HOW JULIE’S SCHEMES FELL FLAT
Nance found the return journey still more trying to her strength, but
she struggled through, and was devoutly thankful when the slack water
under Brenière was reached.
She waded ashore almost too weary to stand, and had to cling to the
rough rocks till she recovered her breath. Then, slowly and heavily, she
dragged herself up the lower ledges to the little plateau where her
clothes were.
Julie had sat revolving grim schemes in that black head of hers.
She hated the girl. She hated Gard. She hated Sark and every one in it.
Why had she ever come into these outer wilds? She would have done with
it all and get away back to the life that was more to her taste.
But first--yes, mon Dieu, she would leave them something to remember her
by.
She had not a doubt that Gard was still on L’Etat. Nothing else would
take this girl across there. The shameless hussy!--to go swimming across
to see her man with nothing but a white shift on!
She could wound Gard through Nance. She could wound Nance through Gard.
She could wait for the girl as she came up the side of the Head, and
push her down again or crush her with a lump of rock.
But that might mean reprisals on the part of the Islanders. She had had
experience of the way in which they resented any ill done to one of
their number by an outsider. She had no wish to join Gard on his rock.
It would be better to hold the girl up to the scorn and contempt of the
neighbours; that would punish her. And by setting the men on Gard’s
track again, that would punish him and her too.
And so she restrained the natural violence of her temper, which would
have run to rocks and bodily injury, and waited in the bracken till
Nance came stumbling along in the half-light. Then up she sprang, with
an unexpectedness that for the moment took Nance’s breath and set her
heart pounding with dreadful certainties of ghosts.
“So this is how you go to visit your fancy monsieur on the rock, is it,
little Nance? And with nothing on but that! Oh shame! What will the
neighbours say when they hear how you swim across to him, and you will
not dare deny it?”
But Nance, relieved in her mind on the score of ghosts, and regaining
her composure with her breath, simply turned her back on her and
proceeded as if she were not there.
“And he is there still!” screamed Julie, dancing round with rage to keep
face to face with her. “I was sure of it, though those fools could not
find him. I’ll see that he’s found or starved out, b’en sûr! Yes, if I
have to go myself and see to it. As for you--shameless one!--it’s the
last time you’ll swim across there, yes indeed!”--and she raved on and
on, as only an angry woman with a grievance can.
Nance slipped her dress over her head and, under cover of it, dropped
off her wet undergarment, coolly wrung it out, put on her cloak and
walked away, Julie raging alongside with wild words that tumbled over
one another in their haste.
Nance walked to the highest point behind Brenière, and waved her white
garment a dozen times to let Gard know she was safe, and then turned and
set off home through the waist-high bracken and the great cushions of
gorse. And close alongside her went Julie, raging and raving the worse
for her silence; for there is nothing so galling to an angry soul as to
find its most venomous shafts fall harmless from the triple mail of
quiet self-possession.
So they came through the other cottages to La Closerie, but the
neighbours were all asleep, and those who woke at the sound of her
violence, turned over and said, “It’s only that mad Frenchwoman in one
of her tantrums. Why, in Heaven’s name, can’t she go to sleep, like
other folks?”
Nance went into her own house and quietly closed the door. Julie
hammered on it with her fists, as she would dearly have liked to hammer
on Nance’s face, and then cursed herself off into her own place,
slamming the door with such violence as to waken all the fowls and set
all the pigs grunting in their sleep.