“Your sister did not like me,” she rejoined evasively; “the dear old thing, I could see her watching me just as though I had come to steal you from her.”
“Would you have felt very guilty if you had done so, Joan?”
“Yes,” she said, and this so seriously that I regretted the question; “guilty to my life’s end, Dr. Fabos.”
I knew that she referred to the story of her own life and the men among whom destiny had sent her. Here was a barrier of the past which must stand between us to all time, she would have said. The same thought had disquieted me often, not for my sake but for her own.
“I would to God, Joan,” said I, “there were no greater guilt in the world than this you speak of. You forbid me to say so. Shall I tell you why?”
She nodded her head, looking away to the patch of blue water revealed by the gorge of the mountains. I lay at her side and had all a man’s impulse to take her in my arms and tell her that which my heart had prompted me to say so many days. God knows, I had come to love this fragile, sweet-willed child of fortune beyond any other hope of my life or ambition of the years. Day by day, her eyes looked into my very soul, awakening there a spirit and a knowledge of whose existence I had been wholly ignorant. I loved her, and thus had fallen into the snare my enemies had set upon me. How little they understood me, I thought.
“You forbid me to say so, Joan,” I ran on, “because you do not trust me.”
“Do not trust you, Dr. Fabos?”
“Not sufficiently to say that I am about to save you from all dangers—even the danger of past years.”
“You cannot do that—oh, you cannot do it, Dr. Fabos.”
I covered her hand with my own, and tried to compel her to look me in the face.
“When a woman learns to love and is loved she has no past,” I said. “All that should concern her is the happiness of the man to whom she has given her life. In your own case, I believe that we shall read the story of bygone years together and find it a sweet story. I do not know, Joan; I am only guessing; but I think it will be a story of a woman’s love and a father’s suffering, and of an innocent man upon whom the gates of prison were long closed. Say that the child of these two, entitled to a fortune in her own right, became the prey of a villain, and we shall be far upon our way. That’s the thought of your prophet. He would give much, Joan, if the facts were as he believes them to be.”
Be sure she turned her head at this and looked me full in the face. I have never seen so many emotions expressed upon a childish face—joy, doubt, love, fear. Quick as all her race to read an enigma, she understood me almost as soon as I had spoken. A light of wondrous thankfulness shone in her eyes. There were long minutes together when we sat there in silence, and the only sound was that of her heart beating.
“Oh,” she cried, “if it were true, Dr. Fabos, if it were true!”
“I will prove it true before we have been in England a month.”
She laughed a little sadly.
“England—England. How far is England away? And my own dear America?”
“Seven days in my yacht, White Wings.”
“If we were birds to fly over the hills!”
“The hills will be kind to us. To-day, to-morrow, whenever it is, Joan, will you cross the hills with me?”
She promised me with a warmth that betrayed her desire. Fearing longer to dwell upon it, I left and went again to the little river to see what message it had for me. Did the waters still ebb away or had my fancy been an hallucination?
Standing this day upon the very brink of the chasm through which the river flowed, I knew I was not mistaken. The stream had subsided by another foot at the least; it no longer raced and tumbled through the gorge; it was scarcely more than warm to the hand. Someone without had diverted its course and would dam it altogether when the good hour came. When that hour might be I had no means of knowing. But my course was clear. I must rest neither night nor day while deliverance was at hand; there must be neither sleeping nor waking for me until Okyada called me and the gate stood open.
And what of Joan, what of my promise to her? Should I leave her the prisoner of the valley or take her over the hills as I had promised? The responsibility was greater than any I had ever faced. Let her go with me, and what a tale these villains would have to tell the world! Let her remain, and what cruelty, what persecution might she not suffer at the Valley House! I knew not what to do. It may be that Fortune wished well to me when she took the matter out of my hands and left me no alternative but to go alone. However it be, I shall relate in a word the simple fact that Okyada, my servant, entered my bedroom at ten o’clock that very night, and that, when I crossed the landing to wake Joan, she did not answer me, nor could my diligent search discover her to be in the house at all.
And the minutes of my opportunity were precious beyond all reckoning.
“Good God!” I cried, “that I must leave her to such men and to such a judgment!”
For I knew that it must be so, and that by flight alone, and the perils of flight, would our salvation be won.
CHAPTER XVIII.
DOWN TO THE SEA.
Dr. Fabos Leaves the Valley House.
There was not a sound within the house, nor did an open window upon the landing admit any signal of alarm from the gardens. I could but hazard that the little Jap had crossed the gully of the river and come by such a road into the valley. To question him would have been as absurd as to delay. Here he was, and there stood the open door. When he thrust a revolver into my hand and bade me follow him by the low verandah to the gardens below, I obeyed without further hesitation. The mystery of Joan’s disappearance asked for no clever solution. This night, I said, the Jew had meant to kill me. And for the first time, it may be, I realised the deadly peril I had lived through at the Valley House.
Okyada has never been a man of many words. I think he uttered but two that night as we crossed the valley garden and made for the river bank. “Shoot, master,” he said, meaning that if any barred the way, the time for passive flight had passed. I nodded my head in answer, and pressed closer upon his heels as he entered the maze of shrubs which defended the gully. The silence about us had become a burden to the nerves. Was it possible that none of the Jew’s men watched the garden? Indeed, for a moment, that appeared to be the truth.
We gained the bank of the whirlpool of yesterday, and for a few minutes lay flat in the shadow of the great border of the rock which rises up above the gully. Behind us we could espy the lighted windows of the bedroom I had just left and the clear shape of the silent châlet. The gardens and the woods were so many patches of black against an azure sky of night. The water below us flowed, in colour a deep indigo, between walls of lightless rock, in a bed of polished stone. Not a breath of wind stirred the pines upon the hill side. We could no longer see the ocean without or the friendly lights it showed to us. We might have been fugitives upon a desert island; and this deception would have continued possible until the sound of a distant rifle-shot awoke a thousand echoes in the hills and shattered in a single instant the dream of security we had found so pleasing.
Okyada sprang up at the sound and began to speak with an earnestness of which he was rarely guilty.
“They have found the honourable Captain—quick, master, we must go to him,” he said.
My answer was to point up to the sloping lawn of the garden