The ship was already abreast of the rock.  Gilliatt could see the stir of life on the sunlit deck.  The deck was as visible as if he had stood upon it.  He saw bride and bridegroom sitting side by side, like two birds, warming themselves in the noonday sun.  A celestial light was in those two faces formed by innocence.  The silence was like the calm of heaven.

The vessel passed.  He watched her till her masts and sails formed only a white obelisk, gradually decreasing against the horizon.  He felt that the water had reached his waist.  Sea-mews and cormorants flew about him restlessly, as if anxious to warn him of his danger.

The ship was rapidly growing less.

There was no foam around the rock where he sat; no wave beat against its granite sides.  The water rose peacefully.  It was nearly level with Gilliatt’s shoulders.

The birds were hovering about him, uttering short cries.  Only his head was now visible.  The tide was nearly at the full.  Evening was approaching.

Gilliatt’s eyes continued fixed upon the vessel on the horizon.  Their expression resembled nothing earthly.  A strange lustre shone in their calm and tragic depths.  There was in them the peace of vanished hopes, the calm but sorrowful acceptance of an end far different from his dreams.  By degrees the dusk of heaven began to dawn in them, though gazing still upon the point in space.  At the same moment the wide waters round the rock and the vast gathering twilight closed upon them.

At the moment when the vessel vanished on the horizon, the head of Gilliatt disappeared.  Nothing now was visible but the sea.

* * * * *

The Man Who Laughs

“The Man Who Laughs” ("L’Homme qui Rit”) was called by its author “A Romance of English History,” and was written during the period Hugo spent in exile in Guernsey.  Like “The Toilers of the Sea,” its immediate predecessor, the main theme of the story is human heroism, confronted with the superhuman tyranny of blind chance.  As a passionate cry on behalf of the tortured and deformed, and the despised and oppressed of the world, “The Man Who Laughs” is irresistible.  Of it Hugo himself says in the preface:  “The true title of this book should be ‘Aristocracy’”—­inasmuch as it was intended as an arraignment of the nobility for their vices, crimes, and selfishness.  “The Man Who Laughs” was first published in 1869.

I.—­The Child

Ursus and Homo were old friends.  Ursus was a man, Homo a wolf.  The two went about together from town to town, from country-side to country-side.  Ursus lived in a small van upon wheels which Homo drew by day and guarded by night.

Ursus was a juggler, a ventriloquist, a doctor, and a misanthrope.  He was also something of a poet.  The wolf and he had grown old together.

One bitterly cold night in January 1690, when Ursus and his van were at Weymouth, a small vessel put off from Portland.  It contained a dozen people, and it left behind on the rock, and alone, a small boy.