Carl watched it with a slight smile. It pleased him to watch it burn. That would hurt Diane, for everything in this beautiful old Spanish room linked her subtly to her mother. Yes, it would hurt her cruelly. Beyond, at the other end of the table, stood a mate to the burning candlestick, doubtless a silent sentry at many a drinking bout of old when roistering knights gathered about the scarred slab of table-wood beneath his fingers. A pity though! Artistically the carven thing was splendid.
Cursing himself for a notional fool, Carl jerked the candlestick from the fire and beat out the flames. The heavy top snapped off in his hands. The falling wood disclosed a hollow receptacle below the branches … a charred paper. Well, there was always some insane whim of Norman Westfall's coming to light somewhere and this doubtless was one of them.
The paper was very old and yellow, the handwriting unmistakably foreign. French, was it not? The firelight was too fitful to tell. Carl switched on the light in the cluster of old iron lanterns above the table and frowned heavily at the paper. No, it was the precise, formal English of a foreigner, with here and there a ludicrous error among the stilted phrases. And as Carl read, a gust of wild, incredulous laughter echoed suddenly through the quiet room. Again he read, cursing the dizzy fever of his head. Houdania! Houdania! Where was Houdania? Surely the name was familiar. With a superhuman effort of will he clenched his hands and jaws and sat motionless, seeking the difficult boon of concentration. Out of the maelstrom of his mind haltingly it came, and with it memory in panoramic flashes.
Once more he heard the clatter of cavalry galloping up a winding mountain road to a gabled city whose roofs and turrets glinted ruddily in the westering sun. There had been royalty abroad with a brilliant escort, handsome, dark-skinned men with a lingering trace of Arab about the eyes, who galloped rapidly by him up the winding road to the little kingdom in the mountains. Houdania!—yes that was it—of course. Houdania! A Lilliputian monarchy of ardent patriots. There had been a flaming sunset behind the turrets of a castle and he had climbed up—up—up to the gabled kingdom, seeking, away from the track of the tourist, relief from the exotic gayety of his rocketing over Europe. And high above the elfin kingdom on a wooded ravine where a silver rivulet leaped and sang along the mountain, a gray and lonely monastery had offered him a cell of retreat.
Houdania! Yes, he had found Houdania. Philip Poynter had told him of the monastery months before. Philip liked to seek and find the picturesque. Thus had he come into Andorra in the Pyrenees and Wisby in the Baltic. And he—Carl—had found Houdania. But what of it? Ah, yes, the burning candlestick—the paper—the paper! And again a gust of laughter drowned the fitful crackle of the fire. There was gold at his hand—great, tempting quantities of it!
"When the test comes, you'll ring true," came the crackle of Philip's voice from the fire. "Mark that, old man, you'll ring true. I tell you, I know." Well, Philip Poynter was his only friend. But Philip was off somewhere, gone out of his life this many a day in a characteristic burst of quixotism.
Carl laughed and shuddered, for a mad instant he held the tempting yellow paper above the fire—and drew it back, stared at the charred candlestick and laughed again—but there was nothing of laughter in his eyes. They were darkly ironic and triumphant. There was blood in the fire—and gold—and Diane had mocked his mother. With a groan Carl flung his arms out passionately upon the table, torn by a conflict of the strangely warring forces within him. And with his head drooping heavily forward upon his hands he lay there until the melancholy dawn grayed the room into shadowy distinctness, his angle of vision twisted and maimed by the demon of the bottle. The candlestick loomed strangely forth from the still grayness; the bottle took form; the yellowed paper glimmered on the table. Carl stirred and a spasm of mirthless laughter shook him.
"So," he said, "Philip Poynter loses—and I—I write to Houdania!"
So from the bottle rose a phantom of glittering gold and temptation to grow in time to a wraith of gigantic proportions. In the bottle to-night had lain tears and jest and love unending, romance and passion, treachery and irony—blood and the shadow of Death.
CHAPTER, VI
BARON TREGAR
Lilac and wistaria flowered royally. Carpenter, wheelwright and painter departed. The trim green wagon, picked out gayly in white, windowed and curtained and splendidly equipped for the fortunes of the road, creaked briskly away upon its pilgrimage, behind a pair of big-boned piebald horses from the Westfall stables, with Johnny at the reins. On the seat beside him Diane radiantly waved adieu to her aunt, who promptly collapsed in a chair on the porch and dabbed violently at her eyes.
"I shall never get over it," sniffed Aunt Agatha tragically. "Carl may say what he will, I never shall. But now that I've come up here to see her off, I've done my duty, I have indeed. And I do hope Carl hasn't any wild ideas for the summer—I couldn't stand it. Allan, as long as Miss Diane is camping within reasonable distance of the farm, you'd better take the run-about each night and find her and see if she's all right—and brush the snakes and bugs and things out of camp. If everything wild in the forest collected around the camp fire, like as not she wouldn't see them until they bit her."
The boy shifted a slim, bare leg and sniggered.
"Miss Westfall," he said, "Miss Diane she says she's a-goin' to a spot by the river and camp a week an'—an' if she finds anybody a-follerin' or spyin' on her from the farm, she'll skin him alive an'—an' them black eyes o' her'n snapped fire when she said it. An' Johnny, he's got weepons 'nough with him to fight pirutes."
Aunt Agatha groaned and rocking dolorously back and forth upon the porch reviewed the calamitous possibilities of the journey.
But the restless young nomad on the road ahead, sniffing the rare, sweet air of early summer, had already relegated the memory of her long-suffering aunt to the forgotten things of civilization. For the summer world, sweet with the scent of wild flowers, was very young, with young leaves, young grass and flowering, sun-warm hedges, and beyond the Sherrill place on the wooded hill, the sun flamed yellow through the hemlocks.
"Oh, Johnny Jutes! Oh, Johnny Jutes!" sang the girl happily, with the color of the wild rose in her sun-brown cheeks. "It's good—it's good to be alive!"
With a chuckle of enthusiasm Johnny cracked his whip and opined that it was.
Now even as the great green van rolled forth upon the country roads, bound for an idyllic spot by the river where Diane had planned to camp a week, two men appeared upon the wide, white-pillared Sherrill porch, smoking and idly admiring the bluish hills and the rolling meadowlands below bright with morning sunlight. To the east lay the silver glimmer of a tree-fringed lake; beyond, a church spire among the trees and a winding country road traveled by the solitary van of green and white.
"A singular conveyance, is it not, Poynter?" inquired the older man, his careful articulation blurred by a pronounced foreign accent. Staring intently at the sunlit road, he added: "Is it a common mode of travel—here in America?"
The younger man, a lean, sinewy chap with singularly fine eyes of blue above lean, tanned cheeks, frowned thoughtfully.
"By no means," said he pleasantly. "Indeed it's quite new to me. Seems to have blowy white things at the sides like window curtains, doesn't it?"
"A nomadic young woman, I am told," shrugged the older man carelessly. He stood watching the dusty trail of the nomad with narrowed, thoughtful eyes, unaware that his companion's eyes had wandered somewhat expectantly to the