He was suddenly ready, and standing fixedly before her, his hat on his head, a heavy cloak over his arm. His voice, his manner, had all at once taken on a tone significant, forceful, imperious.
“I have a thing to say before I go—one last thing. Attend to it well. M. Saint-Péray is asleep this morning. I think he is better now, and will recover. But from this moment the treatment is to be changed—no mending of an idyll any longer; no leading of him that way to hope and sanity. What I set you to do I set you now to undo. The end we once designed has become impossible. Do you understand? They cannot ever marry now.”
“Why not?” Her voice was like a death-cry far away.
“She’s not for him, I say. Let that suffice. If he is weak—he may be—be strong for him. He’ll thank you some day. For the rest, bear what I say in mind—they must be kept apart at any price.”
He gazed at her earnestly a minute, pressed her hand, and was gone. She did not follow him to the door. She stood as he had left her, quite silent and motionless. A bee, a whiff of apples were blown in together at the open window. The sing-song of a bell, high up and distant somewhere, rippled in soft throbbings through her brain. A crow cawed in the trees opposite. There was a chair near her, a plain Windsor cottage chair, which Cartouche had bought at a sale to please some whim of hers. She threw herself down at its feet, and prostrate, as if praying, over the hard wood, fell into a convulsion of crying.
“O, mammy! Come and take your bad girl home to England!”
CHAPTER X
Dr Bonito sat isolated at a little table in the self-same Café where he and Louis-Marie had once before consorted. The table stood well in the middle of the room, and under an uncompromising glare of candles. Thus, and in public, your wise plotter will station himself for security. It is a mistake to suppose that, because his plans are obscure, he will seek obscure corners for developing them. Panels have ears; and even a tree, however solitary on a plain, may be hollow. Dr Bonito sat, for all his stale and fusty exterior was worth, in the light.
Judged by it, he seemed, indeed, too spare a vessel to contain much worth discussion. He was like one of those little sticks of grassini, all crust. Each of the tiny sips he took from a tiny glass of vermouth at his side suggested the threading of a needle. There was no question of breadth or openness in him anywhere. Shrewd, wintry, caustic, he was just as cold, as sharp and as bowelless as a needle—a thing all point and eye.
The latter, visionless as it appeared, never lost account of the minutes ticking themselves away on a dingy clock on the wall. They were Destiny’s forerunners to the doctor, few or many; but he had too much wit to question the delays of Destiny. She had to travel by roundabout roads very often.