid to ask me again."
"Well, repeat it, — repeat it, I beg of you, that I may at last
believe it! Tell me for the hundredth time that you refuse my love,
which had your mother's sanction. Make me understand once for all
that you are trifling with my happiness, that my life or death are
nothing to you. Ah, to have dreamed for ten years of being your
husband, Mercedes, and to lose that hope, which was the only stay
of my existence!"
"At least it was not I who ever encouraged you in that hope,
Fernand," replied Mercedes; "you cannot reproach me with the
slightest coquetry. I have always said to you, `I love you as a
brother; but do not ask from me more than sisterly affection, for
my heart is another's.' Is not this true, Fernand?"
"Yes, that is very true, Mercedes," replied the young man, "Yes,
you have been cruelly frank with me; but do you forget that it is
among the Catalans a sacred law to intermarry?"
"You mistake, Fernand; it is not a law, but merely a custom,
and, I pray of you, do not cite this custom in your favor. You are
included in the conscription, Fernand, and are only at liberty on
sufferance, liable at any moment to be called upon to take up arms.
Once a soldier, what would you do with me, a poor orphan, forlorn,
without fortune, with nothing but a half-ruined hut and a few
ragged nets, the miserable inheritance left by my father to myragged nets, the miserable inheritance left by my father to my
mother, and by my mother to me? She has been dead a year, and you
know, Fernand, I have subsisted almost entirely on public charity.
Sometimes you pretend I am useful to you, and that is an excuse to
share with me the produce of your fishing, and I accept it,
Fernand, because you are the son of my father's brother, because we
were brought up together, and still more because it would give you
so much pain if I refuse. But I feel very deeply that this fish
which I go and sell, and with the produce of which I buy the flax I
spin, — I feel very keenly, Fernand, that this is charity."
"And if it were, Mercedes, poor and lone as you are, you suit me
as well as the daughter of the first shipowner or the richest
banker of Marseilles! What do such as we desire but a good wife and
careful housekeeper, and where can I look for these better than in
you?"
"Fernand," answered Mercedes, shaking her head, "a woman becomes
a bad manager, and who shall say she will remain an honest woman,
when she loves another man better than her husband? Rest content
with my friendship, for I say once more that is all I can promise,
and I will promise no more than I can bestow."
"I understand," replied Fernand, "you can endure your own
wretchedness patiently, but you are afraid to share mine. Well,
Mercedes, beloved by you, I would tempt fortune; you would bring me
good luck, and I should become rich. I could extend my occupation
as a fisherman, might get a place as clerk in a warehouse, and
become in time a dealer myself."
"You could do no such thing, Fernand; you are a soldier, and if
you remain at the Catalans it is because there is no war; so remain
a fisherman, and contented with my friendship, as I cannot give you
more."
"Well, I will do better, Mercedes. I will be a sailor; instead
of the costume of our fathers, which you despise, I will wear a
varnished hat, a striped shirt, and a blue jacket, with an anchor
on the buttons. Would not that dress please you?"