“Certainly not,” was the brief, determined answer. “I am going to do my level best to rid the world of the most inhuman, damnable monster that ever disgraced it.”
“You will have to be as cool as—as this air, then, Orlebar. Your friend—your enemy I should say rather—is something like a dead shot. By the way, your story is one of the strangest I ever heard in my life; and not the oddest part of it to me is that you should still persist in choosing this place.”
“Because it is this place. You were here at the time of—of that other affair, Major. You will be able to place us upon the exact spot. I have a presentiment. On the very spot where that villain wounded my father I shall kill him. That is why I have chosen it.”
The other shook his head gravely. He was an older man than he looked—and he looked past middle age. Major Fox’s own career had been an eventful one. He had seen active service under the flag of two foreign powers severally, and, moreover, was reckoned an authority on hostile meetings of a private nature, at many of which he had assisted, not always in the character of second. That the object of this early drive was a hostile meeting the above fragment of conversation will clearly show.
Where is the sunny-tempered, light-hearted Philip Orlebar of old? Dead—dead and buried. He who now sits here, pale, stern, gloomy, with the aspect of a man upon whose life a great blow has fallen—whom that blow has aged a dozen years at least—surely these two personalities can have nothing in common?
Onward and upward, higher and higher wends the carriage. Then the acclivity ends, and surmounting the roll of its brow a great flat wooded space, with here and there the distant hump of a mountain jutting against the sky, lies spread out in front. It is the Roncevallés plateau.
A bell clangs forth, slow and sepulchral upon the raw morning air. Its measured, intermittent toll, heard beneath the gloomy lour of the overcast heavens, would be depressing enough under ordinary circumstances. But now it strikes the hearers as immeasurably ominous, for it is the death-toll.
Standing up, the Major, speaking in fluent French, impresses a few directions upon the Basque driver. The latter nods and whips up his horses. As they trot past the quaint, old-world monastery, with its red roofs lying against an appropriate background of foliage, dark hooded figures could be seen gliding about.
“That changes the scene again, Orlebar,” remarked Major Fox. “A few minutes ago one might almost have expected to meet Caesar and his legions emerging from the great beech-forests. Now this brings us to more mediaeval times again. Hallo! What is it?”
For the horses had been suddenly reined in. Then the driver drew them up to the side of the road.