“I must remember this, McShanus. Do you think you could entertain the old lady while I talk to her?”
“What, the she-cat with the man’s hair and the telescope? The Lord be good to me. I’d sooner do penal servitude.”
“Now, come, you can see by her glance that she is an authority upon some of the ’isms, McShanus. I know that she plays golf. I saw her carrying sticks this very afternoon.”
“To break heads at a fair. Is Timothy McShanus fallen to this? To tread at the heels of a she-man with sticks in her hands. Faith, ’twould be a fancy fair and fête entirely.”
“Drink some more champagne, and brace yourself up to it, Timothy.”
He shook his head and lapsed into a melancholy silence. Certainly his nerves required bracing up for the ordeal, and many glasses of ’89 Pommery went to that process. When dinner was done, we strolled out upon the verandah and found Miss Fordibras and her chaperone, Miss Aston, drinking coffee at one of the little tables in the vestibule. They made way for us at once, as though we had been expected, and I presented McShanus to them immediately.
“Mr. Timothy McShanus—the author of ‘Ireland and Her Kings.’ He’s descended from the last of them, I believe. Is it not so, McShanus?”
“From all of them, Dr. Fabos. Me father ruled Ireland in the past, and me sons will rule it in the future. Ladies, your servant. Be not after calling me an historian. ’Tis a poet I am when not in the police courts.”
Miss Aston, the elderly lady with the short hair and the glasses, took McShanus seriously, I am afraid. She began to speak to him of Browning and Walt Whitman and Omar Khayyam. I drew my chair near to Miss Fordibras and took my text from the common talk.
“No one reads poetry nowadays,” I said. “We have all grown too cynical. Even McShanus does not consider his immortal odes worth publishing.”
“They will perish with me in an abbey tomb,” said he; “a thousand years from now, ’tis the professors from New Zealand who will tell the world what McShanus wrote.”
Miss Aston suggested a little tritely that much modern poetry should be so treated.
“Time is the true critic,” she exclaimed majestically, and McShanus looked at me as who should say, “She has some experience of that same Time.”
I turned to Joan Fordibras and asked her to defend the poets.
“The twentieth century gives us no solitudes,” I said; “you cannot have poets without solitudes. We live in crowds nowadays. Even yachting is a little old-fashioned. Men go where other men can see them show off. Vanity takes them there—even Bridge is vanity, the desire to do better than the other man.”
Miss Aston demurred.
“There are some women who know nothing of vanity,” she said stonily. “We live within ourselves, and our lives are our own. Our whole existence is a solitude. We are most truly alone when many surround us.”
“’Tis a compliment to my friend Fabos,” cried McShanus triumphantly. “Let me have the honour to escort ye to the Casino, lady, for such a man is no company for us. No doubt he’ll bring Miss Fordibras over when they’ve done with the poets. Will ye not, doctor?”
I said that I should be delighted, and when the cloaks had been found we all set out for the Casino. Timothy was playing his part well, it appeared. I found myself alone with Joan Fordibras presently—and neither of us had the desire to hurry on to the Casino. In truth, the season at Dieppe had already begun to wane, and there were comparatively few people abroad on the parade by the sea-shore. We walked apart, a great moon making golden islands of light upon the sleeping sea, and the distant music of the Casino band in our ears.
“This time to-morrow,” I said, “my yacht will be nearer Ushant than Dieppe.”
She looked up at me a little timidly. I thought that I had rarely seen a face at once so pathetic and so beautiful.
“Away to the solitudes?” she asked quickly.
“Possibly,” I said; “but that is the point about yachting. You set out for nowhere, and if you don’t like it, you come back again.”
“And you positively don’t know where you are going?”
“I positively don’t know where I am going.”
“But I do,” she said. “You are going to follow my father.”
I had never been so amazed in my life. To say that I was astonished would be to misrepresent the truth. I knew already that she suspected me; but this challenge—from a mere child—this outspoken defiance, it passed all comprehension.
“Why should I follow your father?” I asked her as quickly.
“I do not know, Dr. Fabos. But you are following him. You suspect him, and you wish to do us an injury.”
“My dear child,” I said, “God forbid that I should do any man an injury. You do not mean what you say. The same cleverness which prompts this tells you also that anything I may be doing is right and proper to do—and should be done. May we not start from that?”
I turned about and faced her. We had come almost to the water’s edge by this time. The lazy waves were rolling at our feet—the waves of that sea I purposed to cross in quest of a truth which should astonish the world. The hour was momentous to both our lives. We knew it so to be and did not flinch from it.
“Oh,” she said, with tears in her eyes, “if I could only believe you to be my friend.”
“Miss Fordibras,” I said, “believe it now because I tell you so. Your friend whatever may befall. Please to call me that.”
I think that she was about to confess to me the whole story of her life. I have always thought that it might have been so at that moment. But the words remained unspoken—for a shadow fell upon us as we talked, and, looking up, I perceived the figure of a man so near to us that his outstretched hand could have touched my own. And instantly perceiving it also, she broke away from me and begged me to take her to the Casino.
“Miss Aston will be anxious,” she cried, excited upon compulsion. “Please let us go. It must be nine o’clock.”
I rejoined that I was quite in ignorance of the fact; but, taking her cue, I led the way from the place and turned toward the Casino. The light of an arc lamp as we went showed me her young face as pale as the moonbeams upon the still sea before us. I understood that the man had been watching her, and that she was afraid of him. Indeed, no artifice could conceal so plain a fact.
Of this, however, she would not speak at all. In the Casino, she went straight to the side of the formidable Miss Aston, and began to babble some idle excuse for our delay. McShanus himself was playing at Petits Chevaux and making the room ring with his exclamations. I understood that the hour for confidence had passed, and that the words she had meant to speak to me might go for ever unspoken.
Was it well that this should be? God knows. The path of my duty lay clearly marked before me. Not even the hand of Joan Fordibras must turn me aside therefrom. I could but hope that time would lift the shadows and let me see the sun beyond them.
CHAPTER VIII.
WE VISIT AFRICA.
The Voyage of the “White Wings.”
“And what,