Paul Ravenel had shot himself on the balcony, the revolver had fallen from his hand, his body had crashed through the flimsy rail and toppled down until it had been caught on the rocks below. Yes, no doubt! The mere fall from that height, even if Ravenel had been unhurt, would have been enough. Yet—yet—there had been a long delay before the shot was fired. Gerard looked keenly and swiftly about the room. No, there was no sign of a rope.
He looked at the girl. She was now crouched down upon her knees, her face hidden between her hands, her body rocking, whilst a wail like a chant, shrill of key but faint, made a measure for her rocking. She was like an animal in pain—that was all, and for her Paul had thrown a great name to the winds! What a piece of irony that she, with hardly more brain and soul than a favourite dog, should have cost France so much!
Gerard stooped and picked up his revolver. He broke the breech, ejected the one exploded cartridge, and closed the breech again with a snap. He leaned forward again to take a last look at that poor rag of flesh and bone, hung there for the vultures to feed upon, which once had been his friend—and he was aware of a subtle change in the woman behind him within the room. Oh, very slight, and for so small a space of time! But just for an imperceptible moment her wail had faltered, the rocking of her body had been stayed. She had been watching him between those fingers with the henna-dyed nails which were so tightly pressed over her face.
He looked at her closely without moving from his position. It was all going correctly on again—the lament, the swaying, the proper conventional expression of the abandonment of grief. Yet she had been watching him, and for a moment she had been startled and afraid. Of what? And the truth flashed upon him. He had been fingering his revolver. She was afraid of the coup de grâce.
Then they were tricking him between them—she with her wailing, he spread out on the bulge of rock below. They should see! He stretched out his arm downwards, the revolver pointed in his hand. And out of the tail of his eye he saw the woman cease from her exhibition and rise to her feet. As he took his aim she unwound the veil from before her face. He could not but look at her; and having looked, he could not take his eyes from her face. He stumbled into the room. “Marguerite Lambert!” he said, in a voice of wonder! “Yes, Marguerite Lambert!”
CHAPTER XXI
Two Outcasts
Gerard de Montignac had never been so thoroughly startled and surprised in his life. But he was angrily conscious of an emotion far keener than his surprise. He was jealous. Jealousy overmastered the shock of wonder, stabbed him through and left him aching. Marguerite Lambert, the girl of the Villa Iris, so politely difficult! And Paul Ravenel, the man without passion! Why, his brother officers used to laugh at him openly—nay, almost sneered at him and made a butt of him—because of his coldness; and he, indifferent to their laughter, had just laughed back and gone his way. Well, he could afford to, it seemed, since he was here, and for two years had been here, hidden quite away from the world with Marguerite Lambert.
They had stolen a march upon their friends, the pair of them, they had tricked them—yes, that was the exact right word—tricked them, even as they had just tried to trick him, she with her Oriental abandonment to grief—little “animal,” as he had called her in his thoughts—he stretched out on a knob of rock above a precipice in a pose of death! Gerard was in an ugly mood, and he spoke out his thought in a blaze of scorn.
“I asked you the last time I saw you to give me two days of your life, my only two days. I asked no more. Yet you were insulted. You could give two years to another, but two days to me? Oh, dear, no! You wished never to speak to me again.”