"And the sketches were asked for?" I suggested--"and you naturally
told what had become of them?"
"I refused to name her."
"Of course; men of our sort can't do that."
"I am not of your sort--you know it."
"Oh yes, you are, my friend--and the same kind of fool, too. There's
only one kind of man in this world."
He looked at me listlessly.
"So they sent you to a fortress?" I asked.
"To New Caledonia,... four years.... I was only twenty, Scarlett,...
and ruined.... I joined Byram in Antwerp and risked the tour through
France."
After a moment's thought I said: "In your opinion, what nation
profited by your sketches? Italy? Spain? Prussia? Bavaria? England?...
Perhaps Russia?"
"Do you mean that this woman was a foreign spy?"
"Perhaps. Perhaps she was only careless, or capricious,... or
inconstant.... You never saw her again?"
"I was under arrest on Sunday. I do not know.... I like to believe
that she went to the book-store on Monday,... that she made an
innocent mistake,... but I never knew, Scarlett,... I never knew."
"Suppose you ask her?" I said.
He reddened furiously.
"I cannot.... If she did me a wrong, I cannot reproach her; if she
was innocent--look at me, Scarlett!--a ragged, ruined mountebank in a
travelling circus,... and she is--"
"An honest woman that a man might care for?"
"That is ... my belief."
"If she is," I said, "go and ask her about those drawings."
"But if she is not,... I cannot tell _you_!" he flashed out.
"Let us shake hands, Kelly," I said,... "and be very good friends.
Will you?"
He gave me his hand rather shyly.
"We will never speak of her again," I said,... "unless you desire
it. You have had a terrible lesson in caution; I need say no more.
Only remember that I have trusted you with a secret concerning
Buckhurst's conspiracy."
His firm hand tightened on mine, then he walked away, steadily, head
high. And I went out to saddle my horse for a canter across the moor
to Point Paradise.
It was a gray day, with a hint of winter in the air, and a wind that
set the gorse rustling like tissue-paper. Up aloft the sun glimmered,
a white spot in a silvery smother; pale lights lay on moorland and
water; the sea tumbled over the bar, boiling like a flood of liquid
lead from which the spindrift curled and blew into a haze that buried
the island of Groix and turned the anchored iron-clad to a phantom.
A day for a gallop, if ever there was such a day!--a day to wash out
care from a troubled mind and cleanse it in the whipping, reeking, wet
east wind--a day for a fox! And I rose in my saddle and shouted aloud
as a red fox shot out of the gorse and galloped away across the
endless moorland, with the feathers of a mallard still sticking to his
whiskers.
Oh, what a gallop, with risk enough, too; for I did not know the coast
moors; and the deep clefts from the cliffs cut far inland, so that eye
and ear and bridle-hand were tense and ready to catch danger ere it
ingulfed us in some sea-churned crevice hidden by the bracken. And how
the gray gulls squealed, high whirling over us, and the wild ducks in
the sedge rose with clapping wings, craning their necks, only to swing
overhead in circles, whimpering, and drop, with pendent legs and wings
aslant, back into the bog from which we startled them.
A ride into an endless gray land, sweet with sea-scents, rank with the
perfume of salty green things; a ride into a land of gushing winds,
wet as spray, strong and caressing, too, and full of mischief; winds
that set miles of sedge rippling; sudden winds, that turned still
pools to geysers and set the yellow gorse flowers flying; winds that
rushed up with a sea-roar like the sound in shells, then, sudden, died
away, to leave the furrowed clover motionless and the tall reeds still
as death.
So, by strange ways and eccentric circles, like the aërial paths of
homing sea-birds, I came at last to the spot I had set out for,
consciously; yet it surprised me to find I had come there.
Before I crossed the little bridge I scented the big orange-tinted
tea-roses and the pinks. Leaves on apricots were falling; the fig-tree
was bare of verdure, and the wind chased the big, bronzed leaves
across the beds of herbs, piling them into heaps at the base of the
granite wall.
A boy took my horse; a servant in full Breton costume admitted me;
the velvet humming of Sylvia Elven's spinning-wheel filled the
silence, like the whirring of a great, soft moth imprisoned in a
room:
"Woe to the Maids of Paradise,
Yvonne!
Twice have the Saxons landed--twice!
Yvonne!
Yet shall Paradise see them thrice!
Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik!
"Fair is their hair and blue their eyes,
Yvonne!
Body o' me! their words are lies,
Yvonne!
Maids of Paradise, oh, be wise!
Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik!"
The door swung open noiselessly; the whir of the wheel and the sound
of the song filled the room for an instant, then was shut out as the
Countess de Vassart closed the door and came forward to greet me.
In her pretty, soft gown, with a tint of blue ribbon at the neck and
shoulders, she seemed scarcely older than a school-girl, so radiant,
so sweet and fresh she stood there, giving me her little hand to touch
in friendship.
"It was so good of you to come," she said; "I know you made it a
duty and gave up a glorious gallop to be amiable to me. Did you?"