On the last word came a low laugh from the other side of the barricade. The Captain started, looked round, listened, smiled, frowned, pulled his moustache. Then, with extraordinary suddenness, resolution, and fierceness, he turned and walked quickly away. "Honour, honour!" he was saying to himself; and the path of honour seemed to lie in flight. Unhappily, though, the Captain was more accustomed to advance.
CHAPTER III
THE LADY IN THE GARDEN
It is possible that Captain Dieppe, full of contentment with the quarters to which fortune had guided him, under-rated the merits and attractions of the inn in the village across the river. Fare and accommodation indeed were plain and rough at the Aquila Nera, but the company round its fireside would have raised his interest. On one side of the hearth sat the young fisherman, he in whom Dieppe had discovered a police-spy on the track of the secrets in that breast-pocket of the Captain's. Oh, these discoveries of the Captain's! For M. Paul de Roustache was not a police-spy, and, moreover, had never seen the gallant Captain in his life, and took no interest in him—a state of things most unlikely to occur to the Captain's mind. Had Paul, then, fished for fishing's sake? It by no means followed, if only the Captain could have remembered that there were other people in the world besides himself—and one or two others even in the Count of Fieramondi's house. "I 'll get at her if I can; but if she 's obstinate, I 'll go to the Count—in the last resort I 'll go to the Count, for I mean to have the money." Reflections such as these (and they were M. de Roustache's at this moment) would have shown even Captain Dieppe—not, perhaps, that he had done the fisherman an injustice, for the police may be very respectable—but at least that he had mistaken his errand and his character.
But however much it might be abashed momentarily, the Captain's acumen would not have been without a refuge. Who was the elderly man with stooping shoulders and small keen eyes, who sat on the other side of the fire, and had been engaged in persuading Paul that he too was a fisherman, that he too loved beautiful scenery, that he too travelled for pleasure, and, finally, that his true, rightful, and only name was Monsieur Guillaume? To which Paul had responded in kind, save that he had not volunteered his name. And now each was wondering what the other wanted, and each was wishing very much that the other would seek his bed, so that the inn might be sunk in quiet and a gentleman be at liberty to go about his private business unobserved.
The landlord came in, bringing a couple of candles, and remarking that it was hard on ten o'clock; but let not the gentlemen hurry themselves. The guests sat a little while longer, exchanged a remark or two on the prospects of the weather, and then, each despairing of outstaying the other, went their respective ways to bed.
Almost at the same moment, up at the Castle, Dieppe was saying to his host, "Good night, my friend, good night. I 'm not for bed yet. The night is fine, and I 'll take a stroll in the garden." A keen observer might have noticed that the Captain did not meet his friend's eye as he spoke. There was a touch of guilt in his air, which the Count's abstraction did not allow him to notice. Conscience was having a hard battle of it; would the Captain keep on the proper side of the barricade?
Monsieur Guillaume, owing to his profession or his temperament, was a man who, if the paradox may be allowed, was not surprised at surprises. Accordingly when he himself emerged from the bedroom to which he had retired, took the path across the meadow from the inn towards the river, and directed his course to the stepping-stones which he had marked as he strolled about before dinner, he was merely interested and in no way astonished to perceive his companion of the fireside in front of him, the moon, nearly full, revealed Paul's Tyrolean headpiece mounting the hill on the far side of the stream. Guillaume followed it, crossed the river at the cost of wet boots, ascended the slope, and crouched down behind a bush a few yards from the top. He had gained on Paul, and arrived at his hiding-place in time to hear the exclamation wrung from his precursor by the sudden sight of the barricade: from the valley below the erection had been so hidden by bushes as to escape notice.
"What the devil's that for?" exclaimed Paul de Roustache in a low voice. He was not left without an answer. The watcher had cause for the smile that spread over his face, as, peeping out, he saw a man's figure rise from a seat and come forward. The next moment Paul was addressed in smooth and suave tones, and in his native language, which he had hurriedly employed in his surprised ejaculation.