BY THE WINDING CREEK
At dawn one morning a long black car shot out from Jacksonville and
took to the open road. It glided swiftly past arid stretches of pine
barrens streaked with stagnant water, past bogs aglow with iris,
through quaint little cities smiling under the shelter of primeval oaks
and on, stopping only long enough for the driver to ask a question of a
negro on a load of wood--or a mammy singing plaintively in the
flower-bright dooryard of a house.
Sometimes losing, sometimes finding, the trail of a green and white
van, the long black car shot on, through roads of pleasant windings
flanked by forest and river, beyond which lay the line of green-fringed
sand hills which parallel the rolling Atlantic. Past placid lakes
skimmed by purple martins, past orange groves heavy with fruit, past
fences overrun with Cherokee roses, and on, but the driver, abroad with
the sunrise glow, seemed somehow to see little or none of it.
Sometimes he stared sombrely at a ghostly palmetto, tall and dark
against the sky. Once with a grinding shudder of brakes he halted on
the border of a cypress swamp and stared frowningly at the dark, dank
trees knee-deep in stagnant water above which the buzzards flew, as if
the loathsome spot matched his mood. As indeed it did.
For the words of Themar had done cruel work. Torn by black suspicion,
Ronador saw no peace in this tranquil Florida world of sun and flower,
of warm south wind and bright-winged bird. He saw only the buzzards,
birds of evil omen. Swayed by fiery gusts of passion, of remorse, of
sullenness and jealousy, he rode on, a prey to sinister resolution. To
confront Diane with his knowledge of those days by the river, this
resolution alternated as frequently with another--to put his fate to
the test and passionately avow his utter trust in one immeasurably
above the rank and file of women. He had racked Themar with insistent
questions, he had quarreled again and again with the Baron since that
night by the pool, until now he had at his finger-ends, the ways and
days of Philip Poynter since the day the Baron had dispatched his young
secretary upon the ill-fated errand to Diane. And as there were finer
moments when his faith in the girl was unmarred by suspicion, so there
were wild, unscrupulous hours of jealousy when he could have killed
Philip and taunted her with insults.
Driving steadily, he came in course of time to a narrow, grass-banked
creek. The nomads on the winding road beside it were many and
beautiful. Here were yellow butterflies, sandpipers and kingfishers,
and now and then an eagle cleaved the dazzling blue overhead with
magnificent wing-strokes. Sand hills reflected the white sunlight.
Beyond glistened a stretch of open sea with a flock of beautiful
gannets of black and white whipping its surface. But Ronador did not
thrill to the peaceful picture. He glanced instead at the buzzard
which seemed curiously to hang above the long black car.
Now presently as he eyed the road ahead for a glimpse of the van,
Ronador saw the familiar lines of a music-machine and drove by it with
a glance of interest. Instantly the blood rushed violently to his
face. For, as the horse and music-machine had been familiar, so was
the driver, who swept a broad sombrero from his head and revealed the
face of Philip Poynter.
With a curse Ronador abruptly brought the car to a standstill. The
very irony of this masquerade fired him with terrible anger.
"You!" he choked. "You!"
Philip nodded.
"I guess you're right," he said.
The blazing dark eyes and the calm, unruffled blue ones met in a glance
of implacable antagonism. Not in the least impressed Philip replaced
his sombrero and spoke to his horse. Fish crows flew overhead with
croaks of harsh derision.
Another buzzard! With a terrible jerk, Ronador drove on, his face
scarlet.
So Poynter still dared to follow! By a trick he had bought the
music-machine, by a trick he had given the Regent's Hymn to the curious
ears at Sherrill's. Very well, there were tricks and tricks! And if
one man may trick, so, surely, may another.
Passion had always hushed the voice of the imperial conscience, though
indeed it awoke and cried in a terrible voice when passion was dead.
So now with stiff white lips fixed in unalterable resolution, Ronador
drove viciously on, turning over and over in his fevered brain the ways
and days of Philip Poynter. . . . So at last he came to the camp he
sought.
It was pitched upon the upland bank of the winding creek and as the car
shot rapidly toward it, a great blue heron flapped indignantly and
soared away to the marsh beyond the trees. Ronador jumped queerly and
colored with a sense of guilt.
There was yellow oxalis here carpeting the ground among the low, dark
cedars, yellow butterflies flitted about among the trees where Johnny
was washing the van, and the inevitable buzzard floated with upturned
wings above the camp. Ronador had grown to hate the ubiquitous bird of
the South. Superstition flamed hotly up in his heart now at the sight
of it.
Diane was sewing. He had caught the flutter of her gown beneath a
cedar as he stopped the car. There was no one visible in the camp of
the Indian girl. Ronador sprang from his car and waved to the girl,
smiling, she came to meet him.
Now as Ronador smiled down into the clear, unfaltering eyes of the girl
before him, he knew suddenly that he trusted her utterly, that the mad
suspicion, sired by the words of Themar and mothered by jealousy, was
but a dank mist that melted away in the sunlight of her presence. Only
jealousy remained and a smouldering, unscrupulous hate for the
persistent young organ-grinder behind him.
Chatting pleasantly they returned to camp.
Imperceptibly their talk of the fortunes of the road took on a more
intimate tinge of reminiscence and presently, with searching eyes fixed
upon the vivid, lovely face of the wind-brown gypsy beneath the cedar,
Ronador asked the girl to marry him.
Very gently Diane released her hands from his grasp, her cheeks scarlet.
"Indeed, indeed," she faltered, "I could not with fairness answer you
now, for I do not in the least know what I think. You will not
misunderstand me, I am sure, if I tell you that not once in the long,
pleasant days we journeyed the same roads, did I ever dream of the
nature of your pleasant friendship." Her frank, dark eyes, alive with
a beautiful sincerity, met his honestly. "There was always
tradition--" she reminded.
Ronador's reply was sincere and gallant. Diane was lovelier than any
princess, he said, and in Houdania, tradition had been replaced years
back by a law which granted freedom.
"Though to be sure," he added bitterly, "each generation seeks to break
it. Tregar tried, urging me persistently for diplomatic reasons to
take a wife of his choosing. And when I--I fled to America to escape
his infernal scheming and spying--he followed. Even here in America I
have been haunted by spies--"
His glance wavered.
"And then," he went on earnestly, "I saw you and I knew that Princess
Phaedra was forever impossible. There was a night of terrible wind and
storm when I planned to beg shelter in your camp and make your
acquaintance. . . . You are annoyed?"
"No," said Diane honestly. "Why fuss now?"
"Tregar must have suspected. I met his--his spy in the forest and we
quarreled wildly. He tried to kill me but the bullet went wild."
Again his glance wavered but the lying words came smoothly. "My
servant, Themar, leaped and stabbed him in the shoulder--"
"No! No!" cried Diane. "Not that--not that!" Her eyes, dark with
horror in the colorless oval of her face, met Ronador's with mute
appeal. "It--it can not be," she added quietly. "The man was Philip
Poynter."
Ronador caught her hands again with fierce resolve. His eyes were
blazing with excitement and anger at the utter faith in her voice.
"Why do you think I adopted the stained face--the disguise of a
wandering minstrel?" he demanded impetuously. "It was to free myself
from his infernal spying--to afford myself the opportunity of gaining
your friendship without his knowledge! Why did he follow--always
follow? Because at the command of his chief, he must needs obstruct my
plan of winning you. There was always Princess Phaedra! Why did he
watch by night in the forest. To spy! Can you not see it?"
"Surely, surely," said Diane, "you must be wrong!"
But Ronador could not be wrong. Themar, his servant, whom he had
dispatched to seek employment with the Baron when the fortunes of the
road had made further attendance upon himself inconvenient, had learned
of the hay-camp and of Poynter's pledge to make his victim's advances
ridiculous in the eyes of Diane.
"And when Themar followed--to warn me--Poynter beat him brutally," he
went on fiercely, "beat him and sent him in a dirty barge to a distant
city. All the while when I fancied my disguise impenetrable, he was
laughing in his sleeve, for he is as clever as he is unscrupulous. He
was even meeting his chief in a Kentucky woods to report. Tregar
admitted it. Why did he make me ridiculous at the Sherrill fête?
Purely because your eyes, Miss Westfall, were among those who watched
the indignity! Why is he driving about now in the music-machine to
mock me? Because having forced me from the road, he must needs see to
it that I do not return. When I do, he must be near at hand to report
to the Baron."
It was an artful network. Somehow, by virtue of the sinister skeleton
of facts underlying the velvet of his logic, it rang true. Diane, as
colorless as a flower, sat utterly silent, slender brown fingers
tightened against the palms of her hands.
Philip false! Philip a spy! Philip--almost a murderer! It could not
be!
Yet how insistently he had striven to force her to return to
civilization. Away from Ronador? It might be. How insistently the
Baron had urged him to linger in her camp! _To spy_? A great wave of
faintness swept over her. And there was Arcadia and the hay-camp and
the mildly impudent indignities--they all slipped accurately into place.
"I--I do not know!" she faltered at last in answer to his impetuous
pleading. "If you will not see me again until I may think it all out--"
But there was danger in waiting. A hot appeal flashed in Ronador's
eyes and eloquently again he fell to pleading.
But Diane had caught the clatter of the music-machine up the road where
Philip was good-humoredly unwinding the hullabaloo for a crowd of
gleeful young darkies, and suddenly she turned very white and stern.
"No! No!" she said. "It must be as I said."
And presently, with faith in his poisoned arrows Ronador went, pledged
to await her summons.
Diane sat very still beneath the cedars, with the noise of the
music-machine wild torture to her ears.