“A fishing-boat?”
“Hardly that,” I said, “from its lights and position it will be some
swifter power-boat and, I should say, not precisely certain about the
channel.”
I have been drawn here into reminiscence that did not, at the time,
detain me in the hall. What my sister had discovered to me, following
Major Carrington's remark, left me distinctly uneasy. It was very nearly
two miles to the village, the road was wholly forest and there would be
no house on the way; for my father, with an utter disregard for cost,
had sought the seclusion of a large acreage when he had built this
absurdly elaborate villa on Mount Desert Island.
Besides I was in no mood for sleep.
And, over all probability, there might be some not entirely imaginary
danger to Madame Barras. Not precisely the danger presented in Major
Carrington's pleasantry, but the always possible danger to one who is
carrying a sum of money about. It would be considered, in the world of
criminal activities, a very large sum of money; and it had been lying
here, as of no value, in a drawer of the library table since the day
on which the gold certificates had arrived on my check from the Boston
bank.
Madame Barras had not taken the currency away as I imagined. It was
extremely careless of her, but was it not an act in character?
What would such a woman know of practical concern?
I spoke to the butler. He should not wait up, I would let myself in; and
I went out.
I remember that I got a cap and a stick out of the rack; there was no
element of selection in the cap, but there was a decided subconscious
direction about the selection of the stick. It was a heavy blackthorn,
with an iron ferrule and a silver weight set in the head; picked up--by
my father at some Irish fair--a weapon in fact.
It was not dark. It was one of those clear hard nights that are not
uncommon on this island in midsummer; with a full moon, the road
was visible even in the wood. I swung along it with no particular
precaution; I was not expecting anything to happen, and in fact, nothing
did happen on the way into the village.
But in this attitude of confidence I failed to discover an event of this
night that might have given the whole adventure a different ending.
There is a point near the village where a road enters our private one;
skirts the border of the mountain, and, making a great turn, enters the
village from the south. At this division of the road I heard distinctly
a sound in the wood.
It was not a sound to incite inquiry. It was the sound of some
considerable animal moving in the leaves, a few steps beyond the road.
It did not impress me at the time; estrays were constantly at large in
our forests in summer, and not infrequently a roaming buck from the
near preserves. There was also here in addition to the other roads,
an abandoned winter wood-road that ran westward across the island to
a small farming settlement. Doubtless I took a slighter notice of the
sound because estrays from the farmers' fields usually trespassed on us
from this road.
At any rate I went on. I fear that I was very much engrossed with the
memory of Madame Barras. Not wholly with the feminine lure of her,
although as I have written she was the perfection of that lure. One
passed women, at all milestones, on the way to age, and kept before
them one's sound estimates of life, but before this woman one lost one's
head, as though Nature, evaded heretofore, would not be denied. But the
weird fortune that had attended her was in my mind.
Married to Senor Barras out of the door of a convent, carried to Rio
de Janeiro to an unbearable life, escaping with a remnant of her
inheritance in English bank-notes, she arrives here to visit the one,
old, persisting friend, Mrs. Jordan, and finds her dead! And what seemed
strange, incredible beyond belief, was that this creature Barras had
thought only of her fortune which he had depleted in two years to the
something less than twenty thousand pounds which I had exchanged for her
into our money; a mere fragment of her great inheritance.
I had listened to the story entranced with the alluring teller of it;
wondering as I now wondered, on the road to the village, how anything
pretending to be man could think of money when she was before his eye.
What could he buy with money that equaled her! And yet this curious
jackal had seen in her only the key to a strong-box. There was behind
it, in explanation, shadowed out, the glamor of an empire that Senor
Barras would set up with the millions in his country of revolutions, and
the enthusiasms of a foolish mother.
And yet the jackal and this wreckage had not touched her. There was no
stain, no crumpled leaf. She was a fresh wonder, even after this, out of
a chrysalis. It was this amazing newness, this virginity of blossom from
which one could not escape.
The word in my reflection brought me up. How had she escaped from
Barras?